He knows which way the wind blows

Since I finished yesterday with Bruce Springsteen, why not begin today with Bob Dylan? As the bard once wrote, "You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows."

And that explains Pete Domenici, who has now become the latest Capitol Hill Republican to hoist a wet finger and declare himself gone.

By my count, the New Mexico senior senator (who is expected to bow out officially later today) will be the fourteenth member of his party to opt out of the 2008 election season - five in the Senate, nine in the House. These imminent retirees clearly see no reason to stand and fight, only to risk becoming fresh casualties of the Bush era. Indeed, there are reports that as many as 18 other House Republicans might head for the lifeboats. (The current Democratic retirement tally: None in the Senate, two in the House. The two House guys are leaving in order to run for the Senate.)

Domenici's decision to bail is a fresh blow to Republicans, whose main aim in 2008 is to hold their potential congressional losses to a minimum. They already have to defend the seats of retirees in Virginia, Nebraska, Colorado, and Idaho. And with Domenici off the ballot, the Democrats have a heightened opportunity to stage a competitive race in New Mexico, which has slowly been trending blue - thanks in part to a burgeoning Democratic-friendly Hispanic electorate, and a popular Democratic governor (current presidential candidate Bill Richardson).

With Domenici off the ballot, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (the GOP's strategy headquarters) will have to fight a lot harder just to keep that seat - at a time when the NRSC is raising a lot less money than its Democratic counterpart. And, conceivably, Richardson himself could seek the Democratic nod. According to the filing calendar, he wouldn't have to make a decision until after the early presidential primaries.

The antiwar lobby is trying to take credit for Domenici's departure; as a spokesman for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq crowed late yesterday, "Sen. Domenici is yet another political casualty of the war in Iraq." But that's all wrong. Domenici is actually a political casualty of a separate Bush disaster: the politicization of the Justice Department, as evidenced by the prosecutor purge scandal. At a time when voters are concerned about lax ethics in Washington, Domenici certainly isn't well-served by his key role in the firing of a U.S. attorney, David Iglesias, who had refused to give the GOP a partisan boost at election time.

As we now know, at least eight Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys were bounced from their jobs during the past year, apparently because Bush loyalists in Washington deemed them to be insufficiently enthusiastic about tailoring their work to the needs of the GOP (despite the fact that U.S. attorneys, by definition, are supposed to be nonpartisan in their duties). Domenici, currently the target of a Senate ethics committee probe, was one of the most flagrant offenders.

Shortly before the highly-contested '06 congressional election, in which Domenici protege Heather Wilson was fighting to hang onto her GOP House seat in New Mexico, Domenici called Iglesias at his home. Domenici had sponsored Iglesias, a fellow Republican, for the U.S. attorney post back in 2001. Now he was apparently calling in his chits. He wanted to know whether Iglesias - who was in the midst of a local corruption case - would be ready to indict some local Democrats in time for the election. As Iglesias later recalled under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the conversation went like this:

Domenici asked, "Are these going to be filed before November?" Iglesias replied that he "didn't think so." To which Domenici said, "I'm very sorry to hear that," and then the line went dead. (Such calls are highly improper. When Iglesias went public about this exchange, Domenici at first said, "I have no idea what he's talking about." Shortly thereafter, his amnesia disappeared. He acknowledged making the call, and said that he regretted it.)

But back to the chronology: Right after the '06 election, Domenici complained to Karl Rove at the White House, demanding Iglesias' ouster. Lo and behold, Iglesias' name turned up on a Dec. 7 list of U.S. attorneys targeted for firing. And out he went.

Domenici has some health problems, which undoubtedly contributed to his decision. But politicians weigh all kinds of calculations. If Domenici was reasonably confident that he could cruise to victory in his usual manner, he would not have to test his stamina. But the prospect of becoming a poster boy for the purge scandal...well, that's probably enough to make anybody feel old. And so would the prospect of returning to Washington as a member of the minority party - a factor that other Republicans are weighing, as they channel Dylan and chart the prevailing winds.

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Following up on Monday's post:

Religious right leader James Dobson surfaced today on, of all places, the op-ed page of the New York Times (the epitome of what Dobson likes to call "the secular news media"). He sought to renew his threat, first voiced last weekend, to bolt the GOP (presumably, in the company of his brethren) and back a minority-party or third-party candidate if the party chooses an '08 nominee who supports abortion rights (presumably, Rudy Giuliani).

He said he cares most about whether the Republican candidate can pass his litmus test; he is far less interested in whether the candidate is electable. In his words, "Polls don't measure right and wrong; voting according to the possibility of winning or losing can lead directly to compromise of one's principles...Winning the presidential election is vitally important, but not at the expense of what we hold most dear."

The Christian conservatives, over the years, have issued many such threats, only to stay in the fold at crunch time. Nevertheless, I well recall 1992, when they assailed President George H. W. Bush as a compromiser who had slighted their agenda, and vowed to vote for him in underwhelming numbers. They followed through on that threat, Bush lost his re-election bid, and a Clinton was elected. Dobson's threat this morning - and similar sentiment from many in the GOP base - could be good news in the end for another Clinton.

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And speaking of Republican retirements, here's an update on the Larry Craig chronology. The toe-tapping sex sting defendant - who first vowed not to resign, then declared his intention to resign, then decided not to resign pending his bid to overturn his summer guilty plea, then said he would resign by Sept. 30 if his guilty plea was still in effect, then said he would not resign by Sept. 30 because the plea had not yet been ruled upon - has now received his ruling.

A Minnesota judge has upheld the guilty plea (no surprise there), trashing Craig in the process: "The defendant, a career politician with a college education, is of at least above-average intelligence. He knew what he was saying, reading and signing."

So now Craig will obviously please his embarrassed Republican colleagues and make good on his various promises to resign...

Not!

Craig just posted this on his website: "I will continue to serve Idaho in the United States Senate...I have seen that it is possible for me to work here effectively...When my term has expired (in January 2009), I will retire and not seek reelection."

His GOP colleagues might want to get that statement notarized.

With the right pedigree, war is good business

The unfolding Blackwater USA saga shines a spotlight on many lamentable aspects of the Bush administration's war in Iraq - the lavish dispensation of U.S. taxpayer dollars ($1,222 per day for each Blackwater mercenary, which is roughly six times the daily pay of an average army soldier); the wasteful deaths of unarmed Iraqi civilians (at least one of whom was shot in the back while trying to flee during the Baghdad Square incident on Sept. 16); and the predictable dearth of accountability (not a single Blackwater employe has ever been prosecuted under U.S. law, because, as a State Department official testified on Capitol Hill yesterday, the legal issues are "very murky").

But today I'll just focus on the political dimension. Blackwater is a textbook case of how war can be good business for those who invest wisely in the right politicians.

Let's start by revisiting a comic moment in yesterday's congressional hearing on Blackwater. California GOP congressman Darrell Issa, in his questioning of Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, was clearly intending to assert that Blackwater conducts its business in a non-partisan way, free of any ideological agenda. But, on his way to making the argument, he goaded Prince into putting some interesting facts on the record. (My annotations are in parenthesis.)

Issa: "Let's go to one area that hasn't been discussed...Is your sister's name Betsy DeVos?"

Prince: "Yes it is."

Issa: "And was she a former Michigan Republican party chairwoman?"

Prince: "Yes she was."

Issa: "And was she a former Pioneer for Bush?" (i.e. a major fundraising bundler in the '04 Bush campaign)

Prince: "I don't know. Could be." (she was)

Issa: "OK, was she a large contributor to President Bush?"

Prince: "They probably were."

Issa: "And raised a lot of money for President Bush?"

Prince: "Could easily be."

Issa: "Went to the Republican conventions in 2000 and 2004?"

Prince: "I would imagine they did, yes." ("they" is an apparent reference to Betsy and her husband Richard)

Issa: "Isn't it true that your family, at least that part of the family, are very well-known Republicans?"

Prince: "Yes."

Issa: "Wouldn't it be fair to say that your company is easily identified as a Republican-leaning company...You don't have to speculate overly, but isn't that something you generally understand?"

Prince (after conferring with his lawyer): "Blackwater is not a partisan company. We execute the mission given us...Yes, I've given political contributions. I've done that since college, I did it when I was an active duty member of the armed services, and I'll probably continue to do that forward. I didn't give up that right when I became a defense contractor."

Issa: "I think you're exactly right. That while being identified as partisan Republican, that in fact your company appears to have done what all companies do, which is in fact to do the job they're doing in a non-partisan way, and I would hope that this committee and the public takes note that labeling a company as 'Republican' because of family members is inappropriate, and I would hope that we not do it again."

Chairman Henry Waxman (delivering the punch line): "Well, the only one who has done it is you." (laughter in the room)

Issa inadvertently performed an important public service. On the way to making an irrelevent argument - nobody is suggesting that Blackwater has guarded Republicans better than it has guarded Democrats - he managed to highlight a key facet of the Blackwater success story: The Prince family's longtime cozy financial ties with the party that ultimately gained power and enabled Erik Prince to make a pile of money in Iraq.

Issa cracked the door open in public, so let's swing it wide: Prince and his wife, since 1989, have rung up $263,150 in political contributions - virtually all of it to Republicans and conservative political action committees. Prince himself, a White House intern under George H.W. Bush, was later a founder of the Family Research Council, a prominent religious conservative group. Sister Betsy raised $100,000 for Bush-Cheney in 2004; brother-in-law Richard was the '06 GOP gubernatorial candidate in Michigan. The DeVos wing of the family over the decades has donated tens of millions to conservative causes.

When asked yesterday whether his family connections, longtime activism, and lavish beneficence to the GOP had in any way helped him land his lucrative government contracts in Iraq (thereby enabling him to profit from the Bush team's partial privatization of the war), Prince replied in the negative.

But let's line up these two financial figures: Before George W. Bush took office, Prince's umbrella company, Prince Holdings, had reportedly received less than $1 million in federal contracts. In the years since Bush has been in office, Prince Holdings, sometimes aided by non-competitive bidding, has received more than $1 billion in federal contracts. (And how does that translate into profits? Prince replied yesterday: "We're a private company, and there's a key word there - private.")

That's a pretty big tab for the American taxpayer, especially considering Blackwater's reputation for alienating the Iraqi citizenry - and yet another example of how the neoconservative dream has gone wrong. As the Boss sings on his new CD, "The wise men were all fools."

The fluidity of the Republican field

Following up on yesterday's post about dissatisfied Christian conservatives, it's no wonder that they can't find a clear favorite in the '08 Republican field. Republican voters in general can't seem to find one, either. This GOP presidential race is unusually fluid - a rare departure for Republicans, who typically coalesce early around an anointed frontrunner - and the latest fundraising figures have done little to clarify the situation.

The money stats for the third quarter of 2007 won't be officially known until Oct. 15, but it's already clear, from the early reports, that none of the top GOP candidates are outdistancing the competition during the run up to the roller-coaster primary season. The state of play currently looks something like this:

Rudy Giuliani, buoyed by his national name ID, leads in most national surveys of likely Republican primary voters, but he is trailing in the polls that assess GOP sentiment in the early primary states. Mitt Romney is lagging badly in the national polls, but he is the top dog in most of the early primary states (Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire), although not in others (South Carolina). Fred Thompson has debuted in second place in the national polls, but his summer fundraising numbers are reportedly unspectacular, and his performance on the stump (see below) continues to be underwhelming. John McCain, the one-time frontrunner, is said to be $2 million in debt, but he's still breathing, even though it's tough to see where he will break through. Mike Huckabee is winning plaudits for his communication skills - he has performed well in the debates - and he's getting some early vice-presidential buzz, but he's still not raising the requisite money for an extended primary run. And so on.

The only clarity this week is that Newt Gingrich has finally ended his long, slow tease and announced that he will not run for president after all (no surprise there); he's blaming the campaign finance laws.

So what happens next? That all depends...

On whether Giuliani can hang on to his broad national support, once conservative GOP voters learn more about his liberal stances on gay rights and abortion rights.

On whether Giuliani can persuade those conservative voters to ignore his liberal stances and focus on his potential strengths in an autumn faceoff with Hillary Clinton.

On whether Giuliani can do sufficiently well in the gatekeeper primaries (especially Iowa and New Hampshire), and thus position himself to win on friendler turf (Florida, with its transplanted northeasterners on Jan. 29; New York, California, and New Jersey on Feb. 5).

On whether Romney can finesse his well-earned reputation as a flip-flopper, overcome Christian conservative skepticism about his Mormon faith, hang on to his early poll advantages in the gatekeeper primaries, and thereby allow him to ride a wave of momentum, and media coverage, into the aforementioned Giuliani-friendly states.

On whether Thompson can show a pulse and get a clue (the other day, echoing the well-known Bush delusions, he appeared to insist that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003, then insisted later that he was referring to the 1980s), both of which might help make a case for his electability.

On whether Thompson can stay alive in the earliest primaries, at least until he gets to friendler South Carolina, a state that he, as a southerner, can ill afford to lose.

On whether McCain can somehow find a way to score a big surprise in the New Hampshire primary - a daunting task, considering the fact that GOP conservatives still distrust him, and considering the fact that the state's swing-voting independents (who can choose to participate in either the GOP or Democratic contest) appear far more motivated to cast ballots in the Democratic race this time around.

No doubt there is a Republican spinner somewhere who will insist that this unusual fluidity is symptomatic of a vibrant and vigorous party (although I have yet to hear anyone say that). And, actually, Giuliani's attempts to downplay his liberalism on social issues by trumpeting his electability is shaping up to be a heckuva story. (A Giuliani strategist does some trumpeting here, under the "2008 General Election" heading.) But to put Republican prospects into perspective, consider this:

Mitt Romney, the GOP's fundraising champ this year, is expected to report about $10 million in new donations for the third quarter. Whereas, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is now reporting, for the third quarter, $27 million. All told, Democratic presidential candidates have raised nearly twice as much money as their Republican counterparts during 2007. As a snapshot of the national mood, that comparison says it all.

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Speaking of Hillary, however, she might have bought herself a bit of trouble last Friday when she said this: "I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18, if they have finished high school, they will be able to access it to go to college, or maybe they will be able to make that down payment on their first home.”

A "baby bond"? With the federal government ponying up four figures for each birth? Hillary floated a version of this idea in a 2006 speech, although, at the time, she was suggesting $500. A new poll has already reported that 60 percent of Americans oppose the idea, as well as a plurality of Democrats.

And talk about conservative catnip - how hard will it be for the GOP to frame that as a "government handout," an ignonimous successor to George McGovern's 1972 idea of giving $1000 to every American? (For instance, here's blogger Phil Klein at The American Spectator: "She's still the radical college student fantasizing about establishing a leftist utopia.") Despite the Republicans' current woes, nothing buoys their spirits more effectively than being served up a fat pitch down the middle of the plate.

Meanwhile, from another angle, I questioned Hillary in my latest Sunday print column.

All is not heavenly for the Christian right

Back in May of 2000, I learned first-hand that James Dobson is a tough man to please.

Dobson, the prominent Christian conservative who believes that his religious brethren have the God-given right to vet Republican presidential candidates, invited some political journalists to dine with him at his headquarters in Colorado Springs. As we silently forked our pasta salads, in his oak-trimmed boardroom, Dobson explained why he was so disappointed in frontrunner George W. Bush.

Bush, apparently, was not sufficiently conservative, because he had not yet categorically renounced the idea of choosing Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge as his running mate. Ridge was a defender of abortion rights, and this triggered Dobson's ire. Basically, he was threatening to bolt the GOP and take his followers (four million listeners, six million on his email list) along with him.

That day, he told us: "A (party) that abandons the unborn child would send a significant number of people to look for another party to represent them...It wouldn't take much. You cannot contradict, you cannot insult the base of your support...I know the Christian community. I hear from 280,000 of them per month. I know them probably better than anyone else does. I know there are some things that set them on fire, and the unborn child is one of them...When you say to (Christian conservatives) that, 'We can compromise on somebody who is a heartbeat away from the presidency,' there's a lot of agitation about that...If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing."

Bush, of course, did not choose Ridge, and Dobson stayed in the fold. But you get the idea:

Dobson (and a number of his allies) will vet only those GOP candidates who are deemed to be true believers. Political compromise is for the sinners.

Which brings us to the present moment, an unhappy one for Dobson - and for all his religious right compatriots. They just can't seem to find an '08 Republican candidate who conforms to their ideals, and they are squabbling with each other about what to do. And this is potentially significant, because Christian conservatives comprise roughly one-third of the GOP electorate; it's rough for a Republican to win a general election if that much of the base is dissatisfied and therefore unmotivated to vote en masse.

Over the weekend, in Salt Lake City, the religious-right leaders conducted a private emergency meeting, in the hopes of sorting out the situation. Dobson reportedly flew in. The upshot: They're threatening to bolt the GOP, and urge their followers to do the same, if abortion-rights defender Rudy Giuliani wins the nomination next year. They signed onto a resolution stating that "if the Republican party nominates a pro-abortion candidate, we will consider running a third-party candidate."

Democrats, of course, would be thrilled if Dobson and his friends follow through on their threat, and split the Republican electorate in time for the autumn '08 finale. But that prospect is a long way off. What's noteworthy right now is that religious right leaders are dividing into two camps: the purists and the pragmatists. That, by itself, signals that spirits are low within the GOP coalition.

The purists, in search of a savior, find fault with most of the current GOP crop. Many of them dislike Fred Thompson, for instance, because he once did some lobbying for an abortion rights group, because he seems insufficiently committed to supporting a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and because he seems insufficiently church-going. As Dobson railed in a recent email to his followers, "He has no passion, no zeal...And yet he is apparently the Great Hope that burns in the breasts of many conservative Christians? Well, not for me, my brothers. Not for me!" (Here's where it gets real complicated: Some of the purists do like Thompson, and believe that Dobson is being unfair; last week, another leader, Richard Land, told Christian Broadcast News, "I’ve received phone calls and emails from Southern Baptists about Senator Thompson. They are all furious at Doctor Dobson.")

Anyway, he purists don't like Giuliani either, for the aforementioned reason, and because he has a messy personal history. They don't like John McCain, because he has warred with the religious right leaders in the past, and also seems to have insufficient zeal for their issues. And they're wary of Mitt Romney, because of their suspicions of his Mormon faith, and because Romney now professes to be for their issues, after years of being against their issues.

But the religious right leaders can't even agree among themselves on how to proceed. The pragmatists include Gary Bauer, who joined the weekend summit by phone and reportedly warned that he and his colleagues should refrain from infighting, lest the nation wind up with Hillary Clinton in the White House. (Indeed, some grassroots Christian conservatives seem willing - at least according to the polls - to ignore Giuliani's social liberalism, and focus on his potential electability, if only to stop Hillary.) On the other hand, Bauer also made some purist noises, by agreeing with his colleagues that if an abortion-rights defender wins the nomination, "it will blow up the GOP."

At this point, there's probably only one thing that Giuliani can do to tamp down this incipient revolt. He'll probably need to address the assembled religious right leaders, and conveniently arrange for his cellphone to ring midway through:

"Excuse me, I need to take this...'Hello? Hiiiiiii....Well, I'd love to talk, but I'm kind of busy right now...I'm talking to the defenders of the faith, isn't that wonderful? Can I call you back later, tell you how it went?...Great...Can't wait to talk to you privately, just you and me...Yes, I love our relationship, too...Love you, bye.'....Sorry for the interruption, folks. That was God."

Jackie Robinson and the four empty lecterns

We can say one thing for certain about the four top contenders for the '08 Republican presidential nomination: They are all men of conviction. They decided many weeks ago to boycott the nationally-televised GOP debate on African-American and Hispanic issues...and they hewed to that pledge. Which is why, when Travis Smiley's forum was aired last night, there were four conspicuously empty lecterns.

It's probably worth nothing that some of the participating candidates did acknowledge that the absence of Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain (supposedly due to scheduling conflicts) was a "disgrace" and an embarrassment to the Republican party, not to mention an insult to minority voters everywhere. But somehow the whole episode, and what it says about the contemporary GOP, made me think of Jackie Robinson.

Robinson, who had broken baseball's racial barrier in 1947, was an active Republican during his early retirement years. He voted for Richard Nixon in 1960, and, soon thereafter, he told author Roger Kahn that he had joined the GOP because he wanted the party to be a home for African-Americans. Using the nomenclature of his era, he said: "It would be a terrible thing if every Negro voted Democratic. Then we'd be on the way to having a white party and a black party in America. That would be a disaster for me - my whole career has been about integration - and, more important, it would be a disaster for the country."

Then he went to the 1964 Republican convention as an honorary delegate - and discovered that he was virtually the only black face in a sea of white. He listened as a succession of speakers denounced the newly-enacted and historic Civil Rights Act (because it mandated that all public accomodations had to be integrated). And he nearly had an altercation with a white Alabama delegate who tried to lunge at him, only to be restrained by his wife.

Robinson was so concerned about his party that he wrote an article that year for The Saturday Evening Post magazine. The title asked the question, "The GOP - For White Men Only?"

Robinson was wrong, of course. Four decades later, the party is for white women as well.

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The plot thickens. Howard Kurtz has more today on the Clintons' muzzling of a negative magazine story (which I mentioned here on Wednesday). The Gentlemen's Quarterly writer whose work was spiked is now on the record for the first time: "GQ told me the Clintons were unhappy..."

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Assuming that I have any other thoughts today, regarding the '08 presidential race, they will be communicated orally, between 10:05 and 11 a.m., on Philadelphia's NPR station, 90.9 FM. If you have a slacker Friday, listen here.

The downside of measuring the drapes

Hillary Clinton got cuffed around pretty badly last night, at the latest Democratic presidential debate, but that kind of thing is bound to happen when a candidate acts like she's already measuring the drapes in the Oval Office.

And, in response, she didn't always perform well. At times, she seemed testy and defensive. None of this may matter in the end, of course, since relatively few Amercans are even watching these '07 debates, but clearly some of her rivals (and the press, as represented by Tim Russert) signaled that they have no intention of allowing Hillary to simply bask in her front-runner status. And the danger, for Hillary, is that any poor responses delivered under fire might well be used as video fodder by the GOP at some future date.

Several moments were revealing last night. Hillary was repeatedly asked whether, in order to make Social Security solvent for the long haul, she would consider raising more money by requiring that affluent Americans pay more Social Security taxes. As Russert explained last night, "Right now, you pay tax for Social Security on your first $97,500 worth of income. Why not tax the entire income of every American?...Senator Clinton, would you be in favor of saying to the American people, 'I'm going to tax your income. I'm not going to cap at $97,500. Everyone, even if you're a millionaire, is going to pay Social Security tax on every cent they make'?"

But she wouldn't give a straight answer. She kept offering variations of her initial response: "I don't think I should be negotiating about what I would do as president. You know, I want to see what other people come to the table with." (Nobody in the primaries has even voted yet, and she's already negotiating as president.)

John Edwards jumped on her for this. Obviously, he needs to draw sharp contrasts with Hillary if he is to stand a chance of winning over liberal primary voters, but he deftly skewered her by turning her non-responsiveness into a character issue:

"I would say that the single most important thing for anybody running for president is to be willing to be honest with America...The American people deserve to hear the truth. They have heard so much politician double-talk on this issue. That's the reason young people don't believe Social Security's going to be there for them. Why would you possibly trust a bunch of politicians who say the same thing over and over and over...

"The honest truth is there are hard choices to be made here...I don't understand why somebody who makes $50 million a year pays Social Security tax on the first $97,000...while somebody who makes $85,000 a year pays Social Security tax on every dime of their income." (By the way, Edwards last night was far more effective than Barack Obama at dogging Hillary. Obama seemed semi-comatose, perhaps because he reportedly had a cold.)

Hillary even took some hits from Joe Biden - an unusual development, since he generally spends his time at these events agreeing with her on foreign policy, seemingly auditioning to be her Secretary of State. Last night, however, he basically declared that she as president would have trouble getting things done because of her image as a polarizer. Referring specificially to health care reform, he said:

"I think it's going to be more difficult -- unfairly, but I think it's more difficult for Hillary...The special interests, with regard to Hillary, they feed on this, you know, this Clinton-Bush thing. It's not Hillary's fault. But the fact of the matter is, it's much more difficult to go out and convince a group of Republicans, I would argue, getting something done that is of a major consequence...I'm not suggesting it's Hillary's fault. I think it's a reality that it's more difficult, because there's a lot of very good things that come with all the great things that President Clinton did. But there's also a lot of the old stuff that comes back. It's kind of hard. When I say 'old stuff,' I'm referring to policy. Policy."

(I love that last qualifier, lest anyone think he was referring to the Lewinsky scandal.)

But her most awkward moment came later in the debate, when Russert brought up the delicate topic of her husband's backstage clout and its potential benefits to her political career. This was shortly after Hillary had insisted, with reference to her husband, "I'm running on my own. Im going to the people on my own."

Her husband heads a charitable group called the William J. Clinton Foundation. Recently, Bill remarked that the foundation is not required to publish the names of all its donors, but, in Bill's words, "if Hillary became president, I think there would questions about whether people would try to win favor (with her) by giving money to me."

Russert read that quote, then asked Hillary: "In light of that, do you believe that the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton (presidential) library should publish all the donors who give contributions to those two entities?"

Hillary: "I actually co-sponsored legislation that would have sitting presidents reveal any donation to their presidential library, and I think that's a good policy." And, as for the foundation, "it would be the same, because that's where the library comes from."

But since there is no such legal requirement, and no apparent likelihood that her bill is destined to become law, Russert asked whether her husband's library and foundation would be willing to voluntarily make their donors public, to address the issue that Bill himself had raised.

Hillary: "Well, you'll have to ask them."

No elaboration. A cold stare, directed at Russert. An expression that said, "I wish I could throttle you with that necktie."

Russert kept going, anyway: "What's your recommendation?"

Hillary: "Well, I don't talk about my private conversations with my husband, but I'm sure he'd be happy to consider that."

There was a lot of bob and weave in those answers. She says she is "running on her own," but, as to whether private donors will curry favor with her by going through Bill, she deems that to be mere pillow talk. Whatever. Russert soon moved on to the topic of Edwards' $400 haircut, giving Hillary a breather. But, as the biggest target in the Democratic field, she'll be back in the line of fire soon enough.

Bill and Hillary's two-for-one media muscle

Way back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was first running for president, he was fond of promoting himself and Hillary as a unique package deal, "two for the price of one." And apparently that's still the deal - as evidenced by the way Bill and Hillary worked in tandem to muscle a national magazine into killing a negative story.

I'm a bit surprised that this incident, revealed this week by Politico, has not garnered more attention, given the fact that it shows how America's premiere power couple operates behind the scenes. One can only assume, hypothetically speaking, that if George H. W. Bush back in 1999 had somehow been able to muscle a national magazine into killing a negative story about his son the candidate, there would have been an outcry on the left about the Bush family using its clout to suppress freedom of the press.

The facts in the Clinton incident, as reported, are essentially these: Gentlemen's Quarterly, the glossy monthly that typically combines political and celebrity profiles with tips on cool socks and accessories, had enlisted a respected free-lancer, Joshua Green, to write about the inside skinny of the Hillary Clinton campaign. That's a tough assignment, because "Hillaryland" is a ship that rarely leaks. But apparently, Green unearthed some evidence of infighting among the top staffers, reportedly including some jealousy over one senior official's pay package. So when the Clinton campaign got word of all this (from Green, who he was seeking comment), the spinners swung into action.

It turned out that GQ had a separate project in the pipeline: a fawning story about Bill Clinton's good works around the globe, a story that was scheduled to run in December, with Bill's familiar mug on the cover. It was a sweet deal for GQ, because Bill is considered one of those rare celebrity-politicians who can actually inspire greater newsstand sales - which explains why GQ wanted him fronting the issue that would have lots of Christmas advertising stuffed inside.

Well, the Clinton team decided to threaten that deal. During the summer, it reportedly, it told GQ: Either you kill that negative Hillary story, or Bill would refuse to cooperate any further on any aspect of the Bill story.

And GQ caved. It killed the unflattering Hillary story in order to save its positive Bill story.

GQ's editor told Politico: "I don’t really get into the inner workings of the magazine, but I can tell you that yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons." Then he declined to say anything further about the "reasons" for this particular killing. In other words, the Politico story is accurate...and the Clintons pulled off a two-fer.

It's hardly unusual, of course, for politicians to shape news coverage, or to wield clout in the publishing world. The Kennedy family was famously adept; thanks to the backstage machinations of old Joe Kennedy, Look and Life magazines often seemed to function as de facto campaign brochures for JFK. But the GQ affair demonstrates how the Clintons plan to play the game, by leverage his unique celebrity on behalf of her candidacy.

What's mysterious about this incident, however, is why the Clintons felt the need to muscle the Green story onto the editor's spike. Perhaps it's because they didn't like Green, who had previously written a long Atlantic magazine piece about how Hillary is "cautious" pol. It's hard to imagine why a piece about intramural campaign squabbling would set off alarms, since that kind of insider stuff is interesting to only the most devoted political junkies. (This being the Internet age, won't this article surface somewhere else, eventually?) The bottom line, however, is that this incident reveals the control-freak mentality inside the Hillary camp.

There could have been a different outcome, of course. GQ might have told the Clintons to stuff it, deciding instead to stick with the Green story and put some other celebrity on the Christmas issue cover. For free-press purists, perhaps that would have been the preferred outcome. But these glossy magazines are accustomed to being squeezed; they have to deal with Hollywood press agents (the most notorious, for a long time, was Pat Kingsley) who decree that their celebrity clients won't grace the mag cover unless the client gets to choose the writer, or even the subject matter. These magazines are all about business, not the First Amendment. And the two-for-one Clintons know how to work that angle.

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Hell has frozen over. A Senate Republican has finally acknowledged that, on an important national issue, President Bush is "factually incorrect."

For years, of course, Bush has been making statements about Iraq that bear no resemblance to factual reality, and this week he has sought to extend the practice to the domestic sphere, to the debate over children's health insurance. But this was too much for Iowa Republican senator Charles Grassley, who also fumed that "the president's understanding of our bill is wrong."

Welcome to the club, Chuck.

He has been a key player in the bipartisan effort to expand a popular children's health insurance program (the one that passed the House last night, with 45 Republicans voting for it). But Bush plans to nix it anyway, claiming over the weekend that the bill "goes too far toward federalizing health care and turns a program into one that covers children in some households with incomes of up to $83,000 a year."

But, as Grassley's camp pointed out, there is no such provision in the bill. Bush was apparently seizing on the news that New York State, citing the high cost of living there, has asked for a waiver that would permit coverage of kids in family-of-four households earning $83,000, but the bill itself has no provisions to expand eligibility, and stipulates that the poorest kids below the poverty level get top priority. (As for New York's requested waiver, the feds have already turned it down.)

In any case, Republican congressman Roy LaHood of Ohio had the best question yesterday: "I'm a little baffled as to why the Bush people picked this issue to fight it out on. It's very sensitive. It's about kids. Who's against kids' health care?"

Indeed, why pick a fight over a children's bill that is endorsed by the American Medical Association, the health insurance industry, governors from both parties (including conservatives such as Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota), the AARP, and enough Republican senators (including Grassley and Orrin Hatch) to ensure a veto-proof Senate majority?

Whatever the answer, Bush's vow to veto health insurance for kids may well prompt even more congressional Republicans to consider retirement rather than run the gauntlet in 2008.

Mitt's beef with his brethren

Can a Republican win the '08 presidential nomination by assailing his own party?

Mitt Romney apparently seems willing to take that gamble. And it would appear to be a risky tactic.

Despite the fact that the Republican "brand" is at low ebb nationally, and despite the fact that the lame-duck Republican president has been written off as an irredeemable failure by roughly 70 percent of the American public, GOP loyalists would prefer not to dwell on their past errors, or question their leader's wisdom; rather, they'd prefer that their '08 candidates simply serve up heapings of red meat about defeat-o-crat Democrats and the perceived evils of Hillary.

But Romney, perhaps with an eye on the Bush-weary independent voters who will ultimately swing the general elections, is now taking a different route. In a new national TV ad, in a weekend speech, and in a widely-circulated "open letter" to fellow Republicans, he has decided (at least for now) to position himself as the "outsider" and "reformer" who will clean up the failed Washington Republican establishment. And the riskiest aspect of this move is his subliminal skewering of the Decider himself.

Among other things, he says in his letter that "government" in Washington, in defiance of conservative principles, has been "spending too much money...If we're going to change Washington, Republicans have to put our own house in order. We can't be like Democrats - a party of big spending...We have to remember who we are. We are not Big Government Republicans."

That Romney pitch, about returning the party to its core values, is aimed at the sizeable number of disaffected Republican conservatives who have long been upset by the runaway government spending of the Bush era. It has long been documented that the former Republican Congress, in cahoots with Bush, jacked up federal spending to heights not recorded since the Democratic era of Lyndon Johnson; indeed, Bush in those years never vetoed a spending bill. This past weekend, in fact, a budget specialist at the conservative Heritage Foundation complained that the federal budget under Bush has grown by seven percent a year - twice the growth rate under Bill Clinton.

Romney, in a weekend speech to Republicans in Michigan, tiptoed even closer to assailing Bush directly. He said that true Republicans know "how to run a tight ship" - and that the handling of Katrina was the opposite. In his words, "the Katrina cleanup didn't look like the Republicans were in charge. I want to bring accountability back to Washington." (Implication: the Bush team is inept, and unaccountable.)

In his speech, Romney did laud Bush briefly, contending that the president has kept America safe since 9/11, while "restoring personal integrity and dignity to the White House" (I'm not sure that swing voters would buy the line about integriy and dignity, but the GOP base probably would). His praise for Bush, however, was quite measured, when compared to his Bush critique at the Iowa straw poll back in August, when he was road-testing his message about changing Washington.

At that Iowa event, he lauded Bush about keeping America safe, about championing the Patriot Act, about arresting terrorists, about pushing for domestic surveillance, and he implied that people were unfairly picking on Bush in general: "I know it's gotten popular in the media and other places to be critical of the president. There's no one that's perfect." Romney isn't talking that way now.

He's also going after the Republicans in Congress (as if those folks don't have enough problems). His open letter includes a blunt reference to the moral lapses of certain unnamed Republicans, presumably Larry Craig (wide stance), David Vitter (hookers), and the now-departed Mark Foley (underage boys). His line in the letter: "We can't have ethical standards that are a punch-line for Jay Leno." This is probably solid territory for Romney, since he is reputed to be squeaky clean on the morality front. But in his Michigan speech this past weekend, he pushed the point even further, by taking implicit aim at Bush: "The standard for high ethical conduct has to start at the very top."

Also, in the Michigan speech, Romney also broadened his ethical critique to include what he dismissively called "earmark Republicans," which perhaps can be taken as a reference to the party's longest-serving senator, earmark king Ted Stevens of Alaska, whose house was recently raided by the FBI in connection with a federal corruption probe.

It's hard to gauge Romney's true position in the unusually fluid GOP race - he is faring decently in the Iowa and New Hampshire polls, but poorly in the national polls - so perhaps he feels the need to roll the dice. And his decision to call himself a "change Republican" is certainly a gamble.

In his Iowa straw poll speech in August, he invoked the change word five times in the first minute. In his current open letter, he invokes the word six times in the last three paragraphs. But his potential problem is obvious: Change is generally a word employed by Democrats (especially in this election cycle); the Republican diehards might not be comfortable hearing that word from one of their own, since it implies that the fault of our current ills lies not just with the Democrats, but with themselves. And despite all of Romney's ardent wooing - particularly his rightward journey on social issues - he may be pitching the party loyalists a daring argument that they simply do not want to hear.

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Public officials, saying and doing foolish things:

The runner up this morning is President Bush, who is continuing his quest to lead his party over the cliff, this time by opposing the bipartisan bill to expand the state health insurance program for children. It's rarely a political winner to be viewed as "against children," but he's apparently doing his best to make life tougher for the congressional Republican moderates who have to run again in 2008.

The SCHIP expansion is just part of the larger congressional spending package that Bush doesn't like; it exceeds his requests by $22 billion. Yesterday, while speaking to business leaders, the born-again fiscal conservative assailed the Democratic Congress for its spending priorities: "Some in Congress will tell you that $22 billion is not a lot of money. As business leaders, you know better."

In other words, Bush views an extra $22 billion for primarily domestic needs as "a lot of money." But here's a way to put the figure in perspective:

That's roughly the same amount of money that Bush is spending in Iraq...every two months.

Nevertheless, today's foolish award goes to Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who insisted at Columbia University yesterday that there is no gay community in his country. ("I don't know who's told you we have it.") This is why it was better to err on the side of free speech and allow the guy to talk. What better way to expose his delusions, than in the open marketplace of ideas?

The perils of privatizing the war

Let’s kick off the week with a fresh roundup of fact-challenged Bush administration assertions about Iraq.

President Bush, June 15, 2004: “I fully agree that it’s a sovereign country.”

Bush, Jan. 27, 2005: “This is a sovereign government, they’re on their feet.”

Donald Rumsfeld, April 26, 2006: “This is a sovereign country, they’re making impressive progress.”

Condoleezza Rice, April 26, 2006: “This is a sovereign government, a permanent government.”

Rice, May 4, 2007: “It’s a matter of respecting Iraq’s sovereignty, of non-interference in Iraq’s affairs….It is our goal to support the Maliki government…consistent with the fact that this is a sovereign government.”

Well, I know you may be shocked to hear this, but it turns out that this line about Iraqi “sovereignty” is just another Bush administration fiction.

Case in point: the Iraqi government is powerless to police or punish the gun-wielding private contractors who work for Blackwater USA – because of a 2004 regulation, written by the American occupation authorities, that shields all American security contractors from Iraqi prosecution. These private-sector soldiers are allowed to operate in Iraq without any legal constraints on their conduct. The “sovereign” Iraqis can’t lift a finger to hold these people accountable.

I realize, of course, that the Blackwater dispute isn’t nearly as important as the portentous struggle over a two-week-old moveon.org newspaper ad; after all, the Blackwater story is merely about the deaths of at least 11 Iraqis and the wounding of 12 more, and we know that, in American politics, those faceless people matter a whole lot less than a few juvenile words aimed at an American military man. But, for the heck of it, consider this chronology:

Eight days ago, armed guards employed by Blackwater (one of the roughly 60 American firms that have profited from the Bush administration’s unprecedented war-fighting privatization program) were involved in a controversial gun battle in Baghdad. The Iraqi government contends that the Blackwater guards, while protecting a U.S. embassy convoy, got spooked by some mortar rounds that had landed nearby, and had then opened fire indiscriminately, killing and wounding the innocent civilians. Three Iraqi ministries have already determined that the Blackwater’s conduct constitutes “a terrorist action against civilians, just like any other terrorist operation.”

(When the Maliki government first tried to investigate further, the Americans reportedly refused to give the Iraqis access to the Blackwater guards in question – or to share any information with Iraqi investigators. Now all parties say that a joint probe is proceeding. Blackwater has issued a statement saying that it acted "lawfully and appropriately.")

Early last week, the Maliki government, which says that the Baghdad incident was the seventh violent episode involving Blackwater this year alone, was making noises about kicking the North Carolina-based firm out of Iraq. That threat didn’t last long. By Friday, a Maliki advisor was telling the press, “The reality of the matter is, we can’t do that.” One big reason: Order 17, signed in 2004 by American occupation chief Paul Bremer, who unilaterally decreed that all U.S. private contractors shall be exempt from Iraqi law.

In other words, “free Iraq” (as Bush likes to call it) shall be considered free as long as it doesn’t try to meddle with the Bush war-fighting privatization program. When it does try to meddle, it is deemed to be a hostage to U.S. interests; as Maliki said yesterday, the Blackwater case poses “serious challenges to the sovereignty of Iraq.” Meanwhile, Blackwater went back on the job last Friday, guarding U.S. convoys, after just a few days in the dog house.

Blackwater has a $750 million contract to guard State Department personnel, but they have plenty of competitors on the ground. By all accounts, the private military contractors (reportedly as many as 30,000 strong) have been involved in dozens of questionable incidents resulting in death and injury of innocent Iraqis. As U.S. Brigadier General Karl Horst reportedly complained to Jeremy Scahill (author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army), “These guys are loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There’s no authority over them, so you can’t come down on them hard when they escalate force….They shoot people, and somebody else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place.”

Actually, it’s not surprising that the Bush administration came up with an order that exempts Blackwater and the other firms from Iraqi law – considering the fact that the private military contractors are also exempt from American laws. Unlike the official soldiers (the ones who wear uniforms), the contractors are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

There has been talk for years that perhaps Congress might want to address this issue – indeed, in 2006 there was even a bipartisan attempt to make the contractors more legally accountable – but, naturally, the supine Republican majority never showed much inclination to question Bush’s bid to fight the war with the aid of the profit motive. They kept cheerleading even after the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal embarrassed America worldwide; many of the abusers at the prison had turned out to be private contractors. U.S. Army investigators had even reported that "approximately 35 percent of the contract interrogators lacked formal military training as interrogators."

Nor can one expect the minority Republicans to help police these military privateers, or even to hold Bush accountable for his claims about “Iraqi sovereignty.” They'd prefer to mask their performance failures by changing the subject, by inveighing anew against the moveon.org ad (yesterday, the Republican National Committee invoked it again), and trying to frame that incident as some sort of national crisis.

A case can be made that the military contractors deserve more scrutiny, particularly since the outsourcing of war seems to be in vogue (as Blackwater CEO Erik Prince has said, “We’re trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service”). Perhaps the majority Democrats might want to take the lead on scrutinizing this issue of outsourcing our national security to unaccountable privateers.

Don’t hold your breath. They will probably shy away, lest they be tagged by the Republicans as “not supporting the mercenaries.”

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Hillary Clinton appeared on all the Sunday shows yesterday - an act now known as The Full Ginsberg, in honor of William Ginsberg, Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, who was famous in 1998 for saturating the Sunday airwaves. I was struck by one particular exchange, with Tim Russert on Meet the Press.

Russert brought up the Norman Hsu fundraising scandal - the former "bundler" of campaign cash is now wearing prison garb - and said: "Money has been an issue that is of grave concern to the American people....You talk about the politics of change. Is this (reliance on fundraising bundlers) changing the way Washington does business?"

Hillary, who recently returned $850,000 collected by Hsu, replied at great length: "Well, I’m very much in favor of public financing, which is the only way to really change a lot of the problems that we have in our campaign finance system. You know, as soon as my campaign found out what I and dozens of other campaigns did not know, that he was a fugitive from justice, we took action. And out of an abundance of caution, we did return any contribution that we could in any way, no matter how indirect, link to him. And I believe that we’ve done what we needed to do based on the information as soon as it came to our attention...But again, the real answer is we’re spending an enormous amount of time, money and effort raising money, mostly to be, you know, clear to go on television. And we have got to solve this. It is not good for our political system. It is certainly not the way that most people I know who run for office and want to try to do something good for their constituents and their country want to be spending all of their time. And we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to address it, and there has to be a way that public financing becomes the law of the land."

Two problems with that answer: First, Hillary's campaign was actually sluggish in its response to the Hsu affair, at every stage (as I documented here). And second, Hillary may claim today that she is "very much in favor" of public financing as the antidote to sleazy bundlers, but there is scant evidence that she has expended much time or energy on that issue.

I don't recall her ever crusading for that kind of reform; on the contrary, she chose to "opt out" of the public financing rules and instead privatize all her primary season and general election fundraising (the first candidate to opt out of both phases since the rules were introduced in 1976).

Pragmatically, her decision made sense, since she thought she could scare away potential rivals by racking up prodigious amounts of private money. But, given her track record, it is disingenuous for her to now claim that she is "very much in favor" of public financing. That's just her way of trying to spin herself free of the Hsu embarrassment.

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Speaking of Hillary, she is being endorsed today by Indiana Senator Evan Bayh. This is noteworthy. Bayh is a centrist Democrat with a long history of red-state electoral success; several years ago, he also served as chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and, in that job, he frequently jousted with the party's liberal base. By endorsing Hillary so early, he is trying to tell independent voters that Hillary is not a flaming liberal - and he is probably trying to put himself on the short list as a running mate, if she does win the nomination. I've long thought (as have others) that he would make the list anyway.

Rudy in full pander mode

Rudy Giuliani, in full pander mode while addressing the National Rifle Association today, demonstrated the art of the acrobatic flip-flop, as he sought to show that he is gung ho for gun rights after having been against 'em.

Rudy today: "People commit crimes, not guns."
Rudy in a PBS interview on May 31, 1995: "It's the person who uses the gun that is the source of the real problem. The gun is also the source of a very big problem."

Rudy's stance today: Each state should be free to decide its own gun laws, without federal interference.
Rudy on May 31, 1995, defending his '94 support for President Clinton's federal ban on assault weapons: "I don't understand (the NRA's) fighting a ban on assault weapons," at a time when his NYC cops were imperiled because "criminals can get their hands on assault weapons outside of New York City." The NRA's "unwillingness to deal with some of the realities we face in cities is a terrible, terrible mistake."

Rudy today: "We need...to leave law-abiding citizens alone."
Rudy in January 1994: "National registration of guns is critically important for us in starting to get a handle on what goes on outside of New York."
Rudy in 1997: "The United State Congress needs to pass uniform licensing for everyone carrying a gun."
Rudy during his brief 2000 Senate race: "I believe that we should treat the possession of a handgun the way we treat driving an automobile."

Rudy today: "I'd like us to respect each other."
Rudy in 2000: "This is an industry which profits from the suffering of innocent people."
Rudy in 1995: The NRA people are "the extremists of the right."

Also, Rudy today somehow forgot to mention that a lawsuit that he filed as mayor seven years ago against the gun industry was being argued this week in federal court. He was reminded of this fact by a questioner. He replied by saying that the lawsuit has taken "several twists and several turns that I don't agree with," and then neglected to identify those disagreeable twists and turns.

Nevertheless, he assured the gun lobby that he was a forthright guy worthy of their trust in the future ("I will tell you what I really believe"). However, he cautioned that if in the future he feels compelled to change his beliefs, "then I'll explain to you why." I'm sure that made the NRA feel better.

Rudy doesn't expect the NRA's endorsement; he is merely hoping that the group will be sufficiently mollified to leave him alone during the Republican primary season. But the NRA never forgets an insult; nor will it necessarily embrace a panderer who has already recalibrated his beliefs in the name of ambition.

The latest snub from the country club

What better way for the GOP to burnish its image as the country club party than to have all its top presidential candidates blow off a long-scheduled, nationally-televised forum on minority issues, a Sept. 27 debate hosted by a prominent black commentator at an historically black college?

Republicans frequently complain that they are unfairly maligned as being insensitive to people of color; indeed, one of the more noteworthy pillars of the long-range Bush-Rove political game plan was to convince black and Hispanic voters that the GOP was a safe haven. Karl Rove's chief political emissary, the now-departed GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, spent much of his time ricocheting around the nation, trying to court non-Caucasians. Just 16 months ago, President Bush said he considered it "a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community," and signaled that GOP should forge those ties again.

But today it's hard to see how that message can have any resonance, now that four '08 Republican contenders - Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and John McCain - have opted to stiff Tavis Smiley, the TV/radio host who is sponsoring next Tuesday's minority issues forum at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Newt Gingrich has called this decision "an enormous error," and no wonder: If the GOP has any hopes of being seen as open to diversity, its cause will hardly be helped next Thursday, when the TV cameras zero in on the four empty lecterns.

One of the biggest frauds in this episode is the excuse being floated by the four boycotting candidates, the old chestnut about "scheduling conflicts." This forum has been on the calendar since it was officially announced back on February 8. And "scheduling conflicts" were also invoked this year by major GOP candidates when they were approached by the NAACP, the Urban League, Univision, and the National Association of Latino and Elected Officials.

Some white GOP conservatives have been talking up the Smiley forum for months, calling it a great opportunity for the '08 hopefuls; as Jack Kemp, the ex-congressman and ex-presidential candidate, wrote in July, "if the GOP is ever to regain its lost ground with African-American voters, a good place to start would be to commit itself to debating (minority) issues before a largely black audience...I can't wait for Sept. 27. I can't wait for someone in the GOP to make a positive and progressive case for voting Republican in 2008, instead of appealing only to our fears and trepidations on immigration and Iraq."

So why are the top contenders cutting and running?

Here's the real answer, from a GOP adviser who was quoted yesterday in The Washington Post: "What's the win? Why would (they) go into a crowd where they're probably going to be booed?"

Wow. These guys don't even have Secret Service protection yet, and they're already in the bubble - fearful of not being universally lionized in the public square. (This is a lamentable bipartisan phobia, by the way; the Democratic candidates seem equally fearful of being asked unpleasant questions by Fox News.)

Although all the debates are generally conducted in a civil manner, there's little doubt that the leading GOP contenders, if they weren't so timorous, would indeed be confronted with some inconvenient questions at the Smiley forum. Maybe questions like this:

How would you have handled the Katrina response differently, in a way that would have prevented the needless deaths of black New Orleans citizens? Why do you think that Republican candidates in 2006 received only 11 percent of the black vote nationwide, and how would you boost that support in the future? How come, according to the U.S. Census, the percentage of blacks living below the poverty line jumped from 22.7 to 24.7 during President Bush's first term, while the gap between black and white income widened - and what would you do to reverse all that? And given the large numbers of African-Americans who are fighting and dying in Iraq, what would you specifically to end this war, and how would those efforts differ from those of the current administration?

Kemp and others insist that the GOP candidates have positive ideas that might resonate with minority listeners (in Kemp's words, "empowerment zones, educational choice, capital and ownership opportunities for low-income families"), but, clearly, the prospect of adversarial questions probably explains the four empty lecterns.

None of the top contenders want to risk saying anything that might make them appear to be distancing themselves from Bush - who still has strong majority support from the white GOP conservatives who are likely to dominate the early Republican primary voting in Iowa, New Hampshire, and (especially) South Carolina. Indeed, politics is often a game of inches, and longer-range concerns - such as the fact that the GOP is sending out an exclusionary message at a time when the nation is becoming more racially diverse - are generally postponed to another day.

Giuliani and the others are basically stuck with their decisions. Even if they suddenly reversed themselves and told Smiley that they will attend next Thursday, that by itself would play like an admission of error. Yet by blowing off the forum, they're apparently alienating minority Republicans who have long hoped for an hospitable GOP.

As Princella Smith, a GOP activist and former political aide, wrote online the other day, referring to the four timid candidates, "the time is up for this kind of cowardice....It is absolutely ridiculous to snub an entire demographic of an electorate and then ask to lead their country. If this is their train of thought, I feel they are not worthy to lead."

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Now that the Senate Democrats have failed in their last serious bid to alter Bush's Iraq war strategy - yesterday, their proposal to set rules on troop redeployments was defeated by the Senate Republicans who are sticking with Bush - it appears that a new era on Capitol Hill is at hand. We will soon move to the phase of open political warfare.

Democrats will no longer try to forge compromises with wavering GOP senators, because apparently that tactic is futile. From now on, in all likelihood, Democrats will fix their eyes on 2008, and seek to portray the Republicans as pro-war obstructionists who would rather stand with the unpopular lame duck than with the American majority. The Democratic goal, of course, is to elect a president and strong congressional majorities that will work together to end the war in 2009.

But what would "ending the war" really mean? Hillary Clinton has signaled for months that a sizeable contingent of U.S. troops, albeit with a reduced combat mission, will be required in Iraq for the foreseeable future. And her chief rival, Barack Obama is now saying much the same thing. Here's a key passage from his foreign policy speech last week, a passage that has been largely overlooked:

"We will need to retain some forces in Iraq and the region. We'll continue to strike at al Qaeda in Iraq. We'll protect our forces as they leave, and we will continue to protect U.S. diplomats and facilities..."

How many forces? For how long? How would he draw distinctions between "al Qaeda in Iraq" and all the other sources of violence, ensuring that we were only striking at the former? By "facilities," is he referring to the sprawling military bases that Bush has built, seemingly with a permanent presence in mind?

In other words, even if the Democrats win all the short-term political battles on Capitol Hill between now and election day, the hard questions, about the nature of our long-range involvement, will await them in 2009.

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Late update: Hey, it turns out that the Democratic Senate has finally managed to assemble a veto-proof majority and speak out on the war that has sowed chaos in the heart of the Middle East, killed nearly 3,800 American soldiers, cost American taxpayers $10 billion a month. The big vote was held today, and 72 senators came together...

...to condemn a newspaper ad.

That's right. The Democrats, while apparently powerless to change the Bush war strategy, were downright resolute on the burning issue of whether a left-wing antiwar group trafficked in dumb hyperbole in a newspaper ad.

If I read this Congress correctly, the war itself is less important than whether an interest group called somebody a nasty name. No wonder Congress' positive job approval rating is heading toward single digits. As Chris Dodd, one of the "no" voters, remarked in his futile attempt to provide some perspective, "It is a sad day in the Senate when we spend hours debating an ad while our young people are dying in Iraq."

How dare she question authority?

I guess we're gonna party like it's 1994. Seriously, I woke up today to discover (via the morning news shows) that the clocks had been set back, that once again it's All O.J. All the Time, reprising his '94 role as an accused felon...and that Hillary Clinton, the foiled reformer of '94, is once again talking up health care. What's next, a Pulp Fiction sequel from Quentin Tarantino?

Actually, 1994 was also the year when Rudy Giuliani took the oath as New York mayor, and began to build a track record that he often invokes today as a presidential candidate. The hitch, however, is that certain aspects of that record don't play well with likely Republican primary voters.

He can't tout himself as the scourge of illegal immigrants, because he was nice to illegal immigrants in New York. He can't tout himself as the scourge of gay people, because he was nice to gay people in New York - and even lived with a gay couple when he was between wives. He can't tout himself as an avowed foe of abortion, because he was nice to abortion rights advocates in New York. And, on the broader canvas, he can't really offer GOP voters any fresh thinking about what to do with Iraq, because he prefers to avoid specifics, and, indeed, when he was offered the opportunity to join the Iraq Study Group, he opted not to show up and was encouraged to quit.

However, as evidenced by his behavior over the past week, there is still one way he can audition for conservative hearts: By beating up on Hillary.

Beating up on moveon.org may be a conservative crowd-pleaser as well, but let's focus here on Rudy's strategy to directly assail, at this early stage, the likeliest '08 Democratic candidate. In terms of wooing wary conservative Republicans (85 percent of whom reportedly view Hillary negatively, according to polls), Rudy's strategy makes a lot of sense. He masks his aforementioned vulnerabilities by offering an advance preview of how he would battle Hillary in a general election - and the top priority right now, among Republicans, is to find a nominee who can effectively take her on. And their top-priority task is to strip away her senatorial image as a strong national security advocate and rebrand her as "anti-military."

As a fawning pro-Rudy commentator at the conservative American Spectator website put it the other day, "While there may be many factors that conservatives will have to consider when choosing the Republican nominee...the ability of a Republican candidate to defeat Hillary Clinton should be a major consideration. This looks like a battle Giuliani was born to fight."

It's questionable, however, whether the kind of anti-Hillary attacks that please the GOP primary electorate would ultimately sway the general electorate. Consider Rudy's most recent arguments, for instance:

Starting last Tuesday, and continuing through the weekend, he picked a fight with Hillary because she had the audacity to voice skepticism about General David Petraeus' testimony on Iraq. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, she told Petraeus: "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief."

Giuliani fumed, in various remarks and in his campaign advertising, that Hillary "was questioning (Petraeus') honesty," that "it was wrong for her to attack the integrity of a commanding general in a time of war," that she had directed "political venom" at the general; all told, he said, "I think that's not the way in a responsible way to go about, you know, forging the foreign policy of the United States and the military policy of the United States."

This might be effective stuff, at least to those GOP voters who prefer to be fact-challenged. But for all other voters who might prefer to see the full context of what Hillary actually said during the committee hearing, here it is. She is addressing Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker:

"Nobody believes that your jobs, or the jobs of the thousands of American forces and civilian personnel in Iraq are anything but incredibly difficult. But today you are testifying about the current status of our policy and the prospects of that policy. It is a policy that you have been ordered to implement by the president. And you have been made the de facto spokesmen for what many of us believe to be a failed policy. Despite what I view as your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony both yesterday and today, I think the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief." (emphasis mine)

In other words, she merely voiced the traditional American belief, dating back 200 years, that civilians (beginning with the president) are ultimately responsible for war policy, and that the military is tasked to carry out that policy. Her expressed "disbelief," in other words, is directed at President Bush - not at the military man who is merely following Bush's orders. Rudy, in his complaints, appeared to be giving short shrift to the American tradition of civilian control over the military - and to the necessity of questioning those who are tasked to carry out civilian policy.

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who is apparently sharpening his antiwar critiques now that he is heading toward retirement, basically argued the other night that Hillary was right. Regarding Bush's decision to use Petraeus as his front man on Iraq, Hagel said: "It's not only a dirty trick, but it's dishonest, it's hypocritical, it's dangerous and irresponsible. The fact is, this is not Petraeus' policy, it's Bush's policy. The military is, certainly very clear in the Constitution, is subservient to the elected public officials of this country."

The latest polls - from USA Today/Gallup, CBS News and Pew, already indicate that most Americans were unpersuaded by Petraeus' testimony and Bush's subsequent address. That's why Rudy's anti-Hillary attacks (at least on the topic of the Iraq war) might well be effective only with conservative primary voters. With respect to the majority of Americans - those who will dominate a general election - it's hard to imagine that they view the Iraq debacle as a less serious issue than the firm questioning of a Bush surrogate.

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Speaking of 1994, I recall that, way back then, the American tradition of free speech was alive and well. A disagreeable person could generally show up at a political event and raise a ruckus. The basic rule of thumb (to quote the U.S. Supreme Court) was that it was basically OK to speak out unless you were "falsely shouting fire in a theatre."

Well, that rule has apparently been tightened. As evidenced by what happened in Florida on Monday, it's now deemed a violation of free speech to act obnoxious in a theatre.

University of Florida student Andrew Meyer appears to be a bit of a provocateur, and he was playing that role while nagging John Kerry with some very persistent questioning. There are always people like that at political events, disputatious souls who'd rather hector and make speeches. But even though Kerry was willing to engage with the kid, the college cops decided to maintain decorum by dragging him up the aisle and zapping him with serious taser voltage, to the point where he sounded like one of Jack Bauer's torture targets on 24.

Perhaps it's time to junk the centuries-old American warning to oppressors - "Don't Tread on Me" - and replace it with "Don't Tase Me, Bro!"

The art of "expedient exaggeration"

This post is an expanded version of my latest print column. It all started when I saw a TV commercial that made my jaw drop...


The resilient myth that Saddam Hussein plotted 9/11 is proof that Mark Twain was right when he said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

Even today, long after this 9/11 myth has been officially and repeatedly discredited, roughly 40 percent of Americans still insist that Hussein conspired with al-Qaeda to bring down the Twin Towers. And it's a fair bet that this myth will remain in mass circulation as long as proponents of the Iraq war persist in believing that it is savvy politics to prey on people's ignorance.

Consider, for instance, the current TV ads - sponsored by a White House front group known as Freedom's Watch - that seek to shore up waning support for the Iraq war by perpetuating the canard that 9/11 was a Hussein production. In their quest to stoke emotions in defiance of fact, the ad-makers aren't exactly subtle. First, some military vets are shown making the case for staying in Iraq. Then, in the key image, we're back on 9/11. The north tower is burning, the second tower is seconds away from igniting, and these words flash on the screen: They Attacked Us.

The ad doesn't state that "they" refers to the Iraqis, but clever advertising is all about connecting the dots. Denizens of the reality-based community - including many in Philadelphia, who have probably seen this ad aired locally - are likely shaking their heads at this effrontery. Wasn't this myth put to rest years ago? Let us count the ways:

1. As early as June 2003, one month after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a monitoring group appointed by the U.N. Security Council announced that it had found no evidence linking Hussein to al-Qaeda.

2. In 2004, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission concluded: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

3. In 2005, a newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document concluded that a key terrorist informant had been "intentionally misleading" his American debriefers when he claimed that Hussein had been in cahoots with al-Qaeda. The document, written 13 months before the U.S. invasion, also stated that "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements."

4. In 2006, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - which, at the time, was still run by the Republicans - concluded in a report: "Postwar information supports prewar intelligence-community assessments that there was no credible information that Iraq was complicit in, or had foreknowledge of, the Sept. 11 attacks or any other al-Qaeda strike."

5. In February of this year, the Pentagon's acting inspector general concluded in a report that President Bush's neoconservative war planners utilized "both reliable and unreliable" information to fashion a Hussein/al-Qaeda link "that was much stronger than that assessed by the [intelligence community], and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the administration."

6. In April of this year, At the Center of the Storm, a memoir by ex-CIA director George Tenet, was published, in which we read that "there was never any real serious evidence that Saddam Hussein was an ally of al-Qaeda."

7. Last, even some notable Bush administration officials have debunked the myth. Donald Rumsfeld did it in 2004: Referring to Hussein and al-Qaeda, he told the Council on Foreign Relations, "I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two." And the other debunker, way back on Sept. 17, 2003, was George W. Bush. In a news conference that day, the president said: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11."

Yet despite all the empirical evidence, a pro-Bush group - financed primarily by some rich Republican donors, and some ex-Bush ambassadors - has nonetheless paid out $15 million to air ads that meet the dictionary definition of propaganda. The ads are airing in 60 districts where Republican congressmen are wavering in their support for the war; Pennsylvania, home to seven targeted GOP House members, is on the front lines of this PR war. (Indeed, one key Freedom's Watch supporter is a prominent Philadelphian: Edward Snider, chairman of Comcast Spectacor.)

Clearly, Freedom’s Watch and its ad makers are not shamed by the prospects of perpetuating a myth. Nor, apparently, do they see a downside in hiring, as their spokesman, the former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, whose track record of prognostications is far from stellar. This is the same guy who insisted, on the first day of the war, that “people will rejoice” in Iraq when the Americans take over, and “there is no question that…Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” Two months later, he opined: “I don’t think there’s any chance of losing the peace.”

When Fleischer popped up recently on MSNBC to defend the ads, guest Hardball host Mike Barnacle asked him how many of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis. (Correct answer: Zero.) Fleischer replied: "Mike, you're stuck in the 2001-2002 timetable and debate. (The situation today) is so far beyond that debate."

Translation: We should simply ignore the historical record.

But these strategists at Freedom's Watch are politically smart. They know, at this point, that it's virtually impossible to buck up the war supporters by talking about the tensions among Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds; many Americans, who are not particularly wise in the ways of the world beyond their borders, can't distinguish one group from another. Hence, the strategists' need for an emotional short-cut: Tie Hussein to al-Qaeda, the amorphous enemy that everybody knows.

The administration has long been performing this sleight of hand. In a letter to Congress on the day after he launched the invasion of Iraq, Bush said it was important "to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001." He did not directly state that Hussein plotted 9/11, but the implication was clear. He repeated that formula for years thereafter.

Even after the evidence mounted that Saddam had not plotted, Bush kept the inference alive, by shifting his terms and claiming that Saddam and al Qaeda had enjoyed a “relationship.” (June 17, 2004: “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda – because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”) Today, the ’08 Republican presidential candidates blur the lines further by routinely linking the Iraq war to the broader war on terror.

The myth about a Hussein-9/11 link persists not just because politicians and spin artists keep repeating it, in order to stoke emotions for the war, but also because many people are hard-wired to believe it. Psychologists have determined in recent studies that false information, once lodged in the brain, often tends to remain embedded, to the point where it becomes impervious to empirical reality. This helps to explain why, in a CBS/New York Times poll taken Sept. 4-8, 33 percent of all Americans - including 27 percent of Democrats - still tied Hussein to 9/11. Some 2007 polls have even pegged the share of credulous Americans to be as high as 41 percent.

Hence, the Twain adage about the traveling lie and the sluggishness of truth. But perhaps Freedom's Watch, in its defense, would prefer to quote another sage commentator, the erudite Cary Grant. While playing a Madison Avenue executive in North by Northwest, Cary purred to his secretary, "Ah, Maggie, in the world of advertising, there is no such thing as a lie, there is only expedient exaggeration."

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Dante Zappala, the brother of slain Pennsyvania National Guardsman Sherwood Baker (KIA in Iraq, 4/26/04), emailed today to express his exasperation about the Freedom's Watch ad campaign: "As someone who lost his brother in Iraq, while he was looking for WMD, no less, it's all very disheartening. This is not the civil democracy my brother believed in." And his mother recently delivered a video response, here.

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In current political news, it is with great sadness that I note the return, to the GOP presidential arena, of Alan Keyes. The black conservative and master of the diatribe - who ran as a fringe candidate in 1996 and 2000, and who got waxed by Barack Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate race, and whose prospects of winning even three percent in any Republican primary are roughly analagous to Britney Spears' odds of dancing on Broadway - filed his candidate papers last Friday. Then he showed up last night at a conservative "values" debate. Maybe he figures that he can be the GOP's Mike Gravel.

My fondest memory of Keyes dates back to the winter of 2000, in New Hampshire. After a Republican debate, he stormed into the press room, where I and my colleagues were attempting the usual miracle, trying to write 1000 words of clean copy on a 45-minute deadline. For 15 of those minutes, Keyes proceeded to inform everyone, at the top of his impressive decibel scale, that the press was against him...because he was black. Then he stormed out. We all made deadline.

Bush reaches out; folksy Fred gets lucky

News on several fronts:

Three weeks ago, in the wake of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' widely applauded resignation, I wrote this: "Bush may be politically constrained from nominating another White House errand boy. This time he faces a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, and there's no way that Patrick Leahy and his crew are going to sign off on anybody who believes that Justice should function merely as a political arm of the Republican National Committee....Bush soon will be battling Congress over executive privilege and domestic surveillance. Gonzales, with his credibility in tatters, would have been the wrong salesman. There are plenty of respected, independent legal scholars who can make a case for strong executive authority...strictly on the merits. Now that Bush's circle of inept Texas cronies has shrunk to nothing, he may have no choice except to reach out."

And apparently he has done so. Bush has tapped Michael Mukasey, a retired federal judge and ex-federal prosecutor. The decision to go with Mukasey is a sign that Bush actually recognizes his current political weakness, and understands that if he goes to the mat for a controversial conservative nominee, he will surely lose. Clearly, somebody in the bunker is thinking clearly, at least on this matter.

Mukasey, by reputation, is a tough law-and-order judge who can indeed advocate for Bush's concerns strictly on the merits. He does not hail from the Bush inner circle; indeed, as an outsider from New York, he is hardly known within the Washington community of conservative activists. (He's an advisor in the Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign.) But this weekend the White House enlisted Bill Kristol to smooth ruffled feathers and make the conservative case for Mukasey.

The activists' favorite candidate for the AG job was Ted Olson, the current U.S. solicitor general, but Olson (fairly or not) would trigger the protracted battle with the Democratic Congress that Bush can ill afford. Olson reputedly has a fine legal mind, and some Democrats (notably, ex-Bill Clinton operative Lanny Davis) sing his praises. But he was a prominent player in some of the major partisan scraps of the past decade - joining the Bush legal team during the 2000 Florida recount battle, and representing the conservative American Spectator magazine during the '90s, when it was investigating Clinton's private life. The current Democratic Congress, which can't seem to do much of anything about Iraq, would have sought to satisfy its liberal base by devouring Olson.

Mukasey, at least, has won early praise from liberals such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer, and Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice; even liberal attorney/blogger Glenn Greenwald likes Mukasey's rulings in the famous Jose Padilla terrorist case. For all these reasons, some conservatives are already suspicious of Mukasey, but perhaps that's a sign that we actually have the making of a bipartisan nominee. Considering the poisonous mood in Washington in the waning days of the Bush era, that alone would be an accomplishment.

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Speaking of terrorism, Fred Thompson, the GOP's annointed great conservative hope, got very lucky early last week. Another embarrassing story about his Washington lobbying career got largely buried, thanks to the heavy media focus on the General Petraeus hearings. Consider this one:

Thompson billed his lobbying firm for the work he performed in 1992 on behalf of two Libyan intelligence agents who had been criminally charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103.

You may remember that terrorist act. The plane blew up over Scotland a few days before Christmas in 1988, sending 270 innocents (most of them Americans) into the sky. Four years later, after two Libyans were indicted, a Libyan lawyer was trying to prevent his clients from being extradited to the West. Seeking legal advice, he finally turned to the Washington lobbying firm where Thompson was hanging his hat. Thompson helped out. As he explained earlier this month, "I believe it was a venue question...I gave them my opinion, and that was the long and the short of it. That's all I know about it."

He wasn't the main player in this episode, but he did bill the firm for 3.3 hours of work on the case. That doesn't sound like much time, but you can still dispense an awful lot of advice to terrorists, or contribute considerable research, in just 3.3 hours. As a lawyer for the Pan Am 103 victims' families put it, "a number (of the families) were offended and angered that American lawyers were willing to earn fees by doing anything to help this pariah nation or the two bombing suspects.”

Thompson got lucky last week that this story quickly died. He's also lucky that he is not a Democrat. Because if a Democratic candidate for president had ever billed 3.3 hours of lobbying work on behalf of terrorist suspects (one of whom was ultimately convicted in the bombing), you can easily imagine the GOP's attack ad:

"The Democrats want us to believe that they can keep this country safe. But when one of their own candidates, working as a Washington lobbyist insider, had the chance to take money from terrorists who killed hundreds of Americans, he took it, and he aided their cause. The families of the victims aboard Pan Am 103 deserved better, and America today deserves a strong president who will fight the terrorists, not embolden them..."

But even if Thompson managed to dodge this story, he can't escape his tepid performance on the stump. This guy might turn out to be the worst product rollout since the DeLorean car in 1981. Asked late last week, in Florida, to comment on the Terri Schiavo case - which galvanized the nation two years ago, and became a conservative cause celebre - Thompson replied thusly:

"I can't pass judgment on it. I know that good people were doing what they thought was best. That's going back in history. I don't remember the details of it."

Consider those last two sentences. We're talking about the national political battle over a brain-damaged woman in 2005, not the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Schiavo's fate, and the GOP Congress' decision to override state's rights and reinsert her feeding tube, was a top news staple for weeks. Either Thompson was so immersed in memorizing his TV scripts in 2005 that he was barely paying attention to real life, or he was feigning bad memory in order to avoid taking a stand on an issue that was crucial to the conservative base. (It appears to be the latter.)

Lobbying for terrorists, claiming amnesia on Schiavo...this is the touted heir to Ronald Reagan?