"Can't anybody here play this game?"

Given the latest pratfalls committed by some of the Republican presidential candidates, is it any wonder that Republican voters are generally turned off to the entire field? That more than half of the GOP electorate has an unfavorable opinion of each and every GOP hopeful?

For starters, consider Mitt Romney – who is viewed favorably by only 36 percent of his fellow Republicans. On Meet the Press yesterday, he provided us with a tour de force of his serial flip-flops on guns, abortion, immigration, gays, and Ronald Reagan. (If you’re wondering about the Reagan flip-flop, here’s what Romney said in 1994, while running for the Senate in Massachusetts: “I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan.” And here’s what he said last Friday: “The right way for America to proceed when we face the kind of challenges we face is to pursue the strategy which Ronald Reagan pursued when we faced the challenges of the last century.”)

Romney’s abortion flip-flops are well documented, of course. What fascinated me yesterday were his fumbling attempts to explain his convenient journey from pro-choice to pro-life. During the ’94 campaign, he explained his pro-choice stance this way (italics are mine): “Many, many years ago I had a dear close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.”

Yet here was Romney yesterday, insisting to Tim Russert that he has always been a closet pro-lifer: “Well, you know, Tim, I was always personally opposed to abortion" -- which helps explain his current support for the Republican party platform, which calls for a constitutional amendment banning abortions nationwide.
Such an amendment, of course, would impose anti-abortion beliefs on those who disagree - precisely the opposite of what Romney pledged in 1994.

And when Russert asked yesterday whether he believed that life begins at conception, he revealed his true self. From the transcript:

“I do. I believe, I believe, from a, from a political perspective that life begins at conception. I, I don’t, I don’t pretend to know, if you will, from a theological standpoint when life begins.”

Wait...Did he just say that he believes life begins at conception “from a political perspective?” No wonder so many grassroots Republicans don’t trust this guy. They want somebody who hews to that belief for theological reasons – not somebody who goes on TV and admits to the entire nation that his stance on life is “political,” and therefore just an exigency of the campaign.

I sense that Romney is basically a moderate Republican (as his father was), and it’s embarrassing to watch his incessant attempts to retrofit his convictions, all the while claiming that he is doing no such thing. There’s a reason why his lead in Iowa has evaporated, despite his expenditure of $7 million; conservatives smell an opportunist.

(Worse yet, an opportunist who makes stuff up. At one point yesterday, he stated that, while running for governor in 2002, "I received the endorsement of the NRA." The factual reality is that he did not receive the endorsement of the NRA. The gun lobby didn't back anybody in that race.)

And here's a lesser-known tidbit from the Romney oeuvre, something that came up yesterday: He had declared in 1994 that, if elected senator, he would vote to enact the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a long-gestating bill aimed at banning job and housing bias against gay people nationwide. But that was then. Here’s what he told Russert yesterday: “I would not support (ENDA) at the federal level, and I changed in that regard because I think that policy makes more sense to be evaluated or to be implemented at the state level.” Suddenly, on the issue of banning anti-gay discrimination, he’s a state’s rights guy. Guess why.

Yet, with respect to one issue, Romney did manage yesterday to exude a sense of conviction: He thinks it’s wrong to strongly criticize “our president,” George W. Bush.

Unfortunately for Romney, that particular conviction will not click with about 70 percent of the American people. But he’s only thinking right now about the GOP electorate, most of whom still support the failed president, and he thinks this stance might help him recoup some of the ground he has lost in Iowa to Mike Huckabee.

Huckabee, the upstart, underfunded rival who has supplanted Romney as the Iowa frontrunner (and who, nonetheless, is viewed favorably by only 30 percent of the GOP electorate), wrote a piece for the January issue of the august Foreign Affairs magazine (or maybe a policy wonk wrote it for him, given Huckabee’s death of foreign policy knowledge), laying out the Huckabee vision for America’s role in the world. It contained this passage, which had Romney in high dudgeon all weekend:

“American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad.”

Romney first assailed Huckabee on Saturday, contending that this passage sounded like something a Democrat would say. (It’s actually something that anyone with a grasp of empirical reality would say, but never mind.) Then yesterday, he said: “That’s an insult to the president, and Mike Huckabee should apologize to the president…he went over the line.”

In response yesterday, Huckabee slam-dunked Romney: “There's no apology necessary to the president. I'm the one who actually supported the president's surge. I supported the Bush tax cuts when Mr. Romney didn't. I was with President Bush on gun control when Mitt Romney wasn't. I was with the president on the president's pro-life position when Mitt Romney wasn't. I was with the president on his position on same-sex relationships and marriage when Mitt Romney wasn't. I was with the president on the legacy of the president's dad and Ronald Reagan when Mitt Romney wasn't. So, you know, I don't have anything to apologize for. I'm running for president of the United States. I've got to show that I do have my own mind when it comes to how this country ought to lead, not only within its own borders but across the world.”

Huckabee is calculating that he can afford to take a shot at Bush’s foreign policy record, given the general mood of Republican discontent, and given his own support for Bush on so many other fronts. He’s calculating that GOP voters will applaud his promise to break with the past – in his words, “I do have my own mind” – and that’s why he has Mitt Romney on the run in Iowa. Because the perception persists that Romney’s mind is shaped by the pragmatics of the moment, and therefore is not his own.

And yet…just when it appears Huckabee might be the man of conviction that grassroots Republicans are yearning for, we get the news that he was once a wholly owned subsidiary of the tobacco industry.

It turns out that, while Huckabee was serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas back in 1994, R. J. Reynolds helped finance a non-profit organization that paid Huckabee to crisscross the country and attack Hillary Clinton’s health care plan. The tobacco giant’s role was kept secret for years – Huckabee neglected to report this income on his ’94 state financial disclosure form – but now it’s all coming out. A former Huckabee political advisor – who doubled as a consultant to R. J. Reynolds – is talking openly about how the tobacco giant put money in Huckabee’s pocket, and the company has now confirmed it.

But here’s the good part: Huckabee claimed last Friday that he didn’t know he was taking big tobacco money while he was on the public payroll. His former advisor, J.J. Vigneault, reportedly has a big problem with that denial, particularly because Vigneault recalls that Huckabee met with R. J. Reynolds officials in his Little Rock apartment.

Vigneault is quoted as saying: “There’s no way he could not have known about the money from R. J. Reynolds. If he’s saying he didn’t know about the Reynolds money, he’s been less than truthful.”

And speaking of untruths, the whopper of the week (last week, anyway) was uttered by Rudy Giuliani, during the final Republican debate of 2007. Giuliani (who is viewed favorably by 41 percent of Republicans) promised that, if elected, he would run an open administration, just as he had as mayor: "I would make sure that government was transparent. My government in New York City was so transparent that they knew every single thing I did almost every time I did it. So I would be extremely open...I think I've had an open, transparent government."

Those statements contradict factual reality. In truth, Rudy was the opposite of transparent. When independent budget watchdogs - seeking to their job, as outlined in the city charter - tried to audit the fiscal practices of his administration, Rudy's stonewalling on data was so endemic that the City Council had to set aside money for the specific purpose of suing him. Later, when the state comptroller tried to do routine audits of city performance, Rudy stonewalled him, too - which prompted the comptroller to issue multiple subpoenas for information, all of which Rudy simply ignored. The comptroller finally sued Rudy for the data; the case dragged on for two years, with Rudy stonewalling all the way. In the end, Rudy lost when the state's highest court ruled against him.

Flip-flopping panderers, faith-based trimmers of truth, outright fabulists...no wonder the Republican electorate is so restive. As Casey Stengel once said, while describing his 1962 New York Mets, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Attack and apologize, Hillary style

In an alleged debate yesterday, the Democratic presidential candidates largely confined themselves to familiar themes and talking points; thanks to the tight Iowa format, nobody was substantively challenged - neither by a rival, nor by moderator Carolyn Washburn, who, for the second straight day, made it clear that her idea of a follow-up question is "Thank you."

A decent roundup of the high and low points is here. I'm more interested in what transpired off stage, in the latest case of Hillary hardball.

As you probably know, Billy Shaheen, the co-chair of Hillary's national campaign and a Clinton family favorite whose wife Jeanne is running for the Senate in New Hampshire, apparently acted alone on Wednesday, in a show of excessive zeal, when he brought up rival Barack Obama's youthful experiences with marijuana and cocaine. (Obama has previously volunteered information about those experiences in a memoir.) In an interview, Shaheen cited the drug use as purported evidence of Obama's unelectability:

"The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight...and one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is his drug use....It'll be, 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?' There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It's hard to overcome."

The story sat out there for 24 hours, gathering national attention (shorthand: Obama = drugs), until Shaheen announced yesterday that he was quitting the campaign, that he had mistakenly lashed out on his own, that Hillary had not authorized him to say any such thing. Then Mark Penn, Hillary's chief strategist, went on Hardball late yesterday to engage in the ritual distancing: "He was never a part of this campaign. It was unacceptable."

It's not hard to figure out what really happened here. Hillary's campaign is spooked by Obama's surge in the polls, notably his erasure of Hillary's once-daunting lead in New Hampshire. And when her people feel threatened, they are fully capable of playing the game rough. The drug story is a classic example: you impugn your rival for a day or so, then you switch to apology-and-resignation mode - which makes it appear that you're back on the high road, but, in reality, only serves to keep the damagibng story in the news a little longer.(Witness Mark Penn yesterday on MSNBC, perpetuating the drug stuff while seeming to knock it down: "The issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising.")

Moreover, Billy Shaheen isn't exactly some overzealous junior aide. He and Jeanne, a former New Hampshire governor, have long been close pals with Bill and Hillary; they reportedly had dinner together a few months ago. Shaheen, lawyer and power broker, at this point has an instinctive understanding of the parameters of Clintonian politicking. He didn't need Hillary to "authorize" any attack on Obama's past drug use. He spoke out because he knows full well how the Hillary camp plays the game when the pressure is on.

And his argument was specious anyway. He basically said, We don't think it's a big deal that Obama used drugs in the past, it's those evil Republicans who will successfully make it a big deal. I doubt that Shaheen, or anyone in the Hillary camp, truly believes that. I haven't seen a shred of polling evidence that suggests Obama is electorally vulnerable because of what he did as a young man; perhaps religious conservatives would view his drug use as a moral deal-breaker, but they wouldn't vote Democratic anyway.

It's also worth remembering that Bill Clinton admitted to marijuana use in 1992 (doing it in his classic fashion, claiming that he "didn't inhale," and that he only did it outside America's territorial waters), and I don't seem to recall that his youthful experiences doomed him at election time. If the Republicans couldn't invoke drugs as a "dirty trick" nearly 16 years ago, I doubt they'd succeed in 2008, particularly when the prevailing political winds appear to be against them. And the Hillary people are savvy enough to know this.

But, apparently, the Hillary people are not savvy enough to realize that when they impugn a rival in this fashion, they risk further alienating those Democratic voters who are fed up with polarized politicking. Or perhaps the Hillary people, hard-wired for combat, simply can't help themselves.

A snoozefest more potent than Ambien

I'm addressing this question to all the heterosexual guys out there:

Have you ever been dragged to a chick flick - the kind where Helena Bonham Carter makes a pot of tea and swoons endlessly about the Victorian gents whom she fancies - and within 30 minutes you're surreptitiously tracking the second hand of your wristwatch as it ticks ever so slowly onward?

Well, that's how it was yesterday, at the Republican presidential debate in Iowa, the last showdown before the Jan. 3 caucuses.

It's not so easy to transform a galvanizing political race into a soporific yawner, but moderator Carolyn Washburn was clearly up to the job. Doing her best imitation of your fourth-grade substitute teacher, Washburn, the editor of the Des Moines Register, made it clear from the outset that the rules would not permit any outbursts from the unruly boys in class.

There would be no talk of immigration (which is merely the hottest issue in the GOP race). There would be no talk of Iraq (which has cost the lives of nearly 4000 Americans and drained the treasury of roughly half a trillion dollars). There would be no opportunities for the candidates to directly address each other (this, at a time when the candidates have started to do so, in their TV ads). Rather, there would be a series of ponderous policy questions (with scant time to respond in any detail), coupled with an opportunity for each candidate to make a "free statement" about himself (which resulted in the usual talking points, which added nothing and illuminated nothing). Worse yet, the GOP field was larger than ever, thanks to the inexplicable inclusion of Alan Keyes, who was somehow let onto the stage despite his zero percent popularity - as measured in a November Iowa poll.

(I felt bad last night for the Des Moines Register reporter who had to cover this event. In his story, he called it as "a free-wheeling forum," which is akin to equating a chick flick with a Die Hard sequel. Maybe he felt compelled to take one for the team.)

This exchange basically summed up the whole affair:

WASHBURN: "I want to take on a new issue. I would like to see a show of hands. How many of you believe global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity?"

FRED THOMPSON: "Well, do you want to give me a minute to answer that?"

WASHBURN: "No, I don't."

THOMPSON: "Well, then I'm not going to answer it."

WASHBURN: "Okay."

MIKE HUCKABEE: "How about 30 seconds?"

WASHBURN: "No, I -- you know, I want --"

You get the idea. She wrestled with her unruly boys all afternoon, trying to keep the lid on spontanaeity. And the upshot was that, in the end, Mike Huckabee benefited the most.

I hesitate to name a "winner" in any debate, particularly in a heavy-lidded affair such as this, but clearly Huckabee had the best day. He entered the event at the top of the polls in Iowa, and he left the event largely unscathed - again, because the tight format did not encourage any of his rivals to take him on directly. The result was that he got off easy, especially when some of his remarks cried out for rejoinders.

At one point, Huckabee made a pitch for his so-called "fair tax" - his proposal to scrap the progressive income tax, and replace it with a flat national sales tax. He claimed that this levy would benefit most Americans. In his words, the Huckabee tax system "means that the rich people aren't going to be made poor, but maybe the poor people could be made rich. That ought to be the goal of any tax system - not to punish somebody, but to enable somebody so that they can have a part of the American dream. The fair tax does just that."

It just so happens that many tax experts, and many Republicans, view the Huckabee plan as downright nutty - because it would do precisely the opposite of what the candidate claims. Some studies have already concluded that a flat national sales tax would actually worsen the tax burden for most people; the richest Americans, in the top fifth, would see their tax rate fall by 20 percent, while the other 80 percent would pay more.

But none of Huckabee's rivals were willing to defy the lofty vibes and refute him. It would've been like rolling a stink bomb down the church aisle. Which is also why Mitt Romney, when asked whether the next president should be an economic conservative, passed up the opportunity to discuss all the taxes that Huckabee raised while he was governor of Arkansas. Which is also why nobody dared bring up the latest developments in the case of Wayne Dumond, the convicted rapist who was pardoned with the encouragement of then-Gov. Huckabee, only to murder a woman in Missouri. (The conservative press is far less reluctant to view Huckabee with the appropriate skepticism.)

Yesterday, the only candidate willing to take on Huckabee, however fleetingly, was Tom Tancredo - who probably figured he had nothing to lose, given the fact that his prospects for becoming president are roughly akin to Kevin Federline's. Noting that Huckabee has in the past voiced compassion for illegal immigrants but now talks tough about border security, Tancredo asked, "how are you going to convince America that you, in fact, changed your mind on the issue of immigration from when you were a governor? That's all I want to know."

Whereupon Washburn, invoking her rule about no immigration talk, stepped in to ask Ron Paul for his favorite New Year's resolution.

If I were Huckabee, I know what my New Year's resolution would be. I'd send that woman a thank-you note for helping him lock down his Iowa lead. Unless he has already concluded that she was an instrument of God's will, and that such a note is therefore not required.

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This is noteworthy: The Hillary Clinton campaign has released a new Iowa TV ad, featuring the candidate's mother.

Dorothy Rodham says, "What I would like people to know about Hillary is what a good person she is. She never was envious of anybody — she was helpful. And she’s continued that with her adult life with helping other women. She has empathy for other people’s unfortunate circumstances. I’ve always admired that because it isn’t always true of people. I think she ought to be elected even if she weren’t my daughter."

Translation: Hillary is bleeding. Support from women has dropped in early primary states, and skepticism about her character persists. Hence, mom to the rescue.

Will the ad work? Don't expect any discussion during today's Democratic debate in Iowa.

The perfect is the enemy of the good

The Republican presidential candidates debate again today, in Iowa. Meanwhile, this is perhaps the oddest aspect of the fluid Republican presidential race: The most electable candidate remains broadly unpopular within his own party.

That would be John McCain, who's still breathing after having been given up for dead not too many months ago. I'm tempted to wonder whether Republicans are so fixated on punishing illegal immigrants that they would prefer to lose the '08 election rather than nominate an electable guy whose talk of compassion flunks their litmus test.

The latest national survey, released yesterday, reports that McCain is currently the only GOP candidate who stacks up well against Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. He leads Hillary by a couple points, and he's tied with Obama - unlike his rivals, many of whom would lose to either Democrat by a landslide.

I wasn't totally surprised by those numbers; McCain is often cited by many Democrats as the only palatable candidate in GOP camp (despite his staunch support for the Iraq war). His enduring appeal (attributable to his strength of character) was evident last week, when he was singled out by a number of participants in a Democratic focus group in Philadelphia.

Hence this question: Given the glaring flaws of the other GOP candidates, why haven't grassroots Republicans gravitated to McCain - who may be ideologically imperfect, from their perspective, yet nevertheless might be most qualified to keep Hillary out of the White House?

One could make an easy case for his assets: He has sustained a more consistent conservative record on the social issues (abortion, gay marriage) than either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani. On fiscal issues, he has been inveighing against wasteful pork-barrel spending far longer than any of his rivals. He has staunchly supported the Iraq war, and has been willing to say so out loud, unlike most of his rivals - and one would think that this would appeal to grassroots Republicans. And, unlike Mike Huckabee, he won't potentially scare off independent swing voters by acting as if he was running for the job of pastor-in-chief.

Yet McCain still lags behind the field - even in New Hampshire, the state that boosted his upstart 2000 campaign. The latest CNN poll shows him far behind Romney, despite the latter's ongoing imitation of a weathervane.

And there's another factor that could complicate McCain's quest to become the GOP's comeback kid: the mood of the independents. Under New Hampshire rules, registered voters unaffiliated with either party can choose, on the day of balloting, to participate in either party primary. This year, the majority of those voters might opt to join the Democratic contest in order to vote for Barack Obama.

So McCain is left with the task of wooing the party base, but the immigration issue apparently remains a deal-breaker. He gets no points for being consistent in his belief that illegals can't simply be shipped home ("these are God's children as well, and they need some protections under the law and they some of our love and compassion"), nor for his willingness to state his belief in front of hostile Republican audiences. For many grassroots Republicans, hostility towards illegal immigrants has replaced hostility towards abortion providers as the ultimate litmus test.

But maybe McCain is providing Republicans with the ultimate test - between pragmatism and purity. What's more important next year: Is it better to punish McCain on this issue, and risk not fielding the most electable candidate?

As Voltaire warned a few centuries ago, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

We interrupt this program

I'm off duty today, traveling. Back tomorrow.

The Huck and the Holy

In the latest church news – excuse me, Republican presidential campaign news – we have some fresh developments concerning GOP prospect Mike Huckabee and his running mate, God. (Or perhaps it's the other way around.)

Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported that Huckabee, during his unsuccessful 1992 bid for a U.S. Senate seat, had willingly shared his concerns about gay people. He told an AP questionnaire, “I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.” Since presidential hopeful Huckabee stressed just the other day that his convictions are “deeply held, consistent, authentic,” we can only assume that today he still sees gay people as he saw them in 1992 – although his ’92 biblical admonition seems at odds with the sunny image he’s currently seeking to project.

His ’92 judgment on gay people – and the fact that he said nothing this weekend to distance himself from that judgment - certainly won’t hurt him in Iowa and South Carolina. He needs religious conservative voters to sustain his insurgent campaign, and they generally share that judgment anyway. But it’s hard to imagine that, if he somehow snagged the ’08 GOP nomination, his views on gays would endear him to the centrist swing voters who are crucial to winning in November. Swing voters tend to be fairly tolerant of gay people, and generally averse to biblical admonitions. And polls indicate that young voters under the age of 30 are even more tolerant; their demographic supports the concept of gay marriage more than any other.

But what voters in general tend to dislike is a double-talking politician. Consider Huckabee's response yesterday on Fox News, when asked about his other ’92 statement that gays should be quarantined from the general population in order to contain the AIDS epidemic. (Never mind the fact that, seven years earlier, the federal government had publicly concluded that AIDS was not spread through casual contact.) Huckabee, in his response yesterday, engaged in some evasive wordplay that would have put Bill Clinton to shame.

Here’s what he had said in 1992: “If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague....It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population…”

When asked about that statement on Fox News, here’s what he said: “I didn’t say that we should quarantine.”

Well, actually, that’s exactly what he said. His ’92 phrase (“we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague”) is synonymous with “should.”

But Huckabee, clearly sensing yesterday that he’d taken the wrong tack, didn’t try to parse his words any further. Rather than continuing to try to weasle out of what he said in '92, he quickly reverted to consistent-conviction mode, and declared that he would stand by his old comments rather than try to “recant” them. So, with respect to pleasing his growing fan base on the religious right, he probably emerged unscathed from that episode.

And on the topic of nurturing that fan base, perhaps he did his best work the other day at Liberty University, the school founded by the late Jerry Falwell. When a student asked him to explain the reasons for his rapid ascendance in the Republican presidential polls, here was Huckabee’s diagnosis:

“There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people. (Applause) That's the only way that our campaign can be doing what it's doing. And I'm not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has. And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits. And I'm enjoying every minute of them trying to figure it out, and until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they'll never figure it out. And it's probably just as well. That's honestly why it's happening.”

Translation: He thinks he’s rising in the polls because it is God’s will.

How naïve of me to believe that presidential candidates rise or fall on things like, you know, issues and positions and other earthly factors such as character and image. The Huck seeks to instruct us that the real explanation is “not a human one.” His basic message is that secular empiricism is so last century.

Again, if he gets the nomination, let’s see how centrist swing voters respond to a guy who apparently sees himself as God’s instrument. Given the current White House occupant's insistence that he too was guided by the Lord (regarding his decision to invade Iraq, President Bush told Bob Woodward, "I was praying for the strength to do God's will"), that kind of claim might not be viewed as an asset this time around.

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In print yesterday, I assessed the GOP debates via the satirical/absurdist route, although that kind of format is not designed for the humor-impaired.

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Last Friday, I wrote here about a Democratic focus group, and its misgivings about the '08 Democratic field. Other journalists watched the proceedings as well. Here's another account, by the Washington columnist Al Hunt.

Some Democrats sitting around talking

The conventional wisdom these days is that grassroots Democrats are happy with their presidential candidates, and confident about recapturing the White House in 2008. But, after attending a Democratic focus group the other night, I am tempted to conclude that the prevailing mood is far less festive than generally described.

Democratic pollster Peter Hart, working with the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, gathered 11 Democratic voters in a Philadelphia conference room, and elicited their opinions about the '08 race. Along with a few noteworthy Washington journalists, I watched the proceedings from behind a one-way mirror. They knew we were there, and they agreed in advance to be quoted by name. That's the basic focus-group format.

Obviously, this was not a scientific national sampling, and these particular Democrats won't have a say in the '08 nomination race, because Pennsylvania schedules its party primary in April, when it makes no difference. But their nuanced remarks helped to explain why the Democratic polls have been tightening lately, and why so many Democratic voters have yet to be conclusively sold on either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama (not to mention the rest of the field).

Basically, there's considerable concern about whether those frontrunners are electable - or, if elected, capable of governing effectively.

Of the 11 voters (six live in Philadelphia, five in the suburbs), only four count themselves as Hillary supporters. Another is undecided, but leaning toward her. Without trying to extrapolate too much, this underwhelming tally appears to suggest that her claim on the Democratic electorate is a tad soft.

Christopher Haig, a Philadelphian who works in the health care field, isn't backing anybody at the moment. His beef about Hillary is that she's too "embroiled in government," that "she's so connected" - meaning, in his view, that she's a status-quo insider. He said, "I'm looking for something completely different."

Andrew Alebergo, a Philadelphian who owns a tanning salon, who is leaning toward John Edwards, fretted that Hillary would just perpetuate the polarization that has afflicted America for so long, thanks to her membership in one of our apparent family dynasties ("Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton"). He put it this way:

"Hillary is divisive. You remember how ugly (the mood) was when Bill was in charge? Just imagine what the Republicans would pull out if Hillary is elected...It'll be red state/blue state all over again...poisonous for the country."

She was sometimes dismissed by these Democrats as too calculating. When they were asked how they thought Hillary might choose to spend a few hours of free time, Philadelphia lawyer Ray Kempenski scoffed, "Depends on what the polls would say."

Even one of her supports, Red Cross manager Lynda Connelly, said she was worried about Hillary's lack of support among women - specifically, upscale professional women. Polls show that that these voters continue to hold back. Connelly talked it out: "Women sometimes can be their own worst enemies. There are women who are jealous that (Hillary) is intelligent, that she has gone to the heights she has gone to. They say to themselves, 'Maybe I could have done that, if only I had made this or that choice'...and so they take it out on a woman who has been successful. I don't understand it, myself." (Fresh evidence, here.)

It also turned out that one of the Hillary supporters, retiree Venetta Allen of suburban Yeadon, is doing so strictly on the rebound. Her first choice is actually Barack Obama - but she doesn't think he can win a general election. Allen, who is African-American, doesn't believe that most Americans would elect a black man, no matter what they tell pollsters. So she's for Hillary, because she thinks that the gender barrier is lower than the racial barrier.

On the racial issue, she was seconded by Philadelphian Cheryl Ewing, who is also black. Ewing is backing Obama over Hillary, but she has no faith that he'll make it all the way: "No matter how intelligent the gentleman might be - he could be a rocket scientist, but people still don't want a black in office...The country's racist."

Craig Gilmer, a job recruiter from nearby Norristown, agreed with Ewing. He too is black, and an Obama supporter. But he fears that Obama, because of his skin color, might not get the requisite "respect" that a candidate needs in order to win.

Only five of the 11 participants think that Obama can win a general election - and not just because of his race. Despite his rock star appeal, some in the room questioned whether he's qualified for the job. Kempinski said, "In eight years he might be an ideal candidate. He's not there yet...There's a level (of competence) that you can only get with experience."

Alebergo nodded in agreement. He said that if Obama made some rookie mistakes in the wake of a terrorist attack, many Americans might not be so willing to cut him slack, and "he'd have a tough time digging his way out....If we weren't involved in a war, I'd say that he is just what we need." But, because of the war, "I'd hesitate to put him in charge."

In the end, there was rough agreement that, despite many nagging reservations, Hillary would probably be the most effective nominee next fall. There was little love for Hillary in that room, but she kept getting points for "toughness," and even Alebergo said he sensed that,as president, she would handle herself well in a crisis.

This may well be an accurate mirror of the national Democratic mood. Above all, these voters want to win. As they got ready to leave, pollster Hart asked if they had any parting advice for the Democratic candidates. Most said things like "be fearless" and "be tough." But Edward Suchy of Hatboro had the last word:

"Don't be a loser."

Did Mitt sway the wary?

Mitt Romney finally delivered The Speech today - his long-awaited disquisition on the role of his Mormon faith in the public square - and he basically hewed to the JFK model, as evidenced by this promise: "Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions."

He said it all kinds of ways: "I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law. As a young man, Lincoln described what he called America's 'political religion' - the commitment to defend the rule of law and the Constitution. When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God." And, a bit later, "we separate church and state affairs in this country...No religion should dictate to the state..."

But we won't know whether his promise is enough to mollify his key target audience -Christian conservatives - until the primary season voting actually begins. Fairly or not, a lot of those folks don't trust Mormons; a recent Pew survey found that 36 percent of white Protestant evangelicals - and 41 percent of those who attend church weekly - say they're less likely to vote for a Mormon.

It's strictly a theological beef. Among those weekly churchgoers, 52 percent do not believe that Mormons are Christians. And since people are sometimes reluctant to come clean with pollsters, lest they appear to be prejudiced, the chances are that the actual percentages are higher. Hence the rise of Mike Huckabee, ex-pastor of the more familiar Baptists, who touts himself in a TV ad as a "Christian leader."

The potential problem for Romney, going forward, is that he said virtually nothing in his speech about the tenets of his religion, much less make the case that Mormons are Christian. He barely mentioned his religion at all, uttering the word Mormon only once. He had a reasonable explanation for why he was refusing to do so - the Founding Fathers decreed that Americans should not be forced to take a "religious test" in order to hold office - but his reticence may not be a short-run asset, politically speaking.

Christian conservatives are crucially important in the early Iowa caucuses and South Carolina primary, and the less they learn about the upside of Mormon religion - the less that Romney himself seeks to dispel their suspicions - the more they might be susceptible to subterranean whispering campaigns that are designed to paint the faith as threatening or simply wierd. (Indeed, Huckabee is reportedly surging in South Carolina anyway.)

Romney tried a few other strategies, in his bid to mollify the wary. He talked about the "American values" shared by all faiths, and he commiserated with Christian conservatives about how "some" are trying to drive religion out of the public square. He also painted himself as a man of conviction who would stay true to his religion no matter what, and therefore worthy of respect - although his words ("Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs") made me wince, given his lengthy track record of flipflops on issues.

So the verdict awaits. The thing is, I suspect that most Americans - as opposed to the gatekeepers of the GOP nomination - won't have a problem with the Romney speech. Perhaps with an eye toward the big-state primaries, he probably reassured the centrist electorate that he would keep his church at a distance while making presidential decisions.

And a lot of Americans don't have a problem with Mormons anyway. As Lynda Connelly, a Red Cross manager and moderate Democrat, remarked the other night during a focus group session in Philadelphia (much more on that tomorrow):

"I don't understand it (the antipathy toward Romney's faith). I've been out to Utah a lot, and I'll tell you something. It's a business, it's not a religion."

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What a shock! It turns out - I know this is hard to believe - that President Bush didn't tell the whole truth on Tuesday, when he claimed in a press conference that he had been kept in the dark last summer about the impending intelligence report on Iran's nukes. (You may remember his Tuesday remark. Referring to intelligence czar Mike McConnell, "He didn’t tell me what the information was.")

Well, consider that claim to be inoperative. Now the White House is saying Bush did know something after all - that, in fact, the spy agencies were looking at the possibility that the Iran nuclear weapons program may have already been "suspended." Here's the latest Bush spin in full:

"Director McConnell said that the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran's covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn't be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data."

Naturally, the White House is saying that there's absolutely no contradiction between what it's saying now and what Bush said on Tuesday. But the big question remains: Given this admission that he was in the loop as early as August about the possibility of a no-nukes report, why was he clanging the alarm about Iranian nukes in October?

Iran report? What Iran report?

It speaks volumes about the fluidity (and quality) of the Republican race that the hottest candidate in the pack is a guy who (a) doesn't believe in evolution, and (b) doesn't have a shred of foreign policy expertise - nor, apparently, the antennae to monitor key foreign policy developments.

The (a) factor clearly isn't hurting Mike Huckabee as he trolls successfully for religious conservative voters in Iowa. But if his candidacy truly takes off, that pesky (b) factor could be a big problem for him down the road. I'll say why in a moment, but first, let's look at the (b) factor in action.

Last night, Huckabee had dinner with some reporters in Des Moines. Here's what transpired.

Q: "I don’t know to what extent you have been briefed or been able to take a look at the NIE report that came out yesterday..."

A: "I’m sorry?"

Q: "The NIE report, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Have you been briefed or been able to take a look at it — "

A: "No."

Q: "Have you heard of the finding?"

A: "No."

OK, I understand that Huckabee has been very busy this week - for instance, lining up an endorsement from biblical values maven Tim LaHaye, author of novels about the coming end of the world - and I understand that he is still operating his campaign on a shoestring and therefore probably doesn't have foreign policy briefers at his elbow.

But still. Imagine the laughter on the right if a Democratic candidate had confessed to being clueless about this development.

The NIE report is, shall we say, kind of a big story. Sixteen intelligence agencies conclude that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago, and signaled the Bush administration over the summer that this conclusion was likely....that story was on every front page and it dominated the TV news. Yesterday, President Bush had held a morning press conference about it. The Democratic candidates had talked about it during an afternoon PBS debate. It's the kind of story that a presidential candidate tends to notice.

Huckabee hadn't noticed. But it didn't stop him from trying to react to the story:

"I don’t know where the intelligence is coming from that says they have suspended the program or how credible that is versus the view that they actually are expanding it...And I’ve heard, the last two weeks, supposed reports that they are accelerating it and it could be having a reactor in a much shorter period of time than originally been thought."

Again, if Huckabee had tracked the news reports at all, he would have learned "where the intelligence is coming from." For starters, spy agencies reportedly intercepted a conversation in which a senior Iranian military official complained about the shuttering of the program; and news reports indicate that the classified version of the report was footnoted with more than 1,000 pieces of fresh information. If Huckabee had known any of this, as opposed to saying "I don't know," then perhaps he would've been able to more thoughtfully assess the validity of the "supposed reports" that he says he has "heard."

Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas with no experience on international issues, is focused almost exclusively on domestic front. He recently complained to National Review magazine that he gets exasperated by all the debate questions about Iraq; in his words, "we still go back through it over and over and over again. I just never quite understood why we continued to plow the same ground." That's how the Democrats used to sound, circa the 2002 election season, when they wanted the national security stuff to just go away so that they could talk about domestic issues.

Perhaps Huckabee's insurgent campaign will gain traction in Iowa and complicate life for his rivals. But, bottom line, it's hard to imagine that Republican voters - who still view the GOP as the strong national security party, and who consider that priority to be paramount in the post-9/11 world - would ultimately entrust the '08 nomination to a guy who has no national security creds...and who had to be clued into the contents of the season's biggest national security story. I see the veep slot as Mike Huckabee's ceiling.

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LATE UPDATE: Huckabee was on CNN today, trying to spin his obliviousness:

"I had been up about 20 hours at that time, and I had not even so much as had the opportunity to look at a newspaper. We were literally going from early in the morning until late that night and talking to guys like you. And so I had not had an opportunity to be briefed on it. There are going to be times out there on the campaign trail, Wolf - you've been on the trail, you know - that candidates are literally driven from one event to the next. And it would have been nice had someone been able to first say here's some things that are going on, that are taking place. That didn't happen. It's going to happen again."

I'm sure Wolf Blitzer really appreciated it when Huckabee essentially said: C'mon, Wolf, you're out there, you know how easy it is to whiff on a major international development.

So much for the "World War III" rhetoric

President Bush just can't catch a break. It seems like every time he tries to be bellicose, the facts come along and trip him up.

Five years ago, he railed against the "grave and gathering danger" of Saddam Hussein's WMDs, only to suffer irreperable domestic political damage when it turned out that he had committed American blood and treasure to the overthrow of a dictator who had no WMDs. And now he has been embarrassed again: Just six weeks after he raised the specter of the Iranians wielding a nuclear weapon, and invoked "World War III," America's 16 intelligence agencies have concluded in a new National Intelligence Estimate, with "high confidence," that the Iranians actually halted their nuclear weapons program...

In 2003.

Worse yet, news reports indicate that, at the time Bush voiced his dire warnings on Oct. 17, he had already been informed that the spy agencies were in the midst of reassessing the purported grave and gathering Iranian threat. Bush's national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, indicated yesterday that the Decider had been briefed some time "in the last few months," perhaps as early as August or September. And other Bush officials were first told in July about the likely NIE conclusion, that the nuke program had been halted in 2003.

Not for the first time in his tenure, however, Bush went ahead anyway and talked darkly about a WMD threat that his own intelligence people were increasingly skeptical about. (Bush, Oct. 17: "I think so long - until they suspend and/or make it clear that they - that their statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon...if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.")

The NIE report, released yesterday, depicts the Iranians as far more rational than the Bush administration - and certain '08 presidential hopefuls - have painted them to be. The spy agencies have concluded that the Iranians are not maniacs hell bent on crashing the nuclear club; according to the report, their decisions "are guided by a cost-benefit approach, rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs."

This report probably foils some of the Bush administration's grand plans for its final year, such as the possible option of a new preemptive war, although I assume that the president and his surrogates will simply find a way to spin the NIE report for their own purposes. Indeed, Bush took that route this morning, telling reporters that even a nuclear program stoppage justifies hawkish vigilance in the future:

"I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program. The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it...I still feel strongly that Iran is a danger.I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace. My opinion hasn't changed."

Bush also said today that he didn't learn of the new intelligence assessment until last week - which appears to undercut the remarks yesterday, by his own national security advisor, that he knew months ago about the gist of the impending report. But wait, Bush also said today that he does recall being told in August, by intelligence overseer Mike McConnell, that a fresh assessment of Iran was in the works; however, "He didn’t tell me what the information was." (But are we supposed to believe that the Decider didn't demand to know what the information was?)

Also today, a reporter asked Bush: "Are you saying at no point while the rhetoric was escalating, as 'World War III' was making it into conversation — at no point, nobody from your intelligence team or your administration was saying, 'Maybe you want to back it down a little bit?'" To which Bush responded: "No — I’ve never — nobody ever told me that." (But wasn't he capable of Deciding, all on his own, that it would be wise, at minimum, to dial down his rhetoric, given the signals he was getting about the impending NIE report?)

Whatever. It's old news that this administration is woefully short on credibility, and this is just the umpteenth example.

More interesting, perhaps, is the report's potential impact on the '08 presidential race, because the findings undercut the rhetoric of those candidates who appeared to be sharpening their sabers with respect to Iran.

For instance, Mitt Romney: "I believe that Iran's leaders and ambitions represent the greatest threat to the world since the fall of the Soviet Union, and before that, Nazi Germany."

Rudy Giuliani: "As we all know, Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and they're threatening to use them. If I'm president of the United States, I guarantee you we will never find out what they will do if they get nuclear weapons, because they're not going to get nuclear weapons." (italics are mine)

John McCain: "There's no doubt that (Iran is) moving forward with the acquisition of a nuclear weapon."

Hillary Clinton: "The (Iranian) Revolutionary Guards are deeply involved in Iran's nuclear program," and "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons."

None of these candidates appear to be backing off their statements, although yesterday Giuliani dialed down his previous rhetoric by observing that "sanctions and other pressures must be continued and stepped up until Iran complies by halting enrichment activities in a verifiable way." Romney said simply that, even in the wake of the NIE report, "I have not said anything in that regard that I regret." And I doubt that any Republican candidate will pay a political price for making needlessly bellicose remarks; the GOP base is already accustomed to supporting a president who lashes out even in the face of flawed intelligence.

But the story may be different on the Democratic side. The liberal base is less tolerant of bellicosity. And her chief rivals, mindful of the base, has been giving Hillary a lot of grief for her Yes vote on the Senate resolution designating the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. Barack Obama and John Edwards have assailed her vote as a gesture that aids and abets the Bush administration hawks. Now, in the wake of the NIE report, they can jump on her again.

We already have Edwards saying this: "The new National Intelligence Estimate shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney's rush to war with Iran is, in fact, a rush to war. This is exactly the reason that we must avoid radical steps like the (Iran resolution) declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which needlessly took us closer to war."

And we already have Obama tying Hillary's '02 war vote to the '07 Iran resolution: "The juxtaposition of this NIE with the president's suggestion of World War III serves as an important reminder of what we learned with the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: members of Congress must carefully read the intelligence before giving the President any justification to use military force." (Hillary reportedly didn't read the '02 NIE report.)

Hillary's people have released a statement saying that the new NIE report "vindicates" what the Hillary camp has been right along in its insistence that Iran requires tough diplomacy, but they've said nothing about how the report squares with her statement, at the recent Philadelphia debate, that "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons." We'll see how all this plays out in Iowa, where the liberal base is famously skeptical about rhetorical bellicosity - and, by most accounts, increasingly skeptical about Hillary.

The rush to war, Rovespeak edition

Karl Rove refutes the old F. Scott Fitzgerald adage that there are no second acts in American lives. After crashing and burning in 2006 – insisting all the way to election day that the Republicans would hold the House and Senate – and after bailing out of his job as George W. Bush’s indispensable sidekick, he is now remarketing himself as a political seer and future memoirist, working the talk shows and writing a column for Newsweek.

The wisest course would be to simply ignore him, to consign him to history; the problem is that, befitting his status as the Ministry of Truth’s spinner emeritus, he persists in trying to flush history down the memory hole. In true Orwellian fashion, he has sought in recent days to rewrite the factual reality of autumn 2002, when (as those of us with cognitive empirical skills will certainly recall) the Bush team was on the march to war in Iraq and goading the Democratic Senate to get with the program as congressional elections loomed.

Five years later, however, that’s not how Rove chooses to remember events. Speaking with Charlie Rose on PBS during Thanksgiving week, and with a Washington Post reporter late last week, Rove now insists that the autumn rush to war was really propagated by...

The Democratic Senate.

What a revelation. Did you know that the Democrats – not the Bush planners and spinners – were really to blame for hustling America into one of the worst foreign policy miscalculations in U.S. history? The way I seem to remember it, the autumn ’02 rush to war had been a Bush production, preceded by a long buildup (Dick Cheney, Aug. 26: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction”), and that the Democrats were in reaction mode, torn between defiance (which was politically risky, in the aftermath of 9/11) and acquiescence (do the war vote quickly, then pivot to domestic issues as the election drew near).

Perhaps we should simply assess this new take on history, in the actual Rovespeak.

On PBS, referring to the war authorization, he said: “The administration was opposed to voting on it in the fall of 2002…Because we didn’t think it belonged within the confines of the election. There was an election coming up in a matter of weeks. We thought it made (the war debate) too political. We wanted it outside the confines of it. It seemed to make things move too fast. There were things that needed to be done to bring along allies and potential allies abroad.”

In the Washington Post, he said: “For Democrats to suggest they didn’t want to vote on it before the election is disingenuous.” The vote schedule was set by the Democratic majority, and “we don’t control that.”

And on Fox News yesterday, Rove tried to buttress his spin by reciting a few autumn ’02 statements from Democratic leaders, all of which seemed to suggest that they were just as eager to wage war as the Bush team. (He conveniently omitted Democratic leader Tom Daschle’s remark of Sept. 10, 2002: “I don’t think we have much choice but to respect the decision – the request of any president, including this one.”)

I could suggest that Rove is still in denial mode (a common Bush team affliction over the years), and that therefore he’s prone to simply making stuff up, but on the latter point I’ll yield the floor to Ari Fleischer, the first-term Bush press secretary. Here’s what Fleischer told the Post, as reported on Saturday; referring to the push for a war authorization vote, “It was definitely the Bush administration that set it in motion and determined the timing, not the Congress. I think Karl in this instance just has his facts wrong.” (Naturally, when his quote was read to Rove yesterday on Fox News, he responded by digging deeper into denial mode: “I disagree with my colleague.”)

It should be easy enough to refute Rove simply by quoting the journalists who covered the war debate at the time; as John Bresnahan of Politico writes, “The White House pushed to hold that vote in October, just a month before the mid-term elections, and Democrats were forced to support it or risk losing their re-election campaigns. It was a bare-knuckled political power play by President Bush and GOP leaders in Congress.” But, for those of you who are skeptical of such refutations from the reality-based community, perhaps this one will hit home:

“My answer to the Congress is, they need to debate this issue and consult with us and get the issue done as quickly as possible. If I were running for office (in November 2002), I’m not sure how I’d explain to the American people – say, ‘vote for me, and oh, by the way, on a matter of national security, I think I’m going to wait for somebody else to act.”

That was Bush himself, in an exchange with reporters on a Sept. 13, 2002, holding the Democrats’ feet to the flame with the election just seven weeks away, essentially giving them the choice of voting for war or being tagged as wimps.

Five days later, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld told Congress that the Bush team had all the WMD evidence it needed: “'The dots are there for all to connect. If they aren't good enough, rest assured they will only be good enough after another (terrorist) disaster….Delaying a vote in Congress would send the wrong message.'' And on the following day, Bush sent his war resolution language to the Senate, and said: “We’ve got to move before the elections.”

Since it is indeed settled fact that the Bush team framed the autumn ’02 war agenda – as Bush chief of staff Andrew Card said at the time, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August” – we can only wonder why Rove is bothering to cut and run from the historical record.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Whereas on PBS he claimed that the Bush team hadn’t tried to politicize national security in the ’02 elections, he seems to have forgotten his own declaration – in a winter ’02 speech - that the Bush team would surely politicize national security in the ’02 elections. Referring to the war on terror, he said on Jan. 18, 2002: “We can also go to the country on this issue because (voters) trust the Republican party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America.”

In other words, Karl Rove is cutting and running from himself.

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So Mitt Romney is intending to deliver The Speech after all. His defense/explanation of his Mormon faith is slated for Thursday - a clear signal that his camp is increasingly nervous about his standing among religious conservative GOP primary voters.

Can Mitt do for Mormonism what JFK did for Catholicism in 1960? Not necessarily, as I suggested in a recent print column: "Whereas Kennedy mollified skeptics by declaring that 'I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,' Romney can ill afford to say that. Conservative Christian voters, who wield great influence in Republican primaries, do not believe in 'absolute' separation. Romney would commit political suicide if he echoed JFK; nor would he want to, for personal reasons. He has repeatedly signaled that religion belongs in the public square, and that the tenets of his faith have infused his conservative politics. Those arguments might be enough to propel him through the primaries; the general election might be another story."

Rudy twists on the trysts

Rudy Giuliani has been busted, and it doesn't appear he'll be able to spin his way out of this one any time soon.

The news reports about how he expensed some of his extramarital trysts to the taxpayer and hid the evidence in obscure city agency budgets...granted, that's seamy stuff, and perhaps his frequent falsehoods about his mayoral record should command far more public attention; indeed, his security firm's ties to a suspected al Qaeda sympathizer are arguably more substantive. Nevertheless, the Judith Nathan tryst story is politically important, because it serves as shorthand for the character questions that have long been raised about Rudy, particularly by skeptical Republican primary voters.

Many of those voters apparently have been prepared to say, OK, the guy has led a checkered private life, but that's his business. On the other hand, if the guy has been spending the taxpayer's money and squirreling it away in obscure public agencies in order to lead that checkered private life...well, that makes it the public's business.

Which brings us to the issue of veracity. By my count, the Rudy camp has now employed six different defenses - five of them in the past 36 hours. Let us review:

1. The stonewall defense. This was the original strategy, back in 2002, when city auditors first raised questions about why the security costs for Rudy's trips to the Hamptons had shown up on the books of agencies that (a) regulated loft space, (b) advocated for the disabled, and (c) provided legal aid to the indigent. The auditors tried to get answers, but Rudy's office stiffed them with silence.

2. The denial defense. As I wrote here yesterday, Rudy said in the GOP debate on Wednesday night that the story, broken by the Politico website, was simply not true, because, in his view, the expenses had all been handled "appropriately." This defense was dead by the first commercial break.

3. The Bill Clinton defense. Rudy tried this one last night on CBS, complaining that the story was "a typical political hit job," a "dirty trick" hatched by his enemies - which is the kind of thing that Clinton used to say back when he was besieged with damaging stories that turned out to be true.

4. The security threat defense. Rudy argued during the debate that he needed his security detail at all times, because he was constantly under threat even before 9/11, yet can't offer any details because such threats must remain confidential. This attempt at a blanket defense doesn't begin to address the creative accounting issue at the core of the tryst story.

5. The "support the troops" defense. This one surfaced yesterday. A former Rudy aide came forward to say that the security costs for Rudy's trips were spread around to the obscure city agencies because, that way, the police officers assigned to Rudy would get their travel expenses paid a lot faster than if they went through normal police department channels. The aide told the Associated Press that cops don't make a lot of money, so this accounting practice was actually designed to help them out. (If this was really the reason, then how come Rudy's camp stonewalled the auditors, rather than simply explain what they were doing?)

6. The "everybody does it" defense. For awhile yesterday, a former Rudy aide insisted that hiding security expenses in obscure city agencies was a common practice that long predated the Rudy regime. But after he was informed that mayoral predecessors Ed Koch and David Dinkins had done no such thing, the aide caved and said, "I'm going to reverse myself...I'm just going to talk about the Giuliani era. I should only talk about what I know about." (The current Bloomberg administration doesn't engage in the creative accounting practice, either.)

The bottom line is, Rudy is trying to woo primary voters who put great stock in a candidate's moral character, yet this story - and his various responses - could make his task more difficult. He risks looking like a guy with an instinct for unwarranted secrecy, a guy with a credibility problem who employs shifting defenses in order to defend the indefensible.

Which sounds a lot like the guy he seeks to succeed.

Rudy's lucky escape and other awards

In the wake of last night's Republican presidential debate, let's hand out some awards.

Lamest answer and luckiest escape: Rudy Giuliani.

Early in the proceedings, CNN's Anderson Cooper said to Rudy, "Politico broke a story a few hours ago questioning your accounting of taxpayer dollars as mayor. They say that as mayor, the report says you took trips to the Hamptons and expensed the cost of your police detail to obscure city offices. One, is that true? And, if so, was it appropriate?"

First of all, that was a charitable interpretation of the story. What the documented evidence strongly suggests is that Rudy was tomcatting with his extramarital lover on the taxpayer's dime, and trying to cover his tracks. He and his security team repeatedly took summer visits to Southampton, the Long Island town where future third wife Judith Nathan had an apartment - there are few indications in the records that he was visiting Southampton on official business - and all the security costs were subsequently squirreled away in the budgets of obscure city offices.

Anyway, Cooper asked if the squirreling was true. Rudy replied: "First of all, it's not true. I had 24-hour security for the eight years that I was mayor. They followed me everyplace I went. It was because there were, you know, threats, threats that I don't generally talk about. Some have become public recently; most of them haven't. And they took care of me, and they put in their records, and they handled them in the way they handled them. I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately."

Wow, where to begin...His first sentence was a lie. The squirreling was true - because, as the Politico story made clear, the fiscal watchdogs in the city comptroller's office discovered the squirreling and tried to get some answers from the mayor. But the watchdogs were repeatedly stonewalled. They later wrote that they "were unable to verify that these expenses were for legitimate or necessary purposes."

The next few sentences of Rudy's response were all smoke (he was under threat, he won't talk about the threats, etc.). He concluded by distancing himself from his security detail, which, he says, made its own decision about how to handle the expenses, and did it "perfectly appropriately," based on whatever he does know.

That response, of course, begs the question of how and why $34,000 in taxpayer costs wound up buried in the accounts of an agency that regulates loft space (and why another $40,000 was charged to an agency dedicated to finding legal aid for the poor). Fortunately for Rudy last night, Cooper did not follow up. Nor did any of Rudy's rivals choose to make the obvious point that this story, at bare minimum, sows fresh doubts about Rudy's ethics and his fealty to the principles of open government....and whether, after nearly eight years of an imperial presidency, it would be wise to elect a successor who engages in imperial behavior and stonewalls about it.

Most pathetic pandering: Mitt Romney.

This award was a tough call, because there were so many contenders. But Mitt gets the nod, based on how he handled one of the YouTube inquiries. A good ole boy from Arizona, clearly hoping to determine whether the GOP contenders are all Manly Men, asked this question: "Any of you-all want to tell us about your gun collection, roughly how many you own, what your favorite make, model and caliber is...?"

Nobody wanted to flub this question; earlier in the debate, Rudy had been booed by the Republicans in attendance, simply for saying that perhaps there were times when gun sales should be subject to "reasonable regulations." (Such as keeping guns away from mental-case psychos. Little things like that.)

Anyway, I was half expecting one of the eight white males to whip out a Glock and proudly fire a round at the ceiling, but everyone on stage merely sought to reassure the Arizonian that either, yes, they do own guns at home (Duncan Hunter: "I have an old 20-gauge L.C. Smith that is just like the gun that my dad used to carry"), or, even if they don't currently own any guns at home, they are clearly not to be mistaken for Girly Men (John McCain: "I know how to use guns").

As for Mitt, he had a slight problem. He himself doesn't own any guns. But, lest anyone judge him insufficiently manly, he flashed his Colgate grin and hastened to point out that "I have two guns in my home. They are owned by my son Josh!" - thereby wrapping himself in family values, as a bonus.

Most inept attempt at stonewalling: Again, Mitt Romney.

Late in the debate, when the topic was gays in the military, Cooper asked, "Governor Romney, you said in 1994 that you looked forward to the day when gays and lesbians could serve, and I quote, 'openly and honestly in our nation's military.' Do you stand by that?"

Mitt, clearly not wanting to stand up for gays in front of this crowd, yet not wanting to renounce his '94 statement lest he again look like a flip-flopper, took refuge in his standard duck-and-cover response: "This isn't that time. This is not that time. We're in the middle of a war. The people who have - "

Cooper interrupted, "Do you look forward to that time, though, one day?" In other words, does Mitt stand by his statement of 1994, since, presumably, there may come a day when we will not be "in the middle of a war"?

Mitt responded by doing a variation on duck and cover: "I'm going to listen to the people who run the military to see what the circumstances are like. And my view is that, at this stage, this is not the time for us" to allow gays to serve openly.

He rambled on a bit longer, but Cooper peristed: "So, just so I'm clear, at this point, do you still look forward to a day when gays can serve openly in the military or no longer?"

Mitt responded again by taking cover and repeating his talking point: "I look forward to hearing from the military exactly what they believe is the right way to have the right kind of cohesion and support in our troops and I listen to what they have to say."

For this, he was booed. It's easy to see why.

Most artful dodger: Mike Huckabee.

The Huck got off easy last night, given the fact that he's virtually the only GOP candidate on the rise these days. Perhaps Mitt and Rudy were concerned that, by assailing him, they would risk ticking off Huckabee's growing corps of religious conservative supporters. The result was that Huckabee was able to praise his own record as an Arkansas governor ("I have a great record on fiscal conservatism"), without being challenged on the facts. Huckabee bragged last night, for instance, that "I cut 90 taxes" as governor, leaving out the fact that he also raised 21 taxes during his tenure, and presided over a net tax hike at the end of his tenure. But nobody on stage bothered to point this out.

Left virtually untouched, Huckabee proceeded to deflect potentially sensitive questions with bits of humor. When a YouTube questioner asked whether Jesus would have supported the death penalty, Huckabee simply remarked, "Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office." Everybody laughed, Huckabee was in the clear, and at that moment he reminded me of a certain Republican president who always seemed to elude difficulty because he was so quick with a quip. He served two terms during the '80s.

Most lop-sided exchange: John McCain versus Mitt Romney.

Yes, it was indeed a bad night for Mitt. And no episode was worse than when he went up against McCain on the issue of torture.

Mitt was busy trying to dodge the question of whether waterboarding was torture, while still arguing that we should reserve the right to use it, when McCain came along and slam-dunked him:

"I am astonished that you would think such a - such a torture would be inflicted on anyone in our (custody)...It's in violation of the Geneva Convention. It's in violation of existing law. And, Governor, let me tell you, if we're going to get the high ground in this world and we're going to be the America that we have
cherished and loved for more than 200 years. We're not going to torture people. We're not going to do what Pol Pot did. We're not going to do what's being done to Burmese monks as we speak. I suggest that you talk to retired military officers and active duty military officers like Colin Powell and others, and how in the world anybody could think that that kind of thing could be inflicted by Americans on people who are held in our custody is absolutely beyond me."

Mitt persisted, trying to reserve the right to use the procedure, and McCain retorted: "Well, then you would have to advocate that we withdraw from the Geneva Conventions, which were for the treatment of people who were held prisoners, whether they be illegal combatants or regular prisoners of war....This is a defining issue and, clearly, we should be able, if we want to be commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, to take a definite and positive position on, and that is, we will never allow torture to take place in the United States of America."

So, Mitt: The moral of the story is, don't get into a fight on the issue of torture with a guy who was being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison at the same time that you were traipsing around France as a Mormon missionary. You'll never win that one.

Finally, I'm betting that the Most Disappointed YouTube Questioner was Joseph from Dallas, Texas. All he wanted to do was make sure that every Republican on that stage believes in every word contained in the Holy Bible...and only three candidates got the opportunity to pander in a manner that would enshrine them as good Republicans.

True, Rudy got to say that the Bible is "the greatest book ever written," and Mitt got to say that the Bible is "the word of God, absolutely," and the Huck got to say that "I believe the Bible is exactly what it is," but five candidates didn't get the chance to say the same thing.

Who knows, maybe one of those candidates might have done something wild and crazy, such as suggest that perhaps this wearing of one's religion on one's sleeve is starting to get a tad out of hand. But if anyone had dared say such a thing, he would have been met with audience derision, and not even a desperate boast about owning an arsenal of AK-47s would have mattered a whit.

Muck on the Huck?

The Republican presidential candidates will joust tonight in the CNN/YouTube debate, and it will be instructive to see whether Mike Huckabee - whose Iowa surge is arguably the biggest GOP story in recent weeks - gets treated as a serious candidate for the first time. Put simply, if some of his rivals start attacking him, we'll know he is being taken seriously. In politics today, there's no greater compliment than getting whacked around.

If Mitt Romney (number one in Iowa, but under threat from Huckabee in the polls) or Fred Thompson (languishing as usual, but needing to halt Huckabee's rise among Christian conservative voters before the primaries head to the South) suddenly goes after the ex-governor's record in Arkansas, and tries to paint him as a phony conservative, we'll know that the Huck is now deemed to be first-tier material.

If they point out that the ordained Baptist pastor was officially rebuked five times for ethics violations during his 14-year gubernatorial stint, he should probably feel flattered. Likewise, if they note that the Arkansas tax burden increased by 47 percent, partly due to higher levies on cigarettes and gasoline, during his reign. Likewise, if they spotlight his past support for providing educational opportunies to the children of illegal immigrants. Likewise, if they talk about how he had helped to free a convicted Arkansas rapist, who then proceeded to murder a woman in Missouri. Likewise, if they bring up some of his past verbal gaffes, like the time he discussed his 100-pound weight loss with Don Imus and joked about how he'd been on a "concentration camp" diet.

Even the Prince of Darkness has now weighed in against Huckabee. But the media-savvy Huckabee will probably manage to deflect most debate attacks, having long dealt with them on his home turf.

What most interests me is why this guy is surging in Iowa - and gaining ground nationally - in the first place. One reason: a lot of social and religious conservatives have latched onto Huckabee as one of their own (a theme he's stressing in a new TV ad, which flashes the phrase "Christian leader" on the screen, thereby also reminding viewers that the Huck is not a Mormon). And, by gravitating toward the candidate whom they judge to be the most morally pure, they're also hoping to demonstrate that they still have clout within the GOP.

But there's another reason, as suggested last night by Ken Duberstein, the former chief of staff to President Reagan. (Duberstein was in Philadelphia to talk politics, on a panel sponsored by Franklin & Marshall College, a panel comprised of prominent F & M alums, such as Duberstein.) Huckabee is basically filling a vacuum; he is the beneficiary of a flawed Republican field. Duberstein, now a Washington lobbyist, described the GOP race as "absolute chaos," thanks to the flaws of the principle candidates.

On Romney: "He's the multiple-choice candidate - if you don't like what he chooses today, wait 'til tomorrow."

On Thompson: "He comes from a long line of unsuccessful Tennessee presidential candidates - Howard Baker, Bill Frist, Lamar Alexander, and Al Gore."

On John McCain: "He had so many self-inflicted wounds during the first year of his ('08) run, that he might not be able to recover."

On Rudy Giuliani (and this was the line of the night): "Everybody knows how they feel about Rudy - you either love him, or he hates you."

But, as far as the Iowa race goes, Rudy hearts Huckabee. He needs Huckabee to finish strong in the caucus on Jan. 3, and deny Romney any momentum on the way to the New Hampshire primary five days later. So tonight, Rudy will flatter the Huck by staying mum about flaws in the Arkansas record. And besides, how could Rudy slam a rival for ethics violations, given his longtime coddling of mob-connected buddy Bernie Kerik?

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On the Democratic side, perhaps the breathless question of the moment is whether Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama will prompt black primary voters (notably in early primary states like South Carolina and Florida) to overlook their loyalty to the Clintons and embrace Hillary's chief rival. But I am dubious that celebrities matter. To cite just one example: Bruce Springsteen, working-class hero, drew huge crowds for John Kerry in the autumn of 2004, yet we all know how that race turned out; in fact, according to the exit polls, President Bush and Kerry split, virtually 50-50, the votes of people who earn between $30,000 and $50,000.

On the F&M panel last night, former congressman William Gray - at one time, the number-three Democrat in the House - was also skeptical about Oprah. Gray, who is African-American, said: "Celebrities can only do two things for you - raise money, and increase your visibility in a media market...People may like her as a TV host, they may like her magazine, but I think she will be shocked" by her lack of clout at the ballot box. "All these celebrities get surprised. Voters don't simply say, 'If some movie star walks in, I'm going to vote for this candidate.'"

Indeed, on the issue of star power, maybe Bill Clinton isn't going to be much help for Hillary, either. Another F&M panelist, Washington lawyer Stanley Brand (a former House Democratic counsel who has defended a slew of Democratic clients) spelled out the problem last night:

"There's a tactical problem for her. She can't simply say, 'I stand tall as a woman,' then bring him in and campaign under his banner. She can't have it both ways...She can't bring her husband in as a savior, as if she's tied to the tracks in a silent movie," because that sends "exactly the wrong message' - the message that she's not the pioneering strong woman she paints herself to be.

And as for Oprah, it's important to note that Obama was gaining ground in Iowa anyway. Those Iowa Democrats who remain wary of Hillary - a growing constituency, according to the polls - didn't need to have their concerns validated by a celebrity.

Anyway, it'll probably all be over by the time the big states vote on Feb. 5 - earlier than ever. As the panelists noted ruefully last night, there's a strong possibility that the two presumptive nominees will then have nine long months to wander the land. Duberstein wondered, "What are these people going to do?"

Pour tar on each other's heads and reduce voters to a state of mental torpor? That's my guess.

Trent's lot in life

As he engineers his abrupt departure from the U.S. Senate, perhaps with an eye toward cashing in on his connections and scoring a golden-parachute deal in the lobbying industry, lame duck Republican leader Trent Lott is winning plaudits in the mainstream press for his frequent willingness to work with Democrats across the aisle.

But that's only part of his legacy. His lot in life is that he turned off a lot of people across the political spectrum, which pretty much guarantees that his political passing will not be universally mourned.

It is sometimes suggested that his now-infamous praise of Strom Thurmond's segregationist past was merely an aberration, a transient moment that should not be allowed to define Lott's career. (At a birthday party for Strom in December 2002, Lott had waxed nostalgic about the old guy's 1948 pro-segregation presidential campaign. Referring to his fellow Mississippians, Lott said: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.") But this outburst was not an aberration; rather, it was part of a pattern.

Trent Lott epitomized the post-'60s surge of Republican stength in the South. That surge was made possible because white southern Democrats, fearing or resenting the influx of black votes into their party in the wake of the civil rights movement, took refuge in the GOP. Lott, as one of the first elected Mississippi Republicans, successfully surfed that wave all the way to Washington.

And he had long displayed his sympathies. As a college student at Ole Miss, at the peak of the '60s civil rights movement, he led a campaign opposing the integration of his fraternity. As a congressman, he voted against renewal of the Voting Rights Act (the law that had enfranchised millions of blacks in the South), and opposed establishing a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Years later, as a senator, he was still giving speeches to the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the segregationist White Citizens' Councils; as he told one gathering in 1992, "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy." He kept showing up at those gatherings even though the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, and the Anti-Defamation League had all identified the CCC as a hate group.

That's the context for Lott's praise of Strom, and it's worth remembering that many conservatives were nearly as furious as the civil-rights activists. Lott was widely assailed on the right; as commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote at the time, Lott's "idiocy" was "indefensible morally, intellectually, and politically....It (does) not seem intellectually risky for most conservatives to denounce Lott, because we feel no allegiance to the racism of the past. We could be just as outraged as sincere liberals."

And, for many conservatives today, the Strom affair is merely one item on their list of grievances. They have long viewed Lott as a sellout to the cause; as the popular blog redstate.com remarked yesterday, "Trent Lott long ago stopped being useful...He hates conservatives. He hates most anything other than establishment Republican ideals of entrenched power and earmarks."

Speaking of earmarks...Conservatives who believe in balanced budgets and small government have long identified Lott as a hypocrite who talks a good game about reducing the size of the federal behemoth - while, in practice, relentlessly larding the federal budget with special-interest pork projects for the folks back home. (These projects, called earmarks, are slipped into bills often in the dead of night, in the hopes that nobody notices.) One classic Lott maneuver occurred last year, when he stuck a $700 million earmark - reportedly the largest in history - onto a defense spending bill, with aim of financing the rerouting of a CSX freight line on the Gulf Coast, thereby making it easier for Mississippi developers to build new casinos.

Writing back in 2001, conservative commentator Ramesh Ponnuru framed the problem: "Lott's strategic flaw is his narrowness of vision....A senator who is avidly pursuing pork is not a senator who is likely to have a grand strategy for advancing the conservative cause or to be an effective advocate for that strategy." And, around that same time, veteran conservative activist Paul Weyrich complained, "I don't think anybody has disappointed me more in public life."

And speaking of Lott's fealty to "entrenched power," is it really mere coincidence that he is leaving the Senate shortly before a lobbying reform bill becomes the law of the land? (By the way, Lott was one of only 14 Republican senators to vote against that reform bill.) If he quit his seat in 2008, with the law in effect, he'd have to wait two years before fattening the wallet. But if he quits now, before the new "revolving door" provision kicks in, he'd only have to wait one year.

When asked about this yesterday, he insisted that the new law didn't play "a big role" in his thinking - a verbal loophole through which you could drive a Hummer. Indeed, his fondness for corporate lobbyists is well documented. In 2006, he led all current lawmakers as the most frequent flyer on corporate jets (typically, tobacco giant UST, and BellSouth), tallying 18 trips - and 123 between 2001 and 2006. And life on K Street would be a comfortably family affair, since his own son, Chester, is already a lobbyist. Or he could simply opt for "consulting," which on paper is a notch away from official lobbying.

Either way, it beats being doomed to four more years as a member of the Senate minority party, and it would pay a lot better, too. Such are the ways of Washington today. When you lose clout, you can always cash in.

It also seems fitting that Lott's interim replacement would be chosen by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Washington lobbyist himself (at the still-named Barbour, Griffith & Rogers). It's precisely this kind of incestuousness that has soured so many conservatives on their elected leaders. Which is why the reaction to Lott is basically, "Don't let the revolving door hit you on the way out."

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Speaking of Senate entrenchment, I noticed a report this morning that Edward Kennedy will receive an $8-million advance for his memoirs, due for publication in 2010. The report contained this sentence: "Mr. Kennedy...is expected to write candidly about his personal history, including the 1969 Chappaquiddick accident in which he drove off a bridge in Martha's Vineyard, resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a former member of Senator Robert F. Kennedy's staff."

Here's what I plan to do. Assuming that a review copy doesn't land in my mailbox in 2010, I'll go to a bookstore and look up the Chappaquiddick passages. If the author fails to "candidly" address, for the first time, whether he was in fact drunk behind the wheel; why he was leaving the Vineyard party with the young woman (conveniently without his driver); why he somehow failed to notice that he had taken a 90-degree turn onto a bumpy dirt road, instead of staying on the asphalt road that led to the ferry (where he was supposedly taking her); why he failed to notice all this, given the fact that he knew those roads well; why he failed to call the police for help after swimming to safety while Kopechne remained trapped in his car; why he instead consulted solely with his closest political aides in secret; why he failed to report the accident until after the car and dead girl were discovered 10 hours later...if Kennedy fails to advance our sketchy understanding of all these issues, then I'll deem his book unworthy of purchase.

In flagrant breach of the Reagan commandment

Yeesh, whatever happened to Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment, "Thou shall not speak ill of any fellow Republican"?

Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani spent the holiday weekend speaking ill of each other...wait, let me amend that. Each guy spend the weekend insisting that the other guy is a fraud and a hypocrite. Mitt basically said that Rudy is Hillary lite, a closeted liberal on social issues, a friend of the sleazy (Bernie Kerik), and a lousy role model in his personal life. Rudy basically said that Mitt was a closeted liberal on social issues, a mediocre governor, a softy on violent crime, a wimp on taxes, and Ted Kennedy lite (Rudy hit Mitt again this morning, on MSNBC: "He was the one as governor of Massachusetts who was likening himself to Ted Kennedy, this guy didn't even support Ronald Reagan").

You're free to wade into the crossfire and determine which guy has the better case; be advised that Mitt also accuses Rudy of "making up facts," which is a polite way of saying that Mitt thinks Rudy is a liar. I'm mainly interested in Rudy's decision to go after Mitt in this manner. Earlier this autumn, Rudy was publicly signaling that he planned to obey the Reagan commandment ("It’s my intention not to attack any other Republicans"), yet now he appears to be fully engaged.

The Giuliani camp says that Rudy is assailing Mitt simply because (to paraphrase a line from the late screenwriter Paddy Chayevsky) he's mad as hell about Mitt's hits and he's not gonna take it anymore. But clearly it's more than that.

Despite what Rudy's aides have been saying lately - that Rudy will be fine even if he loses the gatekeeper contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, that Rudy will simply bounce back in the big states - they obviously fear that early losses in Iowa (Jan. 3) and New Hampshire (Jan. 8) could create momentum for the early winner and hamper Rudy's prospects for a quick recovery later in the month and in early February. And right now, the state polls indicate that Mitt is well positioned to win both Iowa and New Hampshire.

In other words, the Rudy camp appears to understand that Rudy's lead in national Republican surveys doesn't mean squat. The top slot in national polls usually goes to the candidate with the highest name ID; those polls tell you nothing about the state-by-state terrain. (In 2003, Joe Lieberman scored high in the Democratic polls, mostly on the basis on his high name ID.) And the terrain in Iowa and New Hampshire favors Mitt, who has out-organized and vastly outspent Rudy.

Hence Rudy's decision to dump the Reagan commandment, in the hopes of moving up early by cutting Mitt down. The risk, of course, is that both guys will suffer, that each will merely sow greater doubts about the other, and that some primary voters might sour on the mutual savaging and go looking for an alternative candidate, somebody who seems less soiled (in Iowa, perhaps Mike Huckabee; in New Hampshire, perhaps John McCain; in South Carolina, perhaps Fred Thompson).

So it goes, in the most fluid Republican race in living memory. No doubt we'll see further evidence on Wednesday night, when they all meet again, in the CNN-YouTube debate.

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By the way, if Rudy's rivals are looking for fresh grist, this report might work just fine: Rudy on the stump regularly inveighs against special-interest, money-wasting congressional "earmarks"....at the same time that Rudy's law firm (which paid him $1.2 million last year) scores special-interest, money-wasting congressional earmarks for its clients.

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And speaking of Fred Thompson, it can't be a good sign when a Republican candidate who fancies himself to be the true conservative in the race feels compelled to complain of media bias...and levels his charge at Fox News.

During an appearance yesterday on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace made an obvious observation - that Fred's candidacy has basically flatlined in the polls since the day he announced - but the candidate got so incensed that he briefly registered a pulse:

"This has been a constant mantra of Fox, to tell you the truth....(F)or you to highlight nothing but the negative in terms of these polls...kind of skews things a little bit....I understand the game of build-up and I understand the game of take-down. And we all go through it. And I’m perfectly willing for you to do that with regard to me as you do the other candidates. But you have the right to put in your one side, put in the Fox side, and I have the right to respond to it."

That's the gist of a long and testy exchange with Wallace, a classic illustration of how a politician in potentially dire straits will always try to blame the media (even an ostensibly friendly outlet) for his woes.

This is the same politician who, during his extended wink-wink pre-candidacy phase, basically took up residence on Fox's Sean Hannity show, where he has logged nearly as many minutes as Rudy. But the fact remains that he has barely moved the needle while on the stump. In the two early primary states most critical to his candidacy - South Carolina and Florida, both in his home region - he has steadily lost ground to his rivals (especially Mitt), and it's hard to imagine this slide is due to the "constant mantra of Fox."

However, he did make one good point yesterday, when he cited the support he has received from the conservatives at the National Review magazine. (Another symptom of the divisions among conservatives, as they assess the GOP field). The National Review gang has indeed praised some of Fred's policy proposals - and last week they even took a fresh swipe at Rudy, pointing out that, as mayor, Rudy "launched lawsuits that sought liberal (court) rulings to punish gun manufacturers...Conservatives can only hope that President Giuliani - if such is our fate - can be counted on to appoint judges who would throw Plaintiff Giuliani out of court."

If such is our fate....In this season of fluidity, even the commentators are in breach of Reagan's 11th commandment.