Politics as usual in six easy steps

Whenever a politician find himself under fire, thanks to his own embarrassing behavior, this is usually what happens next:

1. The pol says he is as clean as a hound's tooth and insists that his enemies are merely out to get him.
2. People don't believe him, and pressure mounts for the pol to quit whatever prestigious post he occupies.
3. The pol vows not to leave the prestigious post he occupies. The leaders of the pol's party vow to help him fight the unfair attacks.
4. Pressure continues to mount, and finally the leaders tell the pol that he has to go. The pol still refuses, vows to fight to the bitter end.
5. The pol quickly gives up his fight vow, even though he still says the attacks on him are baseless. He announces his surrender late on a Friday or Saturday, hoping to minimize press coverage.
6. The party leaders put out a strong statement of support for the pol that they had just pressured to quit.

This is the usual Washington drill, and the Democrats completed all six steps last night, in the case of Allan Mollohan. (A Friday night, naturally, in order to minimize press coverage.) The capper, as you will soon see, was a statement by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi that falls several notches short of honesty.

For weeks, pressure had mounted on West Virginia congressman Mollohan, who apparently is quite ethics-challenged, to give up his seat on the House Ethics Committee. It was getting very embarrassing. The Democratic leaders want to paint the GOP as the party of corruption in 2006 -- yet, as I mentioned a few days ago, their top Ethics guy used special-interest loopholes to steer $250 million into five nonprofit organizations which then hired a number of ex-Mollohan aides for big salary jobs.

He has also worked some suspiciously lucrative real estate deals with an ex-aide who runs one of the nonprofits, and he initially failed to pay real estate taxes. All these acts have been reported in the press, and federal prosecutors in Washington are also scrutinizing his finances. This has all been known for weeks, yet House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (a leading critic of Republican "corruption"), kept insisting there was no reason for Mollohan to give up his Ethics seat.

Then, on Thursday night, she told him to give up his Ethics seat. He resisted, vowed to fight. Yesterday, he gave up the fight, still insisting the charges against him were "baseless." And sure enough, Pelosi said that the man she just booted off the Ethics panel is really just avictim of his enemies. An excerpt from Pelosi's statement:

"The allegations against Congressman Mollohan originate from the National Legal and Policy Center, which engages in highly partisan attacks on Democrats. The attacks are an attempt to deflect attention from the long list of Republican criminal investigations, indictments, plea agreements and resignations..."

If Pelosi's Republican counterpart had issued such a statement, defending an ethics-challenged GOP pol as a mere victim of "highly partisan attacks," she would have considered that to be further evidence of Republican turpitude.

Somehow Pelosi seems to have overlooked the fact that Mollohan's actions had been outed by the Wall Street Journal on April 7 (on the front page, where nonpartisan, professional reporters do their best work), that a U.S. attorney is scrutinizing the congressman, and that mainstream newspapers such as The Washington Post have been calling for Mollohan to step down since last weekend.

Meanwhile, it's true that the National Legal and Policy Center is conservative, but that doesn't mean its work should be automatically dismissed as dishonest -- any more than moveon.org's campaigns should be dismissed as dishonest just because the group is liberal.

This whole episode, and Pelosi's defensive reaction, is further proof that the Democrats may not have an easy time parlaying their anti-GOP "culture of corruption" message into votes next November. To a lot of Americans (or, at least those paying attention), the Six Steps outlined above might seem like just more bipartisan politics as usual.

The perfect issue for gasbags

I awoke today to see this story, about how the Democrats are eager to exploit rising gasoline prices as a campaign '06 issue, and my reaction was:
Dream on.

This issue pops up in the spring and summer of every single election season -- gas prices inevitably spike as car-dependent Americans prepare to hit the road -- and politicians from the "out" party always convince themselves that they have been handed a gift. They love the gas issue because so many Americans love their cars. So they try to pin the blame for high prices on the incumbent party...and nothing happens.

Warm-weather anger never translates into autumn votes; the amnesiacs in the Democratic party don't seem to even recall the recent past.

Consider the spring of 2004, when John Kerry tried to hang the average $2.06 per gallon price around President Bush's neck, by lamenting Bush's refusal to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (a phony charge anyway, because such a move would have slashed prices by only a few pennies, as President Clinton discovered in 2000, when he released 30 million barrels). In 2004, other Democrats joined in by painting Bush as a do-nothing tool of the oil companies. Yet somehow I don't remember this issue playing much of a role in the November results.

No doubt, in the weeks ahead, the Republicans will retaliate by contending that the Democrats are to blame for high gas prices because the "obstructionists" barred oil drilling in the Arctic refuge. But that will be a phony charge as well, because Bush's own Energy Department concluded several years ago that any price drop triggered by new domestic oil would be "negligible." Meanwhile, today, the GOP decided that the best way to handle the gas price hike issue was to resurrect the fact that many Democrats voted to raise the federal gas tax. So they put out a press release. Those Democratic votes occurred...in 1993 and 1996.

The point is, presidents and political parties can't control the pump price of gas. Voters sense that there is no way to strictly assign partisan blame. Anyone who picks up a newspaper can see that the biggest global factor driving up gas prices is the burgeoning demand for oil in the fast-developing economies of China and India.

And as Democrats seek to exploit this issue at GOP expense, let's see whether they will point any of the blame at the gas-guzzling American consumer. Not likely, since gas-guzzling consumers vote. Checking a news website the other day, I saw two headlines: gas prices are going up...and Detroit is expecting a big sales year for SUVs.

Which reminds me of a story. This comes from John Zogby, the pollster. He told me a few years back, "My son and I just went to a book party for Arianna Huffington. She waxed eloquent about the pitfalls of SUVs, everybody listened -- and when we left, maybe 11 SUVs were parked outside, waiting to pick up guests. Point is, you can't call on Americans to sacrifice during a...campaign. That's a loser."

So is the gas issue itself.

And this is a Republican talking

So how should we best assess all these staff changes at the White House? Will they make a big difference, and help President Bush find his mojo again?
Peggy Noonan says that won't happen - not unless the guy at the top engages in some cosmic soul-searching of his own.

Noonan, the famous Republican speechwriter who crafted key phrases for Ronald Reagan and the senior George Bush, makes that argument in a column today. Her reservations about the younger Bush are, shall we say, politely rendered. You don't have to be a genius to read between the lines. Key excerpts:

"Mr. Bush's feelings, assumptions and convictions set theme, direction and mood....When he won't budge, the White House won't budge. When it clings to an idea beyond evidence and history, it is Mr. Bush who is doing the clinging. When he stands firm, it stands firm...
"(H)e puts severe limits on the number and kind of people who can (advise) him. He picks them, receives their passionate and by definition limited recommendations, makes his decision, and sticks. All very Trumanesque, except Truman could tolerate argument and dissent. They didn't pass the buck to little Harry, they threw it at his head. Clark Clifford was in in the morning telling him he had to recognize Israel, and George Marshall was there in the afternoon telling him he'd step down as secretary of state if he did. It was a mess. Messes aren't all bad...

"George W. Bush, on the other hand, does not tolerate dissent, argument, bitter internal battles....Bruce Bartlett has written of how, as a conservative economist, he was treated with courtesy by the Clinton White House, which occasionally sought out his views. But once he'd offered mild criticisms of the Bush White House he was shut out, and rudely, by Bush staffers. Why would they be like that? Because they believe that as a conservative, Mr. Bartlett owes his loyalty to the president. He thought his loyalty was to principles.
"There are many stories like this, from many others. It leaves friends on the outside having to self-censor or accept designation as The Enemy. It leaves a distinguished former government official and prominent Republican saying, in conversation, 'Those people aren't drinking the Kool-Aid, they're sucking it from a spigot!'

"(S)ometimes the bravest thing is to question yourself, question the wisdom around you, reach out, tolerate a hellacious argument, or series of arguments. Yes there is a feeling of safety in decisiveness, but if it's the wrong decision, the safety doesn't last. And safety isn't the point in any case. Governing well is. That involves arguments. It means considering you may be wrong about some things. This isn't weak--it's humble. It's not breaking, it's bending, tacking, steadying yourself in a wind."

Noonan says a lot more in this vein. Her point, of course, is that major staff changes are "irrelevent" if The Decider proves incapable of changing himself.

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By the way, on a related front:
The pollsters at Fox News announced today that President Bush is now supported by only 33 percent of the American public. That's a record low in the Fox poll, which has measured Bush's appeal since 2001. The Fox low, in fact, is lower than the lows recorded lately by Gallup, ABC News-Washington Post, and the Pew Media Center.
I expect that this finding by Fox News will thoroughly confuse and disorient those Americans who assume that such a dire statistic could only be an "MSM" "lie."

Beam up the next Scotty

On the occasion today of Scott McClellan's resignation as White House press secretary, let us briefly travel back in time to this classic exercise in stonewalling, as performed by the president's top flak:

"I'm not going to parse that (presidential) statement....I'm just not going to parse the statement for you, it speaks for itself...I'm not characterizing it beyond what the statement that I've already issued says...You can stand here and ask a lot of questions over and over again and will elicit the exact same answer...I'm not leaving any impression, David, and don't twist my words...I'm here to represent the thinking, the actions, the decisions of the president. That's what I get paid to do....I didn't write the statement..."

Sounds just like McClellan, right? It has to be McClellan, right?
Wrong.
That was Michael McCurry, press secretary for President Bill Clinton, on the afternoon of January 21, 1998. The news about Monica Lewinsky had just broken, and the president's lawyers had handed McCurry a statement contending that Clinton had never engaged in any "improper relationship" with the intern. Basically, McCurry was sent out there to lie (he didn't yet know it was a lie), to stand at the podium and let the press pound him as if he was a pinata.

In other words, that's often the nature of the job. Even McCurry, a longtime Democratic strategist who socializes with political reporters, knew that. All administrations, Democratic and Republican, lie or conceal, on rare occasions or with frequency, for good reasons or bad -- and the chief flak-catcher, whether he is in the know or out of the loop, has the thankless task of dancing at arm's length with the truth. On worldwide TV. In streaming video.

Ron Ziegler did this for Republican Richard Nixon during Watergate (he's the one who initially called it "a third-rate burglary attempt"). Bill Moyers did this for Democrat Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam, until he got bleeding ulcers and quit in 1966, telling his wife that "no man can serve two masters," referring to the president and the press corps.

So, in the institutional sense, it is not surprising that Scott McClellan's rocky ride has come to an end, and that his credibility is in tatters (notwithstanding President Bush's heckuva-job-Brownie statement today, praising McClellan for a "job well done"). The adversarial climate in the White House briefing room has been notoriously inhospitable, ever since the '60s. Even Bill Clinton, a Democrat trailed by a supposedly Democrat-friendly press corps, had three press secretaries during his eight years.

But this is not to suggest that all press secretaries are equally burdened by the job, or that their failings are equally distributed. They all operate (and most depart) under circumstances that are unique to their respective tenures. And, in McClellan's case, it was hard to imagine that he would ever go the distance, not with his particular marching orders.

Yes, McClellan did max out on his credibility in the traditional sense. He had insisted in 2003 that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were "not involved"in the outing of CIA employe Valerie Plame, then he was forced to stonewall in 2005 when it turned out they were indeed involved. Most recently, he was compelled to argue that if Bush leaks classified material (in this case, to defend his war in Iraq), then it's in the "public interest," but if anyone else leaks, it's a threat to national security. And earlier this month, when the Washington Post found fresh documentary evidence that some of Bush's WMD claims in Iraq were groundless, McClellan's response was to dismiss the evidence as "old news" and demand that the press apologize.

But McClellan's mission was not to merely evade or spin information in the traditional sense. His core purpose was to be the point man for an assertive, even revolutionary, White House effort to delegitimize the mainstream conveyers of the news. And whoever replaces McClellan will play the same role.

As indicated in numerous reports, particularly here and here, the Bush administration has sought to treat the mainstream press as just another troublesome special interest group, to reduce its role as a semi-official participant in the nation's governance.
Jay Rosen, a press watchdog and journalism professor at New York University, wrote last summer: "I believe the ultimate goal is to enhance executive power and maximize the president's freedom of maneuver - not only in policy-making and warfare, but on the terrain of fact itself." And writer Ron Suskind, after interviewing top Bush officials, said in an interview that they clearly want to create "a culture and public dialogue based on assertion rather than authenticity, on claim rather than fact."

That's the key to assessing McClellan. His job was to contest or deny the "terrain of fact," the empirical evidence, as traditionally defined. Examples:

1. In the face of evidence last September that the Bush administration had responded sluggishly to the Katrina crisis (behavior that was later assailed in a House Republican report), McClellan simply offered an assertion: "Flood control has been a priority of this administration from Day One."

2. In the face of evidence last June that the Iraqi insurgency was not in its "last throes" (as Vice President Cheney had insisted), McClellan simply asserted that it was: "We're making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements...so this is a period when they (insurgents) are in a desperate mode."

3. Sometimes, when cornered, he used to catch a breather by calling on Jeff Gannon. Remember Jeff Gannon? He seems so 15 months ago. Jeff Gannon was the fake name used by the real James Guckert, who wrote for a fake news service that was, in reality, an offshoot of a conservative activist website called GOPUSA. McClellan would call on "Gannon," a friendly softball would be lobbed his way, and McClellan would say, "I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff." Gannon became Exhibit A of the administration's rather expansive view of how the press should be defined. (I wrote about the Gannon case in some detail last year.)

In all likelihood, the new Scott won't differ much from the old Scott, not as long as the basic mission remains unchanged. Perhaps the successor's personal style will be different. One prominent conservative blogger said today that he hopes the new flak will be a tougher customer ("it's probably wishful thinking to imagine that the President would appoint someone who would take a more combative attitude toward the White House press corps"), but somebody like Dan Senor, an ex-Bush spokesman in Iraq, would be seen as a great leap forward in articulation skills.

But no matter who gets the job, the adversarial dynamic will remain the same. It was Mike McCurry, back in his crisis days of 1998, who opened a press briefing with these words:
"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the theatre of the absurd."

Why he stays

It's almost a waste of time to ask the question, "Will Rummy survive?"
Because it seems like a slam dunk that he will.

President Bush, in all likelihood, will stick with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for several fundamental political reasons:

1. If he dumped Rumsfeld, that would be tantamount to giving himself a devastating thumbs-down review. The war in Iraq is Bush's signature issue, the issue on which he will be judged by historians. If he removes the Pentagon chief who prosecuted that war, he would be telling the American people that the war itself was ill-conceived, or, at the very least, poorly executed. And, in terms of political damage, the buck would stop in the Oval Office.
All told, the firing would be a gift to the Democrats. (Conservative commentator John Podhoretz agrees, here.) Just imagine what the Senate confirmation hearings for Rumsfeld's successor would be like. Those hearings would become a stormy, high-profile examination of the Iraq war. In an election year, no less.

2. If he dumped Rumsfeld, those who are sympathetic to the dumpee would come forward to contend that the Defense secretary was being scapegoated. They would argue that, yes, Rumsfeld's longstanding crusade at the Pentagon (to develop a lighter, more mobile, more high-tech military) may have helped fuel his resistence to a larger ground game in Iraq and his relative lack of interest in postwar security issues....but they would point out -- rightly -- that Rumsfeld had only been trying to enforce the priorites established by the Bush team.
The fact is, candidate Bush gave a speech in 1999 calling for a lighter, more mobile, more high-tech military that would be focused on winning wars, not nation-building. That speech was drafted by a coterie of conservational national security think-tankers who had spent the Clinton era developing their ideas; by 1999, they had already attached themselves to Bush. Rumsfeld was not yet a member of the team. But he was ultimately tapped to carry out the team's vision.
So, again, Rumsfeld's removal would be widely perceived as a negative reflection on Bush.

3. If Bush dumped Rumsfeld, it would send a message that the Defense secretary's most credible critics were right. It's one thing to dismiss antiwar protestors like Cindy Sheehan, and to paint them as members of the so-called "loony left." It's a bit tougher to dismiss critics from within the ranks of the military, some of whom fought in Iraq.
The administration's most effective retort, thus far, is that these decorated dissenters are publicly imperiling the tradition of civilian control of the military. If Bush dumped Rumsfeld, he'd be giving up that argument. And there are plenty of conservatives -- defenders of tradition -- who would not be happy with Bush for doing that. The GOP needs their votes in November.

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By the way, on a related topic:
It's not hard to see why top administration officials gravitate toward the conservative press when it's time to give interviews. Rumsfeld did a stint yesterday on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Never mind Rumsfeld's answers, they were predictable. Just sample some of Rush's questions, none of which seem to honor the old adage that the press should afflict the comfortable:

RUSH: "You were being hailed as a sex symbol in Washington (six years ago)...Today it's a far different circumstance, and it's a great illustration of just how things work inside the Beltway. What does it feel like to you to go through these ups and downs and to have practically the entire media jump on the case of these six generals demanding your ouster?"

RUSH: "...with the (Iraq war) news that you just gave us, it's much better there than it's being reported, and I assume that you're optimistic about the final outcome."

RUSH: "How would you describe the process and the progress there?"

RUSH: "I try to share with my audience as often as possible that people like you and the president know far more than the public knows about any number of events, simply because it's not possible for the information that you learn to be shared nor should most of it, and yet that would have to force you at some point to say, 'You know, we do have an anti-war crowd and they're loud and they're being affected by our enemy. But the American people, some of them, just don't know what we know,' and you have to stick with what you think is right, and that's where the whole democratic process I would think becomes challenging for you because you have to make a judgment: 'Do what's right or we listen to the people?'"

RUSH: "I met you a couple weeks ago in New York and I forgot to tell you something. I had so many people -- as I mentioned I was going to be at the Marine dinner, and I had so many people -- in my audience tell me to be sure to tell you how much they love and respect what you're doing. So let me do it now."

RUSH: "Mr. Secretary? Can I please follow you outside, and personally wash your limo?"
(OK, he didn't say that one. But he might as well have.)

Rewriting history for Rummy

Once again, it's fact-checking time.
A Bush administration defender tried yesterday to support the embattled Donald Rumsfeld by again denigrating Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff who had stated in prewar testimony that the occupation of Iraq would require several hundred thousand soldiers.

Shinseki is obviously a sore subject for Rumsfeld's defenders, given the fact that he was hustled into early retirement after stating his view (which contradicted Rumsfeld's smaller troop estimates) to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. So when former Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Richard Myers appeared on ABC yesterday, and the Shinseki testimony was brought up, he basically insisted that Shinseki had dreamed up his troop estimate on the spot.

Myers said: "I’m just saying that General Shinseki was forced to make that comment under pressure, pulled a number out.…He was forced to make — say a number. He said a number."

Myers was factually inaccurate. Shinseki had chosen that number because it was widely substantiated elsewhere.

For starters, here's Ret. Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq. He said on television the other day:
"You know, there’s a process within the Department of Defense, a very deliberate planning process which goes into each contingency and deliberately analytically develops war plans. It continues year to year. Our senior (Pentagon) leadership chose to radically modify 12 years of very deliberate planning with respect to Iraq. Previous planning identified the requirement for three times the level of forces that we committed into Iraq to take down a regime and then build the peace."

Another source: The bestselling book Cobra II, a detailed military history of the prewar planning. Pages 101-2, in particular.
Steve Hawkins, a brigadier general assigned to the Joint Staff and charged with postwar planning, briefed Shinseki during the same week that Shinseki visited the Senate committee. From the book: "Shinseki asked him how many troops he thought were needed to secure Iraq after Saddam was toppled. Hawkins said that no fewer than 350,000 coalition forces would do, and (possibly) half a million."

Most important, the authors concluded: "For all of the controversy, Shinseki's numbers were similar to those generated by CENTCOM," a reference to U.S. central command.

Fresh denigrations of Shinseki aren't likely to inspire the military dissenters to clam up.

The good reverend's seal of approval

A postscript or two about John McCain, whose rightward repositioning was analyzed today in a newspaper column by yours truly:

McCain's "electability" as a presidential candidate hinges on the assumption that he can still attract a large crossover vote from independents and Democrats. Certainly that was the case during the 2000 GOP primaries; non-Republicans flocked to McCain in both New Hampshire and Michigan, where the rules permit crossover voters. But it's not a cinch bet that he can attract a significant share of those voters as the GOP nominee in 2008 - especially if those voters view the erstwhile straight shooter as a spin doctor for the religious right.

One of his new best friends, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, appeared on CNN today, and it would not be surprising if Falwell's lavish praise for McCain winds up in a Democratic video somewhere down the road. In Falwell's words:

"You know, John McCain is a strong conservative. He's pro- life....His view on family is just where most conservative Christians' views are...And he and I are friends now. And he is speaking May 13."

The latter is a reference to McCain's upcoming appearance as a commencement speaker at Falwell's university in Virginia. The previous two speakers were Karl Rove and Sean Hannity.

It's too early to say whether McCain's popularity among independents and Democrats will be jeopardized by the fact that he is now "friends" with a guy who has declared that the 9/11 attacks were God's retribution for America's tolerance of gays, lesbians, and abortion doctors. Maybe McCain's many repositionings won't matter at all in the end; after all, he's taking all these steps two years away from the election, when the vast majority of Americans probably aren't paying atttention.

But I wonder what accounts for the slide in his popularity, vis a vis Hillary Clinton, over the past two months, as measured by a respected polling operation. Here's what nonpartisan analyst Charlie Cook, who runs the Cook Political Report, wrote yesterday:

"In two Cook Political Report/RT Strategies polls - one taken in late February and the other in early April - McCain received 18 percent of the self-identified 'liberal' vote when matched up against Clinton. But will one in five liberals still support McCain if he continues to assiduously court conservatives? In the latest Cook/RT Strategies poll, which was conducted April 6-9 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percent, McCain's lead over Clinton among all adults dropped from 10 points (47 percent to 37 percent) to 5 points. Among registered voters, it dropped from 12 points (48 percent to 36 percent) to 9 points (46 percent to 37 percent). While these shifts aren't huge, the McCain-versus-Clinton spread should be watched closely in coming months..."

Cook seems to be suggesting that McCain's drop might be attributed to his rightward repositioning. I think it's way too early to state it with certainty. Perhaps Cook will find something more definitive later this spring, after McCain appears at Liberty University, sharing the stage May 13 with the man he once assailed as an "agent of intolerance."

Saturday mailbag: the corruption issue, the anti-Rummy revolt

Two items today:

1. Some eagle-eyed blog readers detected a contradiction in several of my posts this week.
Previewing a special congressional election in California on Tuesday, I had written that the Democrats would be sending a potent national message if their candidate, Francine Busby, managed to pull at least 40 percent of the vote in California-50, the heavily Republican district on the north side of San Diego.

Yet, after the results were finally tabulated, I wrote on Wednesday that the Democrats had failed to send a potent national message because Busby had managed to pull only 44 percent of the vote.

You ask, Huh?
I reply, mea culpa.

After my first post, I received two calls from Democrats whom I have long respected for their honesty, even when it hurts their side. They persuaded me (it didn't take much persuading) that I had the race all wrong, that Busby's failure to clear 50 percent plus one will probably doom her bid for office. If she'd cleared the majority mark, in the crowded field of candidates, she would have won outright. But by failing to do so, she must now face Brian Bilbray, the second-place Republican, in a June runoff. And it's likely that most Republican voters in this Republican district will coalesce behind the GOP candidate; by contrast, they split their votes among 14 Republicans on this week's open ballot.

All this thinking, and more, was reflected in my Wednesday post. I would have been smarter, however, if I had mentioned the interim impact of those persuasive Democrats. Meanwhile, a non-partisan analyst in Washington, Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report, underscored their point in remarks on Thursday: "Did voters send a message? The answer is no."

My thinking has further evolved this week, not to the Democrats' benefit. The Democrats want to push a "culture of corruption" theme during their '06 bid to retake the House, and certainly Duke Cunningham, the now-jailed Republican congressman who represented California-50, is Exhibit A. But there is also growing evidence that the corruption theme is hardly a clear winner for the Democrats -- because they apparently have knaves in their ranks, as well.

Case in point, West Virginia Congressman Alan Mollohan. Here's a mere sampling of his suspected sleaze: Using the special-interest loopholes known as "earmarks," he parlayed his stint on the House Appropriations Committee to steer $250 million to five nonprofits that he played a role in establishing. The groups in turn paid big salaries to various associates and ex-employes. He has also worked some suspiciously lucrative real estate deals with one of those ex-aides (who runs one of the nonprofits), and then initially failed to pay real estate taxes.

And this guy is the top Democrat on the House Ethics Committee.

Today, the Washington Post editorialized that Mollohan should quit the committee until he is fully scrutinized. My point is that Mollohan is lucrative fodder for the Republicans, who can now demonstrate that they hardly have a monopoly on the "culture of corruption." Yes, it's true that the Republicans run everything on Capitol Hill, thus they are arguably more culpable - but the GOP now has ammo that can allow them to play to those many voters who simply say, "Both sides do it, they're all a bunch of crook."

And remember, in June Duke Cunningham won't be on the California-50 ballot.

2. Now, on the other matter: The revolt against Rummy by high-ranking retired military officers. I believe the latest number is seven.

This week I received some emails from thoughtful people who are troubled by the notion that military leaders are now so willing to speak out publicly against their civilian superiors. These emailers have no love for Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush. They just worry that a bad precedent is being established which -- down the road, and in other circumstances -- could imperil the important constitutional tradition of civilian control.

It's an interesting point, and it demonstrates why the anti-Rummy revolt may well become (as we say in the news business) a story with legs. And, sure enough, today I ran across a guest column that makes the same point. Authored by former military officer Andrew Bacevich, who's now a Boston University international relations professor (and an occasional source of mine), it posits the argument this way:

"...But in their eagerness to settle scores, Rumsfeld's pursuers are flirting with ideas that can only be regarded as subversive. (One military critic) has resurrected the notion that a senior officer's primary obligation lies not to those atop the chain of command but to the Constitution....To grant even the most narrowly drawn exceptions to the principle of civilian control is to open up a Pandora's box of complications.
In the short term, instigating Rumsfeld's ouster might secure him top billing in the list of bunglers who screwed up the Iraq war. In the long term, it would only exacerbate the underlying problem. Unless and until we can restore some semblance of civilian-military effectiveness, defective policies will be the norm rather than the exception. This — not the sins of Donald Rumsfeld — is the nub of the matter."

Bacevich, at least, is offering a high-road rebuttal to those dissenting military guys. By contrast, however, Rumsfeld's defenders seem to be trafficking the lower roads. The other day I cited an attack on the dissenters for being self-promoters in time of war. But now I find a new one; the same attack is here as well. And the gist is:
It's Bill Clinton's fault.
Or, in one attacker's words, "these generals appear to be mostly from the Clinton era."

No further comment is necessary.

Those failed Democratic courtiers

Due to the holidays, and the urgent need to write a weekend newspaper column (about John McCain) on an early deadline, I'll keep my blog observations brief today. I'll return tomorrow with lots to say from the Saturday mailbag. Anyway:

Joe Klein, the Time magazine columnist, has an interesting piece this week about the strong - and perhaps burdensome - influence of big-shot consultants inside the Democratic party. His basic argument, which he will apparently address as well in a forthcoming book, is that these Beltway strategists deserve considerable blame for the failures of Al Gore and John Kerry during the last two presidential elections.

Klein writes that these consultants "have become specialists in caution," captives of their focus groups, and that they drained whatever spontaneity Gore and Kerry might have otherwise displayed on the stump. (I have heard that Bob Shrum, a top consultant to both men, is disputing some of the details in Klein's account, but let us not give his complaints too much weight. Bob Shrum retired from politics last year with a record of 0-8 in presidential races.)

It's fair to say that Gore and Kerry share some of the blame as well; perhaps, if they had been more instinctive candidates, they would not have elevated the consultants to guru status. Gore and Kerry ended up paying big bucks for bad advice - notably, the traditional (and wrongheaded) Democratic argument that voters are looking at issues, rather than character.

Klein's key passage:
"'We're going to meet the voters where they are,' Shrum had told me early in the Kerry campaign, which sounded innocent enough—but what he really meant was, We're going to follow our polling numbers and focus groups. We're going to emphasize the things that voters think are important. In fact, Shrum had it completely wrong. Presidential campaigns are not about 'meeting the voters where they are.' They are about leadership and character. Mark Mellman, Kerry's lead pollster, figured that out too late. 'If you asked people what they were most interested in, they would say jobs, education and health care,' he later said. 'But they thought the President should be interested in national security'."

I concur with Klein.
I can't recount the number of meals I have shared with Democratic consultants who have told me, "We're right on the issues, the voters are exactly where we are on the issues." I would inevitably counter with, "Yeah, but you guys were saying that all through the '80s, when the voters were always with the Democrats on the issues - but Ronald Reagan got elected twice anyway." Their answer would be, "Yeah, but Reagan was Reagan, that was different."

They never learn. In 2004, most voters sided with the Democrats on federal spending for social programs, the environment, Social Security, on down the line. Yet they chose to re-elect Bush, because the Republicans had framed the campaign on character, and on their terms (Bush said at his convention that you'd always know where he stood, even if you disagreed; Kerry was painted as the flip-flopper).

And, to underscore what Klein writes, I have dredged up my notes from Sept. 2, 2004. That was the day when I knew Kerry would lose.

The scene was a New York City conference room, during the waning hours of the Republican national convention. The Kerry campaign had decided to fly all their top consultants into town, to reassure the national press that everything was going great for them. (If things had really been going great, they wouldn't have bothered to fly in.)

So we met at a breakfast, sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. The talk quickly turned to the anti-Kerry ads, sponsored by those famed Swift Boat veterans. As the Swift Boat attacks mounted during August, the Kerry people had said nothing. Days and even weeks had passed, with little or no response. We asked the consultants, why didn't you hit back right away?

Mary Beth Cahill, the campaign manager, replied that the Swift Boat attacks were "beside the point, in terms of what most voters want to hear."

And what was that?

Tad Devine said that voters wanted to hear about economic issues, not "an exchange of insults."

But why couldn't you do both?

Devine: "We could see that (the Swift Boat attack) was resonating immediately. But we (decided) to engage it in the serious media when the time was right...to engage it on our timetable, not theirs."

To me, that was the key remark. By "serious media," what he also called "the credible media," Devine was specifically referring to The New York Times. The Swift Boat attacks had circulated for many days, coursing through the conservative/cable/online media, before The Times finally took notice. Yet it was a testament to the elitism of the Democratic consultants that the story didn't count until it landed in the Times. It was the old way of thinking, baldly revealed.

So the question is, will the next Democratic candidate be weighed down by the consultant class? Or, at the very least, can the next round of consultants be as nimble as President Bush's tight-knit team?

A final question: Didn't I promise a brief posting? Sorry about that.

Those unethical self-promoting blatherers

Four days ago, I wrote this: "Three retired and highly decorated military leaders, including a three-star Marine Corps general yesterday, have publicly assailed the administration's handling of the Iraq war, and have publicly called for the removal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. I await the inevitable attacks on their motivations and characters."

Well, that didn't take long. The wait is over.

In the wake of the news today that a fourth military leader -- retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-05 -- has now gone public to assail the administration's war strategy and to demand Rumsfeld's ouster, a prominent conservative commentator has stepped forward to attack their motivations and characters.

Victor Davis Hanson argues today that nobody should listen to these "frenetic" guys, because they are "self-appointed ethicists" and "talking heads" who "blather" on television, and because they may be trying to "hype" a book.

The hype remark is a jab at retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who has authored a new book on Iraq (the other three are not book authors). Hanson basically argues that the act of authorship should be considered a character flaw -- and possibly unpatriotic as well.
In Hanson's words, there are "ethical questions involved in promoting a book or showcasing a media appearance during a time of war."

Unethical, unpatriotic, self-promoting...let's see... what else is wrong with these guys?
Oh, yes: They are "pensioned."

I was always under the impression that it's appropriate for retired officers to collect government pay after serving their country. I never realized that the word was a pejorative, or that it was meant to suggest that such officers should keep their mouths shut in exchange for their stipends.

Assailing the officer corps might not be the greatest strategy, if only because, as this article reports, the ranks of the dissenters may well continue to swell:

"(W)e are witnessing the rumblings of an officers' revolt, and things could get ugly if it were to take hold and roar....It is startling to hear, in private conversations, how widely and deeply the U.S. officer corps despises this secretary of defense. The joke in some Pentagon circles is that if Rumsfeld were meeting with the service chiefs and commanders and a group of terrorists barged into the room and kidnapped him, not a single general would lift a finger to help him."

There is one conservative voice, George Conway, who is sticking up today for those four officers, here. But Hanson's putdown prompts me to wonder:

Since even military guys are apparently grist for attack, is it possible for any American to ask hard questions about this war and this administration without having one's character impugned?

Here we go again

It's another day of damage control for the Bush administration, as it seeks yet again to shore up its shaky credibility. And the issue, as usual, is Iraq.
Let's start with something the president said back on May 29, 2003: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." He made this statement two months into the war, when skeptical Americans were already asking questions about those elusive WMDs. On this particular day, Bush was discussing the discovery of some suspicious mobile trailers.
We've known ever since that Bush's claim didn't pan out. But, in the wake of a new report today, we have now learned something new: That on the day when Bush made his WMD claim, the administration already had strong reason to believe that such a claim was factually incorrect.
I'll let the Post story speak for itself: "A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded (at the time Bush spoke) that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement. The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped 'secret' and shelved."
So while the fact-finders, dispatched to Iraq by the Defense Intelligence Agency, were privately referring to those trailers as "the biggest sand toilets in the world," a parade of administration officials, led by Bush, continued to describe those trailers in dire terms. I found a few such statements. A sampling:
Secretary of State Colin Powell, on June 2, 2003, said, "We have already discovered mobile biological factories of the kind that I described to the Security Council on the 5th of February. We have now found them. There is no question in our mind that that’s what their purpose was."
National security advisor Condolleezza Rice, a day later, said, "This is a weapons laboratory trailer capable of making a lot of...dry agent, dry biological agent, that can kill a lot of people."
Bush again, on June 5: "We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents."
Vice President Cheney, on Sept. 14: "They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack."
Questions abound, as usual:
Did nobody in power read that field report? Or did they read it and opt to ignore it, because (as the Post also reported) there were other field teams that suspected that those trailers might have been nefarious? If the latter is the case, however, why did the administration pretend in public that the WMD finding was beyond dispute (Powell: "There's no question in our mind") ?
And none of those administration officials offered to subsequently retract the WMD claim, even though weapons inspector David Kay told Congress, in the autumn of 2003, that he had found nothing that tied those trailers to WMDs.
Which brings us to White House press secretary Scott McClellan. His defense today was to take the offensive.
In a press briefing, he said that the media should apologize for reporting the trailer story: "You know, I saw some reporting talking about how this latest revelation — which is not something that is new; this is all old information that’s being rehashed — was an embarrassment for the White House. No, it’s an embarrassment for the media that is out there reporting this...I hope they will go and publicly apologize..."
What's most interesting here is not the demand for an apology (that's just a predictable attempt to blame the messenger), but, rather, his contention that the trailer story is old news, "old information that's being rehashed."
Word for word, that's exactly what Bill Clinton's spin doctors used to say whenever he was hit with scandal allegations. Republicans used to laugh when the Clinton flaks tried that dodge.
And that behavior was one reason why Bush ran for president on a pledge to "restore honor and integrity to the White House."

Swing and a miss

The Democrats are beginning to resemble the Philadelphia Phillies. They're always retooling, always in search of a winning formula, and when they finally take the field, they always seem to wind up a tad short on the scoreboard.
It happened again last night, in an affluent congressional district on the north side of San Diego.
All the elements of a stunning victory seemed to be in place: A special election was being conducted, to fill the seat vacated by a Republican congressman, Duke Cunningham, who had just been hauled to the slammer for taking $2 million in bribes. Cunningham seemed like the ideal poster child for the Democrats' national "culture of corruption" message - the argument that the ruling Republicans on Capitol Hill deserve to be ousted from power because they have been egregiously abusing it.
The Democrats seemed primed to exploit Republican voter disenchantment, not just toward Cunningham, but toward the Bush administration and the GOP Congress in general (for the missteps in Iraq, and the failure to hold the line on federal spending). Moreover, in this special election, the Democrats were unifying around one well-financed candidate, Francine Busby - while the Republicans were fielding 14 candidates, most of whom were busy beating each other up.
In short, Busby seemed poised to win more than 50 percent of the vote - in a heavily Republican district, no less - and thereby send a national message that the GOP was indeed facing big trouble in the November elections.
It didn't happen. And until the Democrats actually win something big some place, their promises of a big Democratic year amounts to nothing but hype.
Busby got 44 percent of the vote. She finished first, but, under California rules, she now has to face the number-two finisher, former Republican congressman Brian Bilbray, in a June runoff. When that happens, Bilbray won't have to share the Republican voters with the 13 GOP rivals who crowded the special election "open" ballot.
Clearly, the Democrats best shot at swiping a Republican seat was last night. So what went wrong for the Democrats, this time?
Above all, they needed a big turnout in that district from their own voters, and they didn't get it. The Democrats can't claim that 2006 will be a "change election" until it can demonstrate that angry voters are rising up in large numbers to demand change.
Supposedly, grassroots Democrats are outraged at Bush, and anxious to send a message by punishing his party. Yet they didn't show up en masse in the 50th congressional district. Granted, it's springtime in southern California, a place where voting takes a back seat to surfing, and this week is spring break for many California families, but wasn't this election billed as a big chance to bloody the Republicans, right after the district's congressman was sent to jail?
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is in despair today. The proprietor of Daily Kos, the popular liberal website, assails the party leadership for failing to whip up those supposedly outraged voters. The party's leaders, he complains, "do nothing to motivate the Democratic base to turn out and vote. My sense of pessimism for November's elections only gets deeper the more elections show lower and lower turnout. Our supporters have stopped giving a (darn)."
Here's one way to measure the underwhelming result: In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore won 43 percent of the district's voters. In 2004, John Kerry won 44 percent of the district's voters. Last night, Busby hit the same ceiling - and this is with 14 Republicans divvying up the GOP vote on the open ballot.
A sunnier interpretation for Democrats can be found here, but even the author, grassroots Democratic activist Chris Bowers, adds this proviso:
"We still haven't put together the pieces for a landslide election in the House....Our basic problem seems to be that turnout is low....It is entirely possible that running on Republican corruption could be a double-edged sword that depresses Republican turnout, but also depresses all turnout, as people grow disgusted with politicians in general. There probably needs to be more work from good field people to really determine if we are facing a turnout problem, but there also needs to be more work done to motivate Democratic voters."
The official Democratic line, naturally, is that everything is great. Consider this statement today from Democratic congressman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who heads the '06 effort to retake the House: "In a Republican district, Busby showed that Democratic candidates for change can and will make status quo, politics-as-usual Republicans fight for their political lives in every corner of this country.”
But until the Democrats actually win something, words are mere bluster.

The GOP's immigration inertia

It's no surprise that the Republican Senate failed last week to figure out a way to deal with illegal immigrants. The whole issue is a political nightmare for the governing party.
If the Republicans had cracked down too much on the illegals - as suggested by the House GOP - then they would have risked alienating the fastest-growing electorate in American politics, one that Karl Rove has been coveting for years. Illegals can't vote, of course, but legal Hispanic voters have already demonstrated, most notably in California, that they view GOP attacks on illegals as a blanket insult on their ethnicity.
Yet if the Senate Republicans had managed to pass a program that would've paved a road to citizenship, they would have risked infuriating their core conservative followers - who have been agitating for the GOP to show some guts on border enforcement. In terms of short-term politics, it's probably just as well that the Senate's compromise bill collapsed last Friday, because any plan that looks remotely like "amnesty" would be an invitation for the GOP conservative base to boycott the 2006 congressional elections.
In other words, Republicans risked alienating either the voters they want to have in the future, or the voters they have right now. Hence their paralysis.
But the problem now is that, by doing nothing, they risk alienating both groups. This is why Matt Lewis, a grassroots Republican strategist, wrote yesterday: "There is no doubt (that immigration) is a wedge issue that puts Republicans in a very unfavorable position." And political analyst John McIntyre, co-founder of realclearpolitics.com, warns that Republicans face "a growing disaster" on this issue.
McIntyre, who is often tough on Democrats, is blunt about the pending House GOP bill (which would essentially reclassify illegals as criminals). McIntyre says this bill "is killing Republicans in the Hispanic community." Yet he says that an illegal-friendly law is also perilous:
"For a conservative base already demoralized by a Republican-led Congress incapable of cutting spending and frustrated by a war that is either portrayed as floundering (or actually is floundering), abdication of responsibility on the illegal immigration mess may be the last straw that compels many conservatives to sit on their hands this November."
By the way, the congressional Democrats aren't totally unified on the issue. Most favor some kind of path to citizenship, which puts them in bed with the big business interests that want labor at the lowest possible wages. That doesn't necessarily sit well with working-class Democrats who worry about wage depression - or with the party's African-Americans, many of whom are low-skill workers.
But the Democratic schisms aren't nearly as wide, and, more importantly, they're not running Washington. They don't have majority at stake. And nd, unlike the GOP, they don't have a president who seems "rudderless" (in McIntyre's word) on this issue.
Bush has long prided himself as a leader on immigration, somebody who wanted to ease the way for illegals to become "guest workers." Now he's rather see the lawmakers take the lead and take the hits. His current laxity is a testament to his waning political capital.

A California earthquake?

Amid all the press speculation about whether the Republicans are really in danger of losing control of Congress this fall, it is a wondrous thing that, on occasion, there is an actual election which can help us gauge that danger with hard numbers.
Such an election will be held today, in the swanky congressional district that encompasses northern San Diego and La Jolla.
I wish I could be there today, if only for the weather and the fish restaurants that are perched on cliffs high above the ocean. But there is still plenty of chew over, from a distance. This is the district, California-50, that was represented by Republican Duke Cunningham until he was recently forced to exchange his congressman's threads for prison garb. Now it's up for grabs, and a special election today might produce his successor.
Here's the important part: This is a solid Republican district (44 percent GOP registration, 30 percent Democratic) -- yet the frontrunner for the seat, according to all polls, is the Democratic candidate, Francine Busby.
That can probably be attributed to Cunningham's downfall -- he took $2 million in bribes - and the fact that Democrats seem energized by their argument that the GOP majority has engaged in a "culture of corruption."
If Busby was to win this seat tonight - she'd need 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff with the number two finisher - or if Busby simply finishes with the biggest vote share, this news would be rightly interpreted as a serious predictor of GOP trauma in November. Republican pollsters are saying this already; Bill McInturff told the Wall Street Journal's John Fund yesterday that a Busby win "would set off political shock waves."
It's not helping the GOP that it's running multiple candidates (who could then divide the Republican vote) -- and that most of them are avoiding all mention of President Bush, who is now posting a 32 percent approval rating in the Golden State.
The Republicans do have the raw numbers to keep that Republican seat, however. It's just a question of whether they are motivated to show up to vote at a time when many seem disillusioned. In any case, easterners like me won't know what happens until tomorrow.

The ongoing legal proceeding

I've written a lot in recent days (here, here and here) about Scooter Libby's sworn testimony, which fingers President Bush as leaker-in-chief. And I'd love to give it a rest.
But yesterday, we finally heard from the president himself, when a Johns Hopkins University student asked him whether it was true - as alleged by Libby's prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald - that the White House had been leaking in order to discredit ex-ambassador and war critic Joseph Wilson. (Republican appointee Fitzgerald put it this way last week, in court filings: "It is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish Wilson.'")
Here's how Bush began his answer: "Yes, no, I, this is, there's an ongoing legal proceeding..."
Translation: I'm in trouble on this one.
Taking refuge behind an "ongoing legal proceeding" is a time-honored Washington stonewalling tactic. And Bush is using it selectively anyway, because the White House didn't hesitate to declare that Tom DeLay was innocent even after he had been indicted in an ongoing legal proceeding.
But, all that aside, Bush did ultimately respond to the student's question. Sort of.
He said that he had declassified a prewar intelligence document in July of 2003 because "it was important for people to get a sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches." (He had given speeches contending that Saddam Hussein was gathering the materials for nuclear weapons. Wilson, on July 6, 2003, said publicy that Hussein was not doing that.)
But more important, yesterday, was what Bush did not say.
He didn't mention the revelation, in the Fitzgerald court filings, that he had authorized Libby to undercut Wilson by selectively leaking to the press only those portions of the intelligence document that supported the notion that Hussein was going nuclear - and that this action was taken several weeks before the entire document was declassified.
As I noted the other day, the material that Libby shared with the press conveniently omitted any reference to the intelligence skeptics (at the State and Energy departments) who essentially agreed with Wilson.
Bush didn't volunteer any of that, even though he said yesterday that "I wanted people to see the truth."
This whole saga won't be going away any time soon. Not with Fitzgerald dropping new court filings along the way. Not with the Libby trial slated to begin this winter (after the midterm election). These developments might do further damage to the president's 60 percent disapproval rating.

A breath of fresh air -- or the kiss of death?

The nascent presidential candidacy of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has gotten a lot more interesting in recent days. Here's a Republican governor, working with an overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature, who just cleared passage for a law that will require statewide universal health care.
Imagine the political possibilities of that.
Candidate Romney will be able to tout himself as a pragmatic problem-solver who can work with the opposition - a potential character asset, at least with those independent swing voters who are generally fed up with the politicians in both parties who are dividers rather than uniters. Voters are fond of electing governors (four of our last five presidents had been governors), because executives often have to make pragmatic decisions for the greater good.
But the potential downside is with the conservative voters who matter greatly during the Republican primaries. They might view Romney's universal health care plan as a big-government boondoggle that could end up raising taxes. They may not like the fact that Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are already praising the plan (actually, conservative dismay is being heard already).
In truth, the Romney health plan, which he is expected to sign into law this week, does contain some conservative features. Take, for example, the credo of personal responsibility: Romney will require that everyone in Massachusetts, except the most impoverished citizens, put some of their own money into the coverage. And the coverage will come from the private sector, not a government program.
Whether these details can survive in a bruising primary season is another matter. Romney's conservative rivals migth reduce his plan to "big government" shorthand.
The biggest potential conservative concern, however, is that Romney's endorsement of universal health care might make the whole concept (which they assailed during the Clinton years) seem more appealing to a broader segment of the electorate. And that might benefit the Democrats most of all, since they have pushing the concept for years.
Would GOP primary voters forgive him for that? Even if he tries to make it up to them by touting his opposition to gay family adoptions?

A new enemy of the state

I've been waiting since last autumn for this to happen, and now the moment has arrived:
The inevitable attack on special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
Now even this Republican appointee, who was named to his sleuth job by the Bush Justice Department, has been denounced as an enemy of the state.
The denouncers left him alone while he investigated whether the Bush administration was responsible for outing a CIA employe who was married to Joseph Wilson, a critic of the war in Iraq. The denouncers left him alone even after he indicted vice-presidential aide Scooter Libby.
But they can't leave him alone now, because he is striking too close to the seat of power.
In court papers last week, Fitzgerald depicted a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" to use classified information in an effort to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" Wilson.
Right on cue, here's conservative analyst William Kristol, on Fox News yesterday:
"I now think the whole prosecution (of Libby) is absurd. And I have hesitated to say this, because I have friends who respect Fitzgerald, but I now think it’s a politically motivated attempt to wound the Bush administration...He is now out to discredit the Bush administration. He has bought the argument that there is something improper about the Bush administration responding to Joe Wilson’s charges, and that’s the real meaning of what’s happened these last few days, which is very dangerous for the Bush administration. They now have a special prosecutor out not to convict Scooter Libby, but out to discredit the administration."
Meanwhile, three retired and highly decorated military leaders, including a three-star Marine Corps general yesterday, have publicly assailed the administration's handling of the Iraq war, and have publicly called for the removal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. I await the inevitable attacks on their motivations and characters.

Still looking for Mr. Goodnews

The key quote, in my newspaper piece today about media coverage of the Iraq war, was supplied by national security expert Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon intelligence aide who later worked for John McCain at the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Cordesman said the negative tenor of the coverage is an accurate reflection of conditions on the ground; more importantly, the latest assessments of those conditions by U.S. officials are equally grim. He said: "Their reports track very closely with the daily news reporting. In general, they're more negative than the media."
I wrote my piece on Friday. During the past 48 hours, Cordesman's argument has been confirmed two more times.
First came news on Saturday that the State Department has drafted a new planning document which is designed to salvage the U.S. reconstruction mess in Iraq. The draft plan states that much of the reconstruction effort (the "good news" that the media has purportedly ignored in Iraq) has been wasted, because, as one U.S. official said, "Doing massive reconstruction in the midst of an insurgency drives up costs and diverts funds."

By the way, why were the reconstruction people working "in the midst" of an insurgency in the first place? Because, according to retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who served as the Pentagon's chief operations officer in the runup to the war, the war planners suffered a competence breakdown. He's writing today in the new issue of Time magazine:
"What we are living with now is the consequences of successive policy failures...(such as)micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq...My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions—or bury the results."

Anyway, back to Cordesman's point. The second new piece of evidence appeared today, in the form of a report co-written by the U.S. embassy in Iraq and the U.S. military command. It basically concluded - back in January, before the Shiite shrine bombing in Samarra, which tipped Iraq closer to open civil war - that one-third of Iraq's provinces are seriously unstable. And that figure is worse than it sounds, because the Baghdad region, which is pivotal to the entire country's stability, is included on that list.
Baghdad, as well as the oil-rich Basra province, are rated as "serious" problems. According to the report, "serious" is defined as having "a government that is not fully formed or cannot serve the needs of its residents; economic development that is stagnant with high unemployment, and a security situation marked by routine violence, assassinations and extremism."
Well, maybe the "good news" that the media is supposedly missing can be found in the nine southern provinces, which have been generally touted as peaceful by Bush administration officials. Nope. In the embassy/military report, none of those nine provinces are rated as stable.

By now you might be wondering what the Bush administration, which is so often upbeat about Iraq, is saying about this downbeat report by its own people. Can it possibly explain away a report that rates five provinces as "serious" and a sixth (Anbar province) as "critical?"
The explanation came this morning, from Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. He told Fox News: "I wouldn't worry about the question of terminology. I wouldn't focus on it."

In other words: Pay no attention to the bad news that we ourselves have documented.

Fresh misadventures in flackery

Is there possibly a more thankless job in public life than the one currently occupied by Scott McClellan?
Imagine having to stand in front of the White House press corps and defend President Bush right after the boss has been exposed in sworn testimony as a leaker of classified national security information. Imagine trying to square Bush's actions with all of Bush's previous condemnations of leakers as contemptable creatures that deserve to be fired.
It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. So McClellan gave quite a performance yesterday, one that conjured memories (at least for yours truly) of Ron Zeigler spinning the Watergate scandal for his '70s boss, Richard Nixon.
Just three quick highlights:

1. McClellan was asked to square Bush's aforementioned actions with his earlier statements. McClellan then replied: "There's a distinction between declassifying information that is in the public interest and the unauthorized disclosure of classified information that could compromise our nation's security."
Translation: If Bush leaks, it's OK. If anyone else leaks, it's not OK. If Bush leaks, it's in the "public interest." If anyone else leaks, it's a threat to the nation's security.
Never mind the fact that what he leaked in the "public interest" was apparently self-serving material that was factually misleading (see my Thursday post). The larger question that comes to mind is this: If Bush can leak whatever he wants by deeming his actions to be in the "public interest," are there any checks and balances at all on his power to withhold, release, and control information?

2. The White House can't get its story straight. In the wake of Scooter Libby's sworn testimony that Bush authorized him to leak material from the National Intelligence Estimate - this was some time prior to July 8, 2003 - the White House now says that it wasn't really a leak at all, because the released NIE material had already been declassified at that point.
But here's the problem with that claim: McClellan held a press conference on July 18, 2003. The NIE came up for discussion that day - whereupon McClellan declared, "It was officially declassified today."
So...doesn't that mean Bush had authorized a leak of material that was still classified prior to July 18?
Here's where McClellan began to spin like a top. At times he tried to plead ignorance, saying that he couldn't recall what he had said on July 18, 2003: "I have not looked back at exactly what was said at that time."
But even though he says he hasn't looked back, he is nevertheless convinced that there would be no need to acknowledge any errors or inconsistencies: "I’d have to go back and look at the specific comments, but I’m not changing anything that was said previously. So let me make that clear."

3. Which brings us to the last highlight. At times he simply took refuge in the fact that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's case against Libby is now being fought out in the court filings. McClellan said: "There is no way for me to...talk about this issue without discussing an ongoing legal proceeding. And I can’t do that. We have a policy that’s been established. And I’ve obligated to adhere to that policy."
Within 10 minutes of saying that, he tried to refute a reporter by citing something that Fitzgerald had filed in court -- as part of the same "ongoing legal proceeding" that McClellan had just said he could not comment about.

It's hard to imagine that McClellan can survive much longer; this new Vanity Fair article probably won't help him much. But the real question is whether any replacement can do any better - given the administration track record that a new person would have to work with.

Libby and Rummy and Condi, oh my

The revelation yesterday that President Bush is apparently the leaker-in-chief is fascinating for many reasons.
There's the complicated legal question of whether a president can summarily declassify secret intelligence on a whim, without needing to at least go through some procedural channels. Indeed, legal experts, quoted here, contend that Bush at the very least should have honored his "professional obligation" by consulting with intelligence officials before leaking.
But, leaving that issue aside, what's truly noteworthy about this specific case - Bush authorizing Scooter Libby to leak classified material to a reporter during the summer of 2003, in order to retroactively defend the March launching of war in Iraq - is the fact his selectively leaked material was apparently false...and that the administration had good reason to believe, long in advance, that this material was false.
According to the federal court filings by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby has told a grand jury that he leaked to a reporter an intelligence report which contended that Saddam Hussein had been trying to obtain fuel for nuclear weapons. This leak was intended to refute the findings of ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had publicly concluded that Hussein had been doing no such thing.
But here's the mirthless punch line: The leak authorized by Bush apparently omitted the fact that, back in October 2002, Bush had received a classified "President's Summary," which informed him that the nuclear-fuel allegation was highly questionable, that experts from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Department of Energy's intelligence branch simply didn't believe it. (For more, read this March 30 piece by Murray Waas, of the nonpartisan National Journal; he's the best investigative reporter tracking this subplot.)
So let us review. Bush says repeatedly in 2003 that he doesn't like leakers. Now there are court papers, with testimony under oath that he himself leaked - and that the material he selectively leaked was not even necessarily true.
What is the White House saying about all this? Very little, at least for attribution. But, as this Washington Post report today makes clear, Bush's anonymous allies are working on a defense. Remember back in 1998 when Bill Clinton was parsing the word "is"? It's much the same thing today, except this time it's about what the meaning of the word "leak" is.
The anonymous defenders essentially told the Post that if Bush had leaked the classified identity of Joseph Wilson's CIA-employed wife (which he didn't), that would have been a bad leak. But since Bush authorized a leak to assure the public of his rationale for war, that was a good leak. As the source put it: "There is a clear difference between the two."
That is very enlightening. Because I was not aware, from previous Bush statements, that there was any distinction to be drawn between good leaks and bad. Bush certainly didn't seem to think so. He has launched criminal investigations to track down leakers. He said in September 2003 that if he learned who a leaker in his employ was, "the person will be taken care of."
But here's my favorite, from December 2001: "Somebody in our government wanted to show off to his family or her family in between Christmas and New Year's by leaking information in the press … I don't know why people do that. I guess either to make you [the press] feel good and/or to make themselves feel good."

Meanwhile, you know that the war isn't going well when two of its leader/defenders within the Bush inner circle are sniping publicly at each other. It all started a week ago when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in Great Britain that the U.S. effort in Iraq was less than perfect: "I know we've made tactical errors, thousand of them I'm sure."
Enter Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He is probably accustomed to hearing such critiques of his performance from people who he presumably dismisses as defeatists and hate-America types. But Rice? Bush's exercise partner? Isn't she on the team?
So he fired back in a radio interview on Tuesday, with the tone of a guy who didn't think that girls belonged on the playing field: "I don't know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest...(C)alling changes in military tactics during the war 'errors' reflects a lack of understanding of warfare."
It's a bad-vibe situation right now. Perhaps someone can leak something new, to make them all feel good.

By the way, the conservative push-back on the Bush leak revelation has begun.
The gist of the Bush defense was articulated today by Cliff May, an ex-GOP spokesman who has helped direct a neoconservative think tank, Project for a New American Century. Today he wrote, on the National Review website, that "there is no hint of a scandal here. There is not even any news here..." Essentially, he argues, "it’s in the job description of the President to decide what will remain classified (secret) and what will be de-classified and released to the press and public."
But here's the real test for May and his colleagues: Suppose Bill Clinton had been waging an unpopular war, and had decided to selectively leak classified material, which in itself was specious, to reporters in an effort to defend his war. Would conservatives be saying that Clinton was merely fulfilling his "job description"?