Not even Fox can skew the mood

It must be frustrating these days to work for the Bush administration TV network – known officially as Fox News – given the president’s lame-duck status and the grim prospects for a Republican victory in 2008. Even the pollster at Fox News seems incapable of divining a silver lining for the beleaguered GOP. The latest survey, released yesterday, reports that only 31 percent of Americans praise Bush’s job performance (the lowest ever recorded by Fox News); reports that only 46 percent of self-identified conservatives praise his performance (another Fox News nadir); and reports that only 42 percent of “born-again Christians” praise his performance (another Fox News nadir).

This time, not even Fox News' loaded questions provided any sustenance. We'll get to that in a moment. But first, some back story:

In the past, the Fox pollster has occasionally managed to word the inquiries in a way that produced the desired responses, thereby providing some aid and comfort to their favored political party, and making it appear that Bush’s prospects weren’t as dire as commonly perceived.

Back in April, for example, Fox worded a question this way: “Do you think that a congressional investigation into the dismissal of the eight federal prosecutors is a good use of taxpayer money?” And, naturally, since the issue was being framed as merely a pocketbook issue for tax-averse Americans, 51 percent said no, the probe was not a good use of their money. (If that’s the only yardstick for public policy, it would have been fascinating to find out what Fox would have discovered if its pollster had also asked, “Do you think that a congressional investigation of the administration’s conduct of the Iraq war is a good use of taxpayer money?” But that question wasn't asked.)

Another April question was little more than a veiled GOP talking point: “After the 2004 presidential election, the president of the left-wing Moveon.org political action committee made the following comment about the Democratic party, ‘In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it’s our party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.’ Do you think the Democratic party should allow a grassroots organization like Moveon.org to take it over, or should it resist this type of takeover?” And, with the inquiry framed that way, naturally 61 percent of Americans said the party should resist such a “takeover.” (The GOP would love to plant the erroneous perception that the congressional Democrats take their orders from Moveon.org. The Fox News pollster was happy to lend a hand.)

But lately, some loaded questions have also backfired. Two months ago, Fox asked Americans, “Is it accurate to compare withdrawal from Iraq to surrender?” The introduction of the visceral S-word - much favored by the war's supporters - failed to skew the response. Sixty-one percent of Americans said no, it was not accurate to compare withdrawal to surrender.

So, in the survey released yesterday, the Fox pollster tried again, by radically upping the ante: “If there is an all-out war between the United States and various radical Muslim groups worldwide, who would you rather have in charge – Democrats or Republicans?”

Whoa, an all-out war worldwide…America under siege from an Islamo-fascist conspiracy…a veritable Armageddon that’s too much for even Jack Bauer to handle. Surely only the GOP can save the day, right? The same party that has traditionally trumped the Democrats on national security issues by 25 or 30 points, right?

Wrong. Even with Fox’s Def Con Five framing, 41 percent of Americans said they’d prefer to have the Democrats in charge. Only 38 percent picked the Republicans.

So what can the Fox pollster do next? Surely there must be a question that can produce the desired result. Maybe something like this:

If terrorists were to break into your suburban McMansion and blow up your high-definition TV during the fourth quarter of a cliffhanger Super Bowl, while Bill Clinton was off somewhere having extramarital relations, and Harry Reid was standing in your driveway laughing while Michael Dukakis drove a military tank over your rosebushes, would you deem it a good use of taxpayer money to allow moveon.org to dictate a Democrat surrender of your country?

Why John and Elizabeth zapped the pundette

It may be sheer happenstance, but over the past five days the John and Elizabeth Edwards tag team has been far more conspicuous than usual.

OK, forget the happenstance. These spouses know exactly what they’re doing, and why. They're running a campaign that needs a boost, especially on the financial side.

Elizabeth, wife of the number-three Democratic presidential candidate, made news on Sunday when she publicly declared in San Francisco that she – unlike her husband – has no problem with the concept of gay married people; “I don’t know why someone else’s marriage has anything to do with me. I’m completely comfortable with gay marriage.” A day later, John and Elizabeth trekked to NBC and sat on Jay Leno’s couch, where John defended his wife: “There’s this strange thing about Elizabeth – she actually says what she thinks. And whatever it is, is whatever it is.” (Maybe she just blurted out her stance on gay marriage in a moment of spontaneous candor; on the other hand, it conveniently signaled liberal gay donors that a gay marriage supporter had the candidate’s ear.)

Then, on Tuesday, Elizabeth decided to return the favor by defending her husband. Dialing into Chris Matthews’ show on MSNBC, she picked a fight with Ann Coulter, the poisonous pundette, who was on the set, decked out in her requisite cocktail-party finery. Elizabeth proceeded to scold Coulter (or tried to, anyway) for the latter’s track record of insults – calling John a “faggot,” for instance, and joking about the couple’s deceased teenage son.

So that was Tuesday. On Wednesday, John returned the favor, appearing on Chris Matthew’s show, and defending his wife for defending him: “I applaud Elizabeth. When people like Ann Coulter…engage in this kind of hate-mongering, you have to stand up to it.” He reiterated the point in a talk with ABC, saying that he was “very proud” of Elizabeth.

So that was Wednesday. Earlier today, Elizabeth resurfaced on NBC and defended her husband all over again, by condemning Coulter for her “name-calling about John…John’s political campaign has been based on real ideas and substance.” Also today, the Des Moines Register (the home newspaper Iowa caucus participants) ran a story about Elizabeth, who had chatted by phone with the paper on Wednesday; she told the reporter, “At some point, somebody has to stand up and say, ‘That’s enough’” – thereby hitting the same talking point that John had invoked on MSNBC Wednesday, when he had defended her for defending him.

I have no doubt that the Edwards spouses feel strongly about Coulter, a master publicist for the politics of insult. But, in a sense, they need her right now; politically, she serves two useful purposes. By assailing her as a dangerous enemy, the Edwards campaign can potentially raise a lot of money from incensed liberal voters – and what better time to contribute than right now, with the ’07 second-quarter fundraising deadline just two days away, and with all reports indicating that Edwards will raise a pittance, at least when compared to the expected hauls for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? (Politically speaking, their targeting of Coulter is roughly akin to the GOP fundraising practice of scaring its base with dark invocations of Ted Kennedy, Michael Moore, or the Clintons.)

Indeed, by staying in the news cycle for days on end with their Coulter condemnations, the Edwards tag team has managed to shift public attention away from the two Democratic frontrunners as the second-quarter money clock winds down. The hope, apparently, is that this publicity blitz can enable the Edwards campaign to at least narrow that fundraising gap. And the campaign sees no downside in keeping Elizabeth front and center; she is a crossover figure who attracts liberals and feminists (in part because she’s an independent-minded career attorney), as well as traditional women who like the fact that she talks freely about her health and personal tragedies.

Timing is everything in politics, and Elizabeth appeared to be playing innocent this morning when she was asked on NBC whether it was sheer happenstance that her targeting of Coulter had occurred at such a crucial moment in the fundraising calendar. She replied, “I had no idea when she was going to…get back on the air again…It just happened to be at the end of the quarter.” She omitted the fact that, after Coulter called her husband a “faggot” last winter, the Edwards camp posted the slur in a video that helped raise $300,000 – all of which just happened to be timed for the end of the first fundraising quarter.

John Edwards was less coy about the whole Coulter deal. When Matthews asked him late yesterday whether it was right to both “attack her and exploit her, he basically replied, Heck, yeah: “If we ask Americans…to join us in standing up and being strong, there’s nothing wrong with that…We are raising money. I don’t know the numbers. I hope they go up.”

And by talking so much about how he and Elizabeth are determined to fight back against the “hate-mongers,” he was also trying to remind liberal donors and primary voters that the Clintons aren’t the only pugilistic marriage partners in the Democratic race. It’s unclear, however, whether he can ultimately convince those voters that the Edwards tag team is Bill and Hillary without the baggage. The odds remain strong that, by next February, John and Elizabeth will be lauding each other in defeat…while Ann Coulter, forever impervious to assault, is tossing her tresses.

A bellwether Republican defects on Iraq

The Bush administration has lost Dick Lugar, and that’s akin to a seismic crack appearing in the wall of a dam.

Given the extent of the debacle in Iraq, and the impending ’08 election calendar, it was probably inevitable that a respected Republican senator with strong foreign policy credentials would publicly renounce the Bush war strategy and thus provide political cover for timorous GOP colleagues who have long yearned to do the same. All year long the White House has tried to forestall such an event, by perpetually pleading for more patience, but the clock ran out on Monday night.

Dick Lugar – the senior senator from red-state Indiana, a Bush loyalist on every key Iraq vote dating back to 2002, winner of landslides in all his Senate elections (especially in 2006, when he didn’t even draw a Democratic opponent), a long-acknowledged dean of the GOP foreign policy establishment, a former Foreign Relations Committee chairman, a guy who routinely draws near-zero ratings from liberal groups, a ’96 presidential candidate who warned about nuclear terrorism even though nobody listened – stood on the Senate floor and issued his declaration of independence from the Bush war team.

In short, he called for a reduction in U.S. troops. Others are bound to follow – GOP senator George Voinovich of Ohio joined Lugar in dissent yesterday, calling for "gradual military disengagement," and senator John Warner of Virginia said of Lugar, “I hail what he did” – in the clearest indication thus far that Republicans will refrain from joining hands with Bush and jumping off the cliff.

Apparently, there is an ebbing desire among Senate Republicans to buttress a president whose approval rating is now on the south side of 30 percent; as Warner reportedly said yesterday, “”you’ll be hearing a number of (Iraq) statements from other colleagues,” after the Fourth of July recess. They well recognize that Gen. David Petraeus is already trying to pre-spin his September report on the Surge by dampening any expectations of success; Lugar, by delivering his speech on Monday night, has signaled that the senators are not content to simply wait around until Petraeus shows up to plead for more patience.

If a Democrat had given the Lugar speech, Bush’s surrogates would have assailed the speaker as a defeatocrat who was obviously “rooting for failure.” But Lugar’s credentials have inoculated him from rhetorical attack; indeed, GOP senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama said yesterday that when Lugar speaks out on foreign policy, “everybody tends to listen.”

Some Lugar highlights: “In my judgment, the current surge strategy is not an effective means of protecting (America’s national security) interests. Its prospects for success are too dependent on the actions of others who do not share our agenda. It relies on military power to achieve goals that it cannot achieve. It distances allies that we will need for any regional diplomatic effort. Its failure, without a careful transition to a back-up policy would intensify our loss of credibility. It uses tremendous amounts of resources that cannot be employed in other ways to secure our objectives. And it lacks domestic support that is necessary to sustain a policy of this type.”

Therefore, he said, “our security interests call for a downsizing and re-deployment of U.S. military forces…I believe that we do have viable options that could strengthen our position in the Middle East, and reduce the prospect of terrorism, regional war, and other calamities. But seizing these opportunities will require the president to downsize the U.S. military’s role in Iraq and place much more emphasis on diplomatic and economic options.”

Perhaps most tellingly, in a message to his normally supine Republican colleagues, this erstwhile Bush loyalist said: “We don’t owe the president our unquestioning agreement.”

With elections looming, elected Republicans can’t afford to march to Bush’s tune anymore. The latest CNN-Opinion Research poll, released yesterday, reports that 38 percent of grassroots Republicans now oppose the war – and that 42 percent now support the withdrawal of at least some U.S. troops from Iraq. Given this growing level of disaffection even within the GOP base, many senators and congressmen seeking re-election in 2008 are therefore well advised to create some distance (at least rhetorically, if not on actual war votes) from the lame-duck war commander. And any Republican who represents a swing state or swing district is doubly advised, given the sentiment of independent voters. The CNN poll reports that 63 percent of all Americans now support partial or full withdrawal.

Lugar, in his speech, specifically addressed the domestic political climate, arguing that Bush’s war strategy has already damaged his party: “Many political observers contend that voter dissatisfaction in 2006 with Administration policies in Iraq was the major factor in producing new Democratic Party majorities in both Houses of Congress.” He was clearly implying that further horrors await the GOP unless Bush changes course with all deliberate speed: “The president and his team must come to grips with the shortened political timeline in this country for military operations in Iraq. Some will argue that political timelines should always be subordinated to military necessity, but that is unrealistic in a democracy.”

If a Republican with tough ‘08 re-election prospects had made this argument, he might have been easily dismissed (at least by White House loyalists) as a nervous Nellie who was merely interested in saving his political skin. That's what happened several months ago, when Sen. Gordon Smith of blue-state Oregon, an imperiled '08 candidate, broke with Bush on Iraq. But Lugar’s credibility on this point is buttressed by the fact that his own political future is secure. A break with Bush is more significant when it’s staged by a red-state senator who has just won re-election with 87 percent of the vote.

This new GOP restiveness doesn’t necessarily translate into substantive Democratic victories, at least in the short term. For instance, Lugar didn’t declare that he would defect to the Democrats and vote this summer for a withdrawal timeline or anything else. But his willingness to speak out is further evidence of Bush’s growing isolation, and a fresh signal that Republicans are deeply concerned about the national mood and their ’08 prospects.

Looking ahead, perhaps the real question is, which ’08 GOP presidential candidate will read the tea leaves and adopt the Dick Lugar template?

Cheney stiffs the Founding Fathers

Well, it appears that all the political science textbooks got it wrong. It appears that the U.S. Constitution got it wrong. It appears that even the Founding Fathers got it wrong. For several centuries now, we’ve all assumed that the vice-president has been part of the executive branch of government – but now Dick Cheney has set us all straight:

From his secret undisclosed location, he has decreed that, in fact, the vice-president is not part of the executive branch of government. It is tempting to contend that Cheney must be in the last throes of sanity, considering the fact that his primary workplace is located in the Executive Office Building, but maybe he is right and everybody else is wrong, which means that there needs to be a massive attitude adjustment in this country. Maybe he really does have the right to defy the rule of law and operate as he sees fit.

Maybe, for instance, he really does have the right to tell the National Archives to take a hike; after all, the bureaucrats over there seem to think that Cheney is covered by Executive Order 12958, which compels the vice-president to tell the National Archives how his office handles and safeguards classified information. It’s true that the executive order covers any “entity within the executive branch that comes into possession of classified information,” but the hitch, apparently, is that this is a mere executive order. And Dick Cheney says he doesn’t have to comply – in fact, he hasn’t complied for the past four years – because he says his office is not “an entity within the executive branch.”

And if he says he’s right, who’s going to persuade him that he’s wrong? Certainly not his subordinates in the White House. Yesterday, deputy White House secretary Dana Perino took some buckshot in the face as she sought to teach the Cheney civics class. At one point, a reporter asked, “Does the president believe that (Cheney) is part of the executive branch?” And Perino replied, “I think that’s an interesting constitutional question, and I think that lots of people can debate it.” (Actually, the question itself was settled when the Constitution was ratified in 1787, but we’ll get back to that later.)

Reporters tried to reword the inquiry: “What is the White House’s view of the argument the vice president is making on whether or not he’s part of the executive branch?” And she replied, “I’m not opining on it.”

Then they tried another approach. They pointed out – this was a good one – that, back in 2001, when Cheney was fighting attempts by Congress to determine who had attended his secret meetings on energy policy, his whole argument was that he didn’t have to comply…because he was a member of the executive branch. In fact, let’s resurrect Cheney’s actual words at the time: he said that a congressional investigation into his energy task force “would unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the executive branch.”

Perino was asked how she could square the two Cheney positions. Why should he not be considered a member of the executive branch in 2007 (when that argument apparently suits his interests), after having considered himself a member of the executive branch in 2001 (when that argument apparently suited his interests)?

Perino: “Look, I’m not a legal scholar…I’m not opining on his argument that his office is making.”

So they tried another approach: If Cheney doesn’t deem himself to be a member of the executive branch, “does the White House then believe he should get funding for the vice-president’s office from the legislative branch instead of from the executive branch?” (This was a clever question, since Congress is currently pondering the executive branch budget. President Bush reportedly wants $4.75 million of that budget to be earmarked for Cheney's office.)

Penino's response: “I don’t know.”

Later, the reporters tried again: “You can't give an opinion about whether the Vice President is part of the executive branch or not?”

Penino: “I think it’s a little bit more complicated than that.”

OK, we get it. Cheney is his own fourth branch of government, and Bush won't contest what Cheney decrees. This being the case, there isn’t a moment to lose: all the civics textbooks need to be thrown into the recycling bins. But we can’t stop there. We will need to rewrite the U.S. Constitition, to bring it into compliance with Cheneyspeak.

For instance, Article II, Section I (which deals exclusively with the executive branch) currently states that “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the vice-president chosen for the same Term, be elected…” But perhaps that language, and all references to the veep as a member of the executive branch, can simply be excised.

Perhaps the Federalist Papers can be rewritten as well, before any high school kids get the wrong idea. Alexander Hamilton is just a dead white guy, what does he know? Back on March 3, 1788, in Paper No. 68, the Founding Fathers’ chief expert on executive power wrote that “the vice president may occasionally become a substitute for the president, in the supreme executive magistracy.” Hamilton rejected an idea, popular at the time, that the Senate should elect one of its own people to serve as vice president; he persuaded his colleagues that the number-two member of the executive branch shall “be chosen in the same manner with the president,” via national election.

But Hamilton is in no position to argue with Cheney, so let’s move on. The next task would be for the U.S. government to rewrite its own websites. This government site states: “The executive branch of the government is responsible for enforcing the laws of the land. The president, vice president, department heads (cabinet members), and heads of independent agencies carry out this mission,” but obviously whoever wrote that is clearly in error.

And these errors are apparently endemic. Take, for instance, the official White House website: “…the Cabinet includes the vice president and the heads of the 15 executive departments.” Not only that, the vice president even gets his own web page. What were they thinking?

Unless the Republicans can find a way to oust Cheney from his job, we had better get with the program and cleanse those websites, as well as rewrite American history. The Vice has decreed that it's time to flush all these inconvenient facts down the memory hole. Where’s George Orwell when we need him?

Ole Fred and the artifice of star power

In the wake of my Sunday newspaper column on the mediagenic assets of lawyer-actor-lobbyist-senator-actor Fred Thompson (that’s the career chronology of the GOP’s savior in the wings), I’m going to linger a bit longer on the words and wisdom of Arthur Miller.

In his book On Politics and the Art of Acting, the late playwright noted that successful politicians in our media-soaked culture tend to be masters of performance art. They know how to project “a relaxed sincerity…a laid-back cool…a self-assurance…a genial temperament,” all of which is meant to create the impression that hanging out with them is akin to taking ‘a quiet Sunday row around the lake.” And I argued yesterday that Thompson (or, as he has called himself, "Ole Fred") has the potential to project in this fashion, given the fact that he has honed his laid-back avuncular image on Law & Order and in dozens of movies over the past several decades.

Miller also contended that the most successful politicians – he cited Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton – are those who are somehow capable of mesmerizing the public via their celebrity star power, to the point where they get a pass on their presidential shortcomings. In print yesterday, I didn’t have room to explore this argument, so here goes:

Miller cited Reagan as the exemplar of the “relaxed sincerity” model: “He disarmed his opponents by never showing the slightest sign of inner conflict about the truth of what he was saying. Simple-minded as his critics found his ideas and remarks, cynical and manipulative as he may have been in actuality, he seemed to believe every word he said. He could tell you that atmospheric pollution came from trees, or that ketchup was a vegetable in school lunches, or leave the impression that he had seen action in World War II, rather than in a movie he had made or perhaps seen, and if you didn’t believe these things you were still kind of amused by how sincerely he said them. Sincerity implies honesty…He not only acted all the time, but did so sincerely.”

But Miller confessed that his wariness of star power was bipartisan. Six decades after the death of FDR, he recognized – at least in his most rational moments – that Roosevelt had failed as president on a key moral issue of his era: aiding the Jews of Europe. Miller wrote that, for instance, Roosevelt had “turned his back (on) the pleas of a shipload of Jewish refugees, men, women, and children who had arrived from Germany on the St. Louis, and were denied entry into America and had to return to Nazi Germany and their fate…he was seen as having chosen not to confront American anti-Semitism…There were some very good reasons to reevaluate one’s belief in Roosevelt. There were days when it seemed he had fooled a lot of people who had trusted him.”

And yet, Miller remains mesmerized: “To this day I can’t see a photo of him without feeling something like pride and a certain happiness which I seem to take in his style. It is emphatically not that I have carefully compared his positive and negative points, but something far less rational that keeps him a noble figure for me…(N)o verdict based on reason out to utterly blot out his bad deeds as I usually find myself doing. The truth, I think, is that he had the impact of a star before whom resistance melts away, a phenomenon quote beyond the normal procedures of moral accounting.”

Miller argues that Bill Clinton was able to navigate the Lewinsky scandal, and survive impeachment, in part because his own star power trumped the public’s temptation to utterly condemn him: “His love of acting may be his most authentic emotion, the realest thing about him…His closest American equivalent is Brer Rabbit, who ravishes people’s vegetable gardens, and, just when he seems to be cornered, charmingly distracts his pursuer with some outrageously engaging story, long enough to let him edge closer and closer to a hole down which he escapes…The actor lies; but with all the spontaneity that careful calculation can lend him.”

Fred Thompson, in other words, can potentially use his laid-back celebrity style, and the free advertising he receives from every Law & Order rerun, to override public doubts about his substance and his thin senatorial record. (On the blog recently, I charted some of the doubts.) Miller probably would have winced at the possibility that Thompson might succeed:

In politics and in mass culture, he wrote, “when one is surrounded by such a roiling mass of consciously contrived performances, it gets harder and harder for a lot of people to locate reality anymore. Admittedly, we live in an age of entertainment, but is it a good thing that our political life, for one, be so profoundly governed by the modes of theatre, from tragedy to vaudeville to farce? I find myself speculating whether the relentless diet of crafted, acted emotions and canned ideas is not subtly pressing our brains not only to mistake fantasy for what is real, but also to absorb this process into our personal sensory mechanism.”

-------

By the way, if you link to the aforementioned Sunday column, you might spy a factual error. The column stated that Thompson "attacked" John McCain's campaign finance reform law. The truth is the opposite; Thompson backed the law. The error occurred because my original draft had a typo in it - I wrote that Thompson had "acked" the McCain law. The editors thought I meant to say "attacked," whereas I meant to say "backed." Apologies. My bad.

While Petraeus was "waxing lyrical"....

I began this week by questioning whether Gen. David Petraeus can be entrusted to give us straight talk about the Surge, given his track record of toeing the Bush administration line on Iraq. In particular, I mentioned how he had sought to reassure Americans – on the eve of the ’04 election – that the U.S. program to equip the Iraqi army, and train Iraqis to defend themselves, was going just swimmingly. (I neglected to mention, by the way, that Petraeus was the supervisory officer of that program.)

I then received a number of emails from people who deemed it inappropriate to question the credibility of a man in uniform; they argued that a soldier of his stature was the perfect choice to tell us this autumn whether the Surge is working. Their actual language was unfit for a family blog, but you get the idea. Perhaps if I offered a fuller picture of Petraeus' training program, they might think differently.

It’s clear that the “progress” he touted back in 2004, with respect to the Iraqi training program, didn’t amount to a hill of beans. If the Iraqi troops had been effectively trained and equipped, chances are that the Bush war team wouldn’t have needed to launch its Surge. In other words (to borrow Bush’s terminology), if the Iraqi troops had indeed been able to stand up, we would be standing down – as opposed to ratcheting up.

So the big question is: What happened? Why did the Iraqi training program, supervised by Petraeus and touted in the press by Petreaus, turn out to be a flop?

The answers are available, to any American with an interest in factual reality. Pick up a copy of The Occupation of Iraq, authored by Ali Allawi, an Iraqi scholar and government insider. He lays out the details midway through his 544-page book:

In April 2004, Allawi writes, the U.S. decided to launch a program to train and expand the Iraqi army. The Iraqi Ministry of Defense was designated as the agency that would run the show, line up the weapons contractors, and disburse the money (primarily American money, naturally). Gen. Petraeus was brought in to supervise.

But here’s what was happening while Petraeus was (in Allawi’s words) “waxing lyrical” about the training program in the American press: The money earmarked for weapons procurement was disappearing. Or, as Allawi puts it, “the Ministry of Defense was being systematically looted.”

As a 2005 Iraqi investigation later discovered, the top Ministry of Defense officials – none of whom had any experience in procurement – awarded no-bid contracts to con men who never intended to provide quality equipment. Allawi writes that “in a series of astounding and brazen decisions that broke every contracting and procurement rule, the ministry started to award huge contracts without any bidding and with minimal documentation.”

For instance, Ziad Qattan, the head of the ministry’s procurement department, knew nothing about his new line of work. He later told the Los Angeles Times that weapons that before the war, “I sold water, flowers, shoes, cars – but not weapons.” At one point, he awarded $1 billion in contracts to a newly-formed company that had no background in the army equipment business.

Most of the American money for the program, as much as $2.3 billion, wound up in the foreign bank accounts of “unknown people,” writes Allawi. And, not surprisingly, the equipment supplied to Petraeus’ training program “was of poor quality, (worth) a fraction of the money that was paid out by the Ministry of Defense.”

Allawi writes about the helicopters, for instance. They were 30 years old, originally owned and operated by a nation that has ceased to exist, the Soviet Union. All told, “the litany of disastrous and outrageously overpriced equipment covered the entire spectrum of armaments, from machine guns that were copies of the ones actually contracted for, to armored vehicles that were so poorly armored that machine-gun bullets would easily pierce them.” Moreover, “the Iraqi army was saddled with vehicles equipped with right-hand drive steering,” which was a problem, because “Iraqis drove with left-hand steering.” Most of the culprits ultimately fled the country.

You might wonder, “Where was Petraeus while all this was happening?”

Allawi replies that Petraeus basically let it happen: “Petraeus was a firm believer in giving the new Iraqi government as wide a latitude as possible to make its own decisions, without intrusive involvement” from the Americans.

In the end, he writes, “the saga of the grand theft of the Ministry of Defense perfectly illustrated the huge gap between the harsh realities on the ground, and the Panglossian spin that permeated official pronouncements of the government, the U.S. embassy, and the Multinational Force. The optimistic assessments of Gen. Petreaus concerning the equipping and training of Iraqi forces clashed with the huge squandering of the MD’s resources and the abysmal and inappropriate equipment purchases for its rapid deployment forces….(Americans) simply watched, while the MD was being plundered in front of their very noses, hiding behind the excuse that the Iraqis were now responsible for their decisions.”

The obvious next step, for those who would prefer to deny this history, is to find a way to discredit the messenger, perhaps to impugn Allawi’s politics or to dismiss him as a terrorist, America-hater, whatever. But this is not easily done. Allawi spent his adult life in exile, as an opponent of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party regime. He returned only in 2003, after the U.S. toppled Saddam, and served as a senior government official in a variety of top jobs.

After witnessing the postwar era, he now writes: “Bush may well go down in history as presiding over one of America’s great strategic blunders. Thousands of servicemen have been the casualties of a failed policy…But it is Iraq and the Iraqis who have paid most for the failed policies of their erstwhile liberators.”

Did he say “erstwhile” liberators? General Petraeus would beg to differ; he just put Dick Cheney’s favorite word back in circulation. During an interview Wednesday with The Times of London, he said: “The interesting dynamic here is that we have been here long enough to become liberators again for certain sectors of the population.”

Still "waxing lyrical," after all these years.

How Rudy went AWOL on Iraq

It’s odd that GOP presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani is constantly described, in mainstream media shorthand, as a tough-on-terrorists/national security candidate – given the fact that he has zero experience in national security policy; that his credentials, such as they are, derive largely from the experience of being the mayor of New York City on 9/11; and that he has never once set foot in Iraq, the place now known as “the central front in the war on terror,” thanks to President Bush’s invasion.

Indeed, for many months, Giuliani has been trying to run for president without even mentioning the I-word. That’s a fairly audacious strategy, considering the fact that most Americans are hungry to know whether he and his ’08 rivals have any bright ideas about how to mop up the Bush administration’s mess. Nevertheless, it has been Rudy’s policy to treat Iraq as if it was the crazy aunt in the closet, as an insoluble embarrassment best kept from public view.

I recall, for instance, his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, back in March 1, when he skated past the I-word, instead issuing a feel-good clarion call to fight the bad guys worldwide: “The reality is, it’s the general thrust of what we’re doing with terrorism that is enormously important, not the fact that every single thing hasn’t worked.” One of those “things,” of course is Iraq, and it would have been instructive if the so-called 9/11 mayor had offered some suggestions on how to better handle Iraq and thus fight the global war on terror more effectively. But he had nothing to say about that.

Then came his “12 commitments” agenda, released June 12. As I noted here last week, the I-word didn’t appear anywhere on his platform. When he was later asked to explain the glaring omission, he replied: “Iraq may get better, Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq, we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people.”

And now it turns out, thanks to a Tuesday story broken by Newsday, that in 2006 Giuliani actually had a golden opportunity to work directly with some of those “other people” who were donating time and effort to chart a new American policy in Iraq. He had the chance to actually rack up some substantive credentials, and demonstrate that he had some real national security bona fides. He was, in fact, an original member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group – but, as we now learn, he never showed up for any of the ISG meetings; and after he was diplomatically urged to either show up or quit the group, he opted to quit the group.

In a May ’06 letter, he told the ISG that he was unable to give the project his “full and active participation.” But now we know why: he was focused on making money. That spring, he delivered series of speeches (on his "six principles of leadership"), for as much as $200,000 a pop, and he pocketed more than $1 million during a month when the rest of the ISG members were busy digging into the crucial details of Iraq policy.

His explanation, offered yesterday, is that he didn’t think it was a good idea for a prospective presidential candidate to be serving on an apolitical panel; in his words, it “didn’t seem that I would really be able to keep the thing focused on a bipartisan, nonpolitical resolution.”

I’ll attempt to translate: Giuliani is saying that he quit the ISG because he didn’t want to risk the temptation to skew the group’s work for his own political ends.

That all sounds very noble, but I don’t buy it.

For starters, Giuliani was merely one of 10 members, and the ISG’s strong-willed chairmen, Republican James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton, were hardly going to let any individual hijack the work and ride it as a political hobbyhorse. It’s presumptuous of Giuliani to now claim that he could have successfully done so. In other words, the rationale he is now offering does not ring true.

No, I suspect that he quit the ISG because – with the Republican primaries on the horizon – he didn’t want to risk being associated with any proposals that might not play well politically. He didn’t want to be in a position of having to put his signature on a document that might tick off the Bush loyalists in the GOP primary electorate, so he took the preventive step of severing his ties. And in the short term, it was probably a smart move, because the ISG has been urging a 2008 troop drawdown – a distasteful option to most GOP primary voters – and Giuliani would not have wanted to be locked into endorsing that.

But, from the perspective of a centrist independent voter – someone who wants a major change in war strategy, someone who is hungry for fresh ideas – Giuliani’s decision to quit the Iraq Study Group simply looks bad. If a Democratic candidate had ever served on the ISG and quit in the same fashion, you can bet that the GOP message mavens, with their traditional gift for the visceral, would be making hay, perhaps this way:

ANOTHER CUT AND RUN DEMOCRAT! Given the chance to serve his country, he surrendered to personal greed. Given the chance to show strength, he chose weakness. Can we trust our nation's security to a man with no credentials?

And maybe Giuliani outsmarted himself. Lately, there have been public hints that the Bush administration might wind up embracing some of the study groups’ ideas. And some Republican lawmakers, notably Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, have endorsed those ideas, including an ’08 drawdown. Giuliani might have been able to boast that he had been part of the vanguard for change. But he blew his chance.

Mike flirts, Hillary dodges

Let’s get real: What are the odds that the voters of America would choose, as their next president, a pint-sized, twice-divorced Jewish billionaire New Yorker who touts gay marriage and gun control, and who not only admits to having smoked weed, but says he liked it?

Paris Hilton would graduate from law school, magna cum laude, before that happens.

Michael Bloomberg, the newly-minted independent mayor of New York, is probably cognizant of these odds; nevertheless, right now, he loses nothing by distancing himself from both parties and leaving all options open. Today, in Manhattan, the ex-Republican and ex-Democrat played peekaboo again; referring to the White House race, he said, "The more people that run for office the better."

This is standard behavior during the season of the big tease.

The big tease is a cyclical thing. A year or two before every recent presidential election, as voters vent their requisite disgust with the partisan bickering of the two major parties, it seems like somebody is always out there flirting with an independent run. The roster of failed flirters includes such names as Bob Kerrey, Bill Bradley, Lowell Weicker, and Colin Powell (the latter said in 1995 that "the time may be at hand for a third major party to emerge from the sensible center of the American political spectrum").

What generally stops them, in the end, is the rational recognition that the financial and ballot obstacles to success are virtually insurmountable, and that Americans – cautious by nature – are ultimately most comfortable with the two established brands. Coke and Pepsi might not be very nutritious, but you know what you’re getting. Nobody really knows what they would be getting if an independent president had to do business with Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Hence, Ross Perot spent $65 million during the ’92 campaign (a hefty sum at the time), and finished with zero electoral votes; his image as a borderline loony certainly didn’t help, but I think the branding issue was pivotal.

Theoretically, Bloomberg at least can tout his record as a successful mayor, he can further nurture his image as a sensible centrist (see the Time magazine cover this week), and he is theoretically prepared to dip into his own pocket for loose change – translation: half a billion dollars – and thus bankroll a national campaign. In other words, he would have the money (and the lawyers) to navigate the state ballot obstacles. In fact, he just took care of one potential hurdle, simply by re-registering as an independent; some states frown on independent candidates who are still registered as party members back home.

The beauty of this moment, for Bloomberg, is that he doesn’t have to decide anything. He can simply dip his toe in the water, and ponder at length whether there is a sufficient market niche for his goods. Right now, at least rhetorically, it would appear so. The polls report that most Americans are fed up with both parties – the Democratic Congress, as well as the Bush-burdened Republicans. The stalemate in Washington has yielded no progress on the issues that people care about most, everything from Iraq and health care to energy and immigration.

Hence, Bloomberg’s key remark the other day, while on the stump in California: “We do not have to settle for the same old politics. We do not have to accept the tired debate between the left and right, between Democrats and Republicans, between Congress and the White House.” Hence, his statement yesterday, about the advantages of being an independent: “Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles, and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.”

He can run those lines for the rest of this year, and it’s a win-win. Potentially, he’ll boost his prospects as a would-be independent candidate; failing that, he’ll look like a national leader – as opposed to merely a lame-duck, term-limited New York mayor. And in the meantime, he’ll get all kinds of free publicity from the punditocracy, which can fill the slow periods with speculation about “who he would hurt, and who he would help” if indeed he took the plunge and made it a three-way race in autumn ’08.

I’m not going to bother; you can find those scenarios elsewhere (here, for example). I suspect that, 15 months from today, none of them will matter.

-------

Did you catch Hillary Clinton’s dodge yesterday, when she refused to say whether she believed it was appropriate to pardon Scooter Libby?

During a labor forum yesterday for Democratic candidates, host Chris Matthews posed the question. She replied: “Oh, I think there would be enough to be said about that without me adding to it.”

Matthews protested (“That is such a political answer!”), but the pro-Hillary audience shouted him down, demanding that he ask “a real question,” and he let it go.

Well, excuse him for asking, but it seems to me that it would valuable to hear Hillary’s thoughts on whether a Bush lieutenant, convicted of lying under oath and obstruction of justice in a national security investigation, should be jailed or not. She’s running for president, and she was asked her thoughts about the rule of law. That sounds like a “real question” to me.

But we know, of course, why Hillary took a powder on that one. If she had declared “Free Scooter,” liberals would have screamed. If she had declared “Jail Scooter,” Hillary-haters would have demanded to know why Scooter shouldn’t get the same deal that Marc Rich received. Rich, as you may remember, is the fugitive financier (58 counts of tax fraud, illegal oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis) who was pardoned by Bill Clinton in his final hours as president. It was widely suspected at the time (but never proven) that Rich’s socialite ex-wife had greased the pardon by donating $1 million to Democratic causes, $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library fund – and $70,000 to Hillary Clinton's first Senate campaign.

So her “non-answer” about Scooter yesterday, as Matthews correctly called it, is further evidence that the old Clinton baggage will on occasion weigh heavily – forcing her to play the inartful dodger.

The radio beast bites back

Trent Lott uttered a revealing remark the other day. The Republican senator from Mississippi was venting to reporters about the stalled immigration reform bill, which has been under relentless attack from rank-and-file conservatives. Lott and other members of the GOP establishment have been pushing hard for the bill, at President Bush’s behest, and they’re clearly unhappy about all the grief they’ve been getting from the grassroots.

On talk radio, the foot soldiers of the increasing fragile GOP coalition – egged on by the talk show hosts – have been relentlessly assailing their own leaders as border wimps who are soft on illegal aliens; as Rush Limbaugh declared earlier this month, “The White House has split the Republican party on this…If this bill is killed, they’re going to have to go back to the drawing board.”

Anyway, Lott is ticked about taking all that heat. Here's his beef: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

Oh, so now it’s a “problem?” Lott and the GOP establishment had no complaints about talk radio when Limbaugh and his minions were working to propel them into power.

As early as 1992, Limbaugh was invited to sit with Marilyn Quayle in the vice president’s box at the GOP national convention. And in 1994, at the dawn of the conservative revolution, talk radio was instrumental in stoking pro-Republican sentiment and spreading the word about Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America. The Republican National Committee lined up 300 radio talk show interviews for the politicians who signed the Contract. After the GOP captured the House, Republicans even held a ceremony in Limbaugh’s honor, naming him “an honorary member of Congress” and lauding him as “the majority maker.” Grateful GOP freshman cited polls showing that frequent talk-show listeners had voted Republican in ’94 by a margin of 3-1.

Back then, the Republicans had no problem with the notion that Limbaugh (joined later by Bill O’Reilly, Neal Boortz, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, and many more) was “running America,” because, most of the time, they behaved like national precinct captains for the GOP, acting as liaisons between leadership and the masses.

Still, there were early signs that talk radio – what the radio consultants call “non-guested confrontation” - might be a double-edged sword for the GOP. Even as Newt was settling into his job in 1995, a Dallas host named David Gold warned publicly, “If they don’t perform, we’re likely to put the heat on them. There’ll be a lot of angry folks out there, and the talk-show hosts will be leading the charge.”

And, by 2002, it was clear that the talk radio titans were not content to simply function as Bush team cheerleaders. An instructive incident occurred in the spring of that year. The Bush administration suggested in a report to the United Nations that global warming might actually be a real man-made phenomenon – and Limbaugh jumped all over it.

Limbaugh said on his Monday show that “these predictions are basically apocalyptic doom and gloom based on raw emotion.” Then he charged that Bush had become “George W. Algore.” Sure enough, within 24 hours, Bush made it clear that his own administration had been wrong; as a news report stated, “President Bush appeared to distance himself yesterday from a report by his administration that says human activities are mostly to blame for recent trends in global warming…”

But that skirmish was tame, compared to what’s happening now. Now we have radio host Michael Savage assailing Bush as the “culprit” who is coddling illegal immigrants, which is why, in Savage’s words, it’s up to the grassroots to “derail this train of treason.”

It’s clear today, in the wake of talk radio anger about immigration reform, that the GOP leadership has failed to recognize a fundamental truth about their ostensible allies: First and foremost, the hosts and their followers are instinctively anti-establishment. Talk radio is a forum for the aggrieved; stoking emotions and firing darts at the establishment (regardless of whether it is liberal or conservative) is considered good radio.

The GOP leaders have belatedly discovered that talk radio is a beast that must be incessantly fed. And now that they’re being chewed up and spit out, now that they’re griping about how the beast is “running America” at their expense, I feel it's appropriate to paraphrase the Bible and simply observe that, in politics as in life, you reap what you sow.

Bush's messenger, then and now

Let us briefly return to Sept. 26, 2004; on that date, President Bush was trying to convince voters to give him a second term. The election was just six weeks away. His number-one priority was to persuade people that he was making measurable progress in Iraq. Accordingly, a guest column appeared that day in The Washington Post, with the upbeat author playing the role of Bush’s Pollyana. Key excerpts:

I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously…There are reasons for optimism…Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired…Progress has also been made in police training…Considerable progress is also being made in the reconstruction and refurbishing of infrastructure for Iraq’s security forces…Iraq’s security forces are developing steadily and they are in the fight. Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders out front and with continued coalition – and now NATO – support, this trend will continue.

Pretty encouraging, right? Any swing voter who read that piece might well have concluded that it would be nuts to dump Bush and elect John Kerry, what with the Iraqis so poised to take responsibility for their own security. And since nobody could possibly question the author’s bona fides, it had to be true: the Iraqis were getting ready to stand up, thereby allowing our troops to stand down – just like the Decider had long promised us.

Well, as we now know, those reassurances turned out to be worthless; after all, there would be no need for a U. S. troop escalation today if Iraqi’s security forces had really stepped forward to secure their own country. And one would think that anyone who played Pollyana in 2004 would be automatically dismissed in 2007 as just another credibility-challenged Bush messenger.

But apparently not. The author of that ’04 column was an Army lieutenant general named David Petraeus – the same guy (now a full general) who is leading Bush’s Surge, and who has been entrusted with giving Americans a straight-talk assessment this September.

You see where I’m going with this. Given Petraeus’ rhetorical track record – and his apparent willingness, back in 2004, to inject himself into the middle of a domestic partisan campaign – why should we have confidence that in September he’ll say anything that would deviate from the White House line?

That ’04 column came to mind last week, while I was reading new remarks by Petraeus about some of the swell things that have been happening in the wake of the Surge. As proof of “normalcy,” he told USA Today about all the “professional soccer leagues with real grass field stadiums, several amusement parks – big ones, (and) markets that are very vibrant.” That’s nice about the soccer leagues. Maybe ESPN would be interested; on the other hand, ESPN might be more interested in the latest Pentagon report, which says that the endemic sectarian violence has not decreased since the Surge began in February; and that the last six months have been the deadliest for U.S. troops since the war began. Not to mention the fact that, despite the Surge and despite the supposed "tangible progress" among Iraq security forces, only 40 percent of Baghdad is currently considered secure - according to the U.S. military.

But the upbeat talking points are tough to give up. Yesterday, Petraeus made his first Sunday talk show appearance (on Fox News, naturally), and reaffirmed his praise for the Iraqi soccer leagues on real grass fields. Clearly, his September message will be: we’re making some tangible progress (soccer), but there are still tough challenges ahead, so therefore we need more time to make the Surge work, Americans should be patient, let’s look ahead to 2008 and beyond.

The key phase of the Fox interview began with this question by Chris Wallace: “There are reports that you…would like the Surge to continue until at least early 2008, that if it’s going to work, it needs to continue into early next year, is that true?”

Petraeus (bobbing and weaving like a seasoned pol): “We’ve got a number of different options that we have looked at, Chris, and it really is premature at this point in time to try to prejudge that. Again, I would suspect that late in the summer, early September, that we will provide some recommendations on the way ahead up our chain of command as well.”

Translation: “Yes.”

Wallace, to his credit, followed up: “But you surely don’t think the job would be done by the Surge by September, do you, sir?”

Petraeus (finally): “I do not, no. I think that we have a lot of heavy lifting to do.”

There it is: The troop hike continues, with Surge proponents in perpetual pursuit of “progress.” In Petraeus’ words, “counterinsurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years,” and perhaps this one should go longer, with “a long-term security arrangement over time,” like we have in South Korea (another idea being floated by Bush).

What’s noteworthy, however, is that Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t buying any of this. While Petraeus was delivering the Bush line on Fox, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell was dissenting on CBS. McConnell, referring to his Republican colleagues, said: “I think everybody anticipates that there’s going to be a new strategy in the fall. I don’t think we’ll have the same level of troops, in all likelihood, that we have now. The Iraqis will have to step up, not only on the political side, but on the military side, to a greater extent. We’re not there forever.”

So there’s the disconnect: The GOP rank and file, anxious about the ’08 elections, wants a decisive September Surge report, and a drawdown of U.S. troops – while Bush and Petraeus want a Surge extension, with no drawdown. The key issue is whether McConnell and his colleagues, having already decided that Bush has no credibility on Iraq, are therefore prepared to question Petraeus’ credibility as well.

If they’re looking for ammo, they might want to start with his ’04 Pollyana pronouncements. Nothing that Petraeus said back then is as credible as what Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is saying now, in his attempt to explain why his Surge-supported government has failed to meet political benchmarks: “There are two mentalities in this region, conspiracy and mistrust.”

The GOP seizes on Verbalgate

Everybody behaved badly. That’s my verdict on the Harry Reid imbroglio, which perhaps can be nicknamed Verbalgate.

Four days ago, in a phone conversation with liberal bloggers, the Senate Democratic leader referred to Peter Pace, the lame duck chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as “incompetent” – a fact that surfaced yesterday, when Politico posted a somewhat sketchy report. In the ensuing fallout, all interested parties played their predictable (and sometimes hypocritical) roles, thereby illustrating the stark ideological divisions that pervade wartime Washington.

Start with Reid. He spent much of yesterday trying to parry the Politico story, telling reporters “I’m not going to get into it, what I said or didn’t say.” Politico had reported the “incompetent” remark, but hadn’t provided any context. That came late in the day, when excerpts from a tape recording of the conversation were posted online. Here’s what Reid said to the liberal bloggers:

“…Well, I guess the president, he's gotten rid of Pace because he could not get confirmed here in the Senate. Pace is also a yes-man for the president. I told him to his face, I laid it out last time he came in to see me. I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was…”

Politically speaking, it’s easy to see why Reid felt compelled to beat up on a senior military officer in a phone call with the bloggers. He is well aware that the Democratic Congress has been plummeting in the polls, in large measure because his party base is furious that it has failed thus far to effectively confront President Bush on the Iraq war; as evidenced by the Washington Post’s surveys, support among liberal Democrats had dropped 22 percentage points since April.

This helps to explain why Reid felt the need to demonstrate that he’s on the case, that he’s still determined to block Bush on the war, that he’s still willing to play the tough guy (at least verbally) – and what better way to demonstrate toughness than to tell the liberal bloggers that he had dressed down a beribboned brass hat in private?

But assuming he really did call Pace incompetent to his face in private, I would suggest that it’s somewhat graceless to publicly share that news. Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned guy who is out of sync with the transparency culture, but it seems to me that there is something to be said for discretion, a trait that was widely embraced in pre-polarized Washington.

Is it fair to Pace – whatever his shortcomings, some of which we’ll discuss in a moment – that criticism directed at him in private is then repeated as red meat for the liberal base? Does that speak well of Reid’s leadership style? Reid himself may have sensed that he had erred by dishing with the bloggers; that may explain why he declined to repeat the “incompetent” characterization while under questioning yesterday.

But while Reid ran his mouth too freely, the Republicans did the same in response. The GOP was in a huff yesterday at the idea that a Democrat would dare say something bad about a man in uniform. At the White House, press secretary Tony Snow declared that “in a time of war, for a leader of a party that says it supports the military, it seems outrageous to be issuing slanders toward the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

Isn’t this the same White House that dumped Pace only one week ago, having apparently decided that his stalwart defense of the Iraq war had tainted him politically, thus making him a poor candidate for a second term as Joint Chiefs chairman? On the issue of “outrageous” “slanders,” isn’t this the same White House that has repeatedly suggested that Democrats who oppose the Iraq war are aiding the terrorists?

And why didn’t the White House assail Sen. John McCain back in February, when he suggested in a hearing that another military luminary had botched his job in Iraq? (McCain to Gen. George Casey: "I question seriously the judgment that was employed in your execution of your responsibilities in Iraq. And we have paid a very, very heavy price in American blood and treasure because of what is now agreed to by literally everyone as a failed policy.")

While the GOP message machine will focus on Reid’s use of the word “incompetent,” it’s just as useful to note that Reid, in his chat with the bloggers, also described Pace as “a yes-man for the president.” That’s about as earth-shattering as the news that Britney Spears parties without underpants. Pace has been uttering the Bush-Cheney line on Iraq for a long time, seemingly impervious to the downward spiral. He was a faithful servant to Donald Rumsfeld, and he was so loyal to the White House that he took it upon himself to write a character reference for convicted felon Scooter Libby, and send it to the judge (“He impressed me as a team player…”).

But even Pace seemed to sense the pitfalls of being a yes man. During a conversation last July with Bob Woodward, the author asked Pace to characterize the latest spike in violence that was plaguing U.S. forces at the time. Pace replied that the insurgents were simply desperate to stop democracy from functioning.

Part of the reason for the violence, Pace said, “is the understanding of the enemy, that they’re on the ropes as far as if this parliament continues to function…” Woodward then asked whether Pace really wanted to suggest that the insurgents were “on the ropes.” Pace replied, “Wrong word.” Woodward then said, “Yeah, you’re going to sound like Dick Cheney. Do you want to retract that?” Pace said, “I would like to retract that, thank you.” All told, however, when asked to characterize the Iraq war, Pace replied: “I do not have doubt about what we’ve done.”

Bush and the GOP are desperate to find anything that might distract Americans from the havoc they have wrought in Iraq, and they seem to think that Reid’s indiscretion will suffice. In reality, however, Verbalgate will provide them with approximately 17 minutes of respite. The GOP seems to think there is political mileage in labeling Reid as “the Far Left’s front man on Iraq,” but, in truth, “the Far Left” and centrist America are in current agreement that this disastrous war is a GOP production, and that the GOP should be held to account. The 2008 election will not hinge on whether Harry Reid is too loose with his lips.

Tony lowballs Iraq, Rudy punts

Back on May 29, I mentioned that the Bush team, despite having originally indicated that September would be a key juncture for measuring the effectiveness of its so-called Surge, was suddenly trying to take a slide on September by dampening in advance any expectations of meaningful progress. Late last month, President Bush’s friends at Fox News and in the think tanks were dutifully spreading the word, in the hopes that perhaps restive congressional Republicans would sit tight and give Bush even more time to indulge his signature disaster.

Actually, from Bush’s perspective, weaseling out of the September deadline makes perfect sense, because the idea that the political and security conditions in Iraq would suddenly improve, just because the U.S. had commenced a troop escalation, seemed laughable from the start. And, sure enough, the Surge thus far hasn’t made any appreciable difference.

Iraq’s political leaders, divided by sectarian hostilities, have taken virtually no steps toward reconciliation, much less enacted the reform laws that the Bush team is demanding as a gauge of progress. And today we have a new Pentagon report, which says that the average daily casualties in Iraq have actually increased since the Surge strategy was first implemented on Feb. 10.

So it’s no surprise that Bush, now tagged with a 29 percent job approval rating, is backing off the statement he made in a Reuters interview on May 22. At the time, he characterized September “as an important moment, because (General) David Petraeus says that’s when he’ll have a pretty good assessment as to what the effect of the Surge has been.” But today, it’s a different story.

My dictionary defines the word important as “of much or great significance or consequence.” The Bush dictionary apparently has a looser definition.

Bush spokesman Tony Snow did his bit for the team yesterday, playing a game of lowball with the White House press corps (while insisting, naturally, that he wasn’t low-balling anything). When he was asked to characterize the impending September assessment, he called it “the first opportunity to have a little bit of metric…At that juncture, you’re going to be able to have a little more granularity, as they say.”

I’m having a little trouble squaring “a little bit of metric” and “a little more granularity” with the dictionary’s “of much or great significance and consequence.” It seems to me that something of great consequence translates, at the very least, into a large amount of granularity.

A reporter asked Snow whether his characterization of September was different from Bush’s May 22 characterization of September. He replied, “No, I will let the president do the characterizations…I think we’re parsing a little bit here.”

A reporter reminded Snow that Bush has said in other interviews that we would know in September whether the Surge was working. Snow was then asked, in reference to September, “is it the right time to judge whether the new way forward is working?”

Snow replied, “Again, let’s see. We’ll have to take a look. I just - ”

Reporter: “But that sounds like backpedaling.”

Snow: “No, it’s not backpedaling. It’s just - it seems to me to be such a vast, metaphysical question.”

And so on. I sympathize with Snow. It’s the thankless job of the White House flak to spin a disastrous war by talking about granularities and metaphysics, and hoping that nobody remembers what the administration has previously said about the Surge (in Senate testimony on Jan. 12, Defense secretary Robert Gates said that we would be able to measure the effectiveness of the Surge "fairly quickly," within "a couple of months").

So perhaps we should seek out substantive answers elsewhere, starting with the Republican frontrunner for the ’08 presidential nomination. What would Rudy Giuliani do in Iraq? How would he differ from the current lame duck? Let’s check out Giuliani’s policy agenda, which he released on Tuesday. He calls it his “12 commitments.” I’ve got it right here. Let’s see….

Wait…Iraq must be on this list somewhere….Still looking…

Nope, not a single word here about Iraq.

He does declare that “I will keep America on offense in the terrorists’ war on us,” but that’s hardly a profile in courage, since I doubt that any ’08 candidate will be promising to put America on defense. And one would think that, if he wants to “keep America on offense,” he might want to at least address what he would do about Iraq, which, at a price tag of $2 billion a week, is severely complicating America’s attempts to stay on offense worldwide.

But not a word about Iraq. And when asked Tuesday why he had stayed mum about the electorate’s number-one concern, he said this: “Iraq may get better, Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq, we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people.”

This, from the guy who wrote a book called Leadership. My dictionary defines leadership as the act of providing “guidance” and “direction.” But, apparently, Giuliani doesn’t want to take the lead and offer guidance and direction; he’d rather punt, by simply saying that the war is “in the hands of other people.” If a Democratic candidate had made such a statement, he and his fellow Republicans would be citing it as proof that the other party doesn’t have the guts and moxie to lead America in time of war.

His dilemma is obvious, however. If he had spelled out a commitment that essentially endorsed Bush’s strategy, he would have endeared himself to the Bush diehards who are expected to vote heavily in the GOP primaries – but he would have signaled his foolhardiness to the swing-voting independents who have long concluded that the war is Bush’s folly. On the other hand, if he had spelled out a commitment to radically change course in Iraq, he might endear himself to swing voters – but hurt himself with GOP primary voters.

This is the mess that Bush has created for his fellow Republicans, and it explains why people like Snow and Giuliani have to play games with the dictionary.

-------

If you're not sick of hearing about Hillary Clinton, you might want to download yesterday's "Radio Times" show on Philadelphia's NPR station. I discussed the Hillary-as-polarizer issue for an hour with author and foreign relations fellow Peter Beinart. It's available here, at 6/13, Hour One. Listen for the caller who insists that Hillary reminds many men of their first wives.

Is Bush plowing fallow soil?

Once again, there is fresh evidence that George W. Bush has severely damaged the Republican party and imperiled its ’08 presidential nominee. It turns out that even rural Americans – roughly 20 percent of the national electorate – are profoundly fed up.

And if those folks say they are disenchanted, it means the GOP is in serious trouble.

Republican presidential candidates generally depend on winning big in the rural environs, to help offset the usual Democratic urban margins. That was the Bush formula in 2000 (when he won 59 percent of rural voters, topping Al Gore by a whopping 22 points), and again in 2004 (when he won the same percentage, besting John Kerry by 19 points). Bush’s father won the rural vote by 11 points in 1988. Ronald Reagan won the rural vote by 16 points in 1980 and by 34 points in 1984.

Yet today, in a new survey sponsored by the non-partisan Center for Rural Strategies, and designed on a bipartisan basis by Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg and GOP consultant Bill Greener, rural voters are signaling something different. When asked whether they would favor a Democratic or Republican presidential candidate in 2008, they opted for the Democrat by two points.

Among swing-voting independents who live in rural areas, the unnamed Democratic candidate is favored by 11 points; among blue-collar rural voters, the Democrat is favored by 12 points; and, perhaps, most significantly, the Democrat is favored by three points among rural voters who have family members fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan.

For the Republicans, these numbers should be a wake-up call that’s roughly equivalent to being jabbed in the kidneys with a cattle prod. The Democratic game plan for recapturing the White House in 2008 does not require winning the rural vote at all. They merely need to be competitive. They merely need not to get wiped out. Indeed, in both 1992 and 1996 Bill Clinton fought the GOP to a virtual draw in rural areas. This new poll suggests that the Democrats are well poised to do that again.

As GOP consultant Greener put it the other day, obviously choosing his words carefully, “Republicans are vastly underperforming among rural Americans. And if we’re going to succeed in 2008, we’re going to have to do better.” Or, as he said in the polling analysis that he co-authored with Greenberg, “Bush’s problems directly impact the entire Republican brand in rural America and usher in a new era of political competition…Democrats in turn have a historic opportunity to strike deep into the Republican base.”

And what’s Bush’s biggest problem, the problem that has triggered a 26-point plunge in his rural job approval since 2004? Take a wild guess.

It’s arguably no surprise that Iraq was cited by rural voters as their top issue - why should they be any different? – but what’s most significant is their personal stake in the war. As the polling analysis points out, “this is the part of the country that, more than others, sends its sons and daughters to do the fighting.” Here’s a stat you won’t see in suburbia: 75 percent of those surveyed know somebody who is fighting in the war; and 27 percent have a family member in harm’s way.

And if elected Democrats in Washington need any more evidence that it is politically safe to confront Bush on the war, consider this: Even in Republican-voting rural America, 50 percent agree with the statement that “the current course cannot bring stability, and we need to start reducing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq,” while 45 percent agree with the argument that “we must stay the course to achieve stability and finish the job in Iraq.”

I assume that some reality-challenged Republicans will be tempted to dismiss these numbers with the usual mantra - that surveys are a mere snapshot in time and that the only relevant poll is the one conducted on election day. But that line won’t fly, because rural voters have already vented their frustrations on election day. I am referring to last November, when the Democrats captured both the House and Senate – with serious help from rural voters.

Republican House candidates topped their Democratic counterparts by only three points among rural voters nationwide (a nine-point drop from the GOP’s winning rural margin in the 2002 House elections). Indeed, the ’06 Democratic rural surge helped propel the party into power; 18 House Republican incumbents with large rural electorates lost their seats. And the same pattern was evident in key Senate races – notably in Virginia, where Democrat James Webb ousted George Allen in part by dueling Allen to a virtual draw among rural voters (Webb won 49 percent of them); and in Missouri, where Democrat Claire McCaskill ousted Jim Talent in part by winning 45 percent of the rural vote.

Some Democratic strategists have arguing for years, and largely in vain, that their party has needlessly ceded rural voters to the GOP. Steve Jarding, one of the most prominent complainers, said several years ago, “It’s a moral argument. How morally right is it for our Democratic nominee for president to sell 60 million people, ‘You don’t matter to me?’” Last year he co-authored a book on the topic with Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, another Democratic strategist who believes in rural outreach; in an interview last year, Saunders argued that a Democratic presidential candidate could score big gains in rural areas if he or she takes the time to show respect for those voters' values. As Saunders put it, "These people have been voting Republican, but they're not really Republican, and we need to show 'em why" they should switch in '08.

But the new survey stats don't foresee '08 Democratic gains as a slam dunk. As the polling analysis makes clear, rural voters instinctively favor the Republicans as the folks more in tune with their way of life. These voters are ticked off about the Iraq war, and that has shaken their allegience to the GOP, but they still don't necessarily trust the Democrats on the crucially important "family values." As the analysis warns Democrats, "What is happening is less about an ideological alignment than a reflection on the current governance." (This helps explain why GOP candidates such as Mitt Romney are stressing "values" and barely mentioning Bush or Iraq.)

And Democrats should also remember that this survey was merely asking rural voters to choose between generic Democratic and Republican presidential candidates; once the actual names are filled in, their sentiments might be somewhat different. For instance, Hillary Clinton scored poorly in the survey, ranking lower than all the other major candidates, although presumably she would seek to employ some of the same strategies that enabled her to win over skeptics in the rural communities of New York State.

But the bottom line for the GOP is not encouraging. If Republicans have to spend precious time and money next year just to shore up their rural base, that alone is a Democratic advantage. It's tough to win a presidential race by playing defense.

Scooter and Gonzo and Pace, oh my

It’s difficult to catalogue all the latest conservative grievances against George W. Bush, but let’s give it a try:

Conservatives wanted Bush to retain Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but last Thursday Bush dumped him. Conservatives want Bush to pardon Scooter Libby (who, after all, merely lied under oath to impede a national security investigation), but Bush refuses to do it. Conservatives want Bush to dump attorney general Alberto Gonzales (whom they consider an incompetent toady), but Bush won’t do that either.

So here’s the right-wing recipe thus far: Keep Pace, free Scooter, ditch Gonzo. Whereas the Bush recipe is: ditch Pace, ditch Scooter, keep Gonzo.

Then add the immigration ingredient, and you’ve got a bubbling cauldron. Conservatives want Bush to ditch his reform bill, the compromise deal that would give 12 million illegals a path to citizenship. But Bush refuses to do that either.

Lately, the Bush-bashing on the right has become nearly as virulent as the Bush-bashing on the left - which I suppose is another way to gauge the political death throes of this administration. He might wish that he had stayed a bit longer in Albania.

For instance, Bill Kristol, the conservative activist and commentator, is furious today that Bush won’t wield his pen on Libby’s behalf; he thinks that Bush is “selfish,” fearful of the political backlash that a Libby pardon might trigger, and motivated by a “petty desire to avoid some additional criticism.”

The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial writers added their ire yesterday: “With Mr. Libby, what is Mr. Bush afraid of – jeopardizing his 33 percent approval rating? A pardon would be a two-day story…his supporters would cheer to see the president standing by the man who stood by him when others in his administration cut and ran.”

Washington attorney Victoria Toensing, a prominent conservative voice, linked two of the grievances and came up with this sound bite: “If the president can pardon 12 million illegal immigrants, he can pardon Scooter Libby.” This quote turned up yesterday in a column by Robert Novak, the conservative pundit who lately has become a conduit for aggrieved conservative Bush-bashers, most of whom are ranting behind the cloak of anonymity in the hopes that the Bush White House will notice their smoke signals.

These sources are linking the Gonzo and Scooter grievances. From Novak: “Prevailing opinion among Republican office holders, contributors and activists could not differ more from Bush’s posture. They regard Libby as a valuable public servant…Republican insiders are enraged by Bush’s retention of Gonzales, whom they consider a political and governmental disaster (presiding over) a crippled, leaderless Justice Department.”

Others suggest that Bush’s credibility on the immigration issue is shot, because he has so little credibility in general. Rich Lowry at the National Review, writing today, even manages to work Gonzo into the mix: “The backdrop to all this, of course, is the Iraq war. The government of the United States presented to the world intelligence that turned out to be wrong. It insisted we were making steady progress in the guerrilla war when, by the end of 2006, we were facing catastrophe. And it has still managed only fitful progress against an enemy whose main weapon is homemade bombs. This casts a pall over our public life, augmented by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, corruption in Congress, paranoiac ranting on the Left, and incompetence in high places (see: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales).”

Still others are equally incensed about the ditching of Peter Pace. Last Friday, the Bush team announced it had decided not to re-nominate Gen. Pace for a new term as Joint Chiefs chairman, because it knew that Pace would be grilled about the Iraq war during his Senate confirmation hearings. That decision has really ticked off the conservative base, which is accusing Bush of timidity under fire.

More grievance linkage, this time from a blogger at redstate.com, the popular grassroots conservative website: “Pace is being ungraciously sacrificed at the altar of capitulation to the antiwar movement…Bush seems more interested in standing by a struggling attorney general…Why, after such a military career, does Gen. Pace find (himself) alone in an open field, with no cover fire? Because the political expediency of his superiors is of greater concern…Throwing yet another faithful servant under the bus for political expediency is NO WAY to honor and respect this Soldier, Warfighter, and American Patriot.”

The Wall Street Journal editorialists chimed in yesterday: “Is George W. Bush still president? We can’t help but wonder.” Dumping Pace “only makes Mr. Bush look weaker as a commander in chief who can’t even select his own war generals.” Dumping Pace is tantamount to “appeasement.”

An appeaser who won’t secure our borders? A “selfish” and “petty” president who’s afraid of political fallout? This is not the Bush image that his handlers sought to nurture back in ’03 when they dressed him in that flight suit. And history tells us that an incumbent party has a tough time staying in office when its own base is deeply disenchanted.

-------

By the way, here was Bush yesterday, complaining about all those U.S. senators who persist in going after Gonzo: "This process has been drug out a long time."

Drug out? It would appear that, in some long-ago grammar class, a certain child got left behind.

Hillary, the director's cut

One of our most fascinating, polarizing public figures is forever destined to be embroiled in controversy, and open to interpretation. But enough about Tony Soprano. Let’s talk instead about Hillary Clinton. Two new interpretive biographies have just been dropped atop the Hillary heap, and I read them so that you don’t have to. I summarized my thoughts in a print column yesterday. A much longer version – the indulgent “director’s cut,” as it were – appears below:


Maybe somebody should just open a Hillary Clinton emporium, a 24/7 store dedicated to the sale of all things Hillary, featuring a book department stocked only with Hillary biographies. It could be the political junkie’s version of a Baskin Robins, a place where fans and foes can choose their favorite Hillary flavors, ranging from sweet to sour, from Hillary as heroic public servant to Hillary as a leftist Lady Macbeth.

There would be no consensus on what constitutes the most accurate Hillary, of course, but we’re long past the point of being capable of distinguishing between partisan spin and empirical substance. There is, it seems, no objective middle ground. The ’08 Democratic frontrunner is one of our most polarizing political figures; virtually all Americans made up their minds about her long ago, pro or con; and the book publishing industry is quite happy about that, because it keeps cranking out new volumes that fit every conceivable preconception.

I can’t imagine that she and her campaign aides are pleased by all this ceaseless attention; they would much prefer to conduct their methodical march to the nomination with minimal focus on her embattled personality, maximum focus on dry public policy, and with minimal references to the controversies that marred her husband’s tumultuous tenure. She can’t erase the ‘90s, but she’d like to be judged afresh. Her presidential bid gives her a second chance to make a first impression, a phenomenon that is quite rare in politics; the problem is, she has to compete with the wide variety of impressions on sale in the Hillary market.

Psychobabble devotees have long been able to consult the Hillary book by Gail Sheehy, conservatives who loathe Hillary’s politics can find comfort in the writings of Bay Buchanan or Dick Morris or Barbara Olson or Emmett Tyrrell, liberals who love Hillary’s politics can consult her memoir or buy the laudatory tome by Susan Estrich, lovers of salacious anti-Hillary gossip can pick up the book by Edward Klein (who claims that Hillary was “widely rumored” to be gay) or perhaps Christopher Anderson’s analysis of her marriage (he compares her to Evita)….it’s endless, really. She’s less a candidate than a mass culture commodity.

And now, naturally, we have two new biographies for the shelf – Her Way, by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Atta Jr. (Gerth was the New York Times reporter who “broke” the Whitewater scandal, or pseudo-scandal); and A Woman in Charge, by the famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein (who reportedly spent eight years on his project). Not surprisingly, the Clinton camp started dumping on both books long before they hit the bookstores.

While both books do have their strengths, discerning readers basically have two choices: They can either cherry-pick their favorite information, to reinforce how they felt about Hillary prior to purchase, or they can read the biographies from preface to index – and rightly decide that Hillary is a lot like most of her fellow humans. In other words, she is complicated. She has her strengths and weaknesses. She is passionate about her ideals and extremely competitive; she is warm to her friends, and uncompromisingly cool to her enemies; she is arrogant and she has a great belly laugh; she is (as Gerth and Van Atta assert) “tough, funny and brilliant,” but also “hardened, and unwilling to fully acknowledge her mistakes.” And of course she is “ambitious,” a word that is considered a compliment when applied to a male politician.

None of these observations are particularly new, but I’d argue that Bernstein’s account is richer. His writing is more lyrical (“the most essential and yet elusive dynamic of the Clinton presidency came to be the relationship between the two of them – the sand in the gears in bad times, the grease that moved the machinery in good ones…”). His depiction of Hillary’s domineering father is more anecdotal (“If Hillary or one of her brothers had left the cap off the toothpaste tube, he threw it out the bathroom window and told the offending child to fetch it from the front yard evergreens, even in snow”).

And he trumped his competitors by gaining access to some valuable Arkansas sources. He was able to sit down with Betsey Wright, a longtime family friend who ran Bill Clinton’s gubernatorial office; it turns out that, not only was Bill driving Hillary crazy (for the reasons we all know), he also made Wright so crazy that the two of them – governor and staffer – signed up to see a shrink together, in order to fix their office relationship. Wright also dished to Bernstein about yet another Bill paramour – Mary Jo Jenkins – who posed a serious threat to the Clinton marriage, just three years before he launched his presidential candidacy.

But Wright is not in the narrative to sling gossip; she is uncommonly insightful about the complexities of the Clinton partnership. She traces her friendship with Hillary back to the latter’s law school days, and she was convinced, even then, that Hillary was destined to be a trailblazer for women in national politics. Indeed, for that very reason, she urged Hillary not to marry Bill and thus take a subordinate role.

Bernstein also scored by gaining access to some private notebooks, compiled after the 1992 election by Hillary’s closest friend, Diane Blair. A political scientist, Blair interviewed virtually everyone who had worked on the Clinton campaign’s secret “defense team,” which had the onerous job of deflecting the relentless GOP attacks on the Clintons’ private lives. Blair never did anything with her thick files; she died in 2000, and the material was locked away. But Bernstein got permission to read them. Hillary is revealed in those pages as the toughest pugilist of all, in the service of saving her marriage and serving Bill’s career.

As one ’92 campaign aide revealingly explained in the Blair papers: “She doesn’t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles. I think of her viewing herself in more heroic terms, an epic character like in The Iliad, fighting battle after battle. Yes, she succumbs to victimization sometimes, in that when the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with the repercussions of her own mistakes or flaws, she falls into victimhood. But that’s a last resort and when she does allow the wallowing it’s only in the warm glow of martyrdom – as a laudable victim – a martyr in the tradition of Joan of Arc, a martyr in the religious sense. She would much rather play the woman warrior…She’s happiest when she’s fighting, when she has identified the enemy and goes into attack mode.”

Typically, of course, that assessment can be read two ways. Hillary haters can claim it as proof that she is a dangerous polarizer who (like her husband) is prone to self-pity; but Hillary lovers can claim it as proof that she (unlike her less battle-tested Democratic rivals) has the requisite moxie to slug it out with the GOP in 2008.

Gerth and Van Atta have experienced the latter, first hand; their new book has already been attacked online by Hillary-friendly media watchdogs, not just because of Gerth’s old Whitewater coverage, but because it’s clear, from at least 30 footnote citations, that he and Van Atta were in close contact, during the late ‘90s, with the office of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. Given Starr’s role as chief sleuth in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Hillary fans may well cite that as sufficient proof of authorial bias.

It’s a sign of the times that the watchdogs at Media Matters for America, a non-profit Washington group, have sought to undercut this book even before it hit the shelves, by noting the Starr office citations and questioning the quality of Gerth’s Whitewater reporting. It’s also a sign of the times that Gerth and Van Atta, clearly anticipating these rebuttals, chose to rebut the rebuttals in advance, by contending in their book that Media Matters has long been “an aggressive protector of Hillary’s reputation,” and thus, presumably, is biased in her favor.

It’s not surprising that Hillary’s allies have targeted those two authors; compared to Bernstein, they’re far tougher on Hillary. Gerth underscored his book’s theme by contending yesterday, on Meet the Press, that “she plays fast and loose with the facts, she won’t admit a mistake,” an assessment that, at least superficially, could be made about George W. Bush.

Whereas Bernstein calls her “principled” and “well-intentioned” and motivated by her Methodist faith to do good, Gerth and Van Atta see her as a cold customer who eschews introspection by defining herself through action; she has, in their words, “a forced, artificial demeanor, a reinforced tendency toward arrogance and a belief that she is immune to the rules, and a sense that anyone who disagrees must be an enemy. It is a great challenge to ask Americans to get to know the authentic self of a person who in some ways has deliberately not gotten to know it herself.” They persuasively demonstrate that her “inflexibility and I-know-what’s best mindset” helped to precipitate the health care reform debacle of 1993.

At times they cut her some slack, by suggesting that she and Bill did have real enemies who were determined to destroy them, thus making it necessary to fight from a bunker in order to survive. On occasion, they even dismiss the critics who think that every Hillary action is the product of calculation. For instance, three weeks before the Lewinsky scandal broke, Bill and Hillary were spotted, courtesy of a telephoto lens, laughing and semi-snuggling on a beach. Some critics insisted the Clintons had staged the whole thing, to dispel doubts about their marriage, but Gerth and Van Atta quote approvingly from Hillary’s 2003 memoir: “Hello? Just name me any 50-year-old woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit – with her back toward the camera.”

Nevertheless, regarding the intersection of policy and politics, they do see her as a calculating Machiavelli. They buttress this assessment with some diligent reporting, focusing particularly on Hillary’s Senate career, which gets short shrift in the Bernstein book. The money chapters are about Iraq.

They painstakingly track Hillary’s ongoing attempts to distance herself from the vote she cast in 2002, authorizing President Bush to exercise the Iraq invasion option. Clearly she didn’t read the classified intelligence report that vigorously questioned Bush’s case for war – a report that had been made available to all senators – and she has since insisted that, by voting Yes, she was merely expecting that Bush would take new diplomatic steps to avoid war. But the war resolution itself didn’t require Bush to do that; moreover, she had already voted against a Democratic amendment that would have compelled Bush to take such steps before going to war. All told, they conclude, “Hillary was stuck in her own Iraq quagmire,” and she has been trying to extricate herself ever since.

More debatable, however, is the authors’ assertion that Bill and Hillary hatched a plan, way back in ‘70s, to put Bill in the Oval Office within 20 years – and then updated the plan in 1993, mapping out a presidency for Hillary as well. The authors breathlessly write, “Their audacious pact has remained a secret until now.” But Bernstein, in his book, doesn’t mention any “his and hers” agreement, and the heresay source cited by Gerth and Van Atta – the historian Taylor Branch, a Clinton family friend – insists now that he has never said any such thing. Last month he told a reporter that “the story is preposterous….I never heard either Clinton talk about a ‘plan’ for them both to become president.”

Gerth struck back yesterday, on Meet the Press, by contending that Branch is merely trying to cover for his pals: “Taylor is a respected historian, but he himself has admitted that when it comes to Bill Clinton he can’t be objective.” In other words, we’re stuck once again in the spin zone. We’ll never know whether there really was such a pact, but it hardly matters. All that matters, at least to the publishing world, is that Hillary is generating heat, and heat is what sells.

More books are in the pipeline (prominent biographer Sally Bedell Smith takes a crack at Hillary this autumn), recent books are still being flacked (a right-wing publisher just emailed me: “Find out the real truth about Hillary’s pathological need to lie”), and the Hillary enigma will endure. No outsider can definitively pierce what Bernstein calls her “camouflage,” and that probably suits her biographers, and the 24/7 media, just fine. It means that all Hillary theories are possible. It also suggests, unfortunately for us, that little is truly knowable.