Another Keystone milestone

I was remiss yesterday in not mentioning another key election that transpired Tuesday night here in the Keystone state, further evidence that an anti-incumbent/anti-Republican voter revolt could be in the works for November.

Voters in Chester County, a rock-ribbed Republican enclave of suburban Philadelphia, were invited to choose a new state senator. They went with the Democratic candidate, Andrew Dinniman -- and he'll be the first Democrat state senator to represent that county since the horse and buggy era. Republicans outnumber Democrats in that district by a 2-1 margin, yet Dinniman took 55 percent of the vote. Dinniman also won 22 of 26 muncipalities.

He and his Republican opponent, Carol Aichele, are both county commissioners. There were no scandals to skew the results. So what happened? Well, Skip Brion, the county Republican chairman, gave the local paper an instant analysis: "What happened here was obviously our voter base decided to send a message to us." And another Republican told the paper that voter dissatisfaction with the Republican leadership contributed to Aichele's defeat, even though she was not to blame.

Coupled with evidence that a significant number of Republican voters crossed over to vote for Dinniman, this election could have implications in November for Jim Gerlach, the Republican congressman whose district includes a large slice of Chester County, and who has only won narrowly in the past.

Gerlach has already been listed by non-partisan handicappers as one of the most vulnerable GOP incumbents nationwide, and now, as Pennsylvania analyst Terry Madonna noted the other day, the Dinniman election "should cause Republicans at the state level to be concerned about the ability of the Democrats to extend their reach in the suburbs....This is not good news for Gerlach. He will have a state official in his backyard who can help plan his political demise."

One can always argue -- as some diehard GOP defenders are doing -- that these are merely local results, with no ill portent for Republicans nationwide, but not even the party's top activists are buying that. They say that this is no time to be in denial.

Pat Toomey, president of the conservative Club for Growth said yesterday that what has happened in Pennsylvania "shows a very worrisome, elevated level of anger and frustration on the part of Republicans. In a primary, they can vent that by voting for challengers. The problem is, in a general election they stay home. It's a very worrisome sign for Republicans in Washington."

The Keystone uprising...and Al Gore rising?

So now we finally have solid empirical evidence that actual voters are in open revolt against the Republicans, also known as the incumbent governing party. I need look no further than the primary results last night in my own state.

Granted, the 12 fallen Republican incumbents were only state legislators, so maybe it's wrong to interpret these results as symptomatic of the national political mood. But Robert Jubelirer, the defeated state Senate President Pro Tempore, wasn't born yesterday, and he's the one who says "It is a historic year, my friends."

Jubelirer was ousted after 32 years in office, and Senate Majority leader David Brightbill, a 20-year veteran, suffered the same fate. Brightbill lost to a tire salesman whose ex-lover was suing him. This is the first time that top state legislative leaders have been ejected from their jobs since the year that the Philadelphia Phillies blew the pennant with 10 straight losses (that would be 1964).

Jubelirer had to spend $1.3 million on his primary campaign, but was beaten by a guy who spent around $200,000. Both leaders were punished for giving themselves a pay raise in a bill that passed at two in the morning, for enacting a series of state income tax hikes, and for expanding the size of state government at twice the rate of inflation. Grassroots Republican voters, using the Internet, spread word that the incumbents were arrogant and out of touch.

All told, this is shaping up to be the largest primary season turnover of Pennsylvania legislative seats in 30 years. One can argue that this is just a local squall. On the other hand, the grievances that animated conservative Pennsylvania voters last night (free-spending incumbents, betraying the GOP philosophy) are roughly similar to the current conservative base complaints against the GOP Congress in Washington.

It's also useful to remember that Pennsylvania in the past has foreshadowed the national mood; witness the special U.S. Senate election in 1991, when underdog Democrat Harris Wofford trounced ex-Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh by 10 percentage points, riding a wave of voter discontent over Republican inaction on health care and the economy. Bill Clinton won the presidency a year later.

By the way, there was one noteworthy GOP congressional primary race last night, in northeastern Pennsylvania. Three-term Republican congressman Don Sherwood got slapped around pretty badly. In both 2002 and 2004, this guy was untouchable; he didn't have to run in any primaries, because he never drew any challengers from within the GOP ranks. But this year was different, thanks to a little contretemps that sullied his conservative family-man image:

It turns out that Sherwood had a mistress 35 years his junior; this became widely known after the woman, Cynthia Ore, filed a $5.5-million lawsuit against Sherwood, claiming that he had tried to choke her while giving her a back rub at his Capitol Hill apartment. (Ore had called 911 at the time.) The suit was settled last November, but the uproar prompted an underdog Republican to challenge him in the primary. Sherwood wound up spending $300,000; the challenger, a political novice, spent around $5000.

Sherwood survived last night, but with with only 56 percent of the vote. Now he has to face Democrat Chris Carney, a former Pentagon intelligence officer, in November. He may well survive that faceoff - he represents a heavily Republican district - but this race is now listed by the nonpartisan National Journal as one of the 50 most competitive House races in 2006.

In a normal incumbent-friendly year, there's no way that Sherwood would crack the top 50. Kinky back rub, notwithstanding.

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On another topic entirely, I recall some weeks ago saying that it would be wise, regarding the 2008 Democratic presidential race, to keep an eye on Al Gore. The Wall Street Journal said the same thing nine days ago.

I'll say it again today. Leaving aside the fact that in recent months he has landed on the cover of three magazines and helmed the opening sketch on Saturday Night Live, he has now dropped a hint that his political ambitions might yet be freed from his lockbox. On Monday in Atlanta, he said: "I’m a recovering politician. But you always have to worry about a relapse.”

One sign that he's being taken seriously as a public figure: A business group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is bankrolled in part by Exxon, intends to head off Gore's new global warming documentary by inveighing against "global warming alarmism."

Well, as attacks go, that's not so bad. At least Big Oil isn't painting him as a liar who claimed to have invented the Internet. (Which, for the record, he never claimed to have done.)

The National Guard flipflop

What is it with President Bush and the National Guard, anyway? As a candidate, he got ambushed by all the reports about how he'd never finished his youthful tour of duty; and now, as president, his conservative base is skinning him alive for his largely symbolic decision to send a few thousand guardsmen to the border for backup duty.

Well, not to add to his woes on the Guard decision, but just take a look at these remarks, uttered last December on Fox News. The question, from Bill O'Reilly, was: Why not send National Guardsmen to the border to back up the border patrol?
Answer: "Well, the National Guard is really, first of all, not trained for that mission. I mean, the fact of the matter is the border is a special place. There are special challenges that are faced there...I think it would be a horribly over-expensive and very difficult way to manage the problem."

Care to guess who made those remarks?
The much-maligned Homeland Security director, Michael Chertoff.

So, on the issue of dispatching the Guard, I guess the administration was against it before they were for it.

The conservative activists don't mind the flipflop, per se. But they apparently detest the idea of sending only 6000 Guardsmen, which strikes them as wimpy and (the worst insult of all) "Clintonian." Some of today's highlights:

Mark Levin, a conservative legal activist, says today on his blog: "I didn't spend 35 years in the conservative movement for this. . . . This is pure idiocy, and (Bush's guest worker idea) has the potential of being far more damaging to this nation than any big-government power-grab perpetrated by any previous president and Congress."

Minneapolis lawyer and conservative blogger John Hinderaker: "He had his chance, and he blew it...President Bush doesn't have many chances left to salvage his second term. After (last night), he might not have any."

For a more complete roundup of today's right-wing Bush-bashing, check here and here.

The downside of having convictions

In today's Inquirer, I assessed the political side of President Bush's prime-time immigration speech, but there is more that needs to be said. In a sense, consider these supplemental remarks to be a tribute to Bush's stubborn convictions.

Yes, he felt compelled to lean rightward on border enforcement (at least symbolically) because the anti-immigrant right-wingers have been putting the squeeze on him. But he didn't go belly up and pander, either. He still managed to slap them around pretty well, with this passage:

"We cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger, or playing on anyone's fears, or exploiting the issue of immigration for political gain. We must always remember that real lives will be affected by our debates and decisions, and that every human being has dignity and value no matter what their citizenship papers say."

That's presidential politesse, of course, but what it means in plain English is this: "People in my own base are acting like racists and demagogues, and they oughta knock it off."

Also, I don't sense that Bush favors a slow-assimilation guest-worker program just because he thinks it would be politically advantageous to bring Hispanic voters into the GOP. That's only one factor. Conservative thinker James Pinkerton, who worked in the senior George Bush's White House, provided useful context in his own column this morning:

"...Bush has held a pro-immigration opinion for a long time. His business background convinced him that low-wage immigration was good for the economy, Karl Rove convinced him that Hispanic immigrants could become future Republicans, and his father -- who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement back in 1992 -- convinced him that the Bush destiny was to preside over improved U.S.-Mexico relations. As governor of Texas, he was proud to show off his Spanish; as president, he has been no foe of bilingualism."

So I sensed last night that Bush was truly sincere when said this: "We must honor the great American tradition of the melting pot, which has made us one Nation out of many peoples. The success of our country depends upon helping newcomers assimilate into our society, and embrace our common identity as Americans...from cleaning offices to running offices ... from a life of low-paying jobs to a diploma, a career, and a home of their own. When immigrants assimilate and advance in our society, they realize their dreams...they renew our spirit...and they add to the unity of America."

Passages like that won't help him heal the growing breach with many on the right -- particularly those House Republicans who have already passed a bill to build a border fence and send the illegals back home. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter who sides with the enforcement-only faction, framed the political stakes this morning on his blog:

"With last night's speech, President Bush severely worsened the schism in the party over immigration. The people he has put in gravest danger are those who most strenuously disagree with him: the House Republicans. Depressed turnout among Republican core voters threatens House members most - with one ironic possible result being an even more liberal immigration bill next year that will gain support from the president, Senate Republicans and a new Democratic House majority."

It's ironic that Bush, the reputed conservative, is suffering some of his worst damage on an issue on which he is actually a genuine moderate. That's politics for ya.

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Speaking of the prospects for sluggish Republican turnout, I wrote a weekend newspaper column about the GOP's counter-strategy: to invoke the specter of "House Speaker Pelosi" as well as other purportedly scary Democrats, as a turnout motivation tool. Anybody still interested in this topic can find a new report, here.

Karl is still Rove-ing the land

Mark Twain once had a line about how reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. We can say the same about Karl Rove.

Last Friday, a report on a website -- which I will not link here, because I didn't believe it -- insisted that not only has President Bush's political swami been secretly indicted, but that he already has informed a number of White House officials in advance. The rumor was so hot by Saturday that an announcement of Rove's indictment was made from the podium at a Michigan trial lawyers association dinner, prompting a standing ovation.

But there he was earlier today, still innocent of any charges that may or may not be brought, speaking in Washington to one of his favorite conservative groups, the American Enterprise Institute. It's worth noting his most interesting remarks, which I excerpt below:

Referring to the mood of the nation, he said, "I think the war looms over everything. No doubt about it....Look, we're in a sour time. I readily admit it. To be in the middle of a war where people turn on their television set and see people dying is not something that makes people happy and optimistic and upbeat.
"I heard the same kind of language about the 2004 election. We're going to be just fine on the fall elections. We stand for... a strong national defense, (winning) the war on terrorism, which involves victory in Iraq, strong national defense, economic policies that are pro-growth involving tax cuts and free trade, fiscal restraint in the budget process. Our opponents at this point stand for little more than...obstructionism....
"The American people are a center-right country presented with center-right candidates will vote center-right candidates....
"I know our own polls. I love reading your polls. I love this (media) mania that substitutes polls for substance. There's going to be a special Betty Ford addiction for those who are addicted to regular poll numbers. The polls I believe (are those) that get run through the (Republican National Committee). I look at them all the time. Americans like this person. (His) personal approval ratings are in the 60s. Job approval is lower. What that says to me is that people like him, they respect him, he's someone they feel a connection with, but they're just sour on the war. And that's the way it's going to be. We'll just fight our way through."

(Whoa, time out for a second: Rove thinks that more than 60 percent of Americans still like and respect Bush? I suppose there's always the chance that the RNC is right and every single other polling operation is wrong, and that would certainly gibe with the administration's general confidence in its own rightness. But, for the record, let us note that the late-April Gallup poll reported that only 39 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Bush personally; that a separate late-April Gallup poll, cosponsored by USA Today and CNN, found that only 40 percent of Americans viewed Bush as honest and trustworthy; and that the new CBS-New York Times poll reports that only 29 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Bush personally. That's down from 64 percent, as reported by CBS-NYT during the summer of 2002.)

Anyway, those Rove remarks were all in response to audience questions. What's most striking was that his formal address was almost entirely a numbing rendition of economic statistics, designed to demonstrate that Bush deserves political credit for a healthy economy. In other words, his chosen theme totally ignored Iraq. I'm sure that those polls he professes to ignore had no influence whatsoever on his choice of topic.

By the way, the issue of Rove's possible indictment did surface -- but only once, and in an oblique fashion, during the question phase. David Corn of The Nation decided to raise a sensitive topic:

Two years ago, Rove had informed Bush press flak Scott McClellan that he, Rove, had played no role in the outing of CIA employe Valerie Plame, wife of Bush critic Joseph Wilson. Later, it turned out that Rove had indeed played a role, by discussing Plame with a Time magazine reporter. (This is one reason why Rove could be indicted.)

So, Corn asked Rove today: "Scott McClellan told the White House press corps--many are here today--that he had spoken to you and you were not involved in the CIA leak. Can you explain why the American public...two and a half years later hasn't been given an explanation? Don't you think it deserves one, for it does seem that you were to some degree--though it may be disputed--involved in that leak?"

Rove said only that his lawyer had issued a statement on April 26, end of response. It turns out that the April 26 comment only addressed Rove's legal status, and didn't deal with the issue Corn was raising. Here is Corn's recounting of what happened today.

Farewell, parallel universe

West Wing, that venerable liberal wet dream, took its final bow on NBC last night, ushering in the Matt Santos administration with so much schmaltzy earnestness that, by 8:45 pm, even the most dewy-eyed Democratic viewer was probably hungering for the street-smart cynicism of The Sopranos at 9.

And yet, there was an odd and intriguing little detail, amidst all the blowing of trumpets, and the solemn musical chairs among wistful and highly verbose policy wonks. At one point, the moving guys stormed into Jeb Bartlet's Oval Office and began to strip the place clean. They went to the bookshelves...whereupon the camera lingered on a volume, Society Must be Defended, by the French political philosopher Michel Foucault.

Why him, of all people? Are we to believe that Bartlet, the earnest idealist from New Hampshire, actually had a secret cynical side? Here's Michel Foucault, who died a few decades ago, summarizing his views: "The role of history will, then, be to show that laws deceive, that kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and that historians tell lies."

No matter. The best of angels of our nature triumphed in the end: There was Bartlet riding to the Inauguration with Santos, a seamless handover of power from one high-minded Democrat to another. And that got me thinking: When was the last time that an exiting Democratic president bequeathed his job to a Democratic successor? I ran to my almanac.
Ready?
It was 1856.
Franklin Pierce to James Buchanan.

And this is why West Wing was the ultimate liberal wet dream.

Sunday sermons from Mary and John

Mary Cheney is a tad puzzling. The vice president's openly lesbian daughter was on Fox News this morning, still exuding outrage that John Kerry referred to her as openly lesbian during a 2004 presidential debate. As she told Chris Wallace, "I think it was a pretty sleazy thing to do."

I was there that night, in Arizona, and when Kerry brought up Mary Cheney ("she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as"), we scribes nodded knowingly at each other, because we could see what Kerry was doing. Of course it was a hardball political act on his part. He was going for a two-fer:

1. By mentioning to viewers that Mary was gay, Kerry was hoping to shock those religious conservatives who might be hearing that fact for the first time, and thereby dampen their enthusiasm for the Bush-Cheney ticket.
2. And, more importantly, Kerry was charging Bush-Cheney with hypocrisy, for tolerating and supporting an open lesbian family member who was living with another woman, while, orchestrating a state-by-state referendum campaign to ban gay marriage.

Which brings us back to Mary Cheney today. In addition to calling Kerry's move "sleazy" on Fox News, she charges in her new book: ''What was offensive was that he was trying to use me and my sexual orientation for his own political gain.'' She also called Kerry an SOB.

By now, you might be hip to Mary's blind spot.

Here was the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, in the midst of its nationwide effort to use gay people for their own political gain -- by getting anti-gay marriage referenda on ballots in key states, in order to gin up conservative turnout -- and Mary today is still most outraged about the Democratic challenger. Moreover, Kerry had brought up her name in response to some comments that Bush had just made -- about his opposition to gay marriage.

It was Mary's party that was trying to intrude on her personal life, by passing laws curbing her personal choices. It was Mary's party that had put the gay issue on the table in that election. It was Mary's party that had made the issue fodder for discussion during that debate. It was Mary's party that got the issue on the ballot in Ohio, thereby attracting anti-gay voters and helping Bush win that pivotal state by a thin margin.

And yet she's still outraged at the Democrats...for saying something that was true. And, having vented again on that subject today, she then tried to have it both ways -- by criticizing the idea of amending the U.S. Constitution to ban same-sex marriage ("I would also hope that no one would think about trying to amend the constitution as a political strategy, that people wouldn't try and use amending the constitution to further their own political goals").

Well, guess what: her own party, in the Senate, is planning to bring up that idea for a vote next month, as a conservative base motivating tool. I haven't heard President Bush seeking to dissuade the Senate Republicans from doing so. In fact, the Republicans are trying again this year to get those referenda on state ballots, in time for the November congressional elections. But in Mary's view, Bush is "a very good man. On these issues, he hasn't caught up."

Yet it's Kerry who is the SOB.

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Well, the Straight Talk Express stopped at Jerry Falwell's college this weekend for some long-scheduled sweet talk with the Falwell student body. I caught the commencement speech earlier this evening on C-Span. Two observations:

1. McCain, who once called Falwell an "agent of intolerance," has absolved Falwell of that harsh sobriquet (because now he needs Falwell, as an ambassador to religious conservatives). Now he has found a new agent of intolerance:

"When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people....I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me....All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them.
"It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium."

There it is, an anti-media punch line for the 21st century. I guess all those blogger barbs about his rightward positioning have stung a bit.

2. He stood foresquare behind the war in Iraq: "My patriotism and my conscience required me to support it and to engage in the debate over whether and how to fight it.... I stand that ground because I believed, rightly or wrongly, that my country’s interests and values required it...Should we lose this war, our defeat will further destabilize an already volatile and dangerous region, strengthen the threat of terrorism, and unleash furies that will assail us for a very long time. I believe the benefits of success will justify the costs and risks we have incurred."

He is at least as hawkish on Iraq as the president whom he supports. Which again prompts a key question: If he becomes the '08 GOP nominee, would he really be able to sustain his past popularity among swing-voting independents and moderate Democrats -- when most of those voters have already soured on the war?

Saturday potpurri

I suggested here on Thursday that most Americans might not take kindly to the idea of the National Security Agency scrutinizing their phone records, with the blessing of the phone companies who bill us every month. So when the Washington Post released a quickie poll on Friday morning, showing that 63 percent of Americans were giving the surveillance program a thumbs-up, I was quickly informed by triumphalist emailers that not only do I hate America, but I am also obviously not in touch with the average person's fear of terrorism.

And Friday was also a good day for the pro-Bush conservatives, who reveled in that poll; witness Mark Levin, a legal activist who wrote on his blog, "Once again the American people prove they are smarter than the media and political elites. They understand that we are at war, that the enemy had infiltrated our country successfully and unleashed devastating attacks against their fellow citizens, and that all this talk about an imperial presidency and violations of privacy rights is ACLU pabulum."

I advised my emailers not to get too giddy. I suggested that the first poll was probably akin to the early polls on the Iraq war, that the first reaction of most people was to assume that the government was doing the right thing, and that support for the phone-data program could wane over time as more information about its workings came to light, or as the ramifications for privacy became clearer.

Well, that didn't take long.

Newsweek has a new poll out today, after surveying twice as many people as the Post did, and it reports that 53 percent of Americans think the NSA program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” while 41 percent feel otherwise. (Among the independent swing voters, it's 56 percent to 41 percent.)

Moreover, the Newsweek poll posed a far more specific question. Whereas the Post only asked whether the NSA program was "acceptable" or "unacceptable," Newsweek's pollsters asked Americans to choose between "goes too far" or "it is a necessary tool to combat terrorism."

In other words, the pro-Bush conservatives are premature in thinking that the President won the PR battle at the starting gate. In his parlance, he faces "hard work" on this issue, especially with ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden facing Senate scrutiny next week on his CIA nomination.

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By the way, you think there's any chance that Qwest will be flooded with prospective new customers who will beg them to come East?

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I also noted the other day that Democratic chairman Howard Dean is at loggerheads with other party leaders over tactics, money, and the proper use of precious resources. And vice versa. He has already spent most of the money he has raised, spreading it around to states where Democrats are not well poised to win anything in November. That practice -- blowing all his money -- is better known in a politics as a "high burn rate," and he did the same thing when he ran for president. By the time he staggered screaming out of Iowa, in round one of the '04 primaries, most of his money was already gone.

On CNN late Thursday, I heard this shot across Dean's bow, courtesy of ex-Democratic strategist Paul Begala, who is still close to Hillary and Bill Clinton:
"He's in trouble, in that campaign managers, candidates, are really angry with him. He raised $74 million and spent $64 million. He says it's a long-term strategy. But what he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose. That's now how you build a party. You win elections. That's how you build a party."

Translation: If Hillary Clinton wins the '08 nomination, say, by clinching it in the early primaries, Howard Dean would be well advised to start scrawling "Burlington, Vermont" with magic marker on his packing boxes at the Democratic National Committee, because he will be going home.

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Bush is slated to give a televised speech Monday night on the immigration issue. That fact alone is a testament to the administration's growing concern about its disaffected conservative base. Many of his followers -- or ex-followers, as the case may be -- think that he's a wimp on the immigration issue because he wants to let a lot of the illegals stay here. The base calls that "amnesty." So, in his speech, expect him to float a lot of get-tough border enforcement ideas. Then it's off to the border for a photo-op. This paean to the conservative base could be a big story early next week, unless Karl Rove gets indicted. The rumors persist.

The Bush base bailout

I’m on the road today – I’m slated to be on a panel that will debate whether the media has been too hard or too soft on President Bush – so forgive me if this blog entry is a bit undernourished. In fact, let’s just turn it over to Peggy Noonan.

In yesterday’s Inquirer, I wrote a column about Bush’s sliding poll numbers. I don’t normally do poll-driven stories, but the current situation is particularly newsworthy, because of the solid evidence that followers in his conservative/Republican base are starting to bail in significant numbers. (This morning, in fact, the Wall Street Journal reports that a new Harris survey pegs Bush’s overall approval rating at his lowest ever, 29 percent.)

It is Noonan, the former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, who provides the best insights into why so many conservatives and Republicans are bailing on the current president. Writing yesterday in the Journal, here are the key excerpts:

“(T)he administration and the Congress are losing their base, but it isn’t because of the media….The Republicans talk about cutting spending, but (instead) they increase it – a lot. They stand for making government smaller, but they keep making it bigger. They say they’re concerned about our borders, but they’re not securing them. And they seem to think we’re slobs for worrying. Republicans used to be sober and tough about foreign policy, but now they’re sort of romantic and full of emotionalism. They talk about cutting taxes, and they have, but the cuts are provisional, temporary. Beyond that, there’s something creepy about increasing spending so much, and not paying the price right away but instead rolling it over and onto our kids, and their kids....What’s a voter to do? Maybe stay home….One gets the impression that party leaders, deep in their hearts believe that the base is…unsophisticated. Primitive….But if history is a guide, the base is about to teach them a lesson instead.”

Sounds like a great political opportunity for the Democrats, but there are no guarantees that they won’t screw it up. Note, for example, that party chairman Howard Dean is heatedly at odds with the party leaders on Capitol Hill who didn’t want him to be chairman in the first place. Dean wants to spend money on organization in all 50 states, but his many party establishment detractors think he is wasting precious bucks in a lot of red states where Democrats don’t have a prayer of gaining ground in the November congressional elections.

And nobody should overlook the track record of Bush maestro Karl Rove, notably his longstanding ability to turn the tables and paint the Democrats as weak, wimpy, wobbly, feckless, and frightening. With emphasis on the frightening. In fact,, the key strategy for re-energizing Peggy Noonan’s grousers will boil down to this message:

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I hope to write about that, in detail, this weekend.

And if anything insightful happens on that aforementioned press panel, I’ll pass it along here.

All past statements are inoperative

Once again, we are witnessing a presidential credibility gap.

In the wake of today's revelation that the National Security Agency since 2001 has been secretly amassing the home and business phone records of tens of millions of ordinary Americans, most of whom aren't suspected of any crime -- in other words, a purely domestic surveillance program -- it becomes necessary to revisit certain Bush administration statements, and to reclassify them as untrue.

1. President Bush, August 2004: "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires--a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so....because we value the Constitution."

That turned out to be untrue, in the wake of the news last December that the NSA was monitoring international calls between people here and people abroad. The NSA was doing it without a court order, even though warrants are apparently required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which states that it is "the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance...may be conducted," even ""during time of war."

2. After that program was revealed by the New York Times, thereby rendering Bush's 2004 statement inoperative, Bush stated anew on Jan. 25 of this year that Americans at home need not be concerned, because "the program applies only to international communications. In other words, one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

3. A White House spokeman also said NSA spying was not domestic in nature: "This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner."

4. A strong assurance came from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 6: "First, only international communications are authorized for interception...to protect the privacy of Americans still further, the NSA employs safeguards to minimize the unnecessary collection and dissemination of information about U.S. persons."

5. A stronger assurance came from Gonzalez, during an exchange on April 6 with the House Judiciary Committee. Check this out.
Q: "Can you assure us that there is no warrantless surveillance of calls between two Americans within the United States?"
GONZALES: "That is not what the president has authorized."
Q: "Can you assure us that it's not being done?"
GONZALES: "As I indicated in response to an earlier question, no technology is perfect (but) we do have minimization procedures in place..."
Q: "But you're not doing that deliberately?"
GONZALES: "That is correct."

All those statements now appear inoperative, in the wake of today's report that the NSA successfully leaned on all the phone companies (except QWest) to cooperate in its purely domestic program to collect "external" data on millions of citizens, and ultimately, in the words of one inside source, "to create a database of every call ever made" in America. And, just as adherence to FISA was deemed unnecessary for the international program, adherence to Section 222 of the federal Communications Act was deemed unnecessary for the domestic program. (Under that law, phone companies are barred from releasing information on customer calling habits - such as who gets called, or how often. And the law also covers incoming calls.)

So now we have new operative statement from the president, issued earlier today. Considering the administration's record, it probably requires some parsing. He stated: "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans." That can be classified as a non-denial denial. Bush never specifically denied the news that the NSA has indeed been running a purely domestic program. He was merely insisting that the collection, analysis, and storage of people's phone call records should not equated with "trolling" through their personal lives.

No doubt, there will be another debate about the legalities of all this -- I see that Bush's defenders are already online saying that this newly-revealed program is constitutional -- but, for now, I am more interested in its political dimension.

Last winter, the polls reported that a slight majority of Americans were OK with the idea that Bush was monitoring international calls, and it was clear earlier this week that he was relishing the opportunity of defending that program when ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden comes up for scrutiny as the new nominee to run CIA. But what about now? It will be instructive to watch the polls, and gauge the reaction of Americans to this domestic program, because this is now the factual shorthand:

The Bush administration got the telecommunication firms to fork over data that will enable it to track every call made by every American. It's likely that conservatives who are concerned about privacy rights will sound off about this. It's arguably less likely that many Democrats, still fearing to appear "weak on terrorism," will do the same.

Nevertheless, expect to hear the lawmakers make noise about conducting (yet another) probe of the administration's conduct. After all, the Bush administration has already demonstrated that it won't probe itself. For instance:

Recently, the Justice Department's ethics office launched a probe that was intended to scrutinize the actions of the government lawyers who had signed off in secret on the international surveillance program (the one that was revealed last December). But today we learn that the ethics office investigators hit a brick wall -- because they were denied the requisite security clearances.

Guy from HUD walks into a room...

I began today with another pleasurable visit to my "reader line," the voicemail service that keeps me in touch with the dissatisfied customer. The first fella in the queue said: "I've never read anything that you've ever said positive about our president or about our country or about anything. Everything has been extremely negative...I feel sorry for you."

Well, what can I say? I suppose I could burst into song, like Maria in The Sound of Music, and croon about "My Favorite Things," all of which can be found on my blog profile, anyway. But this job is about watching the folks in power and exercising due vigiliance. And today, for instance, it would be hard to wax positive about President Bush's man at HUD, Alphonso Jackson.

You ask, who's Alphonso Jackson? He's secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. And even though much of the media (including my own newspaper) has either overlooked or ignored the Jackson saga that has unfolded in recent days, it's worth recounting if only for its entertainment value.

Jackson has been caught in a messy and embarrassing situation, and here is his best defense:
I am a liar.

This is no exaggeration. But let's start from the beginning:
On April 28, Jackson delivered a speech in Dallas to the Real Estate Executive Council, a national consortium of minority-owned real estate agencies. During that speech, he said that he didn't want to award federal money to anyone who didn't like President Bush.

And - as reported in the Dallas Business Journal - he related this detailed, specific anecdote about one prospective minority contractor:

"(This contractor) had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years. He made a heck of a proposal and was on the list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something ... he said, 'I have a problem with your president.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect - the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell (me).'"

Jackson then told his Dallas audience, "He didn't get the contract. Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

Well, first of all, such conduct on Jackson's part -- denying a contract because the contractor lacked political loyalty to the leader -- would appear to be a violation of the impartiality requirements in federal law, specifically 48 CFR 3.101-1:
"Government business shall be conducted in a manner above reproach and, except as authorized by statute or regulation, with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none. Transactions relating to the expenditure of public funds require the highest degree of public trust and an impeccable standard of conduct."

But naturally, the saga got wierder once the spinners got to work.

Jackson's speech sparked an uproar on Capitol Hill, among Democrats who were concerned that the federal procurement process was being skewed by a GOP appointee on the basis of political loyalty. This in turn prompted a defiant defense of Jackson by a HUD flak, Dustee Tucker. She supplied fresh details to the Dallas journal on May 3, saying that the dispute concerned "an advertising contract with a minority publication," but that the rejected contractor had persisted in "trashing, in a very aggressive way" the president.

Again, that explanation raised questions about violations of federal law.
But then the explanation changed.

The new explanation, offered a couple days ago, goes like this: Jackson made the whole thing up.

As reported here and here, spokeswoman Tucker now says that the HUD secretary's story was "hypothetical," that, in reality, Jackson "did not actually meet with someone and turn down a contract. He's not part of the contracting process."
And yesterday, in the wake of a report that the HUD inspector general was examining the incident, Jackson stepped forward to say this: "I deeply regret the anecdotal remarks I made at a recent Texas small business forum and would like to reassure the public that all HUD contracts are awarded solely on a stringent merit-based process. During my tenure, no contract has ever been awarded, rejected, or rescinded due to the personal or political beliefs of the recipient."

How negative of me to ask these questions:
Can we believe with confidence that explanation number two -- that the story is untrue -- is really true?
Would Jackson have come forward to assert that he had lied to his audience if a furor had not ensued on Capitol Hill and in the HUD inspector general's office?
And if he really did make the whole thing up, why would he want to volunteer the notion --again, apparently illegal -- that Bush opponents are turned away if they ask for federal contracts?

Maybe, to quote Porter Goss, it's just "one of those mysteries."

Battling for the 'burbs

Check out these proposals, currently being readied for the legislative mill on Capitol Hill:

A bill that would help preserve open space.
A bill that would promote tax-free college savings plans.
A bill that would help local officials conduct background checks on teachers and coaches.
A bill that would create a better database to track sex offenders.

These ideas, and five others, all slated to be formally unveiled today, have been cooked up by 50 House Republicans who call themselves the Suburban Agenda Caucus. It doesn't take a genius to see what's going on:

1. These 50 GOP lawmakers know that success or failure in the 2006 congressional elections will hinge on their performance in the suburbs, where most of the electorate now lives.

2. Many of their suburban districts, once reliably Republican in sentiment, have now become more competitive (many moderate Republican voters have been turned off by the GOP's social conservatism; and there has been an influx of Democratic voters, relocating from nearby cities).

3. Eighteen of these 50 lawmakers have been specifically targeted for defeat by national Democratic strategists, and a number of non-partisan analysts consider those Republicans to be vulnerable. The overall Democratic list includes Deborah Pryce (suburbs near Columbus, Ohio), Michael Fitzpatrick and Jim Gerlach (both in suburbs near Philadelphia), and Christopher Shays and Nancy Johnson (both in the Connecticut suburbs).

4. All are generally fearful that the 2006 congressional elections will be a disaster if they are forced to run on the legacy of their leader in the White House. So naturally they are anxious to distance themselves from President Bush, by steering the subject away from the national issues that appear to be working against them (Iraq, gas prices, Iraq, Katrina/competence, Iraq, Jack Abramoff, and Iraq).

Which brings us to these very Clintonesque suburban proposals, all designed to show that Republicans care, that they feel a real connection with their constituents' everyday concerns. Why do I call their approach Clintonesque? Because the president whom they impeached is the same guy who pioneered modest, bite-sized, poll-driven policy ideas back in 1996 (remember his ideas -- or maybe they were pollster Dick Morris' ideas -- about school uniforms and mandatory school curfews?). And now the Republicans find his approach to be useful, to save their own skins.

As Robert Lang, who studies the suburbs at the Metropolitan Institute, tells the Chicago Tribune today, "The outlook for the Republicans is grim, unless they are able to connect directly to local constituent concerns, quality-of-life issues and solving problems that seem apolitical."

The problem, however, is that these nine suburb-friendly bills might not be enough to cancel out the national trends that seem to be breaking against the GOP. It is noteworthy, for instance, that this suburban agenda doesn't even mention cultural issues. There's nothing here about abortion, or stem cells, or gays.

And it's easy to see why: the national party keeps taking conservative stances on those issues, and those stances turn off a lot of suburban voters, particularly those who live in the socially tolerant inner suburbs near big cities. (In my own backyard, I am thinking of Bucks and Montgomery counties, outside of Philadelphia). Yet, sure enough, the Republican leadership has scheduled an early-June vote on a federal amendment to ban gay marriage. From, the perspective of the Suburban Agenda Caucus, that might not be the ideal focus.

By the way, on the topic of President Bush today, is America ready for this?






,

The kossing of Hillary Clinton

Incoming!
Over the weekend, the U.S.S. Hillary Clinton took a hit off the port bow from uber blogger Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the left-leaning Daily Kos and a spokesman for the liberal netroots activists who see themselves as the future of the Democratic party. Writing a guest column in The Washington Post, he kossed the '08 frontrunner as "a heartless, passionless machine," establishment puppet, and heir to the Bill Clinton legacy "that decimated the national Democratic party" during the '90s.

So there it is, laid bare:
Even at a time when virtually all liberals and Democrats are united in their hunger to defeat President Bush's GOP in 2006 and win back the White House in 2008, there's still enough energy for some serious intramural animosity. The Moulitsas manifesto is clearly intended as a warning to what he calls the "D.C. insiders" that a Hillary Clinton candidacy will be resisted by "those of us in the netroots," whom he claims will soon be wielding major clout over the nomination process. In his words, "real power in the party has shifted."

I have several reactions.
1. His remarks are a signal that the '08 Democratic race will be turbulent (at least until the front-loaded primary calendar yields a quick winner), because the liberal netrooters seem intent on finding their own candidate -- someone who is either a blank slate on Iraq (perhaps ex-Virginia governor Mark Warner), or openly antiwar (perhaps Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold), and prompting their Internet donors to put up the bucks.

That, in itself, will be a test of whether the netrooters are truly capable of exercising "real power," or whether, as many suspect, their professed prowess is mostly hype. And it will be interesting to see, over the next 18 months, whether further attacks from the liberal netroots will tempt Clinton to tiptoe leftward, at the expense of her red-state centrist strategy (which I recently saw in action, during a visit to Kentucky).

2. Applying the same fact-checking techniques that prove so fruitful when gauging the claims of the Bush regime, it appears that many of Moulitsas' arguments lack forensic merit. For instance, to buttress his argument that the netroots are the new power brokers, he lauds "Howard Dean's transformation campaign" of 2004, which, as he sees it, sent the message that "no longer would D.C. insiders impose their candidates on us without our input."

Somehow he overlooked the fact that Dean was transformative only up until the moment when he had to face real voters. Then the real voters sent him packing. He lost 17 of 18 primaries. I was in Iowa when it all started, and I sat in many kitchens talking to average Democrats, mostly grassroots liberals, and very few of them cared a whit about Dean's netroots apparatus. On the contrary, they judged Dean as too inexperienced, particularly on foreign policy. They moved toward John Kerry not because he was "imposed" by "D.C. insiders," but because he seemed to have the strongest foreign policy experience of anyone in the Democratic field that winter.

3. Which brings me to another point. Moulitsas dismisses Hillary Clinton as "the establishment's choice," but, in reality, she is trouncing her Democratic '08 rivals in the early polls because she has a lot of support from rank-and-file Democrats who are far removed from the Washington Beltway.

In other words, the liberal netrooters are just one constituency within the broader ranks of party activists, including state and local elected officials, union members, volunteer canvassers, public employes -- all of whom may read the liberal blogs and even send money sometimes, but nevertheless are not guided by the blogthink.

4. It's also noteworthy that, in order to fuel his criticism of Hillary Clinton, he assailed her husband for failing to breach the 50 percent mark in either of his presidential races, somehow overlooking the fact that he was nevertheless the only Democrat to win two terms of office since Franklin D. Roosevelt... and that to this day, many African Americans in particular (another powerful bloc within the party base) wish that Clinton could have run for a third term. I personally saw that sentiment while talking to southern blacks during the 2004 primaries.

None of this means that I am making a brief for Hillary Clinton, and I have no idea at this point whether she is electable (not a single friend of mine believes that she is, although conservative commentator John Podhoretz seems to think so). Nor does this mean that I am dismissing the netrooters out of hand, or that I share centrist Democratic analyst Marshall Wittmann's view that they're all just "McGovernites with modems."

But they have yet to prove that their clout is as great as they claim it is, or that they can effectively sink Hillary's ship. I'll keep an open mind on that. Moulitsas is hosting a big conference next month in Las Vegas; it's intended in part to trumpet the netrooters' prowess, and I'm looking forward to showing up and taking their measure.

Goss, hookers, clueless constitutionalists...Who needs novelists?

Great novels about Washington have been exceedingly rare, and I suspect it's because (to paraphrase sportswriter Red Smith), reality is constantly strangling invention.
Which is a fancy way of saying, You just can't make this stuff up.

For instance, here is today's multi-faceted bemusement:

1. Porter Goss has abruptly quit his job at CIA director, and when asked by CNN to explain why, he responds that it's "just one of those mysteries." This can be interpreted in several ways: (a) He doesn't know why he's leaving his job; perhaps he has simply sleepwalked out of the post after borrowing some of Patrick Kennedy's Ambien. (b) He knows darn well why he's leaving, but he simply chooses not to tell the American taxpayers, who are paying the salaries of the people entrusted to keep the country safe.

2. A mystery leaves us all free to speculate, and even though "intelligence sources" tell us that it's just the result of a turf war with national intelligence director John Negroponte, we shouldn't necessarily ignore the Dusty Foggo factor. Dusty Foggo...isn't that a great name for a scandal figure? Dusty Foggo -- the CIA executive director (number three in the hierarchy), appointed to the post by Porter Goss -- has been linked (last week, by the Wall Street Journal) to a pair of defense contractors who are being officialy scrutinized in connection with bribing a member of Congress and Pentagon officials.

But that's not the seamy stuff. Goss' guy is also under investigation, by the FBI as well as the CIA inspector general, for his attendance, along with some unnamed congressmen, at a number of suspicious poker parties hosted by those defense contractors since the 1990s. It appears, as the Journal reported, that the businessmen (one of whom was a major Bush fundraiser in 2004) brought in prostitutes as part of their wining-and-dining pursuit of federal contracts. One congressmen in regular attendance was Republican Duke Cunningham, who recently gave up his California seat in exchange for spending time in the slammer after his conviction for taking bribes.

And -- here's one of the true-life plot points that strangles invention -- these fun parties took place at a famous Washington locale. The Watergate.

Could any of this possibly have anything to do with Goss' resignation? Even as a contributing factor? Nah, it's gotta be a "turf war"....but wait, here's one report out of Washington which indicates that members of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board wanted Goss ousted in part because of that party scene ("Alarms were set off at the advisory board by a widening FBI sex and cronyism investigation that's targeted Foggo, the No.3 official at the CIA, and also touched on Goss himself...").

3. And now President Bush wants to replace Goss with a guy who has already demonstrated that he doesn't understand the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.

Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, has been one of the staunchest defenders of Bush's warrantless surveillance program. Clearly, by nominating Hayden to be the nation's top spook, Bush wants to pick a fresh fight with Congress over the surveillance program, in the hopes of giving strategist Karl Rove some fresh evidence that Democrats running for re-election are security softies just because they believe in court warrants.

Indeed, Senate Republicans sent a fundraising letter last week, warning that if Democrats took control of a congressional chamber, they would put the war on terrorism "on the back burner." True enough, polls last winter showed that a thin majority of Americans backed Bush's domestic spy program, when the issue was defined as a choice between the abstract and the visceral, i.e. a choice between civil liberties and personal safety. Bush doesn't enjoy an edge on much of anything else right now, so perhaps it makes political sense for him to bring up the spy program again (especially since most Democrats fled for the hills when liberal Senator Russ Feingold proposed censuring Bush over the program).

On the flip side, however, Bush is less popular today than he was even in January, so perhaps this issue won't give him the traction he seeks. The latest Gallup poll, released today, puts his approval rating at a record-low 31 percent; disapproval, 65 percent.

Anyway, I digress. The important point is, even some Republicans, including Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, are raising concerns about Hayden because of the spy program. And, regarding that topic, here's the part that's better than fiction:

Hayden doesn't know what's in the Fourth Amendment, which was crafted to guard Americans' privacy.

Last January, while defending the warrantless program, he tussled with Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay, who is one of the sharpest pros in the Washington press corps. The transcript goes like this:

LANDAY: "...the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to violate an American's right against unreasonable searches and seizures..."
HAYDEN: "No, actually - the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure."
LANDAY: "But the --"
HAYDEN: "That's what it says."
LANDAY: "The legal measure is probable cause, it says."
HAYDEN: "The Amendment says: unreasonable search and seizure."
LANDAY: "But does it not say 'probable cause'?"
HAYDEN: "No! The Amendment says unreasonable search and seizure."
LANDAY: "The legal standard is probable cause, General -- "
HAYDEN: "Just to be very clear ... and believe me, if there's any Amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. Alright? And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. The constitutional standard is 'reasonable.'"

Oh, really?
Read the Fourth Amendment for yourself:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." (Emphasis added.)

I loved the Washington satirical novel Thank You For Smoking. But with apologies to Christopher Buckley, this stuff is better.

Lieberman, the Director's Cut

The fruits of my sojourn to Connecticut are available here, in a newspaper column about the liberal revolt against Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman. Thanks in part to his support for President Bush on the war in Iraq, he's facing a serious challenge from antiwar candidate Ned Lamont in an August party primary. This, in itself, is a very rare event, because Connecticut has long been a state where party discipline reigns and incumbents are generally revered.

Notwithstanding the length of my print dispatch, however, there is much more to be said on the subject. So today, in the parlance of our DVD culture, I'm going to restore some deleted scenes, and append some director's commentary:

Lieberman campaign manager Sean Smith, during a long conversation in his office, said: "The senator does feel a little wounded (by the personal nature of the liberal attacks on him). But once his competitive juices start flowing, it becomes a fight. And he also feels inspired by the past: the strong, idealistic foreign policy, as exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. That's the Democratic party that he joined. He has been consistent to those values his whole career.
"So it's a little discouraging to see that a group in your own party -- even if it is a minority -- somehow wants to push you out, for representing those three presidents."

Smith is saying, in a sense, that Lieberman's hawkishness on Iraq is consistent with the muscular foreign policy liberalism that characterized Democrats back in the era when they consistently won national elections.

This is an argument that also animates other Democrats today; I heard the same thing in North Carolina last weekend from Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, an '08 presidential hopeful, when he delivered a speech at a party fundraiser.

It was also articulated last weekend in a New York Times magazine piece by political commentator Peter Beinart, who wrote that Democrats right now "cannot tell a coherent story about the post-9/11 world...because they have not found their usable past, and they have not conquered "their ideological amnesia."

What Smith is saying is that Lieberman -- whether one agrees with him or not -- at least has a coherent post-9/11 foreign policy that harkens back to Democratic roots. That strikes me as the core message in Lieberman's battle with Lamont. Lieberman said on the radio recently that his liberal detractors are mostly fixated on hating Bush, and punishing anyone who agrees with Bush on anything -- but that such an attitude doesn't begin to address the realities of a dangerous world. And Lieberman's attempts to define himself in the tradition of JFK (more specifically, the Cold War liberal version of JFK) could sway some primary voters, because Kennedy remains an unassailable party icon -- especially in Connecticut, and especially among the older Democratic loyalists who remember the JFK era.

But here's a problem with the Lieberman pitch:
There was a fourth president who embodied that muscular foreign policy liberalism, Lyndon Johnson. Yet Lieberman is not invoking him. LBJ inherited Kennedy's commitment to rolling back the communists in Vietnam (which in itself was an application of the hawkish Democratic credo; see David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest); and then LBJ expanded on the credo until that war consumed his presidency, split his party, and divided America.

Is it possible to embrace those traditional Democratic values -- including the urge to police the globe and spread democracy abroad -- without acknowledging that the hubris inherent in those values helped produce the debacle in Vietnam?
This question might well surface in Connecticut in the weeks ahead....because, after all, it was Joe Lieberman, as a Yalie in 1970, who cut his teeth in Connecticut politics as an anti-Vietnam war activist.

And there's another wrinkle in the current Connecticut race: Since Lieberman is seeking to paint himself as the ultimate Democrat, why has he dropped hints that, if party voters reject him in an August primary, he might refuse to endorse Lamont and instead run as an independent this fall? Wouldn't that scenario guarantee a split among Democratic voters in November, and aid the Republicans at a time when the GOP seems so vulnerable? (As state Republican chairman George Gallo said not long ago, the Lieberman imbroglio "is music to my ears.")

Lieberman hinted at an independent candidacy a few weeks ago, and I asked Sean Smith if that scenario was possible.
Smith said, "The senator expects to win (a primary), and he will always be a Democrat."
Not exactly a Shermanesque renuniciation of the idea.
"So," I said, "that means you're not ruling out running as an independent."
Smith: "I don't want to speculate on that, to be honest. We're not dealing with contingencies."

No wonder Lieberman's Connecticut critics are upset. In the words of popular radio talk show host Colin McEnroe, "There's just something about Joe's smiling Buddha composure that drives so many Democrats insane. I wouldn't put it past Joe to run as an independent. He just wants to get back to Washington. For Joe right now, it's all about Joe."

--------

Addendum: To hear Lieberman tangling recently with McEnroe on the air -- it got pretty nasty -- check out this. Scroll down to "Lieberman blames bloggers," then click audio.

The Orwell administration

It is a compliment to the writer George Orwell that his name has become a household adjective. But rather than simply applying the term "Orwellian" to some of the latest news developments, let us first consult his classic novel 1984.
Chapter Four, to be precise:

In the government's Records Department, "(a) process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs....Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was...scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."

All history scraped clean...That sums up the Bush administration's Orwellian impulse. We have seen two fresh examples this week:

1. On Wednesday, Laura Bush sought to bring the past "up to date," as it were, by denying the factual reality of May 1, 2003 and imposing a new version.

On CNN, John King questioned her by saying, "This week was the third anniversary of what has become known as the 'mission accomplished' speech..."

But the First Lady said, "The fact is, when the president stood on the Abraham Lincoln, that Abraham Lincoln's mission was accomplished. They were coming into San Diego with all of their troops on board and that was the end of their term in Iraq..."

But clearly the Records Department hasn't done the requisite scraping, because as I look back, President Bush said nothing that day to suggest that the message on the "Mission Accomplished" banner was only about the ship. That day, the White House ensured that the banner would serve as a visual backdrop to Bush's declaration that "major combat operations" were over in Iraq.

Six months later, when it was clear that combat operations had not ended, Bush did try to shift the blame, by saying that the banner had been the Navy's idea (even though the White House arranged to have it made). The problem is, by that point he had already dug himself a hole by using the phrase "mission accomplished" in venues far from the Navy ship.

Not even Laura, with her high poll ratings, can scrape this one clean:
On June 5, 2003, Bush said to the U.S. troops in Qatar, "America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished."

2. But the Orwellian master is still Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
On Thursday, he was ambushed in Atlanta by questioner Ray McGovern, who happened to be a retired CIA official who provided President Reagan with daily intelligence briefings. McGovern rebuked Rumsfeld for falsely claiming, during the early weeks of the war, that weapons of mass destruction had been located.

McGovern: "You said you knew where they were."
Rumsfeld: "I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were."

Memo to the Records Department: Call up all previous Rumsfeld statements and insert the words "suspect sites."

Too late. We already have the transcript of Rumsfeld on ABC. March 30, 2003.
Question to Rumsfeld: "Is it curious to you that (troops) haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?"
Rumsfeld: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Another technique in 1984 was to simply dump inconvenient facts down the "memory hole." Rumsfeld has tried that numerous times already. One of my favorites: On Feb. 20, 2003, during the runup to war, he told PBS that the Americans "would be welcomed," a scene akin to Afghanisatan, where people were "playing music, cheering, flying kites." Seven months later, when a broadcast journalist read the PBS remarks back to Rumsfeld, the Defense secretary replied:
"Never said that. Never did...You're thinking of somebody else."

Could these myriad attempts to rewrite history have anything to do with the latest poll findings, which show that even 45 percent of self-identified conservatives are now voicing disappoval of the president?

---------------------------
But, speaking of history, let us pause for a minute to ponder the Kennedys.

The Kennedys have been cruising on their brand name for decades, and now we have another suspicious car incident which looks a bit like Chappaquiddik without a death or water.

Ted Kennedy's son, Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy, driving with his lights off at 2:45 a.m. Thursday, crashed his car into a U.S. Capitol security barrier after narrowly missing a police cruiser. He told cops he was late for a vote.

Actually, he was very late; the House had adjourned around midnight.

Cops at the scene wanted to administer a sobriety test, because (as they said subsequently) they smelled alcohol on Kennedy's breath -- but they were overruled by supervisors who drove Kennedy home. The union that represents the cops is ticked off; president Lou Cannon said, "the officers just want to be able to do their jobs...he was extended a courtesy by virtue of his position."

Meanwhile, Kennedy took 19 hours to come up with a series of explanations. In an initial statement, he said he had consumed "no alcohol." Much later, he said he had been under the influence of two prescription drugs, both of which had been ingested at home. The problem is, the Boston Herald checked around, and discovered that he had been drinking that night at a popular Capitol Hill bar, the Hawk & Dove.

No charges have been filed, but the accident is under investigation, and the police are looking into whether Kennedy got special treatment - or, as it is euphemistically put, they are "reviewing steps taken during the initial accident investigation to ensure compliance with existing policies and procedures."

Unlike the Bushes and their Orwellian impulse, the Kennedys have no interest in changing the past or flushing stuff down the memory hole. Quite the contrary. They'll hang onto Camelot as long as they can.

Bits about Mitt and more

I am currently traveling in Connecticut, working on a weekend column about Senator Joe Lieberman's political woes (President Bush's favorite Democrat will be challenged in an '06 primary by a well-financed antiwar candidate), so my time this morning is limited. But there are some items in the news that cry out for comment.

1. I mentioned some weeks ago that Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a likely Republican president candidate in '08, might have problems with evangelical Christian voters who are suspicious about his Mormon faith. (Many of them view Mormonism as a cult.) Now it appears that Romney is acknowledging this danger to his ambitions.

He seems to be preparing the ground for a speech patterned after the 1960 John F. Kennedy speech about his Catholicism. Romney says: "I think if I decided to go national that there will probably be a time when people will ask questions, and it will be about my faith, and I'll have the opportunity to talk about the role of religion in our society and in the leadership of our nation."

There's no indication why Romney is acknowledging this issue now, but I bet Robert Novak has something to do with it. Novak, the conservative columnist, who is often dismissed by the left as "the prince of darkness," but the guy has good conservative sources, and those sources have been sounding the alarm on Romney. Here's what Novak wrote last week:

"Prominent, respectable Evangelical Christians have told me, not for quotation, that millions of their co-religionists cannot and will not vote for Romney for president solely because he is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If Romney is nominated and their abstention results in the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton, that's just too bad. The evangelicals are adamant, saying there is no way Romney can win them over. "

Romney, at the very least, understands that he needs to neutralize their hostility if he expects to survive crucial early primary tests in Iowa and South Carolina. Christian conservatives vote heavily in those two GOP contests.

2. Much attention has been paid lately (by me, as well) to the military generals who have been assailing Donald Rumsfeld and the war. But, lest we forget, they were preceded by others. Take, for instance, retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, who also ran the National Security Agency for Ronald Reagan.

Odom has a piece in the new issue of Foreign Policy magazine, entitled, "Cut and Run? You Bet." Among his arguments: "Only with a rapid withdrawal from Iraq will Washington regain diplomatic and military mobility. Tied down like Gulliver in the sands of Mesopotamia, we simply cannot attract the diplomatic and military cooperation necessary to win the real battle against terror. Getting out of Iraq is the precondition for any improvement."

Perhaps the White House can find a way to shrug off this Reaganite military man by tying him to Cindy Sheehan or the "angry left."

3. Another congressional Democrat, William Jefferson of Louisiana, is undercutting his party's attempts to link the GOP to "a culture of corruption." A business executive has pleaded guilty to charges of bribing Jefferson, starting in 2001. The New York Times contends today that the current federal probe of Jefferson "has given Republican leaders an opportunity to try to divert public attention from recent federal corruption investigations involving House and Senate Republicans and their ties to corporate lobbyists."

Can't argue with that.

On the other hand, maybe this corruption stuff is just inside baseball to most voters; in the '06 congressional election, they may be more focused on issues like Iraq and gas prices. And, concerning the latter, nonpartisan analyst Charlie Cook made an interesting point the other day. He said that high gas prices might hurt the GOP big time, because it's a matter of demographics:

"Studies show that voters in Bush-friendly red states drive significantly more miles each month than those in blue states, and it's a pretty logical assumption that gasoline usage is much greater in the predominately suburban, rural and small town congressional districts most often represented by Republicans, than in more compact, urban districts usually held by Democrats. That means the longer gasoline prices remain high, the worse it will be for GOP candidates."

4. Just a teaser for my weekend piece on Joe Lieberman: The antiwar liberals up here are mighty ticked off at the guy for his unapologetic embrace of President Bush's Iraq mission. And he's being pecked to bits by the liberal Connecticut bloggers.

I'm skeptical that they actually will drum him out of the party in the August primary -- my home state, after all, is known as The Land of Steady Habits -- and replace him on the November ticket with cable TV entrepeneur Ned Lamont (who is affluent, articulate, and outspokenly antiwar), but it's entirely possible that they will embarrass him. This is one situation that bears watching.

Did I say Connecticut is my home state? It is. I was a guest on a Hartford talk show yesterday, talking about Lieberman, and I took calls from drive-time listeners. One caller screeched: "So you come to town and you don't even call me??" It turned out to be my cousin.
As Thomas Wolfe said, You can't go home again.

Pump gas, curse Clinton

Any day now, I am expecting to hear that the beleagured Republican leaders in Washington have set up a website called blamebillclinton.org. Or perhaps he can be retroactively impeached on a new list of charges.

Bill Frist, the lame duck Senate leader, is the latest to play the blame Bill game, seeking to turn back the clock to the '90s as a way to shift responsibility from today's governing party. But as we shall see in a moment, factual reality can make that game very difficult.

On the Today show yesterday, Frist said we wouldn't be having gasoline problems today if President Clinton had decided 10 years ago to permit oil drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge. Frist told Katie Couric:

"We passed it last month in the United States Senate. It has overwhelming — maybe you don’t support it — but it has overwhelming support. We passed it in the legislature back in 1996. President Clinton vetoed it. Unbelievable. Passed the House. Pass the Senate. And if President Clinton had not vetoed that, we would have more than a million barrels of oil coming here every single day. That’s more oil than we import from Saudi Arabia right now. It’s a matter supply and demand. Right now we would have increase supply if it had not been vetoed by President Clinton."

(Just a quick digression. You've got to love his little side comment, "maybe you don't support it." Translation: Katie's also to blame, Katie must also be ganging up on the Republicans. In the ensuing exchange with Frist, she had to interject, "I don't have a position.")

Anyway, Frist's problem was that he omitted a few important facts about price and supply:

1. Two years ago, President Bush's federal Energy Department concluded that any price drop triggered by a larger domestic oil supply would be "negligible."
2. And the U.S. Geological Service has concluded that, at the peak of production (probably 20 years after the refuge was even opened), the amount of extracted oil would satisfy roughly one to two percent of Americans' daily consumption.

It's easy to understand why the Republicans are anxious to try the Clinton card. Their best hope for 2006 is to frame the congressional elections as a series of local contests, whereby voters who are fed up with Congress in the abstract will nevertheless re-elect their own individual congressman. But the gas issue (along with Iraq) is threatening to frame this election as a national referendum on the incumbent governing party. Clearly, the idea of throwing $100 at every motorist hasn't gone over well (that's less than two tanks of gas for the SUV-addicted), and that helps to explain Frist's Clinton fixation.

And even GOP strategists are warning that the Republicans better come up with something that can sell. Party pollster David Winston, who deals with both the GOP Congress and the White House, recently argued that the local-contest scenario is dead and gone. I can't link his piece (it's behind a subscription wall), but here are key excerpts:

"(K)keeping things local today is virtually impossible in an age of cable news, web logs and talk radio. When was the last time Rush Limbaugh talked about local issues?....we've got a national campaign environment and probably a permanent one....Democrats have spent the past year trying to ensure that this will be a national election. With issues including the war in Iraq, rising gas prices, immigration, health care, the economy and taxes driving the current right track/wrong track numbers and the president's job approval, they likely will get what they want....the first step toward winning in November for Republicans is to acknowledge the reality of the situation: We are going to play in a national arena this fall, not a local sandlot."

And I question whether "Clinton did it, not us" will resonate as a national message.

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The Charlie Wilson for Congress campaign in Ohio has managed to erase one of the more knuckleheaded political acts of the year (see yesterday's post). In a highly competitive congressional district - crucial to the Democrats' national '06 prospects - Wilson needed to persuade Democratic voters to write his name onto the ballot last night so that he could win a crucial party primary and become the nominee. This was because his earlier failure to get a mere 50 verifiable petition signatures had kept him off the ballot.

But he and his organization got their act together and pulled off a tough feat, because voters are generally averse to writing in names. Wilson, a state senator, has been highly touted by the national party, and no wonder: Ohio's sixth district features a conservative-leaning electorate, and in the 2004 presidential race, the voters there chose President Bush over John Kerry by one percentage point.

The seat is now held by a Democrat who is leaving it to run for governor, and Wilson's challenger will be a state House Republican leader. But, now that he's finally on the ballot, he can be expected to invoke the same national issues that GOP pollster Winston mentioned earlier.

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Yesterday I griped about the smug insularity of the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner. Today I discover that the editor of the American Journalism Review seems to share that view, and is even arguing that the event should be scrapped entirely.

I also noted yesterday that the New York Times story on the dinner conveniently omitted any mention of Steven Colbert's scalding performance, including his swipes at the Washington press corps for going too easy on Bush. (The Monday article was written by Elizabeth Bumiller, who remarked a few years ago that sometimes, when war fever is high, it's intimidating to ask Bush tough questions at press conferences.)

Well, today I see that the Times has found a way to mention Colbert after all - thanks to the tried and true "second-day story" device. The bloggers have been kicking up a fuss about Colbert, so that gives the Times media writer a chance to report on the fuss about Colbert. As Dana Carvey used to say when he played Church Lady on Saturday Night Live, "How conveeenient!"

Of knuckleheads, 9/11 mythologists, and rude dinner guests

Some observations today about a few noteworthy politicians:

The competition for Democratic Knucklehead of the Year has been pretty intense - my previous nominees on this blog, here and here, have been Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and West Virginia congressman Allan Mollohan -- but another strong contender has to be a state senator in Ohio named Charlie Wilson.

By way of introduction, here's a TV ad for Wilson that has been running in Ohio's Sixth Congressional District, in advance of today's primary to choose a Democratic candidate for Congress in November:
"Democrats need to write in his name for Congress. Charlie Wilson. In the (state) legislature, he fought Governor Taft and lowered the cost of prescription drugs. Charlie Wilson. In Congress, he'll stand up to the Republicans and President Bush. Charlie Wilson. Saying 'no' to privatizing Social Security and 'yes' to real health care reform. Charlie Wilson....We need to write in Charlie Wilson."

Get the message? Democratic primary voters need to write in his name on the ballot today. But if the guy is so good (and apparently he's far more qualified than two other Democrats who did make the ballot), then why is he not on the ballot?
This is where the Knucklehead nomination comes in.

If the Democrats, nationally, hope to achieve their ambition of retaking the U.S. House, they absolutely need to hang on to their seat in Ohio's sixth district. Right now it's being vacated by Ted Strickland, who is running for governor. Wilson was tapped as the national party's best hope to keep that seat. His first step, back in February, was to get on the May 2 primary ballot. All he needed to do was collect enough petition signatures. And, under the lenient rules, all he needed was 50 signees.

He got 46.

So he's not on the ballot.

Apparently, by all accounts, Wilson's campaign manager (who is also his son) screwed that one up, flunking Politics 101. And as a result, Wilson's chances of winning the nomination are vastly reduced, because most voters generally don't write in names. And that would mean victory for one of the underqualified Democrats, either of whom reportedly would have a tough time beating the Republican challenger, a state legislator named Charles Blasdel. And that would mean a seat pickup for the GOP in November.

Maybe Wilson will prevail, who knows. But his knuckleheaded gaffe has already forced the national Democrats to spend nearly half a million dollars on mail, ads, and phone banks, just to ensure that people know he's a write-in candidate. And he has opened himself up to the lawyers, because Ohio officials say it could take 10 days to read all the write-in names, in all 12 counties, and determine whether they say "Charlie Wilson." Scrawled handwriting can be challenged.

Perhaps this final anecdote says it all:
At a meeting in the district the other night, labor leaders had to conduct a session to teach voters how to write Wilson's name on the ballot. Wilson himself was supposed to show up at the session.
He never made it. He had car trouble.

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Rudy Giuliani has been floating on a wave of positive publicity ever since he donned a hard hat on 9/11. His latest foray, yesterday, was to the state of Iowa -- the first stop on the presidential primary trail, and a favorite destination place for politicians who deny they have any interest in the presidential primary trail.

It is generally assumed that Giuliani, if he chose to embark on that trail, would be a long shot for the GOP nomination because his pro-choice, pro-gay rights stances would play poorly with the conservatives who tend to dominate early primaries. It is also generally assumed that he might have a shot anyway, because (as the New York Times story says today), his "personal popularity" has been "burnished by his leadership of New York City during and after the Sept. 11 terror attack."

But if he does become a candidate, some of his competitors will try to de-burnish his 9/11 popularity. And they will have some ammunition.

Start with the book "102 Minutes," by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, two New York reporters who have written the best account of the World Trade Center disaster. Go to pages 58-60. Here are some excerpts: Despite the fact that Giuliani became mayor in the mid-'90s by stressing the issue of public safety, "the city did not organize a single joint drill involving all the emergency responders at the trade center in the eight years after the (initial) 1993 (terrorist) attack."

And remember how Giuliani and his emergency officials were roaming the streets after the attack? It was because they were essentially homeless. Here's why:
The book reports that his Office of Emergency Management was unable to orchestrate the 9/11 rescue efforts, because it had been forced to evacuate its new, $13-million "bunker" headquarters. That bunker had been located at 7 World Trade Center.
A few years earlier, a number of emergency-response efforts had insisted that this was a dumb place to build the agency bunker, given the fact that the WTC had been targeted by terrorists before. But, the book notes, "the mayor brushed off the critics as people mired in the 'old ways' of thinking. His aides described the bunker as state of the art and imagined it as impregnable."

Meanwhile, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report has also concluded that the city response, while heroic, was woefully inadequate. The commission staff, in a report, stated: "Effective decision-making in New York was hampered by limited command and control and internal communications."

And one of the 9/11 commissioners, former Navy secretary John F. Lehman, specifically went after Bernard Kerik, the city police commissioner on that fateful day. Lehman said that the emergency response was undercut by turf warfare between Kerik's cops and the fire department, and that Kerik's perfomance was "a scandal."

Kerik was Giuliani's former driver, and a business partner, and the 9/11 Commission's harsh verdict did not dissuade Giuliani from getting Kerik nominated (with President Bush's OK) as the new Homeland Security secretary in late 2004. But Rudy's pal had to withdraw his name after it was revealed that, among other things, he had met with several mistresses in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero that was supposed to be a haven for exhausted firefighters working at the site.

The point is, Giuliani's 9/11 hero profile will stay pristine as long as he remains a non-candidate. If his status changes, factual reality may intrude.

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Finally, an observation about that famed Washington institution, the White House Correspondents Dinner. It was held last Saturday night, and there has been great debate in recent days about the performance of Steven Colbert, the Comedy Central star who unleashed his barbed ironic humor on the grand sachems of the Beltway establishment and earned few laughs as a result.

You go, Steven.

Maybe it's just because I don't live and work in Washington, but I find myself baffled by that event. I attended once, back in 2000, and that was enough. Too much smug self-satisfaction. Too much ritualized chumminess between press and newsmakers.

The tradition is to hire comics who will poke some fun but without drawing too much blood. Jay Leno, for example.

Steven Colbert, on the other hand, shattered the politesse. (C-Span has it all.) He said this about President Bush, who was sitting a few feet away:

"I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world...You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change, this man's beliefs never will."

Then he went after the journalists in the audience, some of the same Washington journalists who didn't ask sufficiently probing questions during the runup to war. They have since acknowledged that, but they squirmed anyway when Colbert said:

"Here's how it works. The President makes decisions, he's the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home.Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction."

It's interesting to note that Colbert wasn't even mentioned in the New York Times writeup on the dinner yesterday. Clearly, Colbert won't be invited back any time soon. Good for him.

Maybe it all depends on his definition of "major"

Today marks the third anniversary of the "Mission Accomplished" banner, the presidential flight suit, and the President's announcement that "major combat operations have ended" in Iraq.

If anyone is still wondering why his political standing as a credible leader has waned since that day, just consider these statistics:

Ninety-four percent of all U.S. military deaths have occurred since that day.
And 97 percent of all wounded U.S. troops have suffered their injuries since that day.

Why did Bush get tripped up by his own triumphalism? Perhaps his former Secretary of State can answer that.
Colin Powell told a British TV interviewer over the weekend that "just because you didn’t foresee (an insurgency), doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have planned for the unforeseen. I have always been one who favored a larger military presence in an operation to make sure that you can deal with the unforeseen, but in the case of the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, you had institutions being destroyed, you had ministries being burned down, and I have said on many occasions I don’t think we had enough force there at that time to impose order. That’s what we were responsible for, because when you have taken out a government, a regime, then you become responsible for the country."

And now we learn that the top U.S. general on the ground in Iraq is openly disputing the notion that major combat operations have ended. In the words of Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli,
"There's nothing about this that I would [call] peacekeeping," he said. "We're in a fight."

The best coda for today's anniversary comes from conservative commentator Rich Lowry, who wrote last week in the National Review magazine, "The Iraq war promises to be the Lewinsky scandal of George W. Bush's presidency."

And when a conservative compares Iraq to Monica Lewinsky, you know this war must be turning into something serious.