Setting the stage for the urge to surge

Operation Iraqi Freedom
Mission Accomplished
Stay the Course
Adapt to Win
Plan for Victory
New Way Forward

The first five slogans are inoperative. But tonight, in yet another allegedly pivotal speech on Iraq, President Bush will declare that the sixth slogan is now operative.

With scant seconds remaining on the game clock, and facing fourth down and 50 on his own five-yard line, Bush is determined to throw the ball deep and simply hope for the best. But at this point the odds are heavily stacked against an immaculate reception. (OK, that exhausts my ability to employ football metaphors. Everyone else seems to be using the poker analogy.)

It does take a fair amount of gumption to decree a new troop escalation, in the face of deep skepticism or outright opposition from, among others, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Abizaid, British ally Tony Blair, gung-ho conservatives like retired Lt. Col. Oliver North (“Sending more U.S. combat troops is simply sending more targets”), the majority of the people in red-state Utah, the majority of ’06 midterm election voters (who mistakenly assumed that their votes would sway the Decider), at least 10 Republican senators, and a landslide majority of the American people (who are currently telling pollsters that Bush is wrong).

Therefore, one cannot reasonably imagine how the president expects to achieve victory in the art of public persuasion. His spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that Bush needs to “bring the public back to this war and restore public confidence in support for the mission,” but it’s hard to see how he can pull that off, given the fact that at this point most Americans either disbelieve his arguments, or have simply tuned him out.

And don’t just take my word for it. Read this verdict: “He has little credibility left on Iraq.” That’s the word from David Keene, veteran conservative Washington activist and the longtime chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Keene wonders whether the public will be receptive to Bush, given the fact that it “has heard too many different and conflicting reasons for our initial invasion.” (Such as the purported Saddam-al Qaeda connection, which was dismissed by the 9/11 Commission; and the purported weapons of mass destruction stockpile, which was disproved by factual reality.)

Keene is also asking himself “why dumping more young men and women into a disastrous mess will do anything but make it worse.” Indeed, lest we forget (or not even realize), Bush in the recent past has tried several troop “surges,” none of which have worked – primarily because his friend the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is closely allied to the top Shiite warlord in the ongoing sectarian civil war.

Those Americans who are still tuning in Bush might well be advised tonight to listen closely to his remarks about Maliki. It is clear that no last-ditch U.S. troop escalation can begin to turn the tide unless the so-called “unity government” in the “young democracy” demonstrates that it is truly willing to take serious political steps for peace. For this to happen, Maliki would have to take on his political benefactor, cleric Muqtada Sadr, who runs one of the most violent Shiite militias.

Is Maliki really willing to do this, after balking so often in the past? Has he communicated this to Bush? Can Bush persuade TV viewers tonight that, this time, things will really be different? And how can Bush assure us that the United States is now imposing strict “benchmarks” on Iraq, at the same time that he keeps insisting that Iraq is “a sovereign nation?”

There are other questions that Bush won’t address tonight. To wit: If this “surge” doesn’t work, what’s plan B? (Or, perhaps more accurately, Plan Z.) It would be valuable to know the answer, since it does not appear that Bush can be deterred from his chosen course of action, notwithstanding the thumbs-down verdict in the voting booth. The potential downside of being a Decider, acting in defiance of overwhelming public sentiment, is that he risks permanent imprisonment within the bubble of his own making.

And don’t just take my word for it. As conservative commentator Tod Lindberg said yesterday in the Washington Times, the Bush escalation plan is his “last stand," and “if it fails, there will be no one else to blame.”

I withhold the balance of my remarks until after Bush’s TV address tonight.

Fresh evidence of the McCain recalibration

As part of our continuing series on John McCain’s politically calculated conversion to Bush Republican orthodoxy, consider his interview the other day on Bloomberg Television.

Political commentator Al Hunt brought up the issue of Iraq, and asked the alleged maverick whether, in this era of severe budget deficits, he would support raising taxes on some wealthy Americans in order to help pay for this war, which is now costing America (or, more specifically, our children and their children) roughly $2 billion a week. Here’s how McCain replied:

“I’m not sure what the point would be. I would ask them to make other sacrifices, but I’m not sure I would want to raise their taxes just because we’re in a war.”

I'm not sure I would want to raise their taxes just because we’re in a war….There it is: the Bush orthodoxy in action, the argument that we can fight a major war and still have a free lunch at home – a concept that is unique in American history. Taxes were hiked during the Vietnam war, during the Korean war…but let’s go farther back:

Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, raised taxes on the wealthy in order to finance his war; he did this, in part, by introducing the tax on inherited wealth (the same tax that Bush and his allies have long been trying to shelve). Lincoln also signed the first bill introducing the income tax, responding (in the words of author Steven Weisman) to a “widespread demand in the North for sacrifice, especially from the wealthy.”

The inheritance tax expired after the war, only to be brought back four decades later by Republican president William McKinley, who needed it to help pay for the brief Spanish-American war. And the top rate of the income tax was raised precipitously by Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1917, to help pay America’s 19-month tab for World War I; as Wilson put it, “The industry of this generation should pay the bills of this generation.”

And a quarter-century after that, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate even higher. In a State of the Union speech, delivered as war clouds loomed, he said: “I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes….I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program to be paid for from (more) taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes.”

But McCain knows that if he was to quote FDR, and suggest that the amount of sacrifice in wartime should be tied to one’s “ability to pay” – in other words, if he was to behave as an actual maverick – he would be toast in the 2008 Republican primaries. If he was to suggest that rich Americans should actually pony up to help pay more for the war that he so vocally defends, just as rich Americans have done in the past, he would quickly lose the support of all those well-heeled Bush campaign donors whom he has been assiduously courting.

Better to let them keep their money, politically speaking. Indeed, they have gotten even richer during the Bush wartime era. In a report released the other day by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, households in the top one percent of earnings have fared best from the Bush tax cuts. Their effective individual tax rates dropped from 24.2 percent in 2000 to 19.6 percent in 2004 – roughly twice the rate cut that went to middle-income families.

There once was a time when McCain was known as a budget-balancing conservative. During the 2000 GOP primary season, when he was competing against Bush for the nomination, he repeatedly contended that Bush’s massive tax cut plan was too big and too risky for the economy; indeed, he countered with a more modest tax cut plan of his own, one that would have directed most of the savings to families with modest incomes. And in 2001, on the Senate floor, he even voted against the first wave of Bush tax cuts.

But many rich GOP donors and Bush loyalists have very long memories; in their eyes, McCain’s past behavior is proof that the man can’t be trusted. Hence his overriding desire to curry their favor during this crucial pre-primary phase. Hence his declaration to Al Hunt that the notion of taxing the rich to pay for a costly war is some kind of alien concept (in his words, “I’m not sure that that’s connected”). Hence his acceptance of the Bush Republican proposition that it is preferable to shift the financial burden for the war on terror to those who today are too young to be taxpayers, and to those not yet born.

It was Woodrow Wilson, 90 years ago, who said of his generation of Americans that “the war must be paid for and it is they who must pay for it, and if the burden is justly distributed…they will carry it cheerfully and with a sort of solemn pride.” But clearly such words are of no use to McCain. In his wooing of the GOP establishment, invoking historical precedents will get him nowhere. His first priority right now is simply to get with the program.

How will the Democrats define their spine?

Even though my latest print column focuses on the Republicans who fear that their leader’s impending troop escalation plan might be a political loser, the news this morning is really about the Democrats.

Because there are indications that they might be growing a spine. Depending on how you define it.

The Democrats are still sending mixed messages about the extent to which they are prepared to contest President Bush’s “New Way Forward,” as evidenced by their myriad comments on the Sunday talk shows, but there was no mistaking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s declaration of defiance. On CBS, she said that, while the Democrats will continue to finance the troops already on the ground in Iraq, they will not be so quick to finance the additional troops that Bush seeks to dispatch:

“If the president chooses to escalate the war, in his budget request, we want to see a distinction between what is there to support the troops who are there now….The American people and the Congress support those troops. We will not abandon them. But if the president wants to add to this mission, he is going to have to justify it, and this is new for him because up until now the Republican Congress has given him a blank check with no oversight, no standards, no conditions.”

Pelosi’s comments echo those made last week by her close ally, John Murtha, the new House defense appropriations chairman, when he said that he intends to “fence the funding.” There is also talk in Democratic circles of holding up the troop escalation money (in the form of an amendment) unless or until Bush proves that it would be well spent.

My translation: The Democrats are not willing to de-fund the war itself (a move demanded by many on the antiwar left), because they do not want to risk being tagged down the road as the party that “lost” Iraq. Fairly or not, this is what happened to the party in the wake of Vietnam. The congressional Democrats in the mid-‘70s cut funding during the last years of that conflict, as a U.S. pullout became imminent, thereby allowing conservatives to claim that the liberal wimps had “lost” Vietnam. Nor does the new gang want to open themselves to the old Karl Rove charge that Democrats don’t back our fighting men and women in the aggregate.

The new Democratic leaders don’t want to take that bait on Iraq. But Pelosi apparently is willing to carve out Bush’s troop escalation plan as a separate and distinct issue – and to subject it to protracted scrutiny, by using the prime weapon that Democrats now have at their disposal: oversight. A slew of House and Senate committees seem primed to examine the Bush plan in detail, and to assess whether more troops can actually make a positive difference – or whether Bush would be merely putting more young lives at peril, in another desperate bid to salvage the signature initiative of his presidency.

It’s clear that Bush, notwithstanding the “thumpin’” that he says he took in the ’06 elections, is daring the newly empowered Democrats to defy him, perhaps in the hopes that they will overreach and play heavily to their liberal antiwar base. Pelosi’s comments yesterday indicate, however, that the Democrats feel more comfortable focusing on the broadly unpopular troop escalation option (which is supported by only 12 percent of Americans nationally, according to the latest Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll; and which is now supported by only 44 percent of the citizens of Utah, the reddest state in the land.)

In other words, by opposing the troop escalation plan, Democrats are practicing safe centrist politics.

Stopping that plan, however, may be another matter entirely. And here we come to the Democrats’ mixed message. While Pelosi was promising serious scrutiny on CBS, Senate Foreign Committee chairman Joe Biden was suggesting on NBC’s Meet the Press that the Democrats really don’t have the clout to block Bush at the end of the day:

“We have a standing army with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. You can’t go in and, like a tinker toy, and play around and say, ‘You can’t spend the money on this piece and this piece’…he’ll be able to keep those troops there forever constitutionally if he wants to.”

Tim Russert then asked whether the Democrats could legislatively cap the number of troops in Iraq. Biden replied: “Because it’s very difficult to—it’s constitutionally questionable whether or not you can do that. I think it is unconstitutional to say, ‘We’re going to tell you can go, but we’re going to micromanage the war.’ When we wrote the Constitution, the intention was to give the commander in chief the authority how to use the forces, when you authorize them, to be able to use the forces.”

Translation: Top Democrats differ on how they would define “spine.”

Biden – a newly-declared ’08 presidential candidate - essentially thinks there is no single definition (“no party out of power ever has a congressional voice that is a unified voice on a particular party”). He basically undercut Pelosi’s declaration that Democrats would substantively fight Bush over the troop escalation issue. Biden clearly has no desire to draw that line in the sand (“there’s not much I can do about it”). Even though he is planning a month of hearings on the Senate side, he sees his role as a public educator (he says he plans to “speak out as loudly as I can”), and maybe a moral persuader (he says he has drafted “a resolution of disapproval”).

One can detect the evolving Democratic balancing act. They will combine tough talk (Pelosi) with caveats about the public expecting too much (Biden). They will stage a slew of committee hearings and submit Bush to the oversight that his Republican allies failed to provide, but, at the same time, the Democrats really don’t want to get into the weeds and grapple with Bush about solutions. They don’t want to share the ownership of this war. They want Iraq to remain Bush’s war, and if somebody on Capitol Hill is really going to pull the plug on Bush, they want Bush’s GOP allies to do it.

Biden even said it: “The only way this is going to change…is when a majority of (GOP) colleagues, Republicans, say to the president, ‘Mr. President, enough. We are not going to support you anymore,’ that when the president will begin to change his policy.”

As I indicated in my Sunday print column, a small number of Republicans (mostly those who are nervously eyeing 2008) have already begun to dissent or waver. But Democrats would be wrong to assume that a critical mass of Republicans will bail them out. In all probability, Democrats will still need to define their own spine.

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Speaking of the Republicans, I wrote again yesterday about how alleged centrist John McCain is risking his standing among independent voters by pushing for the Bush troop escalation plan. Here is another fresh take on that topic.

Insufficiently conservative candidates, and military musical chairs

This is usually the time of year when Democrats wallow in despair; witness the election aftermaths in January ’01, January ’03 and January ’05. But politics in America is cyclical, and today, with the Democrats running Capitol Hill and with the lame-duck liberator of Iraq posting 30 percent popularity, it’s the Republican conservatives who have to hunker down for a winter of discontent.

And what better way to gauge that discontent than to take a snapshot of the fast-evolving Republican ’08 presidential race? Social and religious conservatives basically control the nomination process, by voting in disproportionate numbers in the early primaries– yet, right now, there doesn’t seem to be a true conservative in the top tier of prospective candidates.

Hence, one of the top political stories of 2007: Can GOP conservatives make peace with candidates whom they don’t entirely trust? Or will they signal to other potential aspirants that the market is still wide open for a true-believer?

I thought about this yesterday, while noting that Mitt Romney had filed his “exploratory” campaign paperwork. Romney, now the ex-governor of Massachusetts, is clearly one of those first-tier guys. He has the money and the organization and the hair and the teeth and the jaw to make a serious run. And he has been making all the requisite moves, such as telling conservatives in early primary states that he too views gay marriage as a Trojan horse that would destroy American life from the inside.

The problem for Romney, however, is that a lot of conservatives suspect he is just saying these things in order to get the nomination. (They may be right). This week, for instance, new concerns were raised about whether he’s just another flip-flopping pandering pol. Deal Hudson, a conservative Catholic scholar who has also advised the Bush White House, detailed Romney’s long gay-friendly gubernatorial record, then wrote on his blog: “Romney’s recent conversion to pro-life, pro-family conservatism contrasts dramatically with his public record of speaking and governing as a social moderate or liberal, routinely backing down when the going gets tough, and accomplishing few conservative successes.”

One Romney quote, in particular, keeps circulating in the conservative camp. When he ran unsuccessfully for U.S. senator in 1994, Romney told a gay group that he, not Ted Kennedy, would be the best advocate for their interests: "If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern. My opponent cannot do this. I can and will."

Meanwhile, a top conservative activist in Michigan (an early ’08 primary state) is now openly attacking Romney. Gary Glenn, who runs the American Family Association of Michigan, predicted: “There are going to be more and more pro-family legislators who had bought the Romney campaign's line of being supportive of our values, and that's proven not to be the case in terms of his record. I think you're going to have more and more people in Michigan - and beyond - disassociate themselves from this campaign."

But would conservative Romney defectors gravitate to Rudy Giuliani (assuming he runs)? That’s theoretically possible, as long as they overlook the fact that he supports gay rights, supports abortion rights, and that, during his breakup with one of his previous wives (the one who accused him in legal papers of “notorious adultery”), he roomed in Manhattan with a gay guy. Oh yeah, and he also has marched in gay parades and hosted gay pride breakfasts at Gracie Mansion.

But if conservatives stiff Romney and ignore Giuliani, are they prepared to warm to John McCain? Certainly, he has been slavishly pursuing them for the better part of two years now. But they’re still ticked that he voted in the Senate against a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and that, during his 2000 bid for the White House, he referred to certain religious right leaders as “forces of evil.” They suspect that his current wooing strategy is insincere.

They may be right. I highly recommend a new profile of McCain, which appears in the current issue of Vanity Fair. One priceless McCain quote stands out. But first, a little context: One ’08 conservative litmus test is border security. The GOP base wants to get tough on illegal immigrants by fencing off the southwestern U.S. border, and it wants a candidate who really believes that this is the right thing to do.

Anyway, McCain was speaking to some businessmen in Wisconsin last fall when the fence issue came up. He quickly acknowledged that the GOP base wants the fence. Then he said, “I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."

Clearly, this is not a man who is lusting to move rightward in his heart. And if the conservatives conclude the same, they will have to look in the second tier for a candidate. Maybe to Newt Gingrich, who is reportedly weighing a late entry. What better candidate for conservatives than the architect of the ’94 conservative revolution?

But, on the morality front, isn’t Newt the same guy who, two wives ago, served divorce papers to wife number one while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery?

What a year this is shaping up to be.

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And next week should be newsworthy as well. President Bush is expected to unveil his troop escalation plan for Iraq. As we gird ourselves for that, consider these two recent statements:

There’s no question (that) locally, more troops will have some effect on the levels of violence, but whether more U.S. troops for a sustained period will get us where we're going faster is an open question.

That’s a pretty tepid assessment of the “surge” option – courtesy of General George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, speaking last October at a Pentagon briefing.

But now he’s leaving. His retirement, originally slated for next spring or summer, has been moved up to now.

And there’s this: I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the core commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, “in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?” And they all said no. And the reason is because we want the Iraqis to do more. It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon to us do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future.

That was Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command, testifying on Capitol Hill two months ago…But now he’s leaving too.

Translation: Bush remains willing to listen to the wisdom of his commanders in the field, as long as their wisdom is in sync with his own. If their wisdom displeases him, they can always be replaced. That should at least reassure the 20 percent of Americans who currently believe that Bush has a clear plan for Iraq.

Trouble on the left flank

Just hearing all those antiwar protestors chanting repetitive slogans and shouting down the speakers so that nobody could get a word in edgewise…well, it was like something out of 1968. I was waiting for somebody to sing something by the Jefferson Airplane.

So it went yesterday on Capitol Hill, as a coterie of left-leaning insurgents led by Cindy Sheehan sought to inform the Democrats that the new congressional majority had not moved quickly enough to end the Iraq war, even though the Democrats had already been in power for...nope, they weren't even in power yet. This is precisely the sort of political headache that governing Democrats will be facing over the next two years: a chronic restiveness on their left flank, with the ongoing potential for great embarrassment.

When new House Democratic leaders, fronted by congressman Rahm Emanuel, attempted at a press briefing yesterday to outline their initial legislative priorities, none of which included Iraq, they were serenaded into silence by a few dozen citizens who intoned, “De-escalate/investigate/troops home now.” Emanuel and his colleagues decided to leave the room and try again later, essentially ceding the fact that that their free-speech rights had been preempted.

Some Democrats, including the ubiquitous cable TV talking head Lawrence O’Donnell, insist that incidents such as can only help the Democrats. O’Donnell said last night that the Democrats in Congress come off as “sensible” centrists whenever folks on the left behave in an unruly manner. In other words, middle-of-the-road Americans will surely conclude that, if the left is ticked off at the Democrats, then the Democrats must be doing something right.

I’m not sure I buy that, probably because I’m old enough to remember how “middle Americans” (as they were called circa 1970) turned against the national Democrats, precisely because they saw the party and the left-leaning antiwar crowd as one and the same.

As conservative blogger and lawyer John Hinderaker put it last night: “I think you had to be there in the 60s and early 70s to fully appreciate the damage the antiwar movement did to the Democratic Party. The party, in fact, has never entirely recovered. The Democrats had an ambiguous relationship with the anti-American activists of that era. The activists focused their ire mainly on the Democrats - think Chicago 1968 - but at the same time, they largely made their home in that party. The idea that history might be repeating itself must appall the Democrats' leadership.” (Obviously, Hinderaker hopes that this history will indeed repeat itself. But his historical recap is not wrong.)

The Democrats on Capitol Hill clearly face a difficult challenge. The liberal activists within their ranks are anxious to advance what they see as the moral rightness of their positions, notably a de-funding of the Iraq war. As Sheehan said yesterday, “These are not requests. These are demands.” And as Deborah Sweet, who runs a pro-impeachment group, said the other day, “We've been told for many years, 12 years now, 'Wait until we get in power. Then you'll see things change.’ We'll give them a couple of months or a few weeks to see what they come up with, but if they don't do something very decisive around the war and these other issues, I think there will be trouble."

But the Democrats basically define politics as the art of the possible, the willingness to accept half a loaf. Hence, the opening 100-hour blitz doesn’t mention Iraq, because the Democrats would rather kick off their tenure with issues that are popular not only with most Democrats but even some moderate Republicans: new ethics rules, a higher minimum wage, lower student loan interest rates, and lower prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients. Democratic leaders have calculated that, if they suddenly adopt an out-now stance on Iraq, or if they try to impeach Bush, such moves would merely imperil the newly-elected Democrats who won seats in swing suburban districts in red states like Indiana and Kansas.

The Democrats broadened their tent in the ’06 elections; they captured 59 percent of all independent swing voters. Whether they can hold those voters over the next two years, while satisfying the shouters on their left flank, is another issue entirely. They probably can’t snag the White House in ’08 unless they find a way.

Some civics tips from the lame duck

President Bush has a byline today. In a Wall Street Journal guest column, he offers some tips to the new Democratic Congress on how to best govern effectively. One might argue that this gesture is a tad cheeky, given the fact that Bush was humiliated in the ’06 elections, precisely because he and his fellow governing Republicans were judged to be failures at governing effectively. But even a lame duck president retains the power to cajole, even if the prospects for success are diminished.

The problem for Bush is that his Journal piece contains a number of howlers that are guaranteed merely to bemuse the newly empowered Democrats. For instance:

Together, we have a chance to serve the American people by solving the complex problems that many don't expect us to tackle, let alone solve, in the partisan environment of today's Washington. To do that, however, we can't play politics as usual.

One big reason why the GOP coughed up both congressional chambers is because independent swing voters viewed the Bush and the Republican Congress as responsible for “the partisan environment of today’s Washington,” and for the ineffective governance that results from “politics as usual.” As recently as late summer, Bush and his top surrogates were still suggesting that Democratic skepticism about the setbacks in Iraq was tantamount to surrender. And I don’t recall any protests from Bush when the Republicans were busy painting their Democratic opponents as coddlers of Osama bin Laden (as happened to Georgia Senator Max Cleland, after he objected to the proposed employe work rules in the new Homeland Security Department).

I believe that when America is willing to use her influence abroad, the American people are safer and the world is more secure.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But the election ’06 verdict against Bush was that he mismanaged this important general principle, to disastrous effect. Nobody in Congress, in either party, objects to the notion that America should exercise clout to protect its own people and those of other nations. The problem is how that clout is to be exercised, and as this new exhaustive report illustrates, the incompetence of the Bush administration in Iraq, on multiple fronts, is now beyond empirical dispute. The challenge for congressional Democrats, as they get ready to hold hearings on Iraq, is to demonstrate (if possible) that they would be more effective stewards of that crucial national security principle.

I believe government closest to the people is more responsive and accountable.

This, from the Republican president who has presided over one of the most massive federal government expansions in history – and whose own administration has worked assiduously at eluding accountability, mostly by stiffing Congress. Big example: the true costs in Iraq have kept out of the regular budget process (with the complicity of the governing GOP), thereby minimizing scrutiny. Smaller example: Last winter, after Bush defended his warrantless domestic surveillance program by contending that "appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed," the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service promptly faulted Bush for failing to inform the full membership of the House and Senate intelligence committees – and thereby acting in a manner "inconsistent with the law."

And it’s hard to imagine that the Democrats will take seriously Bush’s newfound devotion to “responsive” and “accountable” government, in light of the fact that he didn’t insist on it before. Best example: Back in the ‘90s, the GOP Congress of that era reportedly took 140 hours of testimony on whether President Clinton had used his Christmas card list to find potential campaign donors. By contrast, in 2004 and 2005, House Republicans took only 12 hours of testimony about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

One important message I took away from the election is that people want to end the secretive process by which Washington insiders are able to slip into legislation billions of dollars of pork-barrel projects that have never been reviewed or voted on by Congress. I'm glad Senator Robert Byrd and Congressman Dave Obey--the Democrats who will lead the appropriations process in the new Congress--heard that message, too, and have indicated they will refrain from including additional earmarks in the continuing resolution for this fiscal year. But we can and should do more. It's time Congress give the president a line-item veto. And today I will announce my own proposal to end this dead-of-the-night process and substantially cut the earmarks passed each year.

Bush underscored this theme this morning, declaring in a statement at the White House that he would like to see the number of earmarks cut in half during 2007. A laudable goal – and very convenient, politically speaking. After saying nothing for years about the burgeoning earmark practices of his Republican brethren (there were 3000 earmarks during the 1996 GOP Congress – and 13,000 in 2006), and after never vetoing a single spending bill that would have at least shelved some of the sweetheart deals, Bush declares that he wants those lawmakers to knock it off – now that the Democrats are running the show.

The Democrats would probably be well advised to curb the practice anyway - in order to mollify independent swing voters, not the president who has suddenly gotten religion on this issue.

The majority party in Congress gets to pass the bills it wants. The minority party, especially where the margins are close, has a strong say in the form bills take.

Just some advice right out of a political science textbook. No doubt those lines are intended as a warning to the ruling Democrats that the GOP should be given “a strong say” in the legislative process – which is a bit rich, considering the track record of recent years. The minority Democrats were systematically excluded from the sausage-making process; often, they never saw substantive legislation until the last moments prior to passage.

As congressional expert Thomas Mann said recently about the GOP Congress, “Regular order - the set of rules, norms and traditions designed to ensure a fair and transparent process - was the first casualty. The results: No serious deliberation. No meaningful oversight of the executive. A culture of corruption. And grievously flawed policy formulation and implementation.”

The Democrats are promising not to exact revenge by humbling the GOP in a similar fashion. As I mentioned this morning on a WHYY radio show, their prime goal is to demonstrate that they can connect with the average voter by governing effectively. They are well aware of this political challenge, in the absence of any civics tips from a lame-duck president.

Farewells to Saddam and Jerry

Before we ring in the new, let’s review a pair of ’06 holiday season deaths:

Saddam Hussein...When the old tyrant took his final swing, the Bush White House barely mustered a response. What a contrast from three Decembers ago, when Hussein was yanked out of his spider hole. Back then, President Bush devoted an Oval Office TV address to the occasion, declaring that Hussein’s capture was “crucial to the rise of a free Iraq,” and a signal that “the United States of America will not relent until this war is won.”

This time, by contrast, the White House merely released a terse written statement, although it did repeat the old mantra that Hussein’s death was another “milestone” on the road to freedom. (Actually, there have been many Bush-described “milestones” on the road to sectarian civil war.)

The muted Bush response signifies, however, that the administration is well aware that any fresh display of triumphalism would not sell well with those Americans (a majority, in fact) who now view the Iraq war as a mistake. Indeed, triumphalism probably would not have sold well with the troops either, since (according to an underrreported Military Times poll) it now appears that only 35 percent of active-duty soldiers support Bush's prosecution of the war.

And it certainly would have been bad salesmanship for Bush to hail Hussein’s death as a great victory – while continuing to plan for a troop escalation that will, in reality, demonstrate that the death of the Bush family's longtime foe has changed absolutely nothing on the ground. Which is apparently what most soldiers believe as well, because only 38 percent told the Military Times poll that they would support escalation.

Gerald Ford...Forget all the satirical shorthand about this accidental president – the physical stumblebum, the Nixon loyalist who handed Nixon a get-out-of-jail-free card, the clumsy debater who insisted that the Soviets did not dominate communist Poland, the leader who tried to combat inflation by wearing a Whip Inflation Now button, the humble guy who really did toast his own English muffins.

What’s most important about Ford – and this could not be truly discerned at the time, back in 1976 – is his historic status as the last GOP leader to serve in the White House prior to the rise of the Republican right. Indeed, as a sitting president, he was nearly derailed in the 1976 GOP primaries by an upstart named Ronald Reagan, who, at the time, was in the process of harnessing the grassroots conservative movement that rose from the ashes of the 1964 Barry Goldwater debacle.

Ford was a man of the Democratic House; as a longstanding congressman in the GOP minority, he had long been a deal-maker and compromiser with the liberals who ruled the roost in those days. As president he even named, as his veep, Nelson Rockefeller, that pillar of the old GOP eastern establishment who had been booed at the Goldwater convention. Ford’s general profile didn’t cut it with the Reagan loyalists, who advocated a more combative conservatism - promoting a more hawkish anti-communist stance abroad, rejecting deals with Democrats at home, and inveighing against ‘60s social "permissivism."

Pressure from the New Right (as it was known then) eventually forced Ford to dump Rocky from the ’76 ticket and replace him with the scrappier Bob Dole, but none of this slowed the inexorable momentum of the Reagan movement; even though it came up short by barely 100 delegates in ’76, it triumphed four years later. As Jonathan Martin of the National Review writes, “(Ford’s) spirited and successful campaign to bat back Reagan’s insurgency marked the last stand of the moderates’ hold of the GOP. No Republican has since won the party’s nod without the backing of the conservative wing of the party.”

It’s noteworthy that Ford in his last years became increasingly outspoken about the conservative wing; in interviews, he described himself as a supporter of abortion rights, he criticized religious conservatives, and in 2004 he told Bob Woodward that the war in Iraq was wrong. Ex-presidents always tend to their legacies, and it’s clear that Ford – who, during the ‘60s, had tried to impeach liberal Supreme Court justice William Douglas over an article that Douglas had written for a semi-racy journal - was increasingly anxious to distance himself from the right-wingers who had won control of his party.

But Ford, at the end, never did address the big question: Would the Republicans have dominated national politics for a generation, starting in 1980, if they hadn’t rejected moderation and moved sharply to the right?

No doubt there are many conservatives today who will stipulate that Ford was a good and decent man. But winning comes first; the Reagan forces tapped into an angry conservative populism, and turned it into votes. And even though the conservative movement that rattled Ford in 1976 might well fail in the presidential election of 2008, consider its recent track record: The GOP is 5-2 since 1980, and it can be argued that Ford’s socially moderate, fiscally-prudent Republicanism would never have pulled that off.

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So, 2007:

The Democrats take over Congress on Thursday. I’ll talk about it tomorrow morning on WHYY radio (90.9 FM, the NPR outlet in Philadelphia).

From 10 to 11 a.m. Wednesday, I’m slated to be a guest on “Radio Times,” along with Susan Milligan, who covers Congress for The Boston Globe. You can listen live here.

Party on!

Barring some unexpected, earthshaking news (President Bush declares, "It's all my fault that Iraq is a disaster of historic proportions," or Hillary Clinton declares, "The American people are sick to death of Bill and me, so therefore I will not run in 2008"), I don't plan to post again until next Tuesday, Jan. 2. Hey, it's the holidays.

Meanwhile... in my final '07 Sunday print column, I did explore what I consider to be the Democrats' prime political challenge of 2008: the need to demonstrate to swing voters that the party is serious about defeating global terrorism. Indeed, many Democrats are talking about this, as evidenced here, here, and here.

Meanwhile II...an emailer argued this morning that Hillary will be thwarted in '08 because the American people are tired of voting all the time for Bushes and Clintons. Which brings to mind a great trivia question: When was the last time that neither national ticket featured a Bush or a Clinton? Answer: It was so long ago, disco music was hip. We're talking 1976.

Anyway, see you in the new year. Party on!

Hillary's electability: conventional wisdom trumps an inconvenient poll

As I mentioned in a print column not long ago, the conventional wisdom persists that prospective presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is not electable in 2008. Since I consider that assumption to be highly flawed, I was therefore eager to read the current edition of Newsweek, which features a cover story on the same topic.

I finally made time to read it last night. The article was quite skeptical about Clinton’s chances, citing the considerable “anti-Hillary sentiment in the country. The key passage: “A recent Marist Poll showed that 47 percent of respondents nationwide ‘definitely will not consider’ voting for her, a percentage that alarms some former aides to President Clinton. Those numbers will need to change for Democratic primary voters -- now comfortable with assessing electability -- to move her way.”

But there’s a big problem with the Newsweek story: The magazine had, in its possession, the results of its own new national poll…showing that, when Clinton is matched against John McCain, she currently beats him by seven points; and that, when she is matched against Rudy Giuliani, she beats him by one point; and that, when she is matched against Mitt Romney, she slaughters him by 26 points.

And yet Newsweek decided not to include this information in its skeptical take on Clinton’s electability.

I know about these poll results only because Newsweek shared its poll results in a separate press release ballyhooing the cover story. Check out the release here. You will need to scroll 60 percent of the way down the page to the fine print.

Hence, my question: Why would Newsweek run a Clinton electability story without including its own latest poll numbers?

It turns out that others were wondering as well. Newsweek editor Jon Meacham gave media watchdog Greg Sargent an explanation a few days ago: “(The Newsweek poll) numbers were eight, nine, 10 days old. This poll was in the field on Wednesday and Thursday (Dec. 6 and 7). The numbers informed our reporting; we routinely poll on questions that we may not end up specifically citing in the issue.”

That defense doesn’t hold water. If he was so concerned that his own Hillary-favorable poll numbers were “old,” then why did the story cite Hillary-averse poll numbers that were even older? The Marist survey, described in the story s “recent,” was actually conducted in late November.

Meacham also said suggested that “horse race” polls, pitting candidates against each other, are essentially meaningless at this point, and hence not necessarily worth citing. True enough, they do need to be viewed skeptically. But it nevertheless seems worth noting that Hillary Clinton’s horse race numbers have markedly improved. She trailed McCain throughout 2006 in the early match-up surveys – yet now, according to Newsweek, she is ahead. (And another new poll, this one by CNN, now shows her dead even with McCain and two points up on Giuliani.)

I’d suggest two reasons for this potential trend that Newsweek did not find relevent to its story: Starting with the elections on Nov. 7, the overall political landscape has shifted in favor of the Democrats, and as a result a sizeable share of voters now seem willing to view Clinton more favorably. Secondly, McCain in particular appears to have lost some ground with independent voters, which should be no surprise, given his strong rightward tilt and his support for a U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq that draws support from roughly 12 percent of Americans.

The point is, political moods are fluid and changeable (obviously, they could change again), and for those reasons it would appear that Newsweek missed an opportunity to add necessary nuance to its own work. Especially since it had paid for those poll numbers. But its glaring omission will only feed the flawed convention wisdom about Clinton’s purportedly high hurdle.

He was for deferring to the military, before he was against it

In my Tuesday post, I revisited an ’05 speech by President Bush, to demonstrate the perishable quality of his Iraq rhetoric. And today, in the wake of the latest news about his contemplated troop “surge,” I will demonstrate again that what he said in the past apparently means little today.

Remember how he has always said that, on the issue of troop levels in Iraq, he defers to the wisdom of his military commanders in the field? Here’s just a recent sampling:

Dec. 4, 2006: “The force size will depend on conditions on the ground, and upon the recommendations of our commanders on the ground, absolutely.”

April 6, 2006: “I remember coming up in the Vietnam War and it seemed like that there was a -- during the Vietnam War, there was a lot of politicization (in Washington) of the military decisions. That's not going to be the case under my administration.” And if the military tells him that it can live with more troops or fewer troops, “that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Jan. 1, 2006: “I'm going to continue to rely upon those commanders, such as General Casey…(to) determine the number of troops we have on the ground in Iraq.”

June 28, 2005: “Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are, in fact, working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters: the sober judgment of our military leaders.”

April 22, 2004, via flak Scott McClellan: “He looks to our commanders in the theater to make (troop) determinations, in terms of what is needed.”

Well, apparently Bush was in favor of deferring to his military leaders before he was against it. Because in his year-end press conference yesterday, while discussing the potential for a troop “surge” (one that is reportedly opposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the soon-to-be-retiring Gen. John Abizaid, and perhaps by other commanders in the field), Bush declined to repeat what he has always said before, about deferring to military opinion.

This time, all he said was this: “The opinion of my commanders is very important. They are bright, capable, smart people whose opinion matters to me a lot."

But the killer quote came from this anonymous Bush official, speaking to The Washington Post: “He (Bush) has never left the decision to commanders. He is the commander in chief. But he has said he will listen to those commanders when making these decisions. That hasn't changed.” (In other words, drop all previous Bush statements into the Orwellian memory hole. The new talking point is: He doesn’t “continue to rely” on the commanders to determine troop levels at all…in fact, he has never continued to rely on the commanders.)

Anyway, in political terms, Bush’s problem isn’t with the commanders. If he overrules their counsel, they’ll zip it and obey. No, his problem will be keeping his restive fellow Republicans in line. Unlike Bush, they still have to run for re-election, and they don’t want his Iraq debacle to be hung around their necks while he goes home to plan his presidential library.

A couple Fridays ago, for instance, I mentioned that GOP Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, who has to run again in ’08, had eviscerated Bush in a Senate floor speech, contending that the president’s war strategy in Iraq “may even be criminal.” I suggested that Smith probably would be joined by other Republicans down the road. Now he has, at least on the “surge” issue.

Yesterday, GOP Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota – you guessed it, he also has to run again in ’08 – announced that he would "stand against" a troop increase, because “I think it would create more targets. I think we would put more life at risk.”

When these kinds of Republicans go public in this manner, it’s a true sign that the wheels have come off. Ditto Rich Lowry, the conservative commentator. He just wrote a piece (hat tip to Howie Kurtz on this one) basically acknowledging that the mainstream media…drum roll…has accurately reported on the dire state of affairs in Iraq, and that his conservative brethren, who have “lost touch with reality in Iraq,” should learn how to deal with it. The last three grafs go to Lowry:

“Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war….

“The ‘good news’ that conservatives have accused the media of not reporting has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments. But the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone’s heads in a full-scale civil war….

“(R)ealism is essential in any war, and it is impossible without an ability to assimilate bad news, even bad news that comes from distasteful sources. Conservatives need to realize that something is not dubious just because it’s reported by the New York Times, and that the media ultimately will be wrong about Iraq only if - fully acknowledging how bad it is there- the Bush administration takes bold steps to reverse the tide.”

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Meanwhile, is there any room on the next Saturday Night Live for a Sandy Berger skit?

It seems that Bill Clinton’s former national security advisor did some creative subterfuge back in 2003, when he swiped some classified material from the National Archives. According to a report released yesterday by the Archives’ inspector general, Berger (who pled guilty to a misdemeanor last year) hid the documents under a trailer at a nearby construction site, then returned a few days later to retrieve them and destroy a few.

But the real fascination is with his socks; specifically, the unresolved debate over whether Berger was seen at the Archives trying to slip some classified material into his socks (as a witness contends), or whether (as Berger contends), he was merely trying to adjust the hosiery because (as the report put it) “his shoes frequently come untied and his socks frequently fall down.”

I suppose this might prompt a sober debate over what is the best type of undergarment for document theft – Sandy Berger’s socks, or Fawn Hall’s bra? (As Oliver North’s secretary, she allegedly spirited away some of his materials back in ’87.) But when thinking only of the physical comedy possibilities involving a guy screwing up with his socks falling down, I am left to ask only this:

Where’s Chevy Chase when we need him most?

Remember that "Plan for Victory" in November '05?....Oh. You don't?

Much ink and air time has been expended lately on the fact that President Bush chose to postpone, until after the holidays, his long-awaited speech on “the way forward” in Iraq.

For instance, the White House press corps has been peppering spokesman Tony Snow about the delay, and Snow has assured everybody that the Decider is just being deliberative: “This is not not knowing what he wants to do; this is out of an absolute determination to do this right, making sure that he is absolutely convinced that the pieces have been put together, he's gotten the best advice, he's gotten the best facts, and that he now has the policy that he thinks will be the best to move forward.”

What puzzles me, however, is why anyone at this point would assume that anything Bush says is going to (a) break new strategic ground, or (b) quell the sectarian chaos, or (c) lodge in the American memory. On the contrary, we seem to have forgotten that he has delivered dozens of speeches on Iraq over the past few years, most of them instantly forgotten, with nary a phrase that can be invoked years from now as testaments to either his eloquence or prescience.

So as we all brace for the next one, the post-holiday address that may well unveil “the surge,” perhaps it is best to dampen expectations by revisiting one of his earlier, much-awaited rhetorical forays, and taking note of its remarkably short shelf life, its yawning chasm between assertion and fact.

It was just over a year ago, on Nov. 30, 2005, when Bush outlined what he called his “strategy for victory” (not to be confused with the January 2007 strategy for victory), during a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy. He said, for instance, “we are pursuing a comprehensive strategy in Iraq….On the security side, coalition and Iraqi security forces are on the offensive against the enemy.” He said that “Iraqi forces have made real progress,” and that “they’re helping to turn the tide of this struggle in freedom’s favor.”

That was good for one news cycle. The problem is, those words are worthless today; not even his own military leaders bother to endorse any talk about turning the tide. As Marine Lt. Gen. John Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday, during a briefing on the Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on Iraq, “The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace. We have to get ahead of that violent cycle, break that continuous chain of sectarian violence.”

Flash back again to that speech one year ago. At another point, Bush lauded the training of Iraqi police officers: “Iraq has now six basic police academies, and one in Jordan, that together produce over 3500 new police officers every ten weeks…As the training has improved, so has the quality of the recruits being trained. Even though the terrorists are targeting Iraqi police and army recruits, there is no shortage of Iraqis who are willing to risk their lives to secure the future of a free Iraq.”

But again, today’s factual reality has rendered those words inoperative. The new Pentagon report frankly points out that many of those ballyhooed police officers are helping the sectarian killers roam at will: “Shia death squads leveraged support from some elements of the Iraqi Police Services and the National Police, who facilitated freedom of movement and provided advance warning of (security) operations. This is a major reason for the increased levels of murders and executions.”

Here, too, is Bush one year ago: “Iraqi (military) units are growing more independent and more capable; they are defending their new democracy with courage and determination….their confidence is growing…”

But yesterday, Sattler said that even though the number of trained Iraqi forces was expected this month to reach 325,000, the number of available troops – after factoring in all the Iraqis who are “on leave” or who have quit – is actually only 196,000. And as for those aforementioned well-trained police units, the number of battalions deemed ready for “lead responsibility” fell during the autumn season from six to two.

One year ago, Bush also declared that “people are expressing their opinions freely on the streets of Baghdad,” a remark that today might well puzzle the people of Baghdad, who seem to be mostly preoccupied with staying alive. The Pentagon report notes that, last January, there were 180 sectarian “executions,” mostly in Baghdad; during the month of October, the number was 1028.

Bush also said, in that ’05 speech, that “we’re also helping (the Iraqi troops) build a democracy that is worthy of their sacrifice…the Iraqi people have made incredible progress on the road to lasting freedom.” Contrast that assertion with today’s factual reality; yesterday, Peter Rodman, an assistant Defense Secretary, told reporters that the ever-escalating violence is now “shaking the institutions” of our client government.

But perhaps the striking aspect of the Naval Academy speech is the material that isn’t there at all.

That day, Bush blamed the violence in Iraq on what he called three distinct groups: the Sunni Arabs who had lost the “privileged status” they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein; the Hussein loyalists who had held power under Hussein; and al Qaeda fighters. Yet there was no mention of the growing presence of the violent Shiite militias (major players in the sectarian civil war of 2006). In particular, Bush said nothing about the Mahdi Army (controlled by a cleric who is close to the Iraqi prime minister), even though that militia was already a prominent force in the streets. It is cited by the Pentagon today as perhaps the greatest threat to security in Iraq.

In other words, no speech at this point can be expected to “turn the tide,” not when the facts on the ground are clearly beyond his control. Most Americans sense this as well; in the latest CNN poll, 70 percent oppose his handling of Iraq, a record high.

Nor can we assume that Bush’s potential “surge” of additional troops will fundamentally change those facts; Pentagon official Sattler didn’t seem to think so yesterday: “I don’t know how many forces you could push into a country, either U.S. or coalition or Iraqi forces, that could cover the whole country, where these death squads couldn’t find somebody.”

And now, in the wake of reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are skeptical about the workability of a “surge,” Bush has actually reached a fascinating juncture. Would he deliver a speech that overrules the military? Back in that ’05 speech, he said: “If our military leaders tell me we need more troops, I will send them” – but what happens if they tell him NOT to send more troops?

Maybe in January he will simply declare, “I will settle for nothing less than complete victory.” That’s what he said at the Naval Academy. If he uses it again, we will know that none of the evidence from the reality-based community has made a dent.

Our democratic ideals at work

Regrettably, blog posts will be brief and sporadic this week. Other pressing work duties require me to take this temporary measure.

So, two quick items today:

1. Here’s a fresh take on President Bush’s freedom agenda, courtesy of a Navy vet who went to Iraq two years ago as a security contractor. After blowing the whistle on yet another corruption case – his company was apparently selling weapons to Iraqi officials with ties to the death squads – Donald Vance wound up in a military brig for 97 days, without access to a defense attorney or to the evidence that the U.S. had compiled against him. (It turned out there was no such evidence.)

Here’s what Vance says today: “Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had. While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”

When a Navy vet/security contractor starts talking like a board member of the ACLU, you know that something must be amiss. Vance is also intending to sue Donald Rumsfeld, who would probably respond by saying that you go to war with the protections we provide you, not the ones you might want or wish to have at a later time.

2. The quote of the day, on the Sunday shows, was uttered by Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid. Referring to Iraq, and his possible support for a temporary "surge" of additional troops, Reid stated: “The American people will not allow this war to go on as it has.”

The American people won’t “allow” it? What a quaint sentiment. Since when do they have a say?

Even though the ’06 elections were a decisive rebuke of Bush’s war policies, even though most people support a drawdown of U.S. troops, and even though only 12 percent want to send more troops, Bush is nevertheless preparing to send more anyway, as part of his “way forward” to “victory.”

The American people sent Bush a clear message – Bush in the past has defined an election as “an accountability moment” – but thus far it hasn’t mattered a whit. What does this say about the “democratic ideals” that Donald Vance was talking about?

'08 dropout watch: Why Evan Bayh is taking a bye

There’s apparently no need for Democratic voters to actually go to the polls during the 2008 presidential primary season and winnow the field of candidates – because the candidates are already winnowing themselves.

The first volunteer casualty was Mark Warner, the ex-Virginia governor who was assumed to be positioning himself as a centrist alternative to Hillary Clinton. And now, this morning, we have another casualty – Evan Bayh, the senator from red-state Indiana who was also expected to be position himself as a centrist alternative to Hillary Clinton.

This may be the shortest toe-dipping candidacy in history; just two weeks ago, Bayh announced that he was setting up his "exploratory" committee. But apparently he decided to take a bye on ’08 after realizing that he would not be able to compete for money and media buzz - not just with Hillary, but with the rapidly ascendant Barack Obama.

No doubt Bayh realized this last weekend, when he found himself stumping in New Hampshire at the same time as Obama, and drew roughly as much attention as a panhandler in midtown Manhattan.

He could probably have dealt with one rock star celebrity rival. But two? Forget about it.

From his statement today: “The odds were always going to be very long for a relatively unknown candidate like myself, a little bit like David and Goliath.” Try two Goliaths.

It has actually become common for aspiring candidates to deal themselves out long before the actual voting commences. One reason why perceived frontrunners like to amass money and resources is because their daunting assets might scare away potential competitors. Hillary Clinton is doing that now. Al Gore did that in 1999, as did George W. Bush. And Obama told the Chicago Tribune the other day that he can probably raise $60 million if he takes the plunge.

Bayh would have a hard time matching that kind of money – which is arguably unfair, because he, unlike Obama, has a long track record in elected politics, having served two terms as Indiana governor before moving to the Senate, and thereby having demonstrated great success at selling Democratic values to red state voters. But Bayh is a bland guy with a serious passion deficit, hardly the kind of persona that would fire up primary voters. That was a concern even before Obama became the flavor of the month.

And there was another big impediment, the same one that may have given Warner pause: Democratic primary voters are disproportionately liberal, whereas Bayh is a moderate who has frequently jousted in the past with the liberal wing. He voted to authorize the war in Iraq. He has also cast a lot of votes that liberals would interpret as being sops to the corporate sector (like his fealty to the credit card companies, for instance). For these reasons alone, it was hard to see how he could navigate the crucial early primaries successfully.

Which brings us to Iowa caucuses, the first pit stop on the primary trail, and another rival that has been widely overlooked amidst the media focus on Clinton and Obama. A poll in Iowa earlier this fall suggested that the favorite there right now is…John Edwards. Under the radar, he has been assiduously working the state. He, unlike Bayh, does not have a day job in the Senate, which means he is freed up to work the grassroots 24/7. He, unlike Bayh, has been moving to the left, wooing the labor groups that are crucial to the caucus process in that state. And he, unlike Bayh, is an instinctive performance artist who knows how to turn on his audience.

So maybe it was three Goliaths.

The result is that Bayh has opted for the next best thing: Waiting by the phone, during the summer of 2008, in the hopes that he wins the nod for running mate. He’ll have plenty of company.

Now begins the process of denting the Obama halo

Picture the scene: a heroic Democratic celebrity senator from a big Midwestern state ventures out on the campaign trail to test the presidential waters, far in advance of the actual campaign, and is besieged by the fawning multitudes. As one press report puts it, “residents in one town hosed down their housefronts in preparation for his arrival…he was greeted with extraordinary warmth…Voters lined up for autographs and snapshots…his folk stature gives him tremendous believability with his audiences…”

I am referring, of course, not to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, but to the man who in 1983 was deemed to have the right stuff for the White House – Senator John Glenn of Ohio, the former gung-ho, can-do astronaut/folk hero who was immortalized on celluloid in The Right Stuff. The quotes above are drawn from a Time magazine article which appeared on June 20 of that year. The movie, starring Ed Harris as Glenn, also appeared that year.

Yet, in the winter of the following year, it was Glenn who disappeared. The purportedly perfect candidate wilted quickly once he was exposed for the first time to the hothouse climate of an actual presidential primary campaign. Which is just my way of saying that all this breathless 24/7 talk about Obama might prove to be a waste of time.

I could be wrong, obviously. But, for the moment, it’s interesting to note that the inevitable dynamics are beginning to take hold. The more Obama inches toward an actual candidacy, the greater the public scrutiny, and the greater the risks of denting that halo on his head. It’s all happening already. When Maureen Dowd is writing about your big ears, and Rush Limbaugh is laughing about how Maureen Dowd is writing about your big ears, it's clear that the honeymoon is over.

Memo to Obama: Welcome to the big leagues, kid.

Policywise, he is already being attacked from both the left and the right. David Sirota, a liberal Democratic activist and blogger, says that Obama may well turn out to be a willing stooge of the corporate special interests that routinely corrupt Washington. And, just a couple days ago, conservative commentator Larry Kudlow wrote that Obama is “an extremely liberal-left politician” who stands against those selfsame corporate interests. Obama may have been in the Senate for only two years, but already he has enough of a voting record to provide ammunition to both sides of the ideological divide.

And for those Americans who profess to care about policy but who, in their heart of hearts, find that stuff to be tad dry, there is already a scandal to latch onto. Or maybe it’s just a perceived scandal. No matter; in politics, perception is akin to reality.

It turns out that the Up With Hope celebrity got down in the muck with a shady dude. As the press back home in Chicago has been reporting lately, Obama swung a lucrative real estate deal with a longtime friendly fund-raiser – one Antoin “Tony” Rezko – who, at the time of the deal, also happened to be the target of a wide-ranging federal investigation. Today, Rezko is in worse shape, having been indicted two months ago on charges of seeking to extort campaign donations and kickbacks from firms that wanted to do business with the state of Illinois.

Rezko says he is innocent. A court of law will determine that. But, for Obama, the court of public opinion has more flexible rules of evidence. A tainted image can be enough to pull a politician down off his pedestal; it doesn’t take much these days, in the presidential campaign realm, to go from hero to zero. From Obama’s perspective, it can’t be a good thing for voters to find out that, in financing his deal with Rezko, he drew on the book advance from his stirring ’04 tome, The Audacity of Hope.

The Rezko deal itself, which appeared to be a cleverly contrived plan to get Obama a sweet purchase on a home for his family, is hardly a fatal political embarrassment. Even though Obama himself acknowledges that Rezko was probably trying to strengthen their “relationship” by doing the senator a favor, this was no taxpayer-financed boondoggle. And Obama has reacted smartly to the press reports; rather than sounding defensive, he has been cranking out mea culpas to anyone who will listen. For instance, he told the Chicago Tribune that it was “stupid” and “boneheaded” to business with a guy who “was already under a cloud of concern.” Indeed, the best way for a politician to defuse a story is to ‘fess up to it.

Nevertheless, for Obama, this episode is a likely portent of what is to come. He has already sought to sell himself as a potentially transformative leader, a rare beacon of hope at a time when most Americans see their country heading in the wrong direction. Any candidate who aspires to that image is setting the bar pretty high for himself. All the more reason why his inevitable policy compromises in the Senate will be placed under the microscope - and why all his past dealings in the bare-knuckled world of Chicago politics will be closely scrutinized.

After all, in many American environs, Chicago politics is hardly a term of endearment.

A history of Tim Johnson, the Bush team's '02 test target

I’m following up on Tim Johnson, the Democratic senator who is currently listed in critical condition after “successful” brain surgery – and whose illness could imperil the fragile ’07 Democratic Senate majority, as I wrote here late yesterday.

Undoubtedly, a lot of people are reacting to this story by asking, “Who’s Tim Johnson?” So while everyone is scrambling to understand the laws and precedents relating to senatorial incapacity, let’s also focus a bit on Johnson – and the important role that he played in national politics, back in 2002.

Early that year, Tim Johnson of South Dakota was the canary in the coal mine. He was arguably the first Democratic senator to be targeted for electoral defeat by the Bush administration on the charge that he was insufficiently patriotic.

I know this well, because I spent a week in South Dakota, in February of 2002. Actually, what I remember most was that you could drive in South Dakota for two straight hours without seeing a tree. What I next remember is that Johnson, a freshman Democrat, was slated to be up for re-election in November – and yet, even at the start of the year, the White House was already trying to take him apart.

Bush, at this particular time, was at the apogee of his popularity. The 9/11 attacks had just happened only a few months earlier, the retaliatory war in Afghanistan was front and center, and the Iraq sales job had barely begun. Moreover, Bush in the 2000 election had won South Dakota by 22 percentage points. Hence, the early decision to go after Johnson, assailing him as a weak obstructionist of the unassailable commander-in-chief. That winter, the White House knew that if they could eject Johnson from his job, the Democrats would lose their one-seat Senate majority (sound familiar?).

So the Bush strategists dispatched Bush emissaries to South Dakota, to deify the Decider; I recall being at a banquet where Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans said of his Texas buddy, “This is a man who has a great mind, a big heart, an extraordinary leader, judgment you can trust.” And the Bush strategists followed up by running a slew of TV ads, sponsored by the national GOP, depicting Johnson as a national security softy whose judgment should not be trusted. (Locals told me that they had never seen such an early barrage of ads, nine months before an election.)

Johnson was a bit of a challenge for the Bush strategists, because he did have a son in the military; in fact, the kid was stationed with the 101st Airborne in Kandahar, Afghanistan. And Johnson himself was an Army vet. But these trifling details didn’t deter the strategists (just as they were not deterred later that year, when they questioned the patriotism of Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee war vet).

Nor were they deterred by the fact that so many South Dakotans seemed to be ignoring the ads. People complained that the ads were a big waste of money, and that folks were more fixated on their local worries, such as the fact that pine beetles were chewing up the mountain forests on the western border, and prairie dogs were ravaging the land. One rancher named Bill Hutchinson told me, "Maybe if you could believe the ads, you'd pay attention. But you know there's always a shady area, or some exaggeration, or something left out. These [candidates] are good men, but the people writing those ads? I wouldn't want them working for me, because they're not honest."

No matter. South Dakota was a test market for the TV messages that would ultimately help Bush recapture the Senate that November, and Tim Johnson was a test target. Most vividly, there was this TV ad: “Al Qaeda terrorists, Saddam Hussein, enemies of America, working to obtain nuclear weapons. Now, more than ever, our nation must have a missile defense system to shoot down missiles fired at America. Yet Tim Johnson has voted against a missile defense system 29 different times.”

Note the facile linking of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein; we would hear a lot more of that during the prelude to war in Iraq. More importantly, the ad attacked Johnson for voting against a system that America didn’t have, that America probably won’t have, and that would have been ineffective against the 9/11 attacks anyway. But this was probably a smart ad to run in South Dakota, where the Cold War missile silos had been emptied only a decade earlier.

Nevertheless, Tim Johnson survived on election night – by 524 votes. Yet another squeaker in this era of squeakers. Republicans cried foul, charging fraud at the polls; the Republican state attorney general dismissed the outcry, calling it “shoddy and irresponsible and sensationalistic and garbage.”

So here we are today, fixed again on South Dakota. Will the ’07 Senate stay in Democratic hands, even if an ailing Johnson remains horizontal for the foreseeable future? Quite possibly, because the rules do not require that convalescent senators give up their jobs – which is why Strom Thurmond was able to hang onto his, despite the fact that he was virtually bedridden in his final years.

And we also have the case of Clair Engel, a California senator who was rendered mute by a brain tumor – yet stayed in his seat, and showed up to vote for the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act. Since he could not speak, he indicated “aye” by pointing to his eye.

He died a month and a half later, with no attendant political speculation about his seat. This was, after all, the era of strong Democratic majorities.

Democrats win Senate...wait, not so fast

As I have often observed, Democrats are a lot like Phillies fans - always dreading the worst, usually for good reason. It did appear, however, that their habitual gloom was dispelled on Nov. 9, when the U.S. Senate officially went Democratic, 51-49.

But not so fast. As the late great Gilda Radner used to say, it's always something.

There is news tonight that Democratic Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota has been hospitalized with a possible strike. We all wish him a speedy recovery, and that's what matters most. The political stakes, however, are obvious. Let's play this one out:

If Johnson is somehow unable to serve, he might have to step down.

If he steps down, the governor of South Dakota is empowered to appoint a replacement (who, as I read the state law, would be allowed to serve until a special election is held - on the same day as the next general election...in 2008).

The governor of South Dakota is a Republican. The odds that he would appoint a Republican are approximately 200 percent.

If a Republican takes Johnson's seat, the '07 Senate party breakdown would be 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans.

If it's a 50-50 breakdown, Vice President Cheney is empowered to break the tie.

Which means that the Republicans would probably get to run the Senate after all...although, as explained here, it's not necessarily that simple. Is there ever a dull moment in national politics anymore?

And speaking of political power swings, am I the only person who remembers that Al Gore conceded his presidential candidacy six years ago tonight?

Rahm Emanuel gets Clintonesque about Mark Foley

To update a line uttered by Captain Renault in Casablanca, I am shocked, shocked to learn that the House Ethics Committee has recommended that no action be taken against the Republican leaders who allowed a sexual predator in their ranks to roam free.

Yes, the leaders were “willfully ignorant,” and, yes, they failed “to exhaust all reasonable efforts to call attention” to Mark Foley’s behavior, but the Ethics Committee report said nonetheless that nobody broke any rules and therefore nobody should be punished in any way. Pretty toothless stuff. I finally got around to reading the report on Sunday night – it was released last Friday, which was no surprise, because Washington politicians always release embarrassing information on Fridays – and its general thrust was fairly predictable.

…Except for all the juicy info about the Democrats.

And the material is even juicier now, in the wake of the NEWS that Democratic congressman Rahm Emanuel, the party’s chief hardball strategist for the ’06 House campaign, actually knew about Foley’s predilections back in ’05 – even though he insisted, in an ABC interview this autumn, that he had known nothing about Foley until the network broke the news on Sept. 28.

I started to wonder about Emanuel when I reached page 45 of the report, and read that some of Foley’s emails had been forwarded, in autumn 2005, to a staffer on the House Democratic Caucus, who in turn shared them with Matt Miller, the communications director of the House Democratic Caucus, who in turn shared them with the communications director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. As Miller testified, “I gave them to him…with the understanding that [the DCCC communications director] is someone that talks to reporters all day….maybe there's a way that he could get the - you know, that he could give them to a reporter.”

Rahm Emanuel was the DCCC flak’s boss. Emanuel’s name does not appear in the Ethics Committee Report, but it strained credulity to believe that the DCCC flak would not give a heads-up to the top DCCC honcho. Which, it turns out, is exactly what happened – as evidenced by this report the other day on the CNN website:

“The head of the House Democrats' campaign committee, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, had heard of former Rep. Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to a former male page a year before they became public, a campaign committee aide told CNN. . . .the Illinois Democrat was informed in 2005, but never saw the correspondence and did not have enough information to raise concerns. The aide said Emanuel took ‘no action’ because his knowledge was ‘cursory’ and little more than ‘rumor.’”

That defense doesn't score well on the Washington spin meter. The entire Democratic argument, in the Foley scandal, rested on the proposition that House Speaker Dennis Hastert and his fellow Republicans took no action because they conveniently chose not to probe deeply into the information they already had in their possession about their predatory colleague. Indeed, Emanuel told ABC on October 8 that the Republicans should pay a price simply for being so incurious. He offered this analogy: “If a high school teacher was found doing this with a child, and the principal knew . . . the community and parents would have that principal and teacher out."

He wasn’t wrong to characterize the Republican leaders in that fashion; and the Ethics Committee report rebukes the Republican leaders for their convenient incuriosity. But the point is, Emanuel covered up the fact that he – for his own political reasons – had been conveniently incurious as well.

And here he is, in cover-up mode (video link, here), leaving the clear impression that he had no advance knowledge of the Foley emails:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: “I just want to ask you plainly -- did you or your staff know anything about these emails or instant messages before they came out?"

EMANUEL: “No…George, never saw ‘em.”

STEPHANOPOULOUS: “So you were not aware of them? Had no involvement?”

EMANUEL: “No. Never saw ‘em.”

REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN ADAM PUTNAM (interjecting): “Was there an awareness?”

EMANUEL: “No. Never saw ‘em. The first time I ever saw these things…was when (ABC reporter) Brian Ross broke the (story).”

Well. One can see how Emanuel, the former Bill Clinton aide, left himself a bit of Clintonesque wiggle room. He kept insisting that he never “saw” the emails in 2005, and maybe that’s literally true. But that’s not what he was asked. Stephanopoulos asked, “Did you or your staff know anything”? Putnam asked, “Was there an awareness?”

So maybe it just comes down to what the meaning of the word “saw” is.

To recap, nothing in the House Ethics Committee report disputes the meta-narrative of the Foley affair, which is that the ruling Republicans acted in their political self-interest when they turned a blind eye to Foley’s behavior. Nor does the report dispute statements made earlier this autumn by ABC’s Brian Ross, who said that he ultimately got wind of the Foley story from Republican contacts.

But now, in the wake of the news about Rahm Emanuel, we have a fuller picture: the House Democrats turned a blind eye as well, clearly hoping – in their own political self-interest – that the Foley info would somehow surface in the press and thus hurt the GOP in campaign ’06.

All told, Americans who believe that politicians should strictly police their ranks were not well served by either party in the Foley affair.

Give that clueless Democrat an "F"!

As the Democrats prepare to share power in 2007, one of their top priorities is to demonstrate that they can be trusted on matters of national security. They have been handed a golden opportunity – thanks to White House bungling and GOP congressional complicity – and their ’08 presidential prospects may well hinge on whether they can convince independent swing voters that they are worthy of that trust.

Too bad they have flunked their first test.

Consider the case of Democratic congressman Silvestre Reyes. He’s the next chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Nancy Pelosi’s compromise choice. She didn’t want to pick the hawkish Jane Harman (they have personal issues). Nor did she want to pick the next Democrat on the panel, Alcee Hastings (he’s a former federal judge who was once impeached by the House and ousted from his job by the Senate). So she went to the next Democrat on the panel, Reyes. He’s considered a decent guy, and he’s a Vietnam vet as well.

The only problem is that, despite his service on the panel, Reyes apparently doesn’t know all that much about the global war on terror.

As Jeff Stein, the national security editor of the nonpartisan Congressional Quarterly magazine put it the other day, “Reyes can’t answer some fundamental questions about the powerful forces arrayed against us in the Middle East….How can the Intelligence Committee do effective oversight of U.S. spy agencies when its leaders don’t know basics about the battlefield?... Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.”

Stein has a reputation for giving pop quizzes to national security officials, just to see what they know. He has embarrassed some FBI people this way. He has also embarrassed some House Republicans in the past. Maybe he’d even embarrass President Bush, who, as I recall, stumbled during his first campaign when a TV reporter gave him a pop quiz. (Politicians hate pop quizzes. I remember a snowy day in New Hamsphire, in 1996, when GOP candidate Lamar Alexander was asked whether he knew the price of a gallon of milk and the price of a loaf of bread. He flunked both.)

Anyway, now that the Democrats have a chance to show some national security expertise and project an image of strength, it’s fair enough to put Reyes on the hot seat. And it turns out that Reyes couldn’t answer the most basic question about al Qaeda. Here’s how it went, according to Stein:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up al Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics. Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center. Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?

As Stein also demonstrated, Reyes didn't know all that much about Hezbollah, either. In the end, Stein asks the reader facetiously, “If President Bush and some of his closest associates, not to mention top counterterrorism officials, have demonstrated their own ignorance about who the players are in the Middle East, why should we expect the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee to get it right?”

I can answer that, at least in political terms. If the Democrats expect to win back the White House in 2008, they need to seriously demonstrate during 2007 that they can get it right.

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Indeed, they have rarely had such an opportunity. The latest CBS News poll, released last night, shows that just 21 percent of the American people support Bush’s handling of the Iraq war – a record low. Yet the White House is still trying to shrug off its critics, even though the ever-expanding pool of critics now includes rank-and-file Republican senators like Gordon Smith of Oregon.

As I mentioned here last Friday, Smith delivered a long Senate floor speech that upbraided Bush for his failed prosecution of the war. But when Bush spokesman Tony Snow was asked yesterday about Smith’s defection, he dismissed any suggestion that Smith had made any substantive arguments. Rather, Snow simply said that “politics are emotional in the wake of an election.”

In other words, the White House is not prepared to take even its Republican critics seriously. The circling of the wagons continues.

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There's a prominent new blogger at work this week - Tom DeLay. No word yet on whether he'll be tapping the keyboard in his bathrobe down in his Sugarland basement (seriously, it appears the blog will be ghost-written), although it does appear that The Hammer means business. He says he is hoping to use his blog as a rallying point for conservatives.

As a blogger, however, he doesn't seem very comfortable with the notion that he will attract comments from people who don't like him. For instance, on his very first day, this message was posted for his perusal: "You corrupt hypocrite, crawl back to the hole you came out of."

Well, DeLay's blog team reportedly got rid of that message - maybe 100 in all. It appears that the indicted ex-congressmen who once threatened federal judges ("judges need to be intimidated") just can't take the heat when it comes his way.

In decorous language, the wise men expose the Bush credibility gap

Appearing yesterday on Meet the Press, Bush family consigliere James Baker was in the midst of discussing his Iraq Study Group report when he flatly stated: “We don’t spend any time wringing our hands about what happened or might not have happened in the past…Everything in our report is forward-looking.”

Well, Baker is a seasoned political poker player, and that surely explains why he was able to utter those remarks with a straight face. Because, in reality, one of the prime strengths of the bipartisan report is its willingness to revisit the past and boldly chart the Bush administration incompetence that has brought the American mission in Iraq to the brink of ruin.

The Bush team and its defenders have frequently sought to blame “the media” for the woes in Iraq, essentially by arguing that domestic morale has been sapped by journalists who report the bad news while ignoring the good. Bush himself has complained about this since the autumn of 2003, when he said: “we’re making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it’s hard to tell it when you listen to the filter.” He complained again this past March, saying, “People resuming their normal lives will never be as dramatic as the footage of an IED explosion,” and, as always, the Fox News team seconded the sentiment. Sean Hannity said there has been "a total and almost complete focus on all the negative aspects of the war."

But Baker and his ISG colleagues demonstrate in their report that blaming the media is a fraudulent exercise. They take no issue with the journalists’ reporting of the violence in Iraq; their beef is with the Bush war team – which, as a matter of official statistical policy, has consistently sought to minimize the violence in Iraq…and has done so in order to protect the Bush administration’s ideological agenda.

It’s right there, in passages buried deep in the report:

“(T)here is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases.

“A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count.

“For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks of significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.”

93 acts of violence reported, as opposed to 1,100 acts of violence committed…Baker and his colleagues are too decorous to state the obvious, but what they are essentially saying here is that the Bush administration, in its official capacity, falsely skews its information.

The next line in the ISG report is particularly damning, even though its bureaucratese may require you to read it twice: “Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.” That’s dry stuff, intentionally so. But, as an attack on the Bush administration, it has real power. Baker and his colleagues are saying that the war team has “systematically” sought to hide the true extent of the Iraq violence so as not to expose the flaws in the neoconservative mission.

(Read that italicized sentence again. Now read what British officials wrote in their now-famous Downing Street memo, about the Bush team's prewar sales pitch: "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Sound familiar?)

All told, the ISG report demonstrates that there has been a serious disconnect between the facts on the ground, and what Americans were being told by the Bush administration (in the president’s words in December 2005, there is “quiet steady progress”). And by exposing the in-house informational coverup, the ISG report probably makes it far less likely that the administration will try in the future to blame the downward spiral in Iraq on the journalists who are reporting it. (Although, on CNN this weekend, Bush spokesman Tony Snow made one drive-by remark, accusing the Iraq correspondents of peddling "a failure narrative.")

But journalists well know that the release of the ISG report will not prevent the war’s staunchest defenders from seeking to blame them anyway. Four decades after Vietnam, it’s a virtual axiom in some circles that “the media” “lost” that war, by reporting so much of the bad news. And as Iraq continues to deteriorate, the same line is being floated again; as Michael Novak argues on Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard website, “What we have discovered in Iraq is the weakest link in the ability of the United States to sustain military operations overseas. That link is the U.S. media. They are Islamists' best friends.”

The people who now consider Baker to be a “surrender monkey” are not likely to endorse his contention that it’s the Bush administration, not the media, that should be blamed for destructively shoddy reporting.