A soldier's message to the government propagandists: "The truth is always more heroic than the hype"

It’s tough enough to track all the current governmental lies, much less catalogue the lies of the recent past. But several of those old lies resurfaced yesterday, lies that tell us much about the dark art of wartime propaganda, and the myriad ways that war marketers seek to manufacture heroes for a naive and credulous public.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill, Pat Tillman’s loved ones finally got the opportunity – after three long years – to vent their anger at the military in an open forum. Tillman, you may recall, was the ex-pro football player who enlisted as an Army Ranger intent on fighting al Qaeda, only to be slain in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. The public was initially fed the story that he died as a hero, killed by evil-doers; he was subsequently awarded the Silver Star, and his May 3 memorial service was nationally televised.

What Americans didn’t know at the time – and what his surviving family members didn’t know, either – was that the military already knew the truth, that Tillman had been killed by members of his own unit in a bungled mission. But the truth was suppressed; whether intentional or not, the timing of this “hero’s death” story was helpful to the Bush administration, which was anxious to blunt the bad news coming out of Iraq from the Falluja seige (which contradicted the Bush scenario of an increasingly pacified land) and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (which undercut our occupancy of the moral high ground).

And while Pat Tillman couldn't speak on his own behalf to assail the hero mythology, Jessica Lynch did show up yesterday to denounce the same practice.

A teenage Army supply clerk, she was marketed by the military as a true-life Rambo after her capture during the initial phase of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003. Officials spread the word that Lynch fought off her Iraqi captors by firing her weapon; they said that “she did not want to be taken alive,” and, as a result of her heroics, she was “shot multiple times.” The military also circulated its own video, shot and edited by its own crew, depicting Lynch’s rescue from an Iraqi hospital (where, it turned out, the soldiers faced no resistance; Iraqi combatants had departed a day earlier). The mainstream media – you know, the same media that is depicted by Bush defenders as “the liberal media” – basically accepted the official version of events; the Washington Post and New York Times ran glowing stories that depicted Lynch as a cross between Stallone and John Wayne, and Newsweek gave Lynch a magazine cover.

Yet here was Lynch yesterday, testifying that it was all a crock. She never fired a weapon. She was never shot. She stated that “the story of the little girl Rambo from the hills who went down fighting” was “not true.” She added, “I’m still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend. The bottom line is that the American people are capable of determining ideals for heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies.”

Kevin Tillman, recounting his brother’s case yesterday, didn’t use the term “elaborate lies.” He preferred something stronger, “deliberate and calculated lies.” He testified, "I come from Hollywood. I expect show biz in Hollywood, not from the military."

Example: The April 30, 2004 press release depicted Pat Tillman storming a hillside to rescue conrades pinned down by enemy fire. The military stated, “Through the firing, Tillman’s voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy forces emplaced on a dominating high ground,” while Tillman “personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun.”

This, too, was a crock. It's now known that an eyewitness saw Tillman yelling "Cease fire, friendlies!" shortly before he was killed. Tillman's brother testified yesterday that the government saw his brother’s death as an “opportunity” to send an “inspirational message” at a time when the war in Iraq was bogging down (which was ironic, because Pat Tillman reportedly opposed the Iraq war, and saw it as a drain on the resources that were needed to effectively fight al Qaeda). Kevin told the lawmakers that the government's strategy "shifted the focus from the grotesque torture at Abu Ghraib...to a 'great American who died a hero's death.'"

Kevin Tillman was joined yesterday by Army specialist Bryan O’Neal, who was the last soldier to see Pat alive. O’Neal testified that, even though he and the lieutenant colonel in charge of the platoon both knew the truth about Tillman’s death, he was told to stonewall Tillman’s family: “I was ordered not to tell them. He (the platoon leader) made it known that I'd get in trouble.”

Multiple government probes – conducted at the behest of the persistent Tillman family members – have broadly confirmed the coverup, and fingered four generals and five subordinate officers for possible discipline, although none have yet addressed the question of whether senior Bush administration officials knew the truth at the time when the family, and the American public, was being fed the lies. The family is hoping that Congress will pursue that issue. (Indeed, at the risk of stating the obvious, yesterday’s first public airing of the Lynch and Tillman cases would never have occurred had Bush’s Republican enablers retained their control of Congress in the elections last November.)

Perhaps Jessica Lynch should get the last word: “The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.”

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Meanwhile, here in the tumultuous present, we have a fresh half-truth from President Bush. In remarks yesterday, he maligned the Democrats for seeking to suggest a troop withdrawal timetable, and said this: "To accept the bill proposed by the Democratic leadership would be to accept a policy that directly contradicts the judgment of our military commanders."

A policy that contradicts the judgment of military commanders...The sheer effrontery of those Democrats! But wait - I seem to recall that, last autumn, when Bush's military commanders openly voiced skepticism of a troop hike in Iraq, Bush proceeded to contradict their judgment by replacing them.

In the new issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, national security specialist Michael Desch (who teaches at Texas A&M's George W. Bush School of Government) describes what happened in the fall of 2006:

(S)enior U.S. military commanders in Iraq had come to believe that U.S. forces were part of the problem, rather than the solution, as the insurgency had morphed into an interconfessional civil war. So instead of asking for more troops, as they did in the run-up to the war, many senior commanders in Iraq began to argue that the United States needed to lower its profile and reduce its footprint. Less than 40 percent of troops supported an increase in force levels, the Military Times found.

General John Abizaid, the current head of Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in November that he did "not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem" in Iraq. In response to prodding from Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), Abizaid explained that he had "met with every division commander, General [George] Casey, the corps commander, General [Martin] Dempsey [head of the Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq]. ... 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."

Abizaid and other senior U.S. commanders believed increasing the number of U.S. forces in Iraq would be counterproductive. As Abizaid explained on 60 Minutes, "There's always been this tension between what we could do and what the Iraqis do. If we want to do everything in Iraq we could do that, but that's not the way that Iraq is going to stabilize." In congressional testimony, he noted, "We can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect ... [but] when you look at the overall American force pool that's available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the army and the Marine Corps."

But despite such protests, the military leadership was once again overruled by civilians in Washington -- leading to the "surge" taking place right now.

As I said at the top, fact-checking this Washington regime is an arduous job.

Lessons in hubris from one of the best and brightest

In a departure from routine, I want to acknowledge the untimely death of a great American author and journalist. David Halberstam was killed in a car crash yesterday, and when I heard the news, I pulled from the shelf my battered hardcover copy of The Best and The Brightest. Halberstam wrote that book more than 35 years ago, yet its insights into the perils of White House hubris are just as true today. Needless to say.

Halberstam, for those of you too young to remember, was already in Vietnam as a young New York Times reporter, writing about the disparity between Washington talking points and factual reality on the battlefield, long before many Americans were even focusing on the war at all. His dispatches seriously ticked off President Kennedy, who then sought to have Halberstam yanked off his beat. Halberstam stayed, and continued to file stories that systematically challenged the sunny spin of the Democratic administration. Several years after he returned to America, he embarked on an ambitious project to tell the inside story about how a team of arrogant war planners, acting on behalf of two Democratic presidents, led America astray during the 1960s.

The Best and the Brightest was published in 1972, and many of its countless anecdotes still resonate. One of my favorites recounts an incident during the summer of 1964, when President Johnson and his war spinners decided to ask Congress for an open-ended resolution to wage war in Vietnam. They did this by exploiting an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, where North Vietnamese PT boats may have challenged two U.S. destroyers. The truth was far murkier (as Halberstam painstakingly documents), but the White House decided to frame the incident as an example of naked communist aggression. Let’s pick up the book narrative:

(War planner) McGeorge Bundy gathered the White House staff together and said that the President had decided to go for a congressional resolution calling for a general posture in Southeast Asia…After Bundy finished, Douglass Cater, a White House adviser on domestic issues, was one of the first to speak up. “Isn’t this a little precipitous?” he asked. “Do we have all the information…?”

Bundy looked quickly at him and said, “The President has decided, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Cater, new to the White House, persisted: “Gee, Mac, I haven’t really thought it through.”

Bundy, with a very small smile: “Don’t.”

Tens of thousands of American deaths later, Halberstam finished his book in 1972 with this assessment:

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past….He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America (about an unwinnable war) and perhaps incurring a great deal of domestic political risk…

Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen; they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress, and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending, and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopefully inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina, and lack of belief….What was singularly missing…was an iota of public admission that they had miscalculated. The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worth of them. So they lost it all.

It is tragic that Halberstam won’t be around to recap the Iraq debacle in similar fashion. But, as you can see, perhaps he already has.

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An open letter to John Edwards:

What is it with you and your hair, anyway? I’ve seen you up close a number of times, and we even chatted when you first ran for the Senate in 1998, and it’s abundantly clear to me that you have good hair, the easy-to-cut kind of hair, the straight hair that mitigates against your ever having a bad hair day…and it shouldn’t cost $400 (at campaign expense, no less) to get that hair looking right.

I don’t intend here to imply that your fancy haircut is the most monumental issue of the day; it’s also important to point out that many politicians with expensive habits have successfully portrayed themselves as friends of the downtrodden. Bobby Kennedy was filthy rich, yet his portrait adorned the walls of thousands of shacks in Appalachia and in ghettoes. Lyndon Johnson, before being consumed by Vietnam, was fixated on fighting poverty, and believed deeply in the mission, even though he had made himself rich, thanks to some sweetheart ownership deals for Texas TV stations. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a friend of the little guy, even though he lived his life in the lap of luxury in Hyde Park. So I wasn’t necessarily scandalized by the news that you had purchased a 100-acre spread in North Carolina, complete with basketball court, squash court, swimming pool, and a 600-square foot bedroom.

But, really, this hair thing was so avoidable.

Fairly or not, you’ve already been tagged with that “Breck girl” label, and you’ve already been immortalized on YouTube as someone preternaturally obsessed with what stray locks might fall over your left brow. That video clip drags on for two minutes, and it feels like 20. Your detractors are forever looking for new ways to question your gravitas as a candidate, to impugn your crafted image as a populist crusader, to show that you’re on the rich side of your Two Americas, so why give them any fresh ammunition?

Here’s how you explained it the other day: “This guy had to come to where I was to (give) a haircut.”

John…Dude…Was it so hard to anticipate that Joseph Torrenueva might be a tad pricey? First, he was making a house call. Second, he was coming from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Repeat, Beverly Hills. That’s a place where a cold plate of gefilte fish at Nate ‘n Al’s Delicatessen will run you nearly $15.

So, just a word of advice: If you want to be a man of the people, get a people’s haircut. I go to an earthy guy named Frank who wears a neck chain and cuts hair for $20, including tip. I’ll give you his number. His shop is located in a swing state with an early primary, if that’s any help. And do yourself another favor: pay for it out of your own pocket next time.

Equating Harry Reid with Jane Fonda: Does that tactic work anymore?

In their increasingly shrill attempts to rationalize the Iraq war, President Bush’s defenders persist in thinking that if they choose to demonize a war critic as a white-flag-waving wimp, that most Americans, even at this point in the conflict, will simply accept the characterization as truth. Apparently these defenders somehow believe that it’s still 2002, and that they still hold sway over public opinion, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary.

Consider, for example, the latest episode involving Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid. Last Thursday, he said: “I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense, and – you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows – that this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq.”

The Republicans and their allies instantly assumed that they had hit the jackpot: Reid had uttered the phrase “this war is lost,” and thus he could be fitted for cement shoes, destined for eternal demonization as an enemy-emboldening, troop-endangering defeat-o-crat. Everybody got into the act. Texas Senator John Cornyn told CNN that Reid “is playing to the worst elements of the antiwar left.” Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino characterized Reid’s stance as “disturbing.” Conservative House Republican Tom Tancredo dismissed Reid as “reckless.” A colleague, Pete Hoekstra, claimed that Reid was conceding Iraq to al Qaeda. Conservative lawyer-activist Mark Levin wrote that Reid’s remark was “so disgraceful and brazen that it could have been uttered by Tokyo Rose during World War II, or Jane Fonda during the Vietnam war.”

And the attacks continues yesterday; on Fox News. neoconservative war hawk William Kristol said that Reid was “a disgrace,” and Fox political commentator Brit Hume said that Reid’s comment was “laughable.”

What’s particularly ironic about these attacks – and the implication that Reid had marginalized himself as a lefty peacenik at odds with the American mainstream – is that the war apologists have totally misread their man. Harry Reid, far from being a left-leaning ideologue, is actually a cautious politician who hews to the middle of the road; one gets the feeling that most of his moves as majority leader were heavily poll-tested in advance. So when he suggests publicly that “this war is lost,” one can assume that he is merely reflecting mainstream opinion.

And that’s precisely the case.

Three days prior to Reid’s remarks, the latest ABC-Washington Post poll was released. It asked Americans whether we would win or lose the war. Fifty-one percent said we’d lose, 35 percent said we’d win. Last month, meanwhile, the USA Today poll offered four choices, ranging from most optimistic to most pessimistic. The largest share of respondents opted for the latter. Forty-six percent said they didn’t think we can win; another 20 percent said victory was possible, but didn’t think it would happen; 17 percent said we’d probably win; and 10 percent said we’d definitely win.

In other words, it is Reid’s critics – not Reid – who are out of the mainstream. We’re long past the point where they can successfully demonize a Democrat simply by putting him in a tank with Michael Dukakis and parading him around as an object of ridicule.

Indeed, when the critics assailed Reid, they somehow overlooked the fact that his substantive point – about the futility of military victory – has already been voiced by a number of military experts. Retired Gen. Tony McPeak, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War under the senior George Bush, said not long ago that “Even if we had a million men to go in, it’s too late now. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.”

And, over the past few days, I don’t recall any of Reid’s critics focusing their ire on conservative icon William F. Buckley, who has long indicated his belief that the war has "failed." Nor have they attacked retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, who directed the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, wrote in February that it’s futile to keep American troops in Iraq (“fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy”).

But Odom was merely repeating what he said on NBC in 2004. Three years before Reid’s remark, he told the Today Show: “We have already failed. Staying in longer makes us fail worse. If we blindly say we should stick to it, we’re misusing our power and we’re making it worse…I think we’ve passed the chances to not fail.” At the time Odom made those remarks, we had lost roughly 720 soldiers in Iraq.

By the way, Reid added some new remarks today. It's noteworthy that he didn't repeat the "war is lost" phrase (why invite fresh attacks, regardles of how fatuous they might be?); rather he opted for this choice of words: "Winning this war is no longer the job of the American military. Our troops have already done their job...The military mission has long since been accomplished. The failure has been political. It has been policy. It has been presidential."

So here’s my question: Who will the public choose to believe about the war – Harry Reid, or the people who are seeking to equate Reid with Jane Fonda?

And here’s another: Who deserves to be more publicly maligned – the war planners and enablers who have precipitated and perpetuated the disaster, or the politician who merely addresses the reality of the disaster?

And a final one: A number of Republicans have already indicated that if Bush’s troop escalation doesn’t yield “progress” by this autumn, they will bail out on Bush in order to save their skins on the ’08 election. (Congressman Jack Kingston: "A heck of a lot of us will start peeling away.") Will they hew to that promise? Or will they cave again, when the president inevitably pleads with them to sit tight and give him another six months to turn the tide?

An insider's take on Fredo's "damning dereliction"

As the preeminent poster child for Bush administration incompetence, attorney general Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales has actually performed an important public service. In his long-awaited Senate testimony yesterday, the president’s crony repeatedly demonstrated – via lapses of memory, and sporadic bursts of damaging candor – all the myriad ways that this lame-duck regime has laid waste to yet another once-proud federal institution, in this case the U.S. Department of Justice.

It is tempting to deconstruct Gonzales’ fumbling attempts to rationalize the firings of the eight federal prosecutors (many of whom were either investigating Republicans during an election season, or were deemed to be investigating Democrats with insufficient zeal). But such an effort on my part would probably constitute a violation of the Eighth Amendment guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.

After all, even Republicans told CNN yesterday that poking holes in the Gonzales narrative was the equivalent of clubbing a baby seal. Suffice it to say (for now) that the best defense offered yesterday by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, when he wasn’t invoking “I can’t recall” more than 50 times, was that he had no idea what his own top aides were doing as they plotted the unprecedented firings, that he had no idea where the original hit list came from – and that, even now, even after weeks of prepping for his testimony, he still can’t explain the reasons for the firings. (By the way, President Bush said yesterday that he was “pleased” with Gonzales’ testimony, a statement which should rank with “Heckuva job, Brownie.”)

So rather than recite his embarrassments at length, I’d like to yield the floor to Daniel Metcalfe, who is well qualified to provide the big picture. Metcalfe, who describes himself as “a purposely non-partisan registered independent,” is a career public servant who worked at the Justice Department for nearly 36 years – under five Republican presidents and two Democratic presidents – as a trial attorney and later as a Freedom of Information specialist. He retired in January, which is why he now feels free to talk. In a long interview the other day with Legal Times, he minced no words in explaining why the prosecutor purge scandal is important, and, more broadly, why the Bush regime should be viewed as uniquely destructive.

I’ll excerpt his remarks at length:

“(T)his is a Cabinet department that, for good reason, prides itself on the high-quality administration of justice, regardless of who is in the White House. Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House's domain….More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton's second term. And even (first Bush AG) John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence…

“But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel (Gonzales) as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip….I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren't even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.

“This matters greatly to Justice Department employees of my generation. They are now the senior career cadre there, with the high-grade institutional knowledge that carries the department from one administration to the next, and when they see a new attorney general come from the White House Counsel's Office with a wave of young ‘Bushies’ in tow and find their worst expectations quickly met, they just as quickly lose respect for nearly all of the department's political leadership, not to mention that leadership's ‘policy concerns.’ That respect is a vital thing, as fragile as it is essential, and now it's gone.”

Metcalfe views the purge scandal as a toxic mix of incompetence and ideological fervor:

“(I worked for) more than a dozen attorneys general, including (Reagan’s) Ed Meese as well as (Nixon’s) John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales….(E)ven Ashcroft brought in political aides who in large measure were experienced in government functioning. Ashcroft's Justice Department appointees, with few exceptions, were not the type of people who caused you to wonder what they were doing there. They might not have been firm believers in the importance of government, but generally speaking, there was a very respectable level of competence (in some instances even exceptionally so) and a relatively strong dedication to quality government, as far as I could see.

“Under Gonzales, though, almost immediately from the time of his arrival in February 2005, this changed quite noticeably….(M)ost significantly for present purposes, there was an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it…

“I found it not at all surprising that the recent U.S. Attorney problems arose in the first place and then were so badly mishandled once they did….No longer was emphasis placed on accomplishing something with the highest-quality product in a timely fashion; rather, it became a matter of making sure that a ‘consensus’ was achieved, regardless of how long that might take and with little or no concern that quality would suffer in such a ‘lowest common denominator’ environment.

“And heaven help anyone, career or non-career employee, if that ‘consensus’ did not include whatever someone in the White House might think about something, be it large, small or medium-sized…

“(I)t became quite clear that under Gonzales, the department placed no more than secondary value on the standards that I and my office had valued so heavily for the preceding 25 years -- accuracy, integrity, responsibility and quality of decision-making being chief among them.”

Therefore, Metcalfe concludes, the attorney general’s “most damning dereliction” is that Kyle Sampson allowed unqualified underlings (whom Metcalfe describes as “too subject-matter ignorant to even realize how ignorant they are”) to cook up the prosecutor purge – even though “the end result was something that even he could not fully explain.”

True enough. My favorite Gonzales line yesterday: "This was a process that was ongoing that I did not have transparency into."

In the long run, said career professional Metcalfe, Gonzales will have to be long gone before the DOJ can “at least begin the process of restoring the department’s previous reputation for political independence and the reliably even-handed administration of justice.” Indeed, he said, the DOJ is in dire need of “Watergate-style repair.”

Which brings us back to one classic moment in Gonzales’ testimony. Midway through his morning ordeal, he declared to the senators: “When you attack the department for being partisan, you're really attacking the career professionals.” By saying that, was he being willfully cynical – or cluelessly incompetent? Because as Metcalfe (and others) have already demonstrated, it’s the career professionals who have been most victimized during Gonzales’ tenure, precisely because they have struggled to remain non-partisan.

Gonzales’ bid to hide behind the “career professionals” echoes Bush’s ongoing attempts to defend his war by hiding behind the troops. The two cronies are indistinguishable. Their talking points are the same; their governing styles are the same.

And remember, it was Bush who was really on the hot seat yesterday. The buck stops with him. As he put it yesterday (via CNN), in his inimitable style, "My job is a job to make decisions. I’m a decision — if the job description were, what do you do — it’s decision-maker."

This is why elections matter - and why the high court matters at election time

The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision to criminalize late-term abortions – a ruling that further imperils the legal right to abortion, as codified in Roe v. Wade - is vivid proof that elections do make a difference, and that the high court’s composition deserves top-tier ranking as a campaign issue.

Back in 2000, when George W. Bush was pitted against Al Gore, it was widely believed that it wouldn’t really matter which guy won the race. Ralph Nader was hardly the only person who believed that there was scant difference between the two major parties, and their respective nominees.

The nation was at peace, the economy was decent, Bush and Gore were competing for moderate swing voters remember “compassionate conservatism?”), and a lot of people noted that, especially on pocketbook issues, the two candidates seemed barely indistinguishable: they both embraced free trade, endorsed a balanced budget, and believed that quality education was crucial in the high-tech era. Those prospective voters who were paying sporadic attention might well have concluded that the main difference between Bush and Gore was that the former seemed a tad light in intellect, and that the latter seemed insufferably superior in manner.

Yet there were fundamental differences. Gore, long before he won the nomination, tried to sound the alarm in Iowa about one crucial issue: “If you want a Supreme Court majority that is keeping with the philosophy of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, that is what is at stake in this election.” He was arguing that if voters wanted to protect (among other things) the right of women to make private decisions about their own bodies, then voters should choose the Democratic nominee in 2000; but if they wanted those rights curbed or eliminated, they should vote GOP in 2000.

At various junctures in that election campaign, candidates and activists and outside observers (myself included) pointed out that Bill Clinton’s successor would have the opportunity to shape the high court for a generation; that four of the nine judges at the time were at least 65 years old; that three of those oldsters – John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg – were longstanding supporters of the Roe ruling; and that the next president would likely get the chance to tap several like-minded nominees.

GOP candidate Bush, with his eye on suburban swing voters that year, repeatedly sought to downplay the court issue, insisting that America “wasn’t ready” for a Roe repeal, and that he merely wanted to defuse the polarized discussion. But activists in Gore’s camp didn’t buy it, and tried to argue that voters should view the future of the high court as a major campaign issue; as academic Carole Joffe contended a month before the 2000 election, “Neither Bush’s evasive chirping about how good people can disagree when he is asked about abortion at a national forum, nor Nader’s impatient dismissal of the differences between Bush and Gore, should blind supporters of reproductive freedom to the stakes in this election. They are monumental.”

But the future of the high court never became a major issue; Bush and Gore basically split the vote in the suburbs, where abortion rights are generally viewed sympathetically, and they split the women’s vote as well. Nor was the high court’s composition a major issue in the 2004 race; neither John Kerry, nor President Bush, talked about it much, even though it was again clear that the direction of the closely-divided bench might well depend on who won that November.

And now we have fresh evidence that the high court, and the president who staffs it, matter greatly.

Yesterday, thanks to the votes of Bush appointees John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the court narrowly decreed – for the very first time – that an abortion procedure should be banned with no exceptions for safeguarding the woman’s health. Seven years ago, in a similar case, the court rejected that thinking; the swing vote was O'Connor. Now she's gone, replaced by Bush appointee Alito. He swung the other way.

The new majority overruled the decisions by six different federal courts, and swept aside longstanding evidence compiled by medical experts (notably the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists), who had argued that relatively rare late-term abortions (known in medical parlance as “intact dilation and extractions”) might sometimes be necessary to protect the health of women suffering from high-risk pregnancies. Until yesterday, the high court over the past three decades had decreed that any restrictions on the right to abortion must include a legal waiver if a woman's physical or emotional health was imperiled; not so anymore. And, as a result of this ruling, anti-abortion activists feel emboldened to push for more.

Since this is hardly the first time that the judges have demonstrated its influence on the everyday lives of Americans, how come the high court’s composition has never been of paramount interest to voters? And - given what happened yesterday, and given the fact that the GOP might be one John Paul Stevens illness away from finally zeroing in on Roe, is it conceivable that the court could become a top-tier issue in 2008?

I’ve been tracking this lack of voter interest since I started covering national politics back in 1992. The judges at that time were also chipping away at Roe, but when I asked some smart people whether the high court was therefore emerge as a major issue, they dismissed the idea. William Galston, a political analyst and occasional Clinton adviser that year, said it best: “I remember when I was a campaign adviser to (Democratic nominee) Walter Mondale in 1984, and Mondale worked hard to play the Supreme Court card (against Ronald Reagan), but it didn’t work. Or course, that year, a Democratic ticket of Jesus and Moses wouldn’t have gotten 45 percent against Reagan. Still, as an issue, it doesn’t work. Fear of the future isn’t as potent as something based on current experience. People are going to be fixated on what’s wrong right now.”

Even dedicated court-watchers tend to agree with that view. In the autumn of 2004, with Bush and Kerry battling, Elliot Mincberg of the liberal People for the American Way told me that, as an issue, the high court “doesn’t have the immediacy of Iraq or the economy. It doesn’t lend itself to the daily back-and-forth of a campaign, because maybe court appointees won’t happen at all, or maybe it’ll take five years for a new majority to coalesce.” In addition, as I have often been told, Americans generally don’t like to see the high court brought into politics, because they prefer to view the judiciary as being independent and separate from the partisan fray. (Even though it isn’t.)

Some women’s rights groups are now hoping that the high court will play well as an issue next year, that yesterday’s ruling will underscore the future stakes for female swing voters in particular. And they’re only mirroring sentiment among their opponents, who have long believed that shaping the judiciary should be a top-tier political crusade. Given the high court’s newly documented willingness to intervene in women’s lives, it would appear that the activists on both sides can make a credible case for spotlighting judicial clout during the ’08 race.

But will most voters care? Not if the past is prologue.

The pitfalls of mourning myopia, and other topics

Dare I breach the national mourning ritual and provide some perspective? Sure, let’s do it.

According to news dispatches, here’s what happened early this week in a galaxy far, far away: In Anbar province, the bodies of 17 Iraqi civilians were found buried in a schoolyard; in Baghdad, 25 civilian bodies were discovered; in Falluja, 10 bodies with signs of torture were discovered; in Mosul, two university professors were shot dead; at a site near Kirkuk, three bodies were discovered; at a checkpoint south of Mosul, 13 Iraqi soldiers were killed in an attack.

Even if you omit the soldiers, that’s 57 dead Iraqis – nearly double the body count at Virginia Tech. Naturally, I am not dismissing the horror of what happened on the home front, or demeaning those whose lives were lost in the campus shootings. But since many Americans tend to be a tad self-absorbed about life in their own backyard – a cultural impulse that is currently being reinforced by the 24/7 cable news coverage – it’s easy to forget, or never to realize in the first place, that random killings of the innocent are a daily fact of life in our war of choice.

The faces and bios of the 32 murdered students and teachers are already being reported and broadcast on the home front, but it should be noted that – in April alone thus far – the known number of slain Iraqi citizens and Iraqi security people exceeds 733. And the website that tallied this number warns that “actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site.” (Update: We can now put that known number at roughly 966. Fresh reports indicate that at least 233 Iraqis were killed or found dead on this day alone.)

Long after the pain of the Virginia Tech tragedy has subsided, Iraqi innocents will continue to be killed in numbers that dwarf what happened here. I am not suggesting that we instantly cauterize our wounds and snuff out our ceremonial candles. But our myopic focus on the death of American innocents does tend to suggest that we assign more value to those lost lives than to those whom we deem to be mere statistics. We wouldn’t really want to leave that impression, would we?

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With respect to cable TV news, there was a particularly shoddy incident on the first night of the Virginia Tech coverage. Once again, the impulse to be first trumped the responsibility to be accurate.

The news channels, anxious to identify the shooter but lacking any hard factual information, seized on badly-sourced newspaper report that the assailant was “a Chinese national” who had only recently arrived in the United States on a visa. It all started with a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, who wrote Monday that “authorities were investigating whether the gunman…was a Chinese national who arrived in the United States last year on a student visa. The 25-year-old man being investigated for the deadliest college carnage in U.S. history reportedly arrived in San Francisco on a United Airlines flight on Aug. 7, 2006, on a visa issued in Shanghai, the source said."

So a columnist hears from unnamed “authorities” that they are chasing a tip (probably one of many), and that the tip (which turned out to be dead wrong) involved an adult arriving last year from Shanghai. The columnist decides to go with this material. And then the cable news channels, without knowing whether these unnamed sources in another news outlet have any veracity, decide to go with it as well, citing "uncomfirmed reports."

There once was a time when being right was more important than being first, when journalists (even on TV) actually took the time to weigh the information in their notebooks before deciding whether to use it. But today, with a deadline every moment, there is too often a tendency to just share the raw notebook material with the world. And given the sensitivities today about foreigners in the post-9/11 world this particular erroneous report had the potential to inflame domestic suspicions.

Indeed, even after the news about shooter Cho Seung-Hui was confirmed, some analysts were suggesting yesterday that maybe such tragedies could be averted if we tightened our border procedures. As National Review commentator Candace de Russy argued, “How much checking up on visa applicants do those responsible for granting such visas actually do? That is, just how effective are these officials at identifying signs that an applicant may prove to be dangerous? In the case of Cho, were any such signs missed?”

Take a chill pill, Candace. He was eight years old when he entered the country.

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Yet another sign of the Bush administration undercutting on its own spurious spin:

Apparently Pentagon chief Robert Gates didn't get the memo about how the Democrats are supposed to be characterized as defeatocrats who merely want to root for failure in Iraq and make it easier for the terrorists to follow our troops home.

For weeks, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been arguing that those meddling Dems on Capitol Hill, with their demands for a withdrawal timeline, are undermining American resolve and prompting Osama bin Laden to turn handsprings - yet here was Gates yesterday, speaking to Pentagon reporters: "The debate in Congress…has been helpful in demonstrating to the Iraqis that American patience is limited. The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact...in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment.”

A new national poll reports that, by a 58-33 percent margin, Americans trust the Democratic Congress more than Bush to handle the situation in Iraq. Now that Bush's top Pentagon guy has validated the Democratic position, I doubt that those numbers will flip any time soon.

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Oy, what a goy: On a lighter note, let’s check in with Tommy Thompson, a Republican presidential candidate who might well be advised to pack up his dreams and fade away. It’s not every day that a White House aspirant wins a Don Imus Award, but this guy qualifies. And he also gets a special mention for most creative excuse.

In Washington two days ago, speaking in front of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, Thompson said: “I'm in the private sector, and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know, that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition, and I do not find anything wrong with that."

You can see the problem with that remark. It seems to me that the Christians who built this country during the nineteenth century, long before Jewish immigrants arrived en masse to work sewing machines in the ghettos, and the Christians who controlled Wall Street and who for many decades enforced Jewish quotas in the major law firms and universities – well, it would appear that those folks were “earning money” quite effectively, even though they were not part of the “Jewish tradition”...

Maybe Thompson didn’t run those thoughts through his mind, but clearly he knew that he had said something wrong, because he quickly decided to amend his remarks…and only made matters worse: “I just want to clarify something because I didn't (by) any means want to infer or imply anything about Jews and finances and things. What I was referring to, ladies and gentlemen, is the accomplishments of the Jewish religion. You've been outstanding business people, and I compliment you for that."

This is like a politician addressing a black audience and saying, “For the first time in my life, I am shooting hoops for exercise. You know, that’s part of the black tradition, and I do not find anything wrong with that…What I was referring to is the accomplishments of the black culture. You’ve been outstanding athletes, and I compliment you for that.”

Anyway, Thompson insisted yesterday that he said these things only because he was tired and had a cold. If he stays in the race, let’s just hope that he doesn’t show up sick at any more Jewish confabs, and ask the women for chicken soup.

Virginia Tech and the muzzled Democratic response

So here we go again; we all know the drill by now. Politicians of all stripes will offer their “thoughts” and “prayers” to the victims’ families. Special-interest groups on the left will cite the latest bloodbath as proof that we need gun control. Special-interest groups on the right will cite the latest bloodbath as proof that we need more gun ownership. Religious right activists will blame the tragedy on the video violence propagated by “Hollywood liberals.” And cable television will rerun the same video clips umpteen times, fill the airways with talking ranters, and thus leave the impression that nothing else is happening anywhere in America or overseas, probably for the next week or so. (Which at least means that Don Imus gets a reprieve.)

This is what happened after two twisted kids shot up the Columbine high school on April 20, 1999. We witnessed the national wringing of hands, the convening of symposia and the ritual assignations of blame – and now we’ll do it again, of course, before settling back into our routines until the next massacre provides a temporary jolt.

But in that spring of 1999, we also witnessed something that we are not likely to see replicated this spring, in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings: The spectacle of elected Democrats clamoring to crack down on the easy purchase of over-the-counter weaponry. Those days are over. The gun-rights lobby has prevailed. The rest of the western world is decrying the American "gun culture" this afternoon, but the Democrats wouldn't dare.

At this writing, we don’t know all the facts about our latest gun marauder. We do know, however, that police found a receipt which indicates that 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui purchased one of his weapons, a Glock .9mm semiautomatic, last month. We don’t know whether he bought it from a licensed legal firearms dealer or from a gun show dealer or from a crook on the street, and we don’t know whether he bought it in Virginia or another state. But the odds are strong that, regardless of the specific circumstances, he was greatly aided by the general ease of purchase. Virginia’s gun laws, for instance, are famously lax; there is no gun registration, and no mandatory waiting period. And, nationally, there are no mandatory background checks at gun shows; nor does Virginia choose to impose its own purchase restrictions.

But you won’t hear much about this from the Democratic presidential candidates, nor from the congressional Democratic leaders (indeed, nothing thus far), because they have long concluded that, as an issue, gun control is a political loser.

They first sensed this during the 1990s, after President Clinton prodded his Democratic Congress to enact a ban on assault weapons. The National Rifle Association promptly went to work, with its cash and electoral muscle, and helped to oust at least a dozen pro-ban Democrats during the 1994 congressional elections – thus playing a key role in the ascent of Newt Gingrich and his conservative Republicans allies in that historic year.

Democrats rightly concluded, in the wake of that debacle, that even though a majority of Americans (particularly suburban moms) professed to favor gun control, they nevertheless were not motivated to cast their votes on the basis of that issue; by contrast, hunters and Second Amendment adherents – including a lot of the blue-collar males that Democrats would dearly love to enlist - were strongly motivated to punish those politicians who seem to be soft on gun rights. (Moreover, support for tighter gun laws has been declining ever since.)

Then came the 2000 presidential race. I well recall that Vice President Gore, right after Columbine, was talking up the need for “sensible” gun-purchase restrictions. He appeared on Larry King’s CNN show and complained that “we have a flood of handguns that are too deadly,” and that an existing ban on automatic weapons should be strengthened. Gore at the time was gearing up for the ’00 race, and, taking early aim at his eventual opponent, he often mentioned during 1999 that George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, had done nothing to curb gun purchases in his state; on the contrary, Bush had signed a law making it easier for Texans to carry concealed weapons.

But after Gore won the nomination, and election day drew near, he barely said a word about gun control, aside from mentioning that maybe a photo ID would be a good idea at the time of purchase. Nor did he take on Bush when the GOP candidate opined on guns in his inimitable style. (I was at a March 2000 debate, in Los Angeles, when Bush sought to explain why he opposed any federal requirement that guns be equipped with trigger locks: “I don’t mind trigger locks being sold, but the question is, are we going to have ‘trigger-lock police’ knocking on people’s doors and saying, ‘show me your trigger locks’?”)

Gore’s people muted the gun issue when it became clear, during the final weeks of the campaign, that he needed to boost his appeal to male gun owners in key swing states. I spent the closing days of the race in one of those states, Michigan, and it was clear that, fairly or not, a lot of the guys viewed any gun restrictions as akin to gun confiscation. One office worker, Joe Overton, said to me, “In this state, we mobilize more people on the first day of hunting than saw hitting the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. My brother and sister are hunters, and they think a photo ID is like getting tattooed.”

In the end, Gore managed to win Michigan – as well as Pennsylvania, another big gun state. But, more significantly, Gore lost Tennessee (his home state), Arkansas (Clinton’s state), and West Virginia (which had been a solid Democratic state for decades). If he had prevailed in just one of those three states, he would have won the election. Democrats have since concluded that those three losses were partly attributable to his image as a gun-curber. The national exit polls provided broader evidence: nearly half the voters in 2000 were gun owners – and they broke for Bush, by 61 to 36 percent.

Flash forward to 2004. That year, the Republican Congress allowed the ’94 weapons-assault ban law to expire – and only a handful of Democrats said a word about it. The new Democratic strategy (which has been working, albeit slowly) is to broaden the party’s appeal in southern and western states by embracing gun rights. A new breed of “macho” Democrats, such as Virginia Sen. James Webb, has joined the ranks. And at least one Democratic presidential candidate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, considers himself the gun owner’s friend.

We don’t yet know whether tight gun laws would have conclusively prevented the Virginia Tech massacre. But since we are now entering yet another broad national debate about the root causes of such tragedies, the traditional Democratic perspective will be conspicuous by its absence (the gun-control groups can’t do it alone).

Already, religious conservatives are filling my in-box with denunciations of our cultural decadence, and of the need to “turn to God” as a hedge against the “evil” that stalks us. A pro-gun group, Gun Owners of America, has emailed to say that the Virginia Tech massacre could have been prevented if only the Virginia legislature hadn’t killed a bill that would have allowed teachers and students to carry concealed guns (“Isn’t it interesting that Utah and Oregon are the only two states that allows faculty to carry guns on campus. And isn’t it interesting that you haven’t read about any school or university shootings in Utah or Oregon?”) Meanwhile, the media watchdogs are already on cable TV, denouncing video games and Quentin Tarantino (we don’t yet know whether the Virginia Tech shooter played video games or watched movies by Quentin Tarantino).

So, since this is destined to be the national conversation for the next few days, it would seem appropriate, at the least, that high-powered Democratic arguments about the easy availability of weaponry should be part of the mix.

"I think we are making progress," and other bloviations from the Cheney bubble

Bob Schieffer of CBS: “Does this administration have a credibility problem?”
Vice President Cheney: “I don’t think so, Bob.”

One would think that if the Bush administration was really interested in reconnecting with the American public, it would put somebody on the air besides Dick Cheney. At this point, Don Imus could probably do a better job.

Cheney’s appearance yesterday on Face the Nation was predictable in most respects. Indeed, it would be waste of cyberspace to critique it at length, given the fact that this is the same guy who insisted that we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq (2003); that the insurgency was in its “last throes” (2005); and that Saddam Hussein’s agents had personally met with 9/11 terrorist leader Mohammed Atta (December 2001, and again in 2004, even after the 9/11 Commission concluded that no such meeting had occurred). Even the pollsters at Fox News are reporting a national thumbs-down verdict on Cheney; in their latest survey, only 34 percent of Americans rate him favorably – his worst showing ever, dating back to the first Fox soundings in July of 2000.

Nevertheless, President Bush’s backstage consigliere did mutter a few new lines that will no doubt look even more embarrassing six months from now. When Cheney was specifically asked about the latest setbacks in Iraq – the massive anti-American protests that were staged last Monday, on the fourth-anniversary of Baghdad’s “liberation”; the Green Zone bomb in the Parliament cafeteria; the two big bombs that were exploded on Saturday (not to mention the Sunday bombs that killed 45 Iraqis, and the Sunday news that two Shiite Cabinet members had quit the government) – Cheney shrugged everything off and said:

“I think we are making progress.”

Also noteworthy was Cheney’s response to the federal prosecutor purge scandal. In the latest document dump by the Justice Department, last Friday, a little gem was unearthed. It turns out that Kyle Sampson, attorney general Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff, had started lining up successors for the targeted prosecutors back in January 2006 – thereby contradicting his sworn statements to Congress last month, when he testified that there had been no organized plan to fire the prosecutors and replace them with pre-designated ideologically loyal Bushies. Meanwhile, Gonzales is slated to testify tomorrow on Capitol Hill, and will have to explain why he first claimed that he had never attended a purge meeting, when in fact documents now show that, last Nov. 27, he most certainly did.

Schieffer wondered aloud why anyone would believe that Gonzales has a firm grasp on what’s going on in his own Justice Department. Cheney’s response: “(Gonzales) is a good man. I have every confidence in him. The president has every confidence in him.”

This was also at the point in the interview when Cheney insisted that the Bush administration does not have a credibility problem. He elaborated: “Obviously, we’ve got issues we need to work through…You do the best you can with what you’ve got.” And in the end, he said, the Bush track record “will stand up well to scrutiny.”

In particular, he is referring to Iraq (hard as that may be to believe). He apparently believes that he and Bush still have the upper hand, politically speaking, in the forthcoming tussle with the Democratic Congress over the future of that conflict. Democratic leaders plan to meet this week with Bush, and insist on their troop withdrawal timeline as a precondition for approving the next round of war money. Bush and Cheney view the Democrats as “irresponsible” (an ironic use of the word, given the way that Bush and Cheney have waged this war, and the arguments they used to launch it), but Cheney’s own language is actually harsher than that.

In a little-noticed speech last Friday, sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Cheney argued that the Democrats have taken “a hard left turn,” toward the “abandonment and retreat” of the early 1970s – as evidenced, he said, by their congressional support for an Iraq withdrawal timetable. But his argument only serves to demonstrate, yet again, that he is out of touch with American public opinion – because, far from taking a hard left turn, the Democrats are taking a stance that precisely mirrors centrist sentiment in the electorate.

As I’ve noted here before, all the polls reflect this. And in the latest CBS News poll released this weekend, 57 percent of Americans said they support a withdrawal timetable. When the question was asked another way, 61 percent said they favor war funding only for a limited time. On yet another question, 60 percent favor decreasing the number of troops, or removing them all. And, as perhaps the best measure of centrist sentiment, 74 percent of independent voters now say that Bush is mishandling the war.

These kinds of figures would never deter Cheney, of course, but he still doesn’t think that the GOP defeat last November was a big deal. In his Heritage speech on Friday, he said this: “It was, in retrospect, a narrow victory. A shift of only 3600 votes would have kept the Senate in Republican hands, and a shift of fewer than 100,000 votes would have maintained Republican control of the House of Representatives.”

Well, if we want to talk about a “narrow victory,” we might simply observe that Cheney owes his job to the fact that Democratic voters in Palm Beach County were flummoxed by the butterfly ballot, and that a one-vote Supreme Court majority dragged him and Bush across the finish line. But anyone can play the “if only” game. The slam-dunk refutation to Cheney’s argument can be found in the fine print of the ’06 vote:

In the aggregate tally of all contested House elections, the Democrats won 53 percent of the national vote, the Republicans only 46.4 percent. That is actually a more decisive spread than the Republicans enjoyed when they took the House in the “revolution” of 1994. (The tally that year was GOP 52.9 percent, Democrats 46.9 percent.) Moreover, in 2006, the GOP failed to capture a single Democratic seat; the GOP hadn’t failed in that fashion since the House elections of 1948.

And totaling all the Senate races, the spread was even larger: the Democrats took 53.8 percent of the national vote, while the GOP took 42.4 percent – a particularly large asymmetry, given the fact that so many of the Democratic triumphs occurred in red states (GOP incumbents were unseated in Virginia, Montana, Missouri, and Ohio). This is in stark contrast to the ’02 Senate midterm elections, when the GOP won 51.3 percent of the national vote, the Democrats only 44.7 percent. To anyone but Dick Cheney, the ’06 Democratic Senate victory can be attributed to a nine-point swing in the vote, which hardly fits the description of “narrow.”

And the ’06 House and Senate exit polls demonstrate why Cheney’s party lost so decisively: Independent voters (again, the center of the electorate) broke for the Democrats by 59 to 41 percent.

But if Cheney truly believes that he and Bush represent the center, and that the Democrats are merely doing the bidding of the “hard left,” perhaps he should take that same Friday speech and deliver it in front of a cross-section of citizens, a moderate audience in a swing state. At least that way, he’d see whether the applause lines that galvanized the Heritage Foundation really work outside the bubble. More likely, middle-of-the-roaders would leave the arena asking themselves the same question that Bob Schieffer articulated yesterday:

“Why should people believe you now, when so many times, in the past, statements from this administration have proved to be incorrect?”

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By the way, before Cheney complains too much about how the Bush team is under fire from "the hard left," he might want to check in with his fellow conservatives who are now demanding that attorney general Gonzales quit his job. In a letter signed by members of the newly-formed American Freedom Agenda - the members include David Keene, chairman of the grassroots American Conservative Union, and veteran conservative fundraiser/activist Richard Viguerie - Gonzales is dismissed as "an unsuitable steward of the law."

They cite the prosecutor purge scandal ("He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice"), but, more generally, they contend that "Mr. Gonzales has presided over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances. He has brought rule of law into disrepute, and debased honesty as the coin of the realm."

But since Gonzales is merely an instrument of his White House masters, what does that say about their debasement of honesty?

There's a big job opening in Washington, but nobody seems to want it

WANTED: Prosecutors of an unpopular, disastrous war seek military expert for newly created job of “war czar.” Must be willing to conspire with his superiors in a PR operation designed to snow the public into believing that something positive is actually being done to mop up the mess. Must be willing to knock heads with a vice president who has a vested interest in perpetuating the disaster. Must be willing to cede all credit to the commander-in-chief, in the unlikely event that progress is really achieved. Must be willing to play the fall guy, and shoulder all the blame, in the more likely event that nothing changes whatsoever, thereby providing some small and ephemeral measure of political protection to the commander-in-chief.

In so many words, that’s basically what the White House has been circulating, as it looks for a war “czar” to preside over President Bush’s debacle. I’m not kidding about this. In case you missed the story the other day, Bush is really seeking such a person – and he has already been turned down by three military leaders who apparently have no desire to climb aboard the Titanic just as the water floods the First Class cabins.

This search for a "czar" would also seem to imply that the president doesn't have confidence in his own team (Defense chief Robert Gates, State's Condoleezza Rice, National Security advisor Stephen Hadley) to run the show anymore, or at least to effectively coordinate policy among themselves. This will hardly help Bush with the American majority that has already written him off.

One of the applicants who rejected the job, retired Marine Gen. and former NATO commander John Sheehan, even talked on the record about his reasons for demurral. Referring to Bush and his fellow war planners, he said: “The very fundamental issue is they don't know where the hell they're going."

But the troops in Iraq certainly know where they’re going: Nowhere.

Two days ago, Bush’s war team announced that the tours of the soldiers currently fighting in Iraq will be extended by three extra months in order to comport with the Bush “surge” strategy. (The soldiers seem to be less than thrilled about the news.) What’s most striking about this announcement, in political terms, is that it totally undercuts one of the president’s key rhetorical attacks against the congressional Democrats.

You may recall that on April 3, in the Rose Garden, Bush contended that unless the Democrats speedily forked over all the money he wants for the war, on an open-ended basis with no strings attached, then the troops would be hurt and the Democrats would have to shoulder all the blame. Here’s what he said: “Congress’ failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines….That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it is unacceptable to the American people.”

He said the same thing on Tuesday of this week, in a speech to the American Legion. Yet one day after the Legion speech, his Pentagon announced the "unacceptable" tour-of-duty extension, which means (to paraphrase Bush) that some of our military families will wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines.

In other words, the growing strains on the military are directly attributable to Bush’s war strategy. Thanks to the actions of his administration, he has thwarted his own attempts to pin the blame on the Democrats.

The White House has a creative explanation for all this, of course. When a reporter asked Bush flak Dana Perino to explain yesterday why Bush had declared a Democratic-driven tour-of-duty extension to be "unacceptable," even while his own Pentagon was preparing to announce such an extension, she replied: "I’m not aware that the President knew that there was going to be — that Secretary Gates had come to any decisions."

Translation: The deputy press secretary is unaware of whether Bush was aware that a decision had been made by a key subordinate to extend the tours of soldiers in Iraq....But wait a minute, isn't Bush supposed to be the Decider?

No wonder those prospective czars said no. What better way to soil one’s career than to join up with a band of lame ducks that can’t even win the PR battle in Washington?

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And finally this week, why is it that Washingtonians seem so fixated on czar, as a descriptive word for a policy tough guy? It all started in 1974, when President Nixon appointed William Simon as his energy "czar," and nobody questioned the word back then, either.

I'll just cede the floor to John Oliver, from The Daily Show: "This is a critical time in the (Iraq) conflict, one that calls for a strong leader. And what better title for that leader than one evoking an ineffectual, tyrannical dynasty ultimately slaughtered by Communists in a filthy basement deep in the Ural Mountains?"

John McCain and the urgency of red-meat politics

Following up on my Monday post about John McCain:

In his speech yesterday to the American people…Correction…In his speech yesterday to the conservative Republican primary voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, and especially South Carolina, the beleaguered GOP presidential hopeful took the only route that is left open to him. He stood up for the Iraq war, which at this point is supported only by diehard Republicans, such as the folks who will vote next winter in Iowa, New Hampshire, and especially South Carolina. And he stood up for the guy who launched that war, a president who is broadly unpopular nationwide, except among the kinds of folks who vote in GOP primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and especially South Carolina.

Perhaps the most amusing quote was provided yesterday by a McCain aide who, in reference to his boss’ Iraq speech, insisted that “none of those is a political calculation.” Yeah, right. No doubt McCain is sincere in his hawkish beliefs, but to argue that “none” of what he said was politically calculated is laughable. McCain’s tone was a giveaway. He is typically mild in his remarks about Democrats; indeed, he works with them frequently. But this time, he was scathing in his denunciations: “Before I left for Iraq, I watched with regret as the House of Representatives voted to deny our troops the support necessary to carry out their new mission. Democratic leaders smiled and cheered as the last votes were counted. What were they celebrating? Defeat? Surrender? In Iraq, only our enemies were cheering.”

That’s red meat for the conservative primary voters who have been slow to warm to McCain. And he badly needs to dish the goods pronto, before he slides any further in the polls, or suffers any fresh fund-raising embarrassments. A new national poll of GOP voters has McCain in third place, behind Fred Thompson, an actor who, by most accounts, had two undistinguished terms in the Senate, and who has yet to declare a candidacy. And on the money front, the latest reports indicate that Mitt Romney, who unlike McCain is known to a fraction of Americans, still managed during the first quarter of ’07 to spend $12 million – the same amount of money that McCain was only able to raise.

Hence, McCain’s urgent need to channel Bush and Cheney, even if it meant embracing some of the same half-truths that have long soured most Americans on this administration. But McCain’s point, presumably, is that the typical GOP primary voter is still on board the mission. Which is why McCain yesterday said things like this: “Democrats argue we should redirect American resources to the 'real' war on terror, of which Iraq is just a sideshow. But whether or not al-Qaeda terrorists were a present danger in Iraq before the war, there is no disputing they are there now, and their leaders recognize Iraq as the main battleground in the war on terror.”

That’s a durable Bush talking point, which requires this interpretation: “Even though we successfully misled the American people into thinking that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots before the war, and launched the war for that false reason, we can now say that al Qaeda really is present in Iraq - thanks to the war we launched for that false reason.”

But the key half-truth needs further explanation. McCain’s speech, mimicking Bush, implies that al Qaeda is orchestrating the war against us in Iraq. The problem, as always, is that the claim doesn’t square with factual reality. Both the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a recent report by the right-leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies, have concluded that foreign jihadists comprise somewhere between four and 10 percent of all the insurgent fights opposing American troops. The rest are native Iraqis who view us as occupiers. As the DIA concluded in February, “attacks by terrorist groups account for only a fraction of insurgent violence.”

But since McCain, in his speech, wasn’t seeking to appeal to the reality-based community, such quibbles are irrelevant. In a Fox News poll of likely GOP primary voters in South Carolina, 70 percent said last week that Bush is doing a good job, and 75 percent support the Iraq war. So maybe McCain's “straight-talking” hawkishness on Iraq will put him back in the hunt for conservative votes; in South Carolina (a traditionally pivotal GOP primary state, with strongly conservative sentiment), Giuliani stood at 26 percent in the Fox poll, with McCain one point behind.

The real test would come late next winter, presumably after he has outfought Rudy Giuliani and Romney, when he has to shift his pitch to the independents and Democrats who once embraced him. Strolling with 100 bodyguards through a Baghdad market and claiming “progress” might wash with the Republican right; it’s hard to imagine anyone else buying that.

Richard Nixon once said that if a Republican wants to be president, he must first run to the right and then to the center. But Iraq is becoming such a chasm that someone like McCain risks a steep plummet before he can even shift his footing.

The faux relevance of the consumer pop quiz

Today I rise in defense of Rudy Giuliani. While campaigning yesterday in Alabama, he had to endure one of the stupidest rituals of contemporary political journalism: the consumer pop quiz.

A local reporter asked him to name the price of a gallon of milk, and he got it badly wrong. He said it was “probably $1.50,” whereas, in reality, the average nationwide price (according to the federal Agriculture Department) is about $3.20, the Alabama price is around $3.40, and the price on the upper West Side in Giuliani’s city runs to about $4.20. Giuliani was also quizzed on the price of a bread loaf, and he guessed $1.30, which was about 70 cents lower than the current going rate in Alabama, although the Giuliani campaign late yesterday insisted that his guess was basically correct, if one consults the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And when pop-quizzed about the price of a gallon of gas, Giuliani said $2.89, which wasn’t a bad guess; that’s slightly higher than the current national average, although less than motorists pay in California.

I first saw this pop quiz in action 11 years ago, at eight in the morning during a snowstorm in New Hampshire (yeah, it’s a glamorous job). We stood in a town square, listening to a campaign pitch by Republican presidential candidate Lamar Alexander. Suddenly, a local reporter asked him whether he could correctly recite the price of milk and a dozen eggs.

Alexander blanked. He quickly turned to an aide for help. The aide was no help. Then he told the aide, “I need to know the price of a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs. I need to know right now.” Alexander’s rivals in the Bob Dole campaign were delighted; later that day, the Dole team put out a press release saying that the next time Alexander went stumping, “he might want to stop in a supermarket.” Alexander himself lamented, “I got stumped this morning on the price of eggs. I haven’t bought eggs in 12 years.”

Here’s my pop quiz: Who cares?

The price test is just a lazy journalistic gimmick which is designed to imply that a political candidate is out of touch with the lives of the masses. (Some political scientists refer to pop quizzes as “degradation ceremonies.”) Giuliani flunks the milk question, ergo he is an elitist. Ditto Lamar Alexander. Ditto Tom Strickland, a Democratic Senate candidate in Colorado, who in a 2002 debate was asked to name the price of a gallon of unleaded gas, and got it wrong. Ditto John Edwards, who blanked on the price of a six-pack of beer in July 2004 (“I haven’t bought a six-pack of beer in years, so I don’t know”). His questioner, by the way, was Don Imus.

If I was asked to explain why any of this should matter, I’d flunk. Presidential candidates, and those few who actually make it to White House, are not like you and me. They tend to have people around them who buy the goods and pump the gas. They tend to focus on things like the Consumer Price Index, not the price at the local grocery. I even read somewhere recently that when Dwight Eisenhower was ready to leave the White House, aides had to school him on the fine art of dialing a telephone and making his own call.

Similarly, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a member of the landed gentry; he lived well from cradle to grave, and I’d bet rarely paid for milk over the counter – yet today he is lionized as the president who lifted the average American out of the Great Depression. John F. Kennedy grew up rich, and in fact he never paid for anything, much less milk or eggs, because (as his biographers report) he never even bothered to carry money. Yet he and his brother Bobby were revered by poor people of color. And consider Ronald Reagan who lived well in Hollywood long before he acquired the rich benefactors who greased his political career; are we supposed to believe that he clipped coupons for the best price on a gallon of skim – and could name that price when prompted? Yet he sold America on his set of conservative principles, effectively communicating his big picture.

Even the famed ’92 incident involving the senior President Bush and a supermarket scanner has been overblown. At a grocers convention, he was photographed looking amazed at the price scanner, and the New York Times ran it on page one, as evidence that Bush was out of touch with the masses. Democratic vice presidential candidate Al Gore said, “Here is a man who sees a 20-year-old technology at the supermarket checkout line, and looks like an ape discovering fire.” It turned out – far too late for the news cycle, and the verdict of history – that Bush was actually being shown a new version of the technology, one that could read torn labels on supermarket items.

I’d also bet that a fair number of Washington political journalists, who typically earn six figures annually, would flunk similar tests. I know I would – not because somebody else buys my goods (nobody does), but because my mind is elsewhere at the checkout line. The eggs and milk get scanned and rung up, and I never bother to check the itemized receipt. I can’t imagine that candidates, even those without gofers, would be any different.

Nevertheless, since this little ritual is here to stay, the wise candidate is the one who can ace the test, bond with the average Joe, and thus ensure that his or her populist creds are in order – even if, in reality, the wise one doesn’t know the difference between Whole Foods and 7-11. Indeed, Lamar Alexander advises all aspirants to cram accordingly; as he wrote in 1998, while listing 30 tips for presidential candidates, “Know the price of milk, bread and eggs. I couldn't remember them one day during the 1996 New Hampshire primary, and the media had a good time at my expense.”

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Late Sunday night, I explained why the Republicans were not exulting about the polls which appear to show that the GOP is well poised to win the next presidential race. Here is further evidence of Republican gloom (thanks to the George W. Bush albatross), published today.

Al Sharpton (of all people) as judge and jury

I don’t really have an opinion on whether Don Imus should be consigned to permanent oblivion for smearing the Rutgers basketball women as “nappy-headed ho’s,” any more than I can offer rational mandatory sentencing guidelines for Michael Richards, Mel Gibson, Isaiah Washington, or any of the other notable celebrities who have engaged in the ritual apologias after uttering racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic remarks.

It’s obvious, of course, that Imus flagrantly breached the current rules of social civility (an everyday occurrence in the disputatious world of loudmouth radio), by reducing a group of aspiring black women to a racial stereotype. Indeed, the most eloquent condemnation was penned today by the prominent black journalist Gwen Ifill: “This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field. Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.”

But even though I can’t decide what form of punishment best fits the verbal crime, I have no problem arguing that the last person who should be sitting in judgment of Don Imus, and arguing for his expulsion from the airwaves, is the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Sharpton was playing judge and jury early this morning, on NBC’s Today Show, declaring that Imus’ Monday apology was “too little, too late,” that it was “business as usual,” and that Imus should vanish forever because “people should not be attacked for their gender or their race.”

And yet Matt Lauer never bothered to ask Sharpton to explain why he deems himself qualified to sit in judgment. Lauer mentioned that Sharpton has been a figure of “controversy” in the past, but never hit the preacher with the actual facts. Such as:

In 1987, Sharpton concocted the Tawana Brawley hoax, charging that a 15-year-old black girl had been abducted, raped, and smeared with feces by a group of white men. He targeted one particular guy, who turned out to innocent. In fact, the crime itself never happened. Sharpton taunted his white target, saying: “If we're lying, sue us.” The guy did sue – and wound up winning a $345,000 defamation verdict against Sharpton…who, to this day, has refused to recant his slander or to apologize.

When Sharpton, as a 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, was asked by Tim Russert on Meet the Press whether he was ready to apologize, he said this: “To apologize for believing and standing with a woman--I think all of us need to take women's claims more seriously…No apology for standing up for civil rights.”

Sharpton followed up on his ’87 performance by stoking anti-Semitic anger in 1991. After an Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn accidentally killed a seven-year-old black boy, Sharpton showed up at the funeral and assailed “diamond merchants” for spilling “the blood of innocent babies.” In case anyone missed the fact that “diamond merchants” was a code phrase for Jews, he lead a pack of demonstrators through a Jewish neighborhood. Subsequently, a rabbinical student was fatally stabbed by a group of assailants that reportedly shouted “Kill the Jews!”

Flash forward to 1995, when a white Jewish property owner raised the rent on a black-owned music store in Harlem. Sharpton’s organization picketed the Jewish property owner at his own store site. Protestors shouted, “Burn down the Jew store,” and one of them thought that was a good idea. The “Jew store” was torched, and seven employes (some of whom had already been shot) died as a result.

Sharpton hasn’t apologized for any of these incidents. When Russert tried to confront candidate Sharpton about his past, the preacher responded by saying, “I think you’ve got white candidates with worse backgrounds.”

At least Russert made an attempt. Not so the 2004 white Democratic candidates who shared numerous debate stages with Sharpton. Anxious not to stoke his ire, they pandered relentlessly. Joe Lieberman, for instance, called him “my dear friend,” and seconded a Sharpton remark by saying “amen, brother.”

Yet this morning, there was Sharpton, going unchallenged on The Today Show. Imus has uttered abusive remarks in the past, and has apologized for those too, but Sharpton was unimpressed: “What precedent are we setting, that we can apologize every ten years?” At that point, Lauer might have been wise to suggest (in the form of a question) that Sharpton, of all people, has scant credibility to voice such a complaint.

But the fact that Sharpton is given a national broadcast platform despite his own track record is proof that there are no rules for appropriate punishment. In this country, the past is a disposable commodity. Sharpton has never owned up to his numerous verbal misfires, yet he retains his celebrity status as moral arbiter. What this suggests, in other words, is that the guy who cracked wise about “ho’s” will weather his humility phase and survive, as this hot story fades from memory. Imus should take heart in the Sharpton saga, because it demonstrates that American amnesia is the verbal offender’s best ally.

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Well, what a relief that this issue has been cleared up, once and for all. The suspense has been unbearable.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...

When I first heard about John McCain’s bizarre lollygag through a Baghdad bazaar – he was extolling peaceful progress while wearing a bulletproof vest, moving in a cocoon of 100 soldiers, and being protected on high by two gunships and three choppers – I suddenly flashed on the memory of Bowie Kuhn at the ’76 World Series.

Granted, this is an asymmetrical comparison, since the war is a tad more important than baseball. But, like McCain, the baseball commissioner at that time was determined to be blithely oblivious to his surroundings, and to the dictates of empirical reality. Kuhn had decreed that the World Series should be played at night, and so, in dark Arctic weather, he showed up at Yankee Stadium sans topcoat, wearing just a business suit. While everybody around him was shivering in multiple layers of cloth, he sought to behave as if it was balmy in the Bronx. (Cold? What cold?) In the end, however, his gesture backfired. The baseball writer Roger Angell famously wrote that Kuhn had succeeded only in making a fool of himself.

Until John McCain’s latest travails over Iraq, few would have said that about him. Like many veteran politicians, McCain has always had his detractors, people who see him as self-righteous, or bullheaded, or vain. But he was never an object of ridicule.

Now he is. His strenuous efforts to cleave himself to the sinking lame duck in the White House, and to the war that may well go down in history as America’s greatest strategic disaster, is making him a laughingstock among those in the electorate (particularly the crucial swing-voting independents) who understand the damage that President Bush’s war has wrought on our global struggle against terrorism. The image of McCain, traipsing through the Baghdad market in his shades (rose-colored, no doubt), in an effort to demonstrate his radio assertion that “there are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk,” not only threatens to delegitimize his presidential candidacy, but also could prove as notorious as the spectacle of Bush bestriding the aircraft carrier in his flight suit.

One week later, after finishing third in the GOP first-quarter money sweepstakes, and in the wake of polling news that Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are beating or crowding him in key early primary states, McCain is still trying to live down what he did in Iraq. Now he has an Iraq speech slated for this Wednesday at the Virginia Military Institute – it smells of a campaign “relaunch,” never a good sign – in which he will try to explain yet again why he is hewing to the Bush stance that has been rejected by a landslide majority of Americans. He wrote an op-ed piece on Iraq in yesterday’s Washington Post. And he tried out a few lines last night, on the Sunday broadcast of CBS’ 60 Minutes (“I disagree with what the majority of the American people want.”)

But he succeeded merely in looking foolish again. At one point, CBS asked him to explain why he had said, in late March, that the current U.S. commander in Iraq “goes out almost every day in an unarmed Humvee,” when, in fact, that was an outright falsehood. (McCain had apparently been trying to cite some evidence about “progress” during the Surge.) In response last night, McCain said this:

“There is no unarmored Humvees. Obviously, that’s the case. I’m trying to make the point over and over and over again that we are making progress, that there are signs of progress…Of course I’m going to misspeak, and I’ve done it on numerous occasions, and I probably will in the future. I regret that when I divert attention to something I said from my message, but, you know, that’s just life, and I’m happy frankly with the way I operate. Otherwise, it’d be a lot less fun.”

That response demonstrates just how far McCain has traveled from the halcyon days of Straight Talk. He is now suggesting that it’s fine to make false assertions in the service of promoting “over and over and over again” the theme of “progress” in Iraq – and that misspeaking in support of Bush’s war policy is “just life.” Even at a time when soldiers are dying every day (actually, at an increased pace since the onset of the Surge), and at a time when most Americans are hungry for honesty on the war, McCain is saying that speaking more carefully, and backing up his assertions with fact, would be “less fun.”

One can make the argument that McCain’s dogged declarations of “progress” are smart short-term politics, given the fact that the likeliest GOP primary voters are still staunch defenders of the Iraq war. Yet he has been losing ground anyway, in key early states such as New Hampshire and South Carolina, and nationwide as well. His political dilemma is two-fold: A lot of conservatives still don’t trust him, despite his best ongoing efforts to mimic Bush’s flight from factual reality on Iraq; and, in terms of a general election, the swing-voting (and heavily antiwar) independents who loved him as a “maverick” in 2000 appear poised to reject him if he does win the ’08 nomination.

He and his advisers undoubtedly believe that he can’t win the GOP nod unless he parades his bona fides as a born-again “loyal Bushie” (in the pet phrase of ex-Justice aide Kyle Sampson). But his timing is unfortunate. Here he is promoting the Bush agenda in Iraq, even in a nightmare Baghdad photo op - at a time when Bush is being repeatedly rebuked on the war by agencies of his own government and by conservative think tanks as well.

Last week, for instance, a declassified Defense Department report again certified that (contrary to Bush’s claims) Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had not been conspiring together prior to the war. Also, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the right-leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Heritage Foundation all contradicted Bush’s rhetorical claim that Iraq terrorists would “follow us home” if they were not defeated over there. And the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office recently concluded that Iraq (exacerbated by inept Pentagon planning) is straining the National Guard so severely that its capability to protect us on the home front has been significantly eroded.

But as McCain struggles to recoup this week, it’s doubtful that he will be able to match Senate colleague Lindsey Graham for sheer exuberance. As Graham cruised the Baghdad marketplace with McCain, the South Carolinian was overcome by the incipient signs of freedom-loving capitalism; in his words, “I bought five rugs for five bucks!” It’s amazing, the bargains that can be had, when a buyer is backed at taxpayer’s expense by the full weight of the American military.

The misleading hype of the hypothetical polls

Since Rudy Giuliani and John McCain continue to score well in the polls that match them against the major '08 Democratic players, how come Republicans don't seem to be jumping for joy?

First, the big picture: Democrats would appear to be on a roll. Right now, about 50 percent of Americans describe themselves as Democrats (partisans and leaners), while only 35 percent similarly describe themselves as Republican – the widest pro-Democratic margin ever measured by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which has been tracking party ID since 1990. Just five years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, the two camps were tied at 43 percent each. And even during the Bill Clinton era, Democrats never had more than an eight-point advantage.

Moreover, the aggregate fund-raising figures, announced last week, demonstrate that Democrats are psyched about their ’08 candidates, while Republicans seem underwhelmed about their own. During the first quarter of this year, Democratic donors anted up $78 million for their White House hopefuls; Republicans, $51 million for theirs. In other words, Democrats raised 60 percent of the first-quarter money. Those are astounding figures, given the fact that the GOP is traditionally far more flush. And this statistic, courtesy of the nonpartisan Diaego-Hotline poll, seems worth noting as well: When Americans were asked whether they wanted to see a Democrat or a Republican win the White House in 2008, 47 percent chose the former and only 29 percent chose the latter.

But even though all this is true, actual Republican candidates (Rudy Giuliani, John McCain) are consistently beating actual Democratic candidates (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards) in the early survey match ups.

No matter who does the polling – Time, NBC-Wall Street Journal, Zogby, Fox, Rasmussen, Newsweek – the results have been the same: Giuliani and McCain defeat the Democratic first tier. You’re not likely to see those results advertised on the liberal websites.

But here’s the hitch: You won’t find many Republicans crowing about those results, either. Because they know that the prevailing national mood is working against them. And they know that these early polls generally don’t mean squat.

Consider these hypothetical match ups, taken one year prior to previous presidential elections, culled from the Harris and Gallup surveys:

1. In February 1995, Bob Dole was favored over incumbent President Clinton by 51 to 45 percent. (In November 1996, Clinton beat Dole by 49 to 41 percent.)

2. In March 1991, the senior George Bush was beating Mario Cuomo by 78 to 17 percent, and few even heard of Bill Clinton. (In November 1992, Clinton beat Bush by five points.)

3. In February 1983, Walter Mondale topped incumbent Ronald Reagan, 47 to 41 percent. (In November 1984, Reagan hammered Mondale in a landslide.)

4. In April 1975, incumbent Gerald Ford trailed Ted Kennedy by 50 to 43 percent. (Kennedy never ran, and 19 months later, Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in a squeaker.)

When you see that kind of track record, you have to wonder why pollsters even bother to take these kinds of soundings so far in advance. As Pew polling director Andy Kohut told me the other day, “I don’t put much faith in polls this early, although we do them. The bottom line is that most people don’t really have their juices flowing yet.”

So what explains the current Democratic deficit in the early match ups?

Kohut said, “McCain and Rudy have universal name identification, and that’s helping to boost their numbers, while the general information on Obama and even Edwards is still pretty thin. But these numbers could well change, once people start thinking more intensely about this election. When you look at the shifts in party affiliation, and the poll numbers showing the strong general dissatisfaction with the country’s direction, and the importance of Iraq – well, all these are indicators that the Republicans will be pushing a heavy rock up the hill.”

And that’s basically what Kate O’Beirne said on Meet the Press today. A seasoned political observer at the conservative National Review, she was unimpressed with the McCain and Giuliani numbers. Referring to the GOP’s traditional ownership of the national security issue, she said, “I don’t think it’s the advantage it once was. The Republicans have a real brand problem, brand name problem. It used to be people thought (that although Republicans) might not much like big government, they can run it. Now they seem to…not be able to run it at all. A Democrat has to be favored in ’08. I think any Democrat has to be favored in ‘08, yeah. I think Republicans have a real brand name problem. It—it’s become a competency problem.”

One random thought: If, as O’Beirne argues, the prevailing national mood favors the Democrats despite the early ’08 match up polls, doesn’t that potentially hurt Hillary Clinton the most, since she had been pitching herself as the one candidate who has the toughness and experience to win? If it’s true, as Kohut argues, that Obama and Edwards are trailing right now only because they lack the universal name ID enjoyed by Giuliani and McCain, then how does one easily explain away Clinton’s deficit – when one considers that she has parity with the GOP guys on name ID?

Nevertheless, the general argument is that any Democratic nominee can render these early polls irrelevant and ride the antiwar mood into power. Mark Schulman, Time’s pollster, said on March 29, “If Iraq persists as an issue, all of our polls show that this will undercut Republican candidates. Being seen as ‘close to Bush’ is a real negative in the polls. When the campaign really heats up, the Democrats should have a lot of cards to play.” (McCain seems to be paying the steepest price already. More on this tomorrow.)

And speaking of Iraq, welcome to the fourth anniversary of Baghdad’s “liberation.” We’re still waiting for those flowers.