Holiday

I'm traveling today. As compensation, I'll write on Sunday.

Giving Hillary a run for the money

In the wake of the news that Barack Obama has jolted Hillary Clinton in the fund-raising sweepstakes, and that, by doing so, he has reshaped the ’08 Democratic race, we hereby present the Most Hilarious Spin Award to Clinton’s campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe.

McAuliffe was asked last night by ABC News to assess the stunning fact that Obama, during the first quarter of 2007, apparently raised more money for his primary season campaign than Clinton did for hers – and that he accomplished this feat by raking in small contributions from a pool of donors twice as large as hers. McAuliffe reacted by saying, “Ultimately, forget the money...”

Forget the money? McAuliffe, the master fundraiser of the Clinton era, the guy who once literally wrestled a 260-pound alligator in order to cajole a $15,000 donation out of a Florida Seminole chief, is saying “forget the money?” That’s like Donald Trump losing out a condo deal and declaring “forget real estate.”

The plain truth is that the Clinton campaign has failed its first big test. The early ’07 goal was to blow Obama (and John Edwards) out of the water by demonstrating implacable money mastery. Instead, Obama in particular has served notice that the rookie is fully capable of slugging it out, over the long haul, with the Friends of Bill and the other well-wired inhabitants of Hillaryland. We don’t yet know officially that Obama has outraised Clinton in primary season money, but ABC News, citing inside sources, reported last night that he collected $23 million, and Clinton $20 million. Her campaign has declined to confirm or deny.

The bottom line is that, at least for now, she has lost the right to be considered the preemptive Democratic favorite.

Here are perhaps the most telling statistics: Ninety percent of Obama’s first-quarter money was comprised of donations smaller than $100, and about half of those people gave about $25 each. Grassroots aside, he also drew some large contributions, of course. Overall, he got money from 100,000 people, averaging $250 apiece; Clinton drew from 50,000 people who averaged $520 apiece – with considerable help from her husband.

Translation: Obama is also well positioned to win the money race during the second quarter.

Here’s why: An individual donor can give a candidate up to $2300 for the primary season. Obama’s current pool of givers is twice as large as Clinton’s; their initial donations were half as large as Clinton’s. Therefore, he can tap his folks repeatedly – whereas there is every indication (and we won’t know all the stats until April 15) that far more of Clinton’s initial smaller pool of donors are already “maxed out” at $2300 apiece.

She might recoup, of course, by expanding her pool of donors this spring; on the other hand, some maxed-out Clinton donors could send money to Obama, just to hedge their bets. Either way, the message of this first financial round is clear: A heck of a lot of grassroots Democrats are motivated not merely to find a fresh attractive face and shake up the traditional political paradigm - but also to put the brakes on any Clinton family dynasty. To use the old phrase, “Clinton fatigue” still lingers, particularly among liberals who disliked Bill’s centrist policy calculations. But it goes beyond that.

I’ll explain further by quoting myself. In a newspaper column last month, I wrote: “There are still a lot of Democrats who remember how they were compelled to defend Bill's lies during the Lewinsky affair; who remember that he had promised to run ‘the most ethical administration in history’; who remember how he left office by pardoning a rich tax felon who had donated generously to Clinton causes and whose ex-wife happened to be one of Hillary's pals. These Democrats have no interest in…a Clinton family dynasty. They have wanted to fight the Clintons for a long time.”

Hillary Clinton can still win this fight – in the end, ideas and message trump money, and many observers think that Obama is still too light on substance – but Obama has officially served notice that she will not be able to avoid one.

Brinksmanship with his back to the wall

It’s time yet again to fact-check President Bush. This has become one of life’s more onerous but necessary chores - the journalistic equivalent of chopping ice or cleaning the cat box – and I’d frankly prefer to focus on something else. But no. I’d be remiss if I failed to address Bush’s fact-defying remarks yesterday in the Rose Garden.

So much of what he said about Iraq and the Democrats was so far removed from empirical reality that I am tempted to recall what the writer Mary McCarthy once said about her contemporary Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.” With respect to the president, that’s probably too harsh. He did, after all, start by saying “good morning,” and it was indeed a nice morning. He also vowed again to veto any congressional bill that includes a U.S. troop withdrawal timeline, and we can probably believe that, too.

It’s the other assertions that seemed problematic. To be charitable, let's just say that he repeatedly engaged in highly selective semi-truthiness. For instance:

1. He said that unless the Democratic Congress bows to his agenda, and speedily agrees to keep financing his war with no strings attached, the funds will start drying up this month, and our military resources will be severely strained: “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, and others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to. That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it is unacceptable to the American people.”

But there’s a problem with trying to label the Democrats as anti-loved ones. The hitch is Bush’s own treatment of the loved ones. Long before the Democrats took over Congress, military leaders were warning that the military was overstretched; long before the Democrats won a share of the power, loved ones were being repeatedly sent back to the front lines, or getting their tours extended beyond the norm.

In fact, just 24 hours before Bush tried to pin that on the Democrats, here’s what the wire services reported: “For just the second time since the war began, the Army is sending large units back to Iraq without giving them at least a year at home, defense officials said Monday. The move signaled how stretched the U.S. fighting force has become….The Army will try not to shorten the troops' U.S. time, ‘but in this case we had to,’ said a senior Army official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. ‘Obviously right now the Army is stretched,’ the official said.”

Indeed, voters decided last year that the burden on our “loved ones” was unacceptable – which is one reason why they rebuked Bush by kicking his GOP congressional enablers out of power and installing the Democrats.

And this is why Bush no longer has the standing to claim that he speaks for “the American people.” On Iraq, according to every poll from Gallup to Fox News, he essentially speaks these days for about 30 percent of the American people (that’s the share that supports his handling of the war). He is also playing a weak hand in the current showdown with the Democrats. In the latest Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans support an ’08 withdrawal timeline; 80 percent support stricter readiness criteria for troops heading to Iraq. Both those positions are in the (as yet unreconciled) Democratic measures that Bush has vowed to veto. The latest Pew poll puts timeline support at 59 percent; the latest Newsweek poll, at 57 percent.

2. At another point yesterday, the president asserted that the Democrats are “more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than providing our troops what they need” – this, from the same president who has repeatedly failed to provide our troops what they need, starting with sufficient body armor.

In January 2006, a Pentagon report concluded that, during the first two years of the war, troops were issued only enough body armor to cover part of their chests and backs, and that as many as 80 percent of Marines who had been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if the government had provided sufficient body armor. (Lest we forget, Bush and his war planners worked with a Republican Congress from January 2003 to January 2007.)

Bush’s attempt yesterday to pin that problem on the Democrats is further undercut by a new report issued just two months ago, by the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. This one goes far beyond body armor: “(Soldiers) experienced shortages of force-protection equipment, such as up-armored vehicles, electronic countermeasure devices, crew-served weapons, and communications equipment. As a result, Service members were not always equipped to effectively complete their missions.”

3. Bush chided the Democrats for taking their spring recess before finishing work on his Iraq supplemental bill, thereby implying that while they gambol, the troops will be hung out to dry. Perhaps he simply forgot that when the Republicans ran Congress in 2006, they too took their spring recess before finishing work on that year’s Iraq supplemental bill; indeed, they didn’t sign off on Bush’s spending request until mid-June.

And did the money for the troops run out when his allies went on vacation – as he claims will occur because the Democrats are currently out of town? Nope. That’s because the Pentagon merely shifted money from other accounts and covered the troop funds in the interim. The same kind of thing would happen again. Somehow Bush failed to mention yesterday that Congress last autumn set up a $70-billion emergency fund, to keep bankrolling the war in the event that money glitches arose in 2007.

4. He claimed that the Democrats, by seeking to attach conditions to the war money, are defying "the voters of America" who "don't want politicians in Washington telling our generals how to fight a war." This was a fascinating remark, since it was Bush himself - as Washington's top-ranked politician - who last winter told the generals how to fight the war. Gen. George Casey and Gen. John Abizaid had both testified last fall that a U.S. troop hike would probably be ineffective - in Abizaid's words, "I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future" - and by early January, they were out the door.

5. Bush insisted that, in the wake of his troop escalation, the Iraqi government is making all kinds of gains: “They have said that they will send Iraqi forces into Baghdad to take the lead, along with U.S. troops, to bring security to Baghdad. And they've done that. They said they'd name a commander for Baghdad. They have done that. They said they'd send up -- you know, they'd send troop out into the neighborhoods to clear and hold and then build. They're doing that. They said they would send a budget up that would spend a considerable amount of their money on reconstruction. They have done that. They're working on an oil law that is in progress. As a matter of fact, I spoke to the prime minister yesterday about progress on the oil law.”

But somehow he air-brushed these realities out of his rosy picture: Leading Shiites still oppose political reconciliation with the Sunnis, perhaps the most crucial goal (on Monday, the top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, signaled his opposition); there is still no law to rein in the sectarian militia death squads; no law extending amnesty to former insurgents; no law paving the way for provincial elections (originally slated for this June); and no indication that the Iraqis will meet their April deadline for taking full control of their own army.

6. Bush still seems unwilling to acknowledge that he is out of sync with prevailing American sentiment. At one point, he said: “I'm very aware that there are a group of people that don't think we should be there in the first place.” Well, let’s try to define our terms properly. “A group of people” is what you go to a ballgame with. “A group of people” is what you play poker with. “A group of people” does not seem to be an accurate way to describe 60 percent of the citizenry. Which is why the Democratic Congress seems unfazed by Bush’s threats of brinksmanship.

And speaking of public opinion, consider this remark, uttered yesterday: “You are not having a success in the hearts and minds of Iraq. There’s simply too many killers there, too many factions that don’t want democracy. And I’m not sure, no matter what surge you have, that you can overcome the Iraqi people not cooperating.”

A hostile reporter, berating Bush? A Senate Democrat, pleading for a U.S. surrender?

No, that was Bill O’Reilly.

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This just in: Barack Obama raised $23.5 million during the first quarter of 2007, virtually matching the vaunted Clinton political machine. Nearly all this money is earmarked for the primaries, whereas much of Hillary's Clinton haul (she won't say how much) is reserved for the general election, assuming she's the nominee. Another striking statistic: Obama got money from 100,000 people - double the Clinton tally, which suggests that she relied far more on big contributors giving the maximum allowed by law.

Clinton will now have to endure a few rough news cycles; no doubt her people will claim that being dueled to a standstill by a newcomer is really no big deal at all. More on this early tomorrow.

Mitt should heed the old Beatles adage

Full disclosure: Money stories bore me. Four times a year, when the candidates file their quarterly earnings, we in the political press examine the books, read the tea leaves, and tend to validate those who have put big bucks in their coffers. We do this - it's happening now with Mitt Romney - even though history has repeatedly taught us that the strength of a candidate can’t necessarily be measured by the weight of the candidate’s war chest.

For instance, Howard Dean titillated everybody during the second half of 2003, by demonstrating the money-raising potential of the netroots; widely overlooked, however, was the fact that he was spending it almost as fast as it was coming in (in campaign parlance, he had a high “burn rate”), to the point that he was actually forced to cut costs before the Democratic primaries had even commenced. (And we all know what happened to Dean in Iowa, although lack of money was not the only factor.)

Eight years before Dean, there was also Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican senator, who boasted in 1995 that he would raise $20 million in “easy money” by Jan. 1 of 1996 (a hefty sum at the time), thereby powering his ‘96 presidential bid; he indeed met his goal, but that didn't impress the GOP primary voters. I remember him limping into Iowa, after getting thrashed in Louisiana by Pat Buchanan, and staging a rally for himself at the State Capitol (a school band played pop tunes like "Louie Louie"), and claiming that all was well - but the problem was that conservative Christian Iowa voters, who didn't care about his "easy money," felt that he was too focused on economic conservatism and insufficiently focused on Christian values. So he was thrashed again, and quit the race, canceling all the hotel rooms that his staff had reserved at the Marriott in Nashua, New Hampshire. (I know this, because I was on the hotel waiting list.)

But my favorite money lesson concerns another Texan, former governor John Connally, who raised and spent a daunting $12 million for his 1980 presidential bid – and wound up winning one delegate, Ada Mills of Clarksville, Arkansas, perhaps the priciest investment in modern political history.

So now let's return to the present day. In the wake of the early reports on the presidential candidates’ first-quarter ’07 earnings, we don’t yet know whether Hillary Clinton’s $26-million intake (aided by her husband’s peripatetic efforts) is as impressive as it seems, because we don’t yet know what she has spent – and we probably won’t know until all the details are officially released by the feds on April 15. Nor do we yet know what share of that money is earmarked for the primaries, and what share would be reserved for the general election. But in her case, at least, we can say that her record haul (the largest ever for a quarterly period, at least until we hear officially from Barack Obama) roughly parallels her poll status as the current favorite of likely Democratic primary voters.

Not so with Mitt Romney. In the end, he might prove to be a classic example of the old Beatles adage that money can’t buy you love. And that we political observers need to be skeptical about mistaking gross revenue for candidate viability.

In the case of the GOP candidate from Massachusetts, the incongruities between voter support and donor support are jarring. In Republican polls, he is barely a blip on the radar - according to Gallup, he’s the favorite of three percent of likely GOP primary voters, down there with Sam Brownback, and trailing a non-candidate with high negatives (Newt Gingrich) as well as a TV actor (Fred Thompson) – yet, despite all that, he is reporting the largest first-quarter haul in the Republican field, $20 million, dwarfing the efforts of John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom are household names with far better poll numbers.

So how can a guy do so well at the bank during the first three months of 2007, after spending most of his time fighting off (valid) charges that he is a transparent flip-flopper, and drifting south in the polls as a result? Is donor support a better gauge of the health of his candidacy?

The answer to the latter is, not necessarily. Here’s the fine print about his $20 million: A lot of it stems from his success in plucking the low-hanging fruit. Romney worked his Bain Capital connections (he founded that private equity firm, and he’d made a lot of money for his investors), as well as his Mormon connections (there are some affluent folks in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). It can certainly be argued that Romney, by raising money effectively, is already demonstrating the organizational skills that would be invaluable as chief executive, but he arguably would not have been this effective if he wasn’t so personally wealthy. He invested $2.3 million of his own money (he has never released his total net worth), just to set up his technologically proficient fund-raising machine. None of his rivals can compete with that.

Also, we don’t yet know the composition of that $20 million. One way to measure candidate viability is to note the number of small contributions; a large number would suggest that a candidate has broad backing. It would also be valuable to know whether a large share of that $20 million came from people who have already “maxed out,” by each giving the maximum $2,300 permitted by federal law for a primary campaign. Small contributors can give again; maxed-out contributors can’t. But Romney has yet to release any of this information.

Nor do we yet know anything about Romney’s “burn rate.” Raising a lot of money is not nearly so impressive if you’ve spend an inordinate amount just to raise it – or if you’re already spending it heavily on the campaign trail. Indeed, there are signs that Romney is doing the latter, because, unlike his GOP rivals, he has already been running TV ads in at least three early primary states, with scant payoff at the polls. The April 15 reports, filed with the Federal Elections Commission, will fill in some of these blanks.

And the aforementioned Mormon factor is worth more attention. There’s a lot of money in that community, and it can help buoy Romney during this critical pre-primary phase. I spoke this morning with Larry Sabato, the uber-political analyst, who spent last November as a guest professor in Utah. He said this: “For Romney, the upside of Mormonism is that they are very well-organized and they are accustomed to giving. It’s part of their tithing tradition. They are hard-working and success-oriented, and they are also prominent in Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and Colorado. And the potential for Romney in Utah is obvious. It’s important to remember that it’s known as the Beehive State.”

The potential downside, however, is just as obvious. That same Mormon money which is boosting Romney today might prove to be a liability next winter, when the GOP primary voters cast their ballots. In an early crucial state such as South Carolina, it’s easy to imagine that some evangelical Christian voters, who already view Mormonism as a cult religion, might not feel any warmer toward Romney if they think he has been heavily bankrolled by adherents of the Mormon church.

This is why I’d prefer to stay away from money commentary (although I might threaten to do another quite soon, when Obama surfaces). There are too many caveats among the tea leaves. The bottom line is, money can put you in play, but you can still get booed off the field. Just ask President Steve Forbes.

Matthew Dowd assails his old boss as "secluded and bubbled"...NOW he tell us

Until now, only the Democrats seemed to have mastered the art of the retroactive apology. “I was wrong,” said John Edwards and John Kerry and Chris Dodd, while apologizing for their votes to authorize the Iraq war. It strained credulity to think that any Republican, and certainly not a “loyal Bushie,” would ever confess misjudgment, or to even hint that the current president was anything short of peerless.

Yet now we have Matthew Dowd, a former key member of the Bush inner circle, declaring publicly that (a) the Decider has feet of clay, (b) the war in Iraq is a disaster and we should pull out, and (c) the best 2008 candidate might arguably be Barack Obama. A Bush guy was saying this stuff? I thought I was reading a put-on from The Onion. (Today's Onion headline, for instance: "Bush refuses to set deadline for withdrawal of head from White House banister.")

But yes, this was Bush’s 2000 campaign pollster and 2004 chief campaign strategist, telling The New York Times that Bush is not the same man whom Dowd had first fallen in love with. He is upset, for instance, that Bush’s attitude is “my way or the highway.” Moreover, “…I’m so disappointed in things. I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in…(He's) not the person I thought…If the American public says they’re done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want. They’re saying, ‘Get out of Iraq.’”

First, a little perspective: It’s not totally unusual for a presidential insider to go public with a renunciation of the boss, even while the boss is still in office. In 1979, ex-Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows wrote a magazine article attacking Carter's "passionless presidency." In 1986,White House budget whiz David Stockman published a memoir that trashed the Reagan tax cuts and dismissed supply-side Reaganomics as mere smoke and mirrors – and this was right after he had helped Reagan sell the budget plan to Congress and the American people. Then in 1987, Donald Regan, fresh from serving the same boss as chief of staff, wrote a memoir claiming that the president was a hapless captive of his wife Nancy, who made key decisions by consulting an astrologer. And a decade after that, ex-Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos went public with a book that detailed many Clintonian flaws.

So Matthew Dowd is the first major player to jump from Bush’s notoriously tight ship; given this president’s downward spiral, it’s not entirely surprising. And, undoubtedly, Dowd’s defection will be fodder for Bush’s critics. But what are we really supposed to think of this guy? Could it be that his renunciation of Bush seems a tad opportunistic? Is it out of line to suggest that this pollster, even while giving voice to his sincere disappointment in Bush, is also distancing himself publicly in order to salvage his own reputation and ensure that he works in the future?

At one point in the Times interview, Dowd said: “I think we should design campaigns that appeal not to 51 percent of the people, but bring the country together as a whole.” Dowd was referring to the fact that Bush decided, almost at the outset of his presidency, to govern as a divider, not a uniter; and to campaign for re-election in 2004 by playing to (and expanding) the conservative base, at the expense of virtually everyone else.

But what Dowd didn’t say, and what the story didn’t say, was that he was arguably the prime architect of the Bush strategy that he is now denouncing. Generally, when ex-aides trash a president, it’s because that president failed to heed their advice (“if he had only listened to me”); here, we seem to have the opposite. Dowd is trashing Bush in part because he did heed Dowd’s advice.

As a 2006 New Republic report makes clear, Dowd wrote a memo right after the 2000 election which argued that Bush should govern as a partisan, rather than seek middle ground; he even persuaded Karl Rove to see it his way. And when they opted in 2004 to stoke the conservative base by trashing John Kerry’s war credentials, Dowd was right in the middle. It worked. As political writer Tom Edsall concluded, in his report, “Four years after he wrote his memo, Matt Dowd was vindicated at the polls.” (In other words, some Bush skeptics, when reading about Dowd’s conversion, might well react by saying, “Now he tells us.”)

And those still residing in the Bush inner circle might well be a tad annoyed that one of the president’s key enablers is publicly declaring a desire “to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world.” And those folks generally don’t like dissenters, anyway. Which is why, as soon as I read Dowd’s remarks, I wondered how they would come after him, and seek to explain away the substance of his remarks. I didn’t have to wait long. On CBS yesterday, White House aide Dan Bartlett suggested that Dowd is dissing the Decider because he is messed up emotionally.

Dowd was recently divorced, a daughter died, and a son is heading to Iraq. Therefore, Bartlett suggested, his criticisms of Bush can be dismissed as the workings of an illogical mind: “I think he’s been on a long personal journey over the last couple of years, both in his private life, as well as his — the politics that he participate in…He himself has acknowledged that he’s going through a lot of personal turmoil but also he has a son who is soon to be deployed to Iraq. That could only impact a parents’ mind…”

The White House worked this angle again today, painting Dowd as overwrought. Spokeswoman Dana Perino said, "War brings out a lot of emotions," and she cited his "personal hardships." When a reporter asked her whether she was suggesting that Dowd's personal hardships had triggered his defection, she replied, "I don't know." Moments later, she tacked the other way and said, "I think it's relevent." Moments after that, having judged him, she then declared, "I'm not going to judge him."

Will Dowd be offended by those remarks? I doubt it. I met him a few times, and he struck me as a fatalist. As he said in one conversation, in August 2004, “I’m Irish, so of course I expect something bad to happen every time I wake up in the morning.”

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In my newspaper column yesterday, I wrote at length about the Bush track record of incompetent governance. I mentioned that liberals tend to frame Bush’s incompetence as an indictment of conservative ideology – arguing, in other words, that those who don’t respect public service are not likely to care about governing well.

But yesterday I received an email from one reader - Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan White House aide and a conservative Bush critic - who argued that there is a link between bad governance and Bush’s policies. I recognized his name; last year he wrote a book entitled Imposter, and assailed many of those policies.

Here’s an excerpt from the email (with his permission):

“I remember two years ago telling my editor that Incompetent might be a better title for my book than Impostor. However, while I still think Bush is incompetent, I think some of those on the right who are belatedly making this argument…are using it as a way of avoiding addressing the actual substance of Bush’s policies. When they complain about incompetence, (they claim that) it is in the implementation of his policies, not in their origination. This is especially the case with regard to Iraq, where right-wingers like (Weekly Standard magazine editor) Bill Kristol would have us believe that the only mistake in Iraq was that we didn’t try harder. They still refuse to accept that the whole operation was fundamentally ill-conceived. This is true of many other Bush policies that were both badly implemented and ill-conceived as well.

“This is where Rudy (Giuliani) worries me. He often comes across as a competent Bush—someone with the same bad ideas, but someone who would do a better job of implementing them. But if the ideas are bad in the first place, is that what we really want? Maybe one of Bush’s saving graces is that he didn’t do a better job on things like getting Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court (or Alberto Gonzales—imagine us with those two instead of Roberts and Alito; it’s frightening).”

By the way, Bruce Bartlett worked until recently for a conservative think tank in Texas. Then he wrote Imposter. Then he sent the manuscript to his think tank boss, as a courtesy. And then he was fired.

No wonder Matthew Dowd is trying to embrace “gentleness.”

With friends like these....

What’s most important to remember, about Kyle Sampson’s Senate testimony yesterday, was that he actually intended his remarks to be a defense of Bush administration behavior in the prosecutor purge scandal.

The former number-two man at Justice started the day by insisting that the unprecedented midterm firings of eight federal prosecutors was no big deal, just a “badly mishandled” snafu; but after many hours of being sliced and diced by his questioners, he wound up looking like a witness for the administration’s accusers. For instance:

1. Sampson drove another nail into attorney general Alberto Gonzales, with statements suggesting that his former boss, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, is a serial liar. Gonzales has insisted that he never had any “discussions” about “where things stood” on the firing front – yet here was his own chief of staff insisting under oath that he had met with Gonzales five times dating back to 2005. Sampson stated: “I don’t think the attorney general’s statement that he was not involved in any discussions about U.S. attorney removals is accurate.”

This prompted Senator Charles Grassley to say, “The bottom line is, we shouldn’ty have conflicting statements coming from somebody who is the top law enforcement officer of the United States, or his staff.” And that’s a Republican talking. (Gonzales is slated to testify again until April 17, assuming he lasts that long, but another three weeks in limbo should give him enough time to blur his recollections even further.)

2. Sampson documented the crucial role that Karl Rove played in the firings. This is the same Karl Role who played no role in the firings, according to initial Bush administration statements. Sampson himself had drafted a February letter to Congress, claiming that Rove had played no role in the decision to fire one federal prosecutor (who, at the time, was investigating the Republican governor of Missouri), and replace him with a political operative loyal to Rove. However, Sampson earlier this winter had emailed a colleague to say that Rove wanted his loyalist in that job. So naturally Sampson was asked yesterday to explain whether he had lied in the letter to Congress, or had lied in the email. He tried to split the difference, saying that he had only discussed this particular firing with Rove’s top aides, as opposed to Rove personally.

But he wasn’t done with Rove. He also testified that, on the eve of the 2006 elections, Rove complained to Gonzales about the failure of New Mexico’s federal prosecutor to aggressively pursue voter-fraud cases that, in essence, might help the GOP win a crucial House race. (That prosecutor, Republican David Iglesias, was fired on Dec. 7. He had previously been viewed, in Sampson’s words, as an “up and comer.” He has since stated repeatedly that he had insufficient legal grounds to bring indictments.) Given everything that Sampson said yesterday about Rove, it’s easy to see why Bush has decreed that Rove shall be questioned only in private and without a transcript.

3. Sampson undercut the fundamental Bush administration spin that the firings were defensible and even proper…by testifying that he wished the whole process had never been conducted in the first place: “I wish the Department hadn’t gone down this road at all, and I regret my role in it, and that’s one of the reasons I resigned.”

Senator Chuck Schumer then asked, “So if the choice were up to you, just thinking back on that fateful Dec. 7, would you now — knowing what you know now — have put David Iglesias on a list, choice solely up to you if he should be fired?” And Sampson replied, “In hindsight, sitting here today, I would not.”

4. Sampson provided another window into the Bush administration’s competence-challenged governing process. It’s hardly surprising that so many of the fired Bush-appointed prosecutors have been speaking out, wondering why they were fired in the first place, given their generally favorable performance ratings – because it turns out, as Sampson testified yesterday, that the firing process “was not scientific, nor was it extensively documented.” He also said this: "I don't remember keeping a very good file. It was a chart and notes that I would dump into my lower right desk drawer." (I'm sure that the prosecutors - and other public servants - will be heartened to learn that the Bush administration assesses their work in such a cavalier manner.)

If Bush remains as unpopular as he is now (61 percent negative, according to the latest Fox News poll, the lowest ever in a Fox survey), he won’t be able to credibly blame his standing on the congressional Democrats. The ineptitude of his own top people (under his lax supervision) has contributed mightily to his inexorable slide. And I plan to have more on the incompetence factor, and its role in the '08 race, in my newspaper column this Sunday.

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By the way, Bush needn't worry, because Rush Limbaugh has his back. Which brings us to the quote of the day. After citing a new USA Today-Gallup poll which shows that 72 percent of the American people support a congressional probe of the firings, Rush had this to say: "72 percent of the American people, a bunch of blithering idiots who have no idea what they're talking about....that is just an indication of so much ignorance out there, lack of civics education and what have you."

She remembers "team-building," but not much else

Today I’m going to follow the old Gene Roberts rule. Back when he was running the Philadelphia Inquirer, he would tell reporters to “zig while everyone else is zagging,” which was his way of saying not to follow the crowd. Therefore, since so many colleagues are currently tracking the Senate testimony of Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department figure who helped effectuate the federal prosecutor purges, I’ll focus instead on an underreported incident that occurred yesterday during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing.

It featured Lurita Alexis Doan, a Bush appointee who runs the General Services Administration, an agency with a $60-billion budget that manages federal buildings and buys the equipment that its workers use. Don’t yawn. The GSA incident is directly related to the prosecutor purge scandal. It is another facet of the same Bush administration impulse to politicize the nonpartisan institutions of government, and make them subservient to the partisan needs of the White House.

I want to share a slice of Doan’s embarrassing testimony, but first it’s important to establish the context. It’s very simple:

The federal Hatch Act, enacted in 1939, prohibits federal employes (who work for all taxpayers) from engaging in partisan political activities in the workplace. But two months ago, on Jan. 26, GSA hosted a brown-bag employe lunch, starring Karl Rove’s deputy political director, J. Scott Jennings. Doan attended. Also participating, via teleconference, were 40 Republican appointees who work elsewhere in America. The Rove deputy, also via teleconference, gave a PowerPoint presentation. His topic: the 2008 House and Senate elections, with rundowns on which Democrats would be targeted and which Republicans should be defended.

Was this a Hatch Act violation? I report, you decide.

The White House political shop sent the Jennings material over to GSA one week in advance of the brown-bag lunch, using a Republican National Committee email address. A Jennings assistant urged, "Please do not email this out or let people see it. It's a close hold and we're not supposed to be emailing it around." The recipient, at GSA, was a Doan assistant.

What sound does an animal make when caught in a leg trap? Let’s join the Wednesday testimony in progress, and hear the human equivalent.

Doan: “…Honestly, I don’t have a recollection of the presentation at all.”

Congressman Bruce Braley of Iowa then showed her the PowerPoint page listing Rove’s top Democratic targets of 2008. He asked Doan to acknowledge the political content therein.

Doan: “Yes, it appears – I honestly…I really truly don’t remember seeing this chart ‘til yesterday when I tried to dig it up. I don’t know what the explanation was that accompanied this. I truly do not remember this part of the presentation.”

Braley: Are you familiar with the word “target?”

Doan: “I think I can say I’m one right now, yes.”

Braley tries again, asking whether she agrees that this was political content.

Doan: “I appreciate your interpretation of that…This was not my meeting…I attended the meeting, yes.”

Braley tries again: Wasn’t this a political presentation, to target Democrats in an election?

Doan: “No, I would not say that. I’d say this is a slide that says, ‘2008 House targets, top 20.’ I do not want to speculate on what was intended by Mr. Jennings on this slide…I possibly saw it during the meeting…I don’t remember it during our meeting. I don’t remember the PowerPoint presentation clearly during our meeting.”

After several more exchanges, and finally getting Doan to acknowledge the obvious (you can watch the whole exchange here), Braley got to the gist of the matter: “What, if anything, do these slides have to do with the GSA’s core purpose of procuring supplies and managing federal buildings?”

Doan: “This brown-bag luncheon I believe has been mischaracterized. This is a meeting that is a team-building meeting…I try to attend whenever I can…We look upon this as team-building…I’m trying to build a superior management team…”

Braley noted that she had not answered his question, so he refined it, asking what a political election briefing had to do with “team-building.”

Doan: “This is a brown-bag luncheon…This is not my presentation.”

Braley then said that the Hatch Act banned “team-building” in the federal workplace for either political party. He then asked Doan about a couple remarks that she is alleged to have made at the conclusion of Jennings’ presentation. One witness, a Republican appointee, has stated in a deposition that Doan asked Jennings, “How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election.” Did Doan say that?

Doan: “I do not have a recollection of actually saying that.”

It gets worse. Another sworn witness recalls Doan asking Jennings, “How can we use different GSA projects – building openings and the like – to further aid other Republicans?” Braley wanted to know whether Doan had said that.

Doan: “I do not have a recollection of saying that.”

You get the idea. Just another day in the life of a waning administration, exposed for the first time to the pitiless glare of accountability.

As Nebraska goes, so goes the nation

If you’re looking for a bellwether state in the Iraq debate, consider Nebraska. Those cornhuskers live in the center of the national map, and their two senators – as evidenced by their actions yesterday - are living proof that opposition to President Bush’s open-ended war is now the centrist stance in American politics.

Without crucial assists from conservative Democrat Ben Nelson and maverick Republican Chuck Hagel, the narrowly Democratic Senate would have failed yesterday to set a troop withdrawal date. Their support proved pivotal – the final vote was 50 to 48 – thus enabling the Senate to rebuke Bush for the first time and declare that America should essentially end, next year, its combat mission in Iraq.

Hagel’s vote was not a total surprise, given his persistent attacks on Bush’s war policy, but when a Republican who represents Nebraska feels comfortable opposing the war, that should tell you something about grassroots sentiment in Nebraska. And the same holds true for Nelson, who was talking skeptically about a withdrawal timeline as recently as two weeks ago.

This is a state, after all, where half the voters are registered Republicans, and only 34 percent are registered Democrats; where Bush won 66 percent of the vote in 2004, and 62 percent of the vote in 2000; and where, in presidential elections going back half a century, Republican candidates have averaged 61.1 percent of the vote – the highest percentage of any state, with the exception of Utah’s 61.6. Indeed, Nebraskans have supported GOP candidates in every presidential election going back 70 years, with the sole exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964.

But, lest we forget, it was a congressman from Nebraska who signaled early Republican restiveness about Iraq, back in 2004. When eight-term House GOP member Doug Bereuter, a former U.S. army intelligence officer, announced he would not seek re-election that year, he took the occasion to lambaste the war. He did it the old-fashioned way, by writing a letter to his local Nebraska newspaper:

“Knowing now what I know about the reliance on the tenuous or insufficiently corroborated intelligence used to conclude that Saddam maintained a substantial WMD arsenal, I believe that launching the pre-emptive military action was not justified….I've reached the conclusion, retrospectively, now that the inadequate intelligence and faulty conclusions are being revealed, that all things being considered, it was a mistake to launch that military action, especially without a broad and engaged international coalition. The cost in casualties is already large and growing, and the immediate and long-term financial costs are incredible. Our country's reputation around the world has never been lower and our alliances are weakened. From the beginning of the conflict it was doubtful that we for long would be seen as liberators, but instead increasingly as an occupying force. Now we are immersed in a dangerous, costly mess and there is no easy and quick way to end our responsibilities in Iraq without creating bigger future problems in the region and, in general, in the Muslim world.”

One can argue, of course, that he bared his true feelings only because he was retiring, and that Nebraska voters in 2004 might not have appreciated such candor. But three years later, Hagel and Nelson have demonstrated, by their pivotal Senate decisions, that it’s probably not politically risky back home to take a public stance against the war.

And, Nebraska aside, that’s the centrist sentiment nationally. As always, the swing-voting independents are crucial in gauging the mood. In the latest poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 61 percent of independents support a troop withdrawal timeline, and 32 percent oppose (the overall electorate numbers are 59-33). Also, a plurality of independents – 41 percent – believe that the Democrats in Congress haven’t yet done enough to challenge Bush on the war; another 33 percent believe that the Democrats have done it “about right,” and only 20 percent say they’ve gone too far in challenging Bush. (Gallup, measuring support for a timeline, posted similar numbers the other day.)

Bush, as he indicated again this morning, will surely veto any bill with a timeline, triggering a confrontation with Congress over whether any strings should be attached to future troop funding. He will seek to paint the Democrats as wimps determined to sever all money to our “men and women in uniform,” and the Democrats don’t want to wear that label, because the same Gallup poll reports that a landslide majority does want the current troops to be funded.

But the Democrats are better positioned today, than ever before, to win the crucial PR battle with Bush, because most people are behind them. Politically speaking, this is ultimately a battle to shape public opinion for the 2008 election, and right now the Democratic congressional majority, as opposed to Bush, is clearly more in sync with the American center - as the two Nebraskans demonstrated yesterday.

Clamming up, zipping the lip, taking the Fifth

So now we have the legal adviser to the nation’s chief law enforcement officer declaring that she intends to take the Fifth.

Monica Goodling, senior counselor to attorney general Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales, said late yesterday (through her own lawyer) that she will invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and thus decline to answer any congressional questions about her role in the U.S. attorney purge scandal. By taking the Fifth, she may well be on solid legal ground, but her decision may not play well in the court of public opinion. Particularly in the wake of a new poll showing that Americans favor a congressional probe of this scandal by a margin of 3-1.

To put it charitably, the Bush administration already has a reputation for being less than truthful on a wide range of matters – and now we have a high-ranking Justice Department official, the legal liaison between Gonzales and the White House, opting to clam up. Goodling has certainly taken a daring position, befitting a graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent University law school, where the mission is "to produce Christian leaders who will make a difference, who will change the world."

Even for many conservatives, Goodling's zip-it strategy is an embarrassment. Terry Jeffrey, activist and editor of Human Events, told CNN yesterday afternoon: "Congress, its Judiciary Committees, they have oversight over the Justice Department. It's inexcusable for people in the Justice Department to take the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying in Congress. People there must go testify. There's no question about it." And as conservative blogger Ed Morrissey put it late yesterday, “People will rightly wonder why senior Justice officials cannot testify honestly to Congress without incriminating themselves – and they not going to blame Congress. The assumption will be that some crime got committed, because without a crime there's no chance of incrimination, at least not in the legal sense.”

That’s what is striking about the statement released by Goodling’s lawyer. Apparently, Goodling can’t afford to testify truthfully under oath because if she did so, somebody (perhaps her, perhaps a colleague, perhaps a superior) would be open to a perjury charge. That argument certainly doesn’t speak well for an administration which has sought to insist that (a) it did nothing wrong by firing those U.S. attorneys, and (b) it has been candid and consistent in saying so.

To which I ask, if the purge was supposedly no big deal (“overblown,” as Gonzales recently described it), then why are the players refusing to come clean about it? Why would Goodling take the Fifth, and why is the White House insisting that Karl Rove and Harriet Miers can be interviewed only in the absence of a transcript? And since I’m not a lawyer, I’m also wondering whether it is legally appropriate for Goodling to take the Fifth just because she thinks that her senatorial inquisitors are a bunch of meanies (her lawyer is complaining about “the hostile and questionable environment in the current congressional proceedings”).

In politics, symbols matter. Taking the Fifth is a durable constitutional right, but it won’t make the Bush regime look good to have the attorney general’s counsel following in the footsteps of people like Frank Costello (famed mobster who took the Fifth in 1950), crooked Teamster leader Dave Beck (who took the Fifth 200 times in 1957), Oliver North, and John Poindexter (figures in the Iran-Contra scandal). Fairly or not, many Americans have a gut instinct about people who take the Fifth; as President Dwight Eisenhower said during a press conference, commenting on Teamster hearings, “I must say I probably share the common reaction – If a man has to go to the Fifth Amendment, there must be something he doesn’t want to tell.”

On the other hand, Goodling would also be following in the footsteps of Zero Mostel, a Hollywood blacklist victim who is widely viewed with sympathy today. Mostel is also our winner of the Most Comedic Taking the Fifth Award.

Back in 1955, the rotund comic and entertainer was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to explain why, in the late 1940s, he had performed for some groups that the panel deemed to be subversive. But whenever this was asked, he would simply hold up five fingers and wiggle them at his questioners. He did, however, agree to break his silence when asked about his current employment:

Q- “What studio are you with?”
A- “18th Century Fox.”
Q- “Do you want that statement to stand?”
A- “Make it 19th Century Fox.”

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John Edwards is a crafty guy; no wonder he was so persuasive with juries. Most of the early reaction to his 60 Minutes interview about Elizabeth’s illness has centered on this (seemingly) selfless quote: “There's not a single person in America that should vote for me because Elizabeth has cancer. Not a one. If you're considering doing it, don't do it. Do not vote for us because you feel some sympathy or compassion for us. That would be an enormous mistake. The vote for the presidency is far too important for any of those things to influence it."

On the other hand, I found this remark to be more noteworthy: “Every single candidate running for president of the United States has a personal life that indicates something about what kind of human being they are, and I think it is a fair evaluation for Americans to make.”

Translation: He most certainly hopes that voters will factor his personal crisis into their thinking. That second statement throws down the gauntlet. What he’s essentially saying, in that remark, is this: “Look at Rudy Giuliani’s personal life (three wives), John McCain’s personal life (two wives), Newt Gingrich’s personal life (three wives) Hillary Clinton’s personal life (a late-night comic’s dream), and look at mine. Now show me the love.”

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On the serious illness front, best wishes also to Tony Snow.

Who is Stuart Bowen, and how does he fit the pattern?

Given all we have learned in recent weeks about Bush administration misbehavior - the ill treatment of wounded soldiers (Walter Reed), the inability to tell the truth (Scooter Libby conviction), the firing of eight U.S. attorneys who were not deemed to be “loyal Bushies” (as one Justice aide termed it, in an email), the president’s invoking of “executive privilege” (a bid to bar top aides from telling the truth under oath), the attorney general’s credibility woes (see Saturday’s post) – the last thing you probably want to read right now is news of yet another performance debacle.

But this one is worth noting. It surfaced briefly in the press last Thursday, but was quickly trumped by bigger stories – such as the historic House vote on Iraq, and the potential collision between the White House and Congress over President Bush’s executive privilege invocation. Here’s the gist:

The Pentagon’s own internal watchdog, Special Inspector Stuart Bowen, released a report last Wednesday that skewered the Bush war planners for screwing up the reconstruction of Iraq, mainly by failing to anticipate the potential for anti-American violence; failing to put in place any procedures that would track the billions in reconstruction money and ensure that it was well spent; and failing, above all, to set up a command structure so that everybody would know who was in charge.

Bowen told reporters: "There was a lack of clarity of roles and responsibility and a lack of effective joint-ness. By that I mean a unity of command, and that needs to be developed before we go to war…the United States government was not well poised to execute the kind of relief and reconstruction operation that was presented in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.”

It’s not exactly major news, of course, that the Bush administration seems to lack basic competence skills, and this is hardly the first time that Bowen has exposed glaring war-planning deficiencies. After all, he already has authored roughly 300 reports, tracking wasted billions and various examples of price-gouging by a well-connected contractor, Halliburton. So why do I bother taking note of his new report?
For this reason: If Bush’s enablers on Capitol Hill had had their way last winter, we would not be getting any more reports from Stuart Bowen. Because he would have been out of a job by Oct. 1 of this year. And he would have been out of job because the job itself was targeted for elimination.

Last autumn, when the GOP was still running Congress, Bush-friendly lawmakers inserted an obscure provision in a defense bill to terminate the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The clause was inserted by Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee in a closed-door conference. The leader of this effort was panel chairman Duncan Hunter (who is now seeking the GOP presidential nomination). The maneuver was ultimately discovered by outraged lawmakers who had no advance warning that firing Bowen would be an item in the final legislation. In the end, there was a successful effort, by Democrats and some moderate Senate Republicans, to save Bowen’s job.

Can you spot the parallel to the U.S. attorney purge?

As one of those targeted federal prosecutors, John McKay, said yesterday on NBC, the job of a public servant is to “focus on the evidence and not allow politics into the work that we do.” (McKay, a Bush appointee, had refused to pursue a voter fraud case in the state of Washington, citing lack of evidence. The White House and the state GOP had wanted that case. Now he’s out of a job.) Similarly, Stuart Bowen has spent the past few years pursuing empirical facts with no regard for politics, but since those facts have repeatedly embarrassed the Bush team, he was deemed disposable.

And this is why the prosecutor purge is significant. It is merely part of a pattern, the attempted politicization of public servants who are supposed to work for the taxpayer, not for those who mistake partisan zeal for high purpose.

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Speaking of partisan zeal, and the selective use of argument for partisan purposes, I bring you a senator newly returned to the GOP leadership, Trent Lott.

Here was Lott yesterday on Fox News, defending Bush’s decision to defy Congress and shield his top aides from testifying under oath about the prosecutor purge: “In my mind, I think if the President would agree for his close advisors in the White House to testify before Congress under oath, he’d be making a huge mistake. There is a thing called executive privilege.”

But here was Lott in 1998, lamenting President Clinton’s attempt to invoke executive privilege and thus shield his top aides from testifying under oath in the Lewinsky sex scandal: “(Clinton has) taken a step that really smacks of Watergate. It certainly looks bad - like there's something serious there that they're trying to hide….I think he should give up (invoking privilege). And I think he should be forthcoming. He should give us more information, not less.”

By the way, Clinton did give up. His aides did testify under oath. But when Fox host Chris Wallace pointed this out yesterday, Lott replied: “Well, yes, but that doesn't mean it was a smart thing to do, or that it should have been done.”

Wait a second….In 1998, hadn’t Lott argued in plain English that giving up the privilege claim was exactly what he thought Clinton should do?

What Lott demonstrates here is the craft of the true partisan warrior, the belief that facts are merely malleable weapons in the service of winning. (“Facts were being fixed around the policy,” as the British famously wrote in a 2002 memo about the Bush team’s decision-making style.) What apparently got most of those U.S. attorneys - and Stuart Bowen - into trouble was their inconvenient belief that the facts come first.

"Fredo" takes another hit

The Bush administration has been caught telling yet another falsehood (domestic politics category, as opposed to the Iraq war category).

Thanks to the latest Friday night document dump, let's just simply compare what attorney general Alberto Gonzales said on March 13, and what he did last Nov. 27.

On March 13, he felt compelled to address the burgeoning evidence that eight U.S. attorneys (all Republicans) had been fired in an unprecedented fashion for failing to sufficiently politicize their offices and aid the GOP at election time. Gonzales denied that he had played any role in the firings. Here was the money quote: "We never had a discussion about where things stood."

Now it turns out, courtesy of an item on the Justice Department calendar, that Gonzales met with his top aides last Nov. 27, to have a discussion about where things stood. They met in a Justice conference room at 9 a.m., and the title of the meeting was "U.S. Attorney Appointments." The firings were engineered on Dec. 7.

Naturally, a Justice spokeswoman said last night that there was absolutely no conflict between what Gonzales said on March 13, and what he did last Nov. 27, but if you're prepared to believe that, I have some Saddam Hussein WMDs to sell you.

Bush stood by his man again today, but in a way it's irrelevant whether Gonzales stays or goes. Bush, not Gonzales, sets the tone for this administration. And Gonzales himself has said that he is merely a yes man (he once said of Bush, "I am not sure that there will ever be a job that I would say 'no' to, if he asked me to do it").

Nevertheless, now that Gonzales has been caught in another falsehood (the first being his statement to Congress that he would "never, ever" fire a U.S. attorney for partisan reasons), we shall see how long Bush can afford to prop him up.

I heard recently that Bush's pet nickname for his acolyte is "Fredo." How apt it is, this inadvertent evocation of the doomed Corleone brother in Godfather II. Perhaps sooner rather than later, this new Fredo may be compelled to row his boat into the middle of Lake Tahoe and await the coup de grace.

Illness as a campaign asset (not!)

It seems almost callous to offer instant speculation about how Elizabeth Edwards’ recurrent cancer might affect her husband’s presidential campaign. Watching their press conference yesterday, my initial impulse was to put aside politics and empathize. But since they have decided to stay in the race, we scribes have no choice but to do our jobs.

For John Edwards – currently trailing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama among Democrats nationally, but very popular among Democrats in crucial Iowa - the sobering news about his spouse could cut either of two ways.

Here’s the thumbs-up scenario: His determination to soldier on as a candidate, while coping gracefully with family tragedy, adds gravitas to his image. Those who routinely dismiss him as a nice-looking lightweight, or as merely a rich trial lawyer, might be compelled to reassess him.

Indeed, Edwards is encouraging this line of thinking; at his press conference, he depicted Elizabeth’s illness as precisely the kind of test that our national leaders are typically forced to confront – his own personal 9/11, as it were. He said: “The maturity and the judgment that’s required of the president, especially in these historic times, requires the president to be able to function and focus under very difficult circumstances.” And Elizabeth weighed in yesterday as well: “He has an unbelievable toughness, a reserve that allows him to push forward with what needs to happen.”

Some observers buy this scenario; talking yesterday to the Associated Press, Democratic operative Chris Lehane (Al Gore’s press spokesman in the 2000 campaign) said: “These are situations where voters extrapolate an awful lot about a person’s character. Those who have questioned whether Edwards had the toughness to be president could well draw a lesson from how he handles this situation.”

Also, under the thumbs-up scenario, voters will presumably embrace Edwards politically because they are rooting for him personally. In an Oprah world, few sagas are more compelling than the triumph over adversity; not to be glib, but the Edwards personal saga might well demonstrate that politicians are people, too. As southern Democratic strategist Dane Strother argued yesterday, the news about Elizabeth “makes him real. It makes her real.”

But consider the thumbs-down scenario:

For John Edwards, the illness injects an element of uncertainty into his campaign. And that’s not a plus, because the last thing he needs right now – during this crucial phase, when activists are trying to decide who to work for, when donors are trying to decide where to send money – is the perception that he might not go the distance.

On the fund-raising front, Edwards is already lagging behind Clinton and Obama; it’s hard to see how the news about his spouse will help him close the gap. Democratic donors will undoubtedly sympathize with his personal challenges, but that won’t prevent them from making cold-eyed assessments about their own money. And given the front-loaded primary schedule, clustered around a slew of major states voting on Feb. 5, a candidate probably can’t survive without first having raised a great deal of money.

It’s easy to imagine that a fair number of donors will now hesitate before investing in Edwards; even if he stays in the race, he might well be (understandably) distracted by his wife’s medical travails…Edwards even acknowledged yesterday that he is fully prepared to leave the campaign trail whenever necessary: “Any place I need to be with Elizabeth, I will be there – period.”

But the donors, while crucial at this stage of the race, are relatively small in number. Let’s consider, in particular, the reaction of women who are most likely to vote in Democratic primaries. Here I am speculating, but it would not surprise me if a fair number of these voters think less of Edwards in the wake of his wife’s news. Why? Because of his decision to stay in the race and pursue his political ambitions, rather than devote himself full time to his wife and his kids (ages eight and six).

I have no instant polling stats; this is just what some women are telling me. Also, some female bloggers today are saying the same thing (“I have to wonder at the self-centered perspective whereby a presidential candidate is convinced that he and he alone is the man of the hour, and that our country's destiny is so dependent on him that his family's needs would not take precedence at such a time as this”). And columnist Margaret Carlson, after sampling some female opinion, writes today, “The women still love (Elizabeth), not so much him…They wanted Edwards to act more like Edward VIII, who renounced the throne of England for Wallis Simpson, to say, over his wife’s objection, that he’s giving this up ‘for the woman I love.’”

On balance, I give the edge to the thumbs-down scenario. But there’s one silver lining for Edwards. His habitual attackers will feel compelled to observe a brief moratorium; at least for a few days, it will be deemed bad form to deride him as a “Breck girl” or a “faggot.”

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In the most substantive pushback against President Bush since the war in Iraq was launched, the Democratic House today passed its bill to establish a troop withdrawal timeline, to compel the governing Iraqis to finally shape up, and to set some readiness standards for the overextended U.S. military. Bush indicated that he will veto it; the Democrats lack the votes to override him. So this bill will not become law.

But, for Democrats, it signals that they intend to keep the pressure on, as a bow to the popular mandate they received last November. They may lose on this legislation, but they clearly have the momentum, and majority support from the electorate. It is hard to see how the Republicans can keep insisting that it's the Democrats who are pushing "a prescription for failure," when it is incontrovertible fact that the Bush war team, with Republican acquiesence, has already spent four years laying the groundwork for failure.

Case in point: a new report released yesterday by the nonpartisan General Accountability Office. It now turns out, according to the GAO, that we made it easy for the insurgents to obtain millions of tons of conventional munitions - because we had too few soldiers guarding the material. The report says that the looting of these enemy munitions by the insurgents was directly attributable to the Bush team's flawed postwar planning. The Bush team underestimated how many troops it would need to secure Iraq, says the GAO, and it didn't anticipate that a program to guard these munitions would even be necessary.

As the GAO put it, in government bureaucratese, "the widespread looting occurred because DOD (Department of Defense) had insufficient troop levels to secure conventional munitions storage sites due to several OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) planning priorities and assumptions...(T)he war plan did not document risk mitigation strategies in case assumptions were proven wrong."

Result: the munitions were used to make the roadside bombs that have killed American soldiers.

Conclusion: The GAO is saying, in so many words, that the Bush team had a "prescription for failure" from the very beginning.

Can the Democrats get their House in order?

The current House Democratic angst over Iraq seems to have been scripted by Aaron Sorkin. One can almost hear his zippy dialogue, straight out of West Wing, transported this time to Capitol Hill, where the Democratic lawmakers no doubt would be speed-walking down the cavernous corridors, all the while debating in Tracy-Hepburn fashion the tradeoffs of purity versus pragmatism, ends versus means, ideals versus compromise.

But it would appear that the House Democrats are not in the mood for cheeky wit, given the fact that they have already spent most of this week acting the way Democrats tend to act when forced to make a national security decision. They have been speaking with a multiplicity of voices about Iraq ever since President Bush launched his fact-challenged push for war nearly five years ago, and they’re still doing it today – even as they are preparing for their first substantive war vote since taking control of Congress.

One might argue that it’s a sign of strength that the House Democrats are such a diverse bunch, ranging from the antiwar purists who occupy safe seats in deep-blue districts to the “blue dog” conservatives whose jobs hang by a thread in red districts. But in the end, only results matter. Voters essentially decreed last November that the Democrats should be given a chance to clean up Bush’s disaster and chart a rational course correction, yet here we are, on the eve of the first big House vote, and it’s not even clear that Nancy Pelosi and her deputies can pass their own bill.

This is where those aforementioned tradeoffs - purity versus pragmatism - come into play.

The Democratic leaders’ compromise would sustain funding for the war, but with a crucial caveat. If the Iraqi government doesn’t shape up by October (by meeting some mandatory benchmarks), then U.S. troops would begin to ship out next April; and even if the Iraqis do shape up, then U.S. troops will stick around only until the autumn of ’08. The problem, however, is that many lawmakers in the antiwar camp view this compromise as a copout, since it gives Bush the war funding that he wants. So they’re not going to vote for it, on the grounds that Pelosi’s plan doesn’t go far enough. (True to their ideals, they want to totally cut off the war money - somehow overlooking the fact such a measure has no change of passage.)

And this is critical, because the Democrats only control the House by 15 votes. Pelosi can ill afford many defections, especially since virtually all Republicans – supine to the bitter end - are still maintaining their lockstep discipline in support of their commander-in-chief. And further complicating the Democratic scenario is the fact that many newly-elected Democrats hail from traditionally red districts (for instance: three in Indiana, one in Texas, one in North Carolina), and they are reportedly tempted to vote No – because their constituents might see the Pelosi measure as going too far. As political analyst Michael Tomasky has noted, 62 House Democrats currently represent districts that Bush carried in 2004. And even though Bush’s popularity has since waned in many of those locales, there are probably lingering concerns about Congress “micro-managing” the war in ways that might encumber commanders in the field.

I suspect there is one other factor that might be prompting Democratic skittishness, and this can arguably apply to party lawmakers at all points on the ideological spectrum: The notion that if Democrats pass something substantive, they will for the first time be claiming partial ownership of this war – thereby providing GOP apparatchiks with the opportunity to hyperbolically blame “General Pelosi” and her “micro-managers” for any eventual defeat.

Thus, given all these rank and file Democratic grievances, we have the current spectacle of Pelosi working overtime to round up 218 votes (the bare minimum for victory), by applying both carrot and stick. She has shaken the stick at fence-straddling colleagues, implying that if they don’t vote for her compromise, she will yank their coveted committee assignments; and she has been dangling the carrot, offering all kinds of pork-laden goodies, essentially trying to buy off some of the fence-straddlers by promising to pump money into their districts. (This is where Sorkin would write some of the best dialogue.)

But clearly she’s having a tough time. The big House vote was supposed to happen today; now it’s going to be tonight at the earliest – an obvious indication that the leaders have yet to nail down a majority. And the antiwar liberal lawmakers are really the key factor; they’re a bigger swing group than the red-state conservatives, roughly twice as big, by some reliable estimates. Their choice is to either accept half a loaf (the traditional political calculation), or to hold out for the whole loaf and get nothing.

It’s noteworthy that a number of liberal bloggers are urging the “out now” faction to park their ideals and get real. Chris Bowers, one of the key players at myDD.com, wrote this the other day: “If, in the House, this bill goes down to defeat because Democrats are divided, not only will we get an even worse bill, but we will also get a national (media) narrative on how we don’t have our own House in order on Iraq.” Referring to the liberals who are refusing to compromise, he added: “I can’t help but think at this point that continued progressive opposition, while principled, has become politically blind belligerence.”

Bowers and others are arguing that at least Pelosi’s strategy would move the ball forward, and signal to Bush (and to Democratic voters) that Congress is prepared to keep pushing for a new direction in Iraq, albeit incrementally. And while it’s true that Democrats are traditionally nervous about asserting themselves on national security issues, fearing that they will be tagged anew as wimps, the truth is that, in the current debate over the war’s future, there are few viable options. And the blame for that rests with Bush.

Consider this new assessment: “On Iraq, Bush seemed to be practically the last man in America to realize his military strategy was failing…Iraq is in a category of its own. More than anything else, it colors the Bush presidency, giving every charge of incompetency extra resonance. A successful chief executive sets achievable goals, puts in place the right people to achieve them, and establishes a decision-making process that makes their job easier. Bush arguably did none of these in Iraq…the administration (could) be run perfectly until January 2009, and the charge of incompetence will still bite.”

That must be Paul Krugman, right? Frank Rich? No, that’s conservative commentator Rich Lowry, writing in the new issue of National Review.

So thanks to a record of ineptitude that is likely to stain his legacy for generations, Bush has driven the family car to the edge of a slippery cliff, with two wheels dangling over the precipice. Extrication will be an exceedingly complex and delicate process. Is it any wonder that Democrats are fighting over how to best salvage what he has wrought?

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Speaking of Democrats...Those pining for an Al Gore '08 candidacy would be well advised to stand down.

In Gore's congressional testimony yesterday, he called for an immediate national freeze on new carbon dioxide emissions, a move that, if ever implemented, would affect every American who drives a car or pushed a lawn mower. He also called for a tax on polluters.

Translation: there isn't the remotest chance that this guy is going back into politician mode. Nobody planning to run for office would ever propose anything that messes with the divine right of Americans to drive cars or cut the grass as they see fit. What Gore loves best about his current life is that he can go for broke without worrying whether he has just kissed off the suburban vote.

In the tradeoff between ideals and compromise, Gore has already cast his own personal vote for the former.

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Quote of the day, courtesy of ABC News...

Here is Bush press secretary Tony Snow, opining about our system of government (emphasis mine): "The executive branch is under no compulsion to testify to Congress, because Congress in fact doesn't have oversight ability."

Gosh, I didn't know that. This decree from the Decider will surely require the rewriting of political science textbooks nationwide, and prompt an overhaul of the exhibits at the National Constitution Center. And I guess this treatise - authored by the State Department, for our U.S. embassies abroad - will have to be purged as well.

"I'm sorry that the situation has gotten to where it's got," but now it's time to stonewall

Consider this presidential quote:

Under the doctrine of “executive privilege,” internal White House business “is not subject to questioning by another branch of government….A president must be able to place absolute confidence in the advice and assistance offered by the members of his staff. And in the performance of their duties for the president, those staff members must not be inhibited by the possibility that their advice and assistance will ever become a matter of public debate.” If presidential aides were to testify in public on Capitol Hill, “the candor with which (their) advice is rendered, and the quality of such assistance, will be compromised and weakened.”

So spoke President Richard Nixon on March 12, 1973, as he sought to defy the congressional leaders who were seeking to subpoena Nixon aides and thus find out the truth about the Watergate scandal. But if those quoted words sound familiar, perhaps it’s because you heard echoes from President Bush late yesterday afternoon, as he sought to invoke executive privilege to defy congressional leaders who are seeking to subpoena Bush aides and thus find out the truth about the prosecutor purge scandal:

“I’m worried about precedents that would make it difficult for somebody to walk into the Oval Office and say, ‘Mr. President, here’s what’s on my mind.’ And if you haul somebody up in front of Congress and put them in oath and all the klieg lights and all the questioning, to me, it makes it very difficult for a president to get good advice.”

Well, it may not shock you to learn that, once again, the president was speaking at odds with factual reality. He says he is “worried” that he would set a precedent if he allowed his top aides to testify in public on Capitol Hill about the purge scandal, but he need not worry – because the truth is that dozens of White House aides, extending back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, have testified in public on Capitol Hill. Bush’s defiance only makes perfect sense if one ignores American history, or prefers to remain clueless about it.

Here are some names to consider: Samuel Berger, Lanny Breuer, Lloyd Cutler, Lisa Caputo, Charles Easley, W. Neil Eggleston, Mark Gearan, Deborah Gorham, Nancy Heinreich, Carolyn Huber, Harold Ickes, Joel Klein, Evelyn Lieberman, Mark Lindsay, Bruce Lindsay, Capricia Marshall, Thomas McLarty, Cheryl Mills, Bobby Nash, Stephen Neuwirth, Dimitri Nionakis, Beth Nolan, John Podesta, John Quinn, Charles Ruff, Jane Sherburne, Clifford Sloan, Patty Solis, George Stephanopoulos, Patsy Thomasson, Margaret Williams.

Those people were all Clinton White House aides; at least 10 of them were entrusted to give Clinton legal advice. Yet all of them, at one time or another, testified before Congress. A sizeable number were even summoned by the Democrats, back when Clinton’s own party was running Capitol Hill, to explain the Whitewater scandal. This information is all contained in a report authored four years ago by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

In other words, there is no such thing as an ironclad “executive privilege” doctrine that can shield Bush, or any other president, from congressional subpoenas. And that’s not surprising, since the Constitution never mentions one. Indeed, in 1974, when Nixon tried to invoke “executive privilege” as a way to shield the secret tapes of his conversations with aides, the U.S. Supreme Court – chaired at the time by one of Nixon’s own appointees – unanimously ruled that “absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets,” a president is on weak ground.

Clinton had to be educated in similar fashion; he too (wrongly) attempted to invoke “executive privilege” in order to shield his aides from testifying (although at the time he was mostly trying to resist grand jury subpoenas in the Monica Lewinsky case), and he failed. What’s also noteworthy is that he was derided for his efforts in 1998 by some of the same people who today are insisting that Bush is defending the honor of his office.

Take Tony Snow, for example. Bush’s spokesman reportedly said last night, referring to the decision to defy Congress, that “we feel pretty comfortable with the constitutional argument” about executive privilege. But when Snow was a columnist back in March 1998, he wrote that Clinton’s executive privilege argument “would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up…Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold – the rule of law.”

That old Snow quote, which is circulating online courtesy of blogger Glenn Greenwald, also came up today at a White House press briefing. A reporter read it to Snow and asked Snow why it was right for him to make that argument in 1998 but wrong for anyone else to make that argument in 2007. Snow's answer: "Because you’re — this is not an entirely analogous situation...I'll let others do the legal arguing on that."

In other words, here’s the drill for Bush defenders: When Clinton invokes the doctrine in order to protect his administration in a scandal over oral sex, it violates the rule of law. When Bush invokes the doctrine in order to protect his administration in a scandal over whether federal prosecutors were fired for being insufficiently partisan, it’s a matter of high principle.

The problem with Bush’s strategy is obvious. After his administration has spent weeks issuing a string of false claims about why and how the eight prosecutors were fired (first it was because they had bad performance reasons, then it wasn’t; Karl Rove had no role in the firings, then it turns out he had a central role), Bush now insists that his targeted aides should be allowed to confer on the Hill without taking the oath to tell the truth, and without their words being taped or transcribed.

That would certainly be helpful to Rove and colleagues; they could subsequently deny anything they said that might be deemed embarrassing to the Bush cause. But it’s not clear how Congress, under such an arrangement, would be “learning the facts,” as Bush put it. Which is probably why a House committee voted this morning to subpoena Rove, ex-White House counsel Harriet Miers, and a few others.

“I’m sorry that the situation has gotten to where it’s got,” he said late yesterday. But it will be instructive to see whether he sticks to his defiant stance. Politically, he probably needed to talk tough and draw a line in the sand, as a way to buck up the 30 percent of the electorate that still believes in him. But history has shown that presidents who invoke executive privilege often bend in the end – in part because privilege claims are generally made in times of political weakness, when a defensive White House is suffering a credibility problem and trying in vain to contain a scandal.

Bush can claim, as he did late yesterday, that the Democratic Congress is merely interested in “dragging White House members up there to score political points or to put the klieg lights out there,” but at this point – given the well-documented public sentiment - it’s more likely that a majority of Americans will conclude that Congress is merely trying to hold the administration accountable. “Executive privilege” may not be in the Constitution, but the principle of checks and balances is.

The annotated story of Iraq

I would be remiss if I didn’t somehow mark the four-year anniversary of the Iraq war. I’ll do this by simply updating an analysis piece that I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 19, 2004 – marking the war’s first anniversary. What follows are the most relevant excerpts. The updates, appearing as italicized annotations, speak for themselves:


Iraq has become an American obsession. One year to the day after our stealth fighters swooped in and dropped the first Bunker Busters of Gulf War II, we remain on the desert sands - committed to democracy yet bedeviled by uncontrollable events, losing a U.S. soldier a day and spending more than $1 billion a week. (It’s now three U.S. soldiers a day – that’s the average since December 2006 – and the price tag is now $2 billion a week.)

It has roiled our relations with traditional allies and deepened the ideological divide in our domestic politics. It is now a laboratory for a daring experiment in Western values, but it is also a fixture each night on international television, as shadowy insurgents harass our fighting men and women. At this point, two-thirds of the soldiers killed in Iraq have died since President Bush appeared May 1 on an aircraft carrier, backed by a giant banner that declared, "Mission Accomplished." (As of today, 96 percent of the soldiers killed in Iraq have died since “Mission Accomplished.” Prior to Bush’s flight suit appearance, 138 soldiers had been killed; the official tally, as of today, is 3215. Do the math.)

Probably half the American electorate is not surprised by this grim tableau; their conviction that Bush went to war on false assumptions, that he sent the military and a small coalition of allies into Iraq on the basis of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, has inflamed domestic political discourse. (According to the latest CNN/Opinion Research poll, 54 percent of Americans say that Bush deliberately misled us into war; 40 percent disagree.) Some of our allies are similarly incensed; twice in the last week, political leaders in Spain and Poland have suggested they were misled when they signed on to the coalition. (Spain has since pulled out.)

Iraq will surely dominate much of the 2004 campaign, not just because the anti-Bush forces…will seek to parlay the war into a Bush defeat, but because the equally impassioned pro-Bush forces will invoke Iraq as a testament to the President's prowess as a war leader in the age of terrorism. And, buoyed by strong poll support, the Bush advertising team is trumpeting that theme. (In 2007, we have yet to see any of the ’08 GOP contenders invoke Iraq as a testament to the outgoing president’s prowess as a leader in the age of terrorism. On the contrary, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney prefer to mention Iraq as little as possible.)

As recently as last Sunday [March 14, 2004], the administration was still being forced to backtrack on its more apocalyptic remarks. When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld insisted on CBS's Face the Nation that he had never called Iraq an "immediate threat," his host simply read from the public record. Rumsfeld indeed had stated, referring to Hussein, that "no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people." Rumsfeld's response, according to the CBS transcript: "Mm-hmmm. It, my view of, of the situation was that he, he had, we, we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that, that we believed and we still do not know, we will know." (McCain recently called Rumsfeld “one of the worst secretaries of Defense in history,” and that’s arguably true, at least with respect to Rumsfeld’s creative use of syntax. Meanwhile, however, we’re still waiting for proof about that “immediate threat.”)

Americans still support the decision to wage war - in one bipartisan survey, by 64 to 32 percent - despite a broad belief that Bush either "exaggerated information" or "deliberately misled people." Bush's political team has obviously harvested the same numbers, because he is standing for reelection as wartime president without apology - as yesterday's war-anniversary speech clearly demonstrates. (Today, those poll numbers are roughly reversed; the latest Gallup survey says that 59 percent of Americans view the decision to wage war as a mistake; 39 percent disagree. But, as Bush demonstrated yesterday in his fourth-anniversary remarks, certain themes from his first-anniversary speech remain in heavy rotation. Here he was in March 2004: “There will be good days and there will be difficult days.” Here he was yesterday: “There will be good days and there will be bad days ahead.”)

Iraq is still a TV war, but sanitized. The White House, taking no chances that viewers might spurn the war if they see the coffins of slain soldiers, has barred all camera coverage. Unlike the soldiers who have fallen in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Panama, Grenada, Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon and Beirut, the casualties from Iraq return off screen. Nor does Bush, unlike past presidents, attend any of their funerals. (Nothing has changed on that front; the “off screen” policy hasn’t budged since Barbara Bush, the president’s mother, first tried to articulate it on ABC News in March 2003: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it’s going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it’s, it’s not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”)

There are ways to measure success. What's the price tag, for starters? The Pentagon's comptroller refuses to estimate the costs….What's the plan for taming the foreign terrorists who were drawn into Iraq because of the war? (A March 2007 Pentagon report now estimates that there are 1000 weekly attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq - a 150 percent increase since the spring of 2004, around the time my piece was written.) What happens if a sovereign Iraqi government takes power…in a climate of pervasive lawlessness? (We now know the answer to that question.)

Iraq will continue to test the power of our ideals in a perilous region, as well as the limits of our military muscle. (Today’s military leaders openly warn that our global military muscle is being stretched to the breaking point; in congressional testimony the other day, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff said that “our next-to-deploy forces” were not primed to fight another war somewhere else. In his words, “the readiness continues to decline.”) The Iraq obsession may well persist for a very long time. (That’s the last line in my ’04 piece. I wouldn’t change a word in that sentence.)

Hubris: a trilogy

I have three items here today, but they’re really all about the same thing: Hubris in high places.

The most substantive problem with the Bush administration’s firings of eight federal prosecutors is the well-documented fact that most of these Republican appointees were not deemed by the White House to be sufficiently zealous about bringing cases that would help Republicans at election time. And the public knows this; a new poll, released this weekend and sponsored by Newsweek, finds that 58 percent of Americans (and, tellingly, 61 percent of independents) view the firings as politically motivated.

Exhibit A is David Iglesias, a Fox News guest yesterday, who had received glowing performance ratings from his Bush overlords in Washington, but who nevertheless was dumped last December from his New Mexico job after he failed to bring any indictments against Democrats during the weeks preceding the ’06 election. Iglesias has since disclosed that two key GOP figures in New Mexico - Republican senator Pete Domenici and congresswoman Heather Wilson (who was fighting for her political life at the time) – called him last fall to ask about whether he was going to bring some indictments in a timely fashion. But, as Iglesias told Fox News, “we didn’t have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors can’t just prosecute on rumor and innuendo.”

Yet, substance aside, what’s also striking about the firings (and we will surely learn more in the days ahead) are the shifting rationales invoked by the administration. President Bush and his surrogates are not necessarily wrong when they say that they wish these firings had been “handled” and “communicated” better. But the reason they didn’t explain their actions swiftly, fully, and honestly is because that kind of behavior would have been out of character. (Their first impulse – to falsely claim that all those prosecutors were dumped because of low performance ratings – was more predictably in character.) Clearly, even four months after the ’06 election, they have only begun to wake up to the factual reality that (a) the Democrats now run Congress, and (b) they will now be held accountable for their actions.

I was also struck by this passage in a Newsweek story, posted yesterday. It concerned a meeting with Bush crony/attorney general Alberto Gonzalez: “Recently, a trio of senators—Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy; Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the committee, and Democrat Charles Schumer—sat down with Gonzales in his wood-paneled conference room to discuss the firings of the U.S. attorneys. Gonzales was initially combative and defensive. ‘Why do I have to prove anything to you?’ he demanded at one point, according to a source who was in the room…”

Why do I have to prove anything to you....Does that sound like anyone else we know?

Here’s a hint, courtesy of a quote from 2002: “I don't have to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

In other words, the hubris starts at the top. Gonzales may soon be sacrificed in this scandal, but he and his people at Justice were merely marching to his patron’s tune.

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Speaking of hubris, a fascinating admission was made by a Bush official on Capitol Hill last Friday afternoon in one of the other scandals. But first, a little context:

Back in September 2003, after it became clear that the White House had been trying to discredit Iraq critic Joe Wilson, and that some retaliatory soul had leaked Valerie Plame Wilson’s confidential CIA status, Bush was called upon to comment. He declared that he was determined to find out exactly what had happened. He said: “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.” He also said: “I want to get to the bottom of this.”

Flash forward to last Friday, when Valerie Plame Wilson testified on Capitol Hill. She said under oath that her work had been compromised. Just as interesting, but underreported, was the testimony of another guest – James Knodell, director of the White House security office. He was asked about Bush’s professed determination to root out the anti-Wilson leakers.

Committee chairman Henry Waxman: “Federal regulations require that any person who has knowlege of the loss or compromise of classified information has an obligation to report to the White House Security Officer….Are you aware if there has been any investigation that ever took place in the White House about the release of this classified information?”

Knodell: “I am not…”

Congressman Elijah Cummings: “I want to make sure I heard you right. Are you saying with regard to this case that is, the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson, there is no report?”

Knodell: “Not in my office there is not.”

Cummings: “And are you also saying there was no investigation?”

Knodell: “Not by my office…”

Waxman: “Do you know whether there was an investigation at the White House after the leaks came out?”

Knodell: “I don't have any knowledge of an investigation within my office.”

Waxman: “Ever?”

Knodell: “I do not.”

Waxman: “Because the President said he was investigating this matter, was going to get to the bottom of it. You're not familiar that any, you're not aware that any investigation took place?”

Knodell: “Not within my office, sir.”

So it would appear that Bush was employing a variation of the O.J. Simpson defense (see last Tuesday’s post), vowing to hunt down a culprit, even though the culprit was in the room with him, yet failing to follow up on the vow. As press reports indicated back in September 2003, he vowed to “get to the bottom of this” during a meeting with Karl Rove – who is now known to be one of the Wilson leakers. But we learned that from the Scooter Libby case, not from any attempt by the White House to hold itself accountable. That would have been incompatible with the imperatives of hubris.

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Finally, on the hubris front, I’ll reference my latest Sunday newspaper column, which deals with Bush’s executive order in November 2001 to make it far easier for presidents, vice presidents, their families, and their heirs to shield their White House documents and papers from public view and, ultimately, from the verdict of history.

Basically, his order says that ex-presidents and their families – as well as an incumbent president acting in support of the ex – can hold up release indefinitely. But as I also noted, the House last week – by a veto-proof margin – approved a bipartisan bill to bring back the 1978 open-records law that essentially ensured future release of these papers. (This development was overlooked in the press last week, amidst all the fallout from the prosecutor scandal, the Walter Reed scandal, and the Libby leak scandal).

And here's some material that I had to excise from my print column.

Many of Ronald Reagan’s papers were slated for release by the National Archives in January 2001; he had left office in January 1989, and the ’78 law had mandated a 12-year release procedure. A Reagan directive had also added one caveat to the law: It gave an incumbent president 30 days to decide whether an ex’s papers should be held up on an executive privilege claim.

So picture the scene: It's January 2001, and Bush has just become president. What do you think happened next?

On March 23, 2001, having already held up the Reagan release for more than the statutory 30 days, Bush directed an aide to write to the Archivist of the United States, and ask for a 90-day extension – but wait, that’s not quite correct. The aide wrote, “I instruct you to extend for 90 days…” (emphasis mine).

Bush got the extended extension, but 90 days came and went. So in June, the aide wrote again to the Archivist: “I am now instructing you to extend until August 31.”

Bush got the new extended extension, but 90 days came and went. So in August, the aide wrote again, “In the spirit of cooperation and collaboration…I am now formally instructing you to extend the time…” The aide asked for “several weeks,” but on Nov. 1, Bush changed all the rules anyway, trumping the ’78 law with his own executive order – and lawmakers on the Hill (including some prominent conservative Republicans) have been trying to undo his act ever since.

The aide who wrote all those memos was his faithful counsel, Alberto Gonzales.