Pillow talk as public policy, and vice versa

You may have noticed that Hillary Clinton likes to repeat herself:

"I have a unique perspective being on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue" (Sept. 18); "My experience at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue...gives me special insight into what we must do" (Sept. 26); "My eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue..." (Oct. 10, 2002, when she voted to authorize the Iraq war option).

And with respect to that experience at the White House end of Pennsylvania Avenue, we also have this long-recurring theme:

"I talk to my husband about everything. We talk constantly (about policy), and, you know, he tells me sometimes why what I think won't work, or thinks it's a good idea and he'll look into it, but sometimes I talk to other people in the administration as well (May 28, 1996); "I worked alongside my husband..." (Jan. 24, 2005); "We have influenced each other so much over these, goodness, 36 years now...there's a bit of a challenge to say 'here's where he stops and I start'" (Essence magazine, Nov '07).

But if a scholar or journalist or voter tries to find out the exact nature of the Bill-Hillary collaboration, to indeed determine where he stops and she starts, the inquiring citizen will be stonewalled. Because all her '90s White House papers are locked away at the federally-financed William J. Clinton Presidential Library, and virtually none of them are expected to see the light of day prior to the '08 election.

Here's the deal, apparently: She gets to tout her First Lady stint as proof of her governmental experience, but we on the receiving end don't get to find out exactly what she did. She gets to travel America extolling the successes of the Bill Clinton administration, and she gets to tell us how much she influenced his thinking, but we don't get the chance to learn exactly what she influenced (much less how and why).

To verify her experience claims, to understand the nature of her advice, and to determine whether her advice helped or hurt her husband's performance, we would need to have access to a number of things: her policy memos, her notes from strategy meetings, her appointment calendars, and a lot more. But there is no such access - as the respected biographer Sally Bedell Smith discovered recently when she visited the library. When she requested material on Hillary's advice to Bill about welfare reform, she was told that "policy" matters were off limits; when she requested material on Bill's advice to Hillary during her 2000 Senate campaign, she was told that "political" matters were off limits.

Much of this is Bill's doing; as Newsweek determined, after reviewing documents obtained from the National Archives under a Freedom of Information request, Bill decreed in a 2002 letter that there should be no speedy release of "sensitive policy, personal, or political" material. He was also very interested in slowing the release of "communications directly between the President and First Lady, and their families, unless routine in nature." Apparently he was casting a wide net, because neither of his immediate predecessors, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, has reportedly placed any controls on the papers of their respective spouses.

Democratic strategists and pro-Clinton archivists have been arguing for months that Bill and Hillary are rightly concerned about the pitfalls of disclosure, that Clinton critics would merely cherry-pick the most negative material. Yes, they would do that. It's just too bad that the voters won't have the chance to decide for themselves whether to believe the critics, or, more importantly, to decide whether the archives confirm Hillary's claims about the breadth of her experience.

The bottom line is that this issue demonstrates why the Clinton collaboration is so unique - and potentially troublesome.

As Hillary keeps telling us, she and Bill have been talking policy since the day they were married; it's part of what bonds them as a couple. But now that she's running for president herself, and people want to understandably find out more about the nature of their policy talk (since, after all, their policy talk affected the nation in the '90s and may well do so again), they're invoking an expansive zone of privacy. Witness Bill's abiding interest in safeguarding "communications between the President and First Lady." Witness Hillary's remark, during a Sept. 26 debate, that "I don't talk about my private conversations with my husband."

So the deal, for the '08 campaign, is that when Hillary touts her close collaboration with Bill, as part of what she calls her "35 years of experience," she expects the voter to simply take it on faith and not sweat the details. Because those details are under lock and key.

The deceptive allure of darn good buzz

On a busy day, I'll confine myself to offering this public service:

In recent weeks, a great number of emailers have excitedly sought to inform me about a particulary juicy entry in The Reagan Diaries, a recently published volume of the late president's private jottings. They have quoted the entry, and urged me to post it forthwith; after I declined to do so, I was duly informed, by some of the emailers, that I was clearly a right-wing stooge/Republican apologist/censor/killjoy.

Here's the passage. Supposedly, the juice factor is high because the writer is Reagan, the "George" is Vice President Bush, and the "son"...well, you know who that is:

"May 17, 1986. A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

For those of you who might find this passage in your email box, and might be tempted to forward it to new recipients, be forewarned: It's fake.

This verdict is apparently a revelation to many of my emailers, who seem to assume, in our new communications era, that anything rocketing through cyberspace automatically has the ring of truth - or, more specifically, that anything that squares with their partisan views should be treated as true. Certainly, back in the mid-'80s, George W. Bush was a notoriously underemployed adult, so perhaps that was sufficient for those who greeted the purported entry with guffaws of delight.

My first reaction, when I read it, was puzzlement. How had this not been highlighted last May, in the initial news stories about the diaries? How was it possible that Bill Maher had not mined it for an entire opening monologue on HBO? How was it possible that a president would have penned such brazenly disdainful prose, when, in fact, every president assumes that his diaries will be publicized, and therefore that they need to be written with malice toward none and charity toward all?

So I went to a bookstore, pulled The Reagan Diaries off the shelf, leafed to the date...and there was nothing about a shiftless ne'er-do-well son. Then I went online, and within seconds, the truth emerged:

Columnist Michael Kinsley learned last spring that he would surface on page 400, where Reagan briefly mentions enjoying an off-the-record lunch with Kinsley and several other journalists. Amused by this news, Kinsley then proceeded, in the July '07 pages of The New Republic, to write a satire, in which he made up several Reagan entries, with himself playing a cameo role in each. The Bush passage was one of three Kinsley inventions.

Somewhere along the line, somebody with no sense of irony highlighted the Bush passage and, minus the Kinsley authorship, passed it along as truth...and out it spun, morphing into darn good buzz.

And what's doubly ironic is that, according to Kinsley, the actual Reagan entry - where he attends an off-the-record lunch with the president - was wrong too. Kinsley says the actual New Republic attendee was Charles Krauthammer; somebody (Reagan, the editor, the publisher) stuck in Kinsley's name by mistake.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make, about slippery factoids on the Internet. There's an old saying in journalism, and it needs to be honored anew: "If your own mother says she loves you, check it out."

Grownups say the dumbest things

In the spirit of broadcast pioneer Art Linkletter, who once authored a book entitled Kids Say the Darndest Things, I offer today's post, Grownups Say the Dumbest Things.

Actually, dumb might be too mild an adjective. In several of the instances listed below, you might feel that moronic is more accurate - depending, of course, on your partisan inclinations:

1. Mike Huckabee, GOP presidential candidate. I mentioned on Monday that he might be poised to ride a boomlet into the Iowa caucuses, in part because he is an effective communicator and an ordained Baptist preacher who is sincerely in sync with the party's religious conservatives. Nevertheless, in a Republican debate on Sunday night, his fervor got in the way of his facts.

At one point, he said, "When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen, they said that we have certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them..." (emphasis mine)

Really? "Most" of the Declaration signers were clergymen? I have toured Independence Hall a number of times, and I have read my share of early histories (thank you, Joseph Ellis), yet I had never heard that stat before. In the reality-based community, "most" is defined as a majority. This would mean, if Huckabee is using the reality-based definition, that, at minimum, 29 signers were clergymen.

Here's the problem, however: All available evidence indicates that, at maximum, the actual number was...four.

Among the signers, there was only one active clergyman (John Witherspoon of New Jersey). One religious website, Adherents.com, says that perhaps four signers were preachers in the past. One conservative group, the Heritage Foundation, puts that number at two.

Perhaps Huckabee was using a faith-based definition, one that is tailored to the belief that the signers were explicitly creating a Christian nation. One of his rivals on stage could have rebutted him by quoting Thomas Paine, whose fiery writings helped inspire the Declaration of Independence ("I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.") But no presidential candidate would dare do that.

2. Glenn Beck, host of The Glenn Beck Program. One of the perks of being a talk radio loudmouth is that the brain's flotsam can be flushed through the lips, without the checks and balances of rational thought. Beck, who is also employed by CNN, belched on his radio show Monday about the current tragedy in southern California:

"I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today."

I would suggest that it is inappropriate to run a loyalty test on people who have just lost their homes. I would even bet that a large number of the newly homeless are America-loving Republicans; there are many such people in southern California, as indicated by the voting rolls and the presence of so many Republican congressmen. But such nuances are the province of journalists, and those who spew on the air don't qualify.

3. Pete Stark, Democratic California congressman. This guy has been a loose cannon for years - six years ago, during a House debate, he falsely charged that black Republican J.C. Watt's children had been "born out of wedlock" - but last week he overreached with an anti-Bush tirade that embarrassed his own party colleagues.

During the struggle last week over children's health insurance, Stark told Republicans: "You don't have money to fund...children, but you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement."

Notwithstanding President Bush's historic miscalculations in Iraq, and the fact that 3,800 Americans are dead because of his errors, it's a tad unfair to assume that he is amused by the death toll. Some liberal bloggers have declared Stark to be a hero, but the reality is, he made life more difficult for the half-dozen House Democratic freshmen who represent conservative districts.

Unlike Stark, who is seemingly a congressman for life because he hails from a liberal northern California enclave, those freshmen have to compete in 2008, and the last thing they need is to be linked with a guy who thinks that a commander-in-chief is amused by the death of soldiers. Which is why Stark was squeezed by the House leadership until he finally apologized. But we'll undoubtedly hear from him again, in some future fracas.

4. Mitt Romney, GOP presidential candidate. Here he was Tuesday morning, discussing the latest developments in the war on terror:

"Actually, just look at what Osam, uh, Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. 'That is a battlefield. That is the central place,' he said. 'Come, join us under one banner.'"

Naturally, Romney's spokesman later explained that the candidate had "simply misspoke." (Twice, in fact.)

I suppose that's understandable. All those funny-sounding names sound alike, right? Granted, one of them is a presidential candidate and the other is a terrorist, but what's a guy to do? Perhaps, if it happens again, Romney can defend himself in song, with apologies to George and Ira Gershwin:

You say Osama, and I say Obama/ Osama, Obama/ Obama, Osama/ Let's call the whole thing off...

Message to the moralists: Mind your own business

It looks like Fred Thompson can kiss off the Christian conservative vote. He has insulted them, big time.

During a news conference yesterday, the Republican presidential candidate basically stated that when a family member is struggling to decide whether to pull the plug on a mortally ill loved one, everybody else should just butt out because it's none of their business. Indeed, it's an issue near and dear to him: “I had to face a situation like that in my own personal life, with my own daughter.”

Thompson's stance is definitely not in tune with the Christian conservative agenda. Their attitude - as evidenced by the Terri Schiavo case, the 24/7 cable TV melodrama of 2005 - is that the federal government should intervene in the private lives of families, and ensure, in accordance with their views of morality, that the doomed patient remains attached to the feeding tube.

When Thompson was asked about the Schiavo case last month, he claimed that he couldn't recall the details. It turns out that he pleaded amnesia merely to avoid discussing his own family trauma. But for those of you who truly don't remember the Schiavo case, here's the gist:

Terri Schiavo, who had hovered near death for the better part of 15 years, was being kept alive by a feeding tube. Her husband wanted to remove the tube. State courts in Florida, backed by the testimony of medical specialists, ruled that he had the right to remove the tube; the key state judge was a southern Baptist and Republican. But religious conservatives, cracking the whip, compelled the Republican Congress to pass a special law, overruling the state courts and Michael Schiavo. In the immortal words of then-House GOP leader Tom DeLay, "I don't care what her husband says."

Eventually, the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled for Michael Schiavo. Which brings us back to Thompson; clearly, his idea of conservatism is that the federal government should not be in the business of promoting morality and butting into people's private lives. That's the old conservative credo, as articulated several generations ago by Barry Goldwater (who said in 1964, "I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow"). The problem is, Thompson's credo is not the Christian right's credo.

It's probably bad enough, from their perspective, that Thompson is known to be an infrequent churchgoer, that he once lobbied for an abortion rights group, and that he bestirred few hearts at the weekend Values Voter Summit. And now, from Thompson at his news conference, comes this blasphemy:

"Making this (Schiavo case, and others like it) into a political football is something that I don't welcome, and this will probably be the last time I ever address it. It should be decided by the families - the federal government and the state government, too, except for the court system, ought to stay out of those matters as far as I am concerned."

And the reason he doesn't want to revist this issue publicly is because he knows first-hand about what it's like to struggle with it in private: His 38-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Panici, died from an accidental drug overdose in 2002, six days after being hospitalized. He said yesterday, "These things need to be decided by the family. And I was at that bedside."

That should put the kibosh on Fred. Anyone who sounds this much like a Goldwater conservative, anyone who refuses to accept a little evangelical assistance while at a stricken daughter's bedside, won't stand much of a chance with religious conservatives. After all, it was Goldwater himself who in 1981 said of those folks, "I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of conservatism."

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On the mercenary front, Erik Prince uttered a revealing remark the other day. The founder/owner of Blackwater, who says his longstanding family Republican ties have played absolutely no role in his reaping of more than $1.02 billion in private security contracts from the Bush administration, was being quizzed on CNN on the issue of accountability...or, more specifically, about why the Bush team and the Iraqi government have long failed to hold Blackwater accountable for anything (as two new audits have also concluded).

Prince was asked, "Whose laws are you subject to?" And in response, almost in passing, he told CNN: "Well, in the ideal sense, we would be subject to the Iraqi law, but that would mean -- that would indicate that there was a functioning Iraqi court system where Westerners could actually get a fair trial. That's not the case right now."

Well, that's not very helpful to the Bush team, is it? The administration has been struggling for many months to put the best spin on the failure of the Iraqi government to meet the benchmarks laid out in Washington...and here is Prince, casually mentioning a failure that is not even addressed in the benchmarks.

When the White House issued its July report card on Iraqi "progress," there was no mention of any criteria for the Iraqi judiciary. Indeed, the judiciary is barely mentioned at all. But now Prince, seeking only to defend his mercenaries, has informed us that the Iraqi judiciary is not even "functioning" in any western sense of the word. Perhaps the White House needs to craft an extra benchmark. We thank Prince for that inadvertent public service.

Christian conservatives and the Huck: perfect together?

Are we perhaps witnessing the political ascendance of Mike Huckabee? Is it possible that restive religious conservatives, widely dissatisfied with their choices in the GOP presidential field, are poised to flock en masse to an ordained Baptist preacher who plays the electric guitar? To an ex-governor from Bill Clinton’s state whose chief claim to fame – until recently – was that he lost 100 pounds? To a guy who, with that kind of name, sounds like he should be cracking cornpone jokes on The Andy Griffith Show?

The answer is yes. Huckabee, notwithstanding his ostensible second-tier status as an ’08 candidate, finished in a virtual tie for first place this weekend in a straw poll of religious conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington (if we include the online voters who chose not to attend), and Huckabee slaughtered the entire GOP field (polling 50 percent, with Mitt Romney a distant second at 10 percent) if we count only the votes that were cast in person, by those who were in the room.

It actually makes perfect sense that grassroots Christian conservatives might be warming to a candidate who has long been right under their noses. Huckabee – in part because he is actually one of them, having been a past leader of Arkansas’ Southern Baptist Convention; in part because he is a gifted communicator; in part because he questions all this stuff about evolution – might be well poised to fill the vacuum that persists on the Republican side.

The vacuum was obvious at the weekend Washington confab. For instance:

Romney (who took 27.62 percent of the total straw poll vote, compared to Huckabee’s 27.15 percent), is still widely perceived by these folks as the quintessential panderer - somebody who’s merely talking a good anti-abortion game, after having previously told Massachusetts voters that he supported abortion “and you will not see me wavering on that.”

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is still (rightly) perceived by the religious right as being a New York liberal on abortion. In his Saturday speech, he tried to sell his unpalatable beliefs as a character asset, as proof that he is a man of conviction: “Isn't it better to tell you what I really believe than to change my positions to fit the prevailing winds? I believe trust is more important than 100 percent agreement." The problem with Rudy’s argument is that these people really aren’t interested in disagreement, particularly on an issue (abortion) that they deem to be a deal-breaker. Rudy wound up with 1.85 percent of the total straw poll vote.

John McCain? He got nowhere this weekend. And how about Fred Thompson, who was supposed to swoop into the race and scoop up the Christian conservative vote? Forget about it. He did tell the Summit crowd that if he makes it to the Oval Office, he will immediately start to pray (perhaps as compensation for the fact that he is not a regular churchgoer, a lifestyle choice that displeases some religious right leaders). But Thompson still isn’t wild about the idea of codifying a gay marriage ban in the U.S. Constitution, he still refuses to apologize for the fact that he did lobbying work for an abortion-rights group, and, in his Summit speech, he probably lulled hundreds of eyelids to half mast with some of his less than scintillating bromides (“We must have good laws. We must do our best to stop bad laws”).

By contrast, Huckabee appeared to electrify the crowd with an eloquent appeal to purity: “I come today not as one who comes to you, but as one who comes from you.” He said that Christian conservatives should focus on candidates who “sing from their hearts,” as opposed to those (Romney, apparently) who “just lip-sync the lyrics from our songs….I don't want expediency or electability to replace our vales. We live or die by those values…Our party may be important, but our principles are even more important…Let us never sacrifice our principles for anybody's politics. Not now. Not ever.” One conservative blogger at the National Review wrote this weekend that Huckabee “blew the doors off the place.”

The crowd also loved his take-no-prisoners stance on abortion. According to Huckabee, not only is abortion a violation of "God's values," it has also forced us to give cheap domestic jobs to immigrants - jobs that could have been filled by the aborted. Yep, that's what the man said on Saturday: "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be (because) for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce, had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973." (If Huckabee was ever to win the nomination, I wonder how independent swing voters - who generally support that abortion ruling, as well as immigration - would react to Huckabee's argument?)

Anyway, the Summit vote marks the second time that the ill-financed Huckabee has come from nowhere to duel the well-heeled Romney to a virtual draw. It happened back in August, at the Iowa Republican straw poll. And it also appears that Huckabee is inching upward in the surveys of likely Iowa caucus-goers. The religious right leaders are still wary of him (because he hasn’t raised much money), but the grassroots seems to be increasingly receptive. If this kind of thing keeps happening, Huckabee will surely win the honor that is bestowed upon all ascendant candidates:

He will become a target.

If he starts to get real traction with the religious right, some of his rivals will start to utter insinuations about Huckabee’s dearth of foreign policy experience (an accurate charge), and about how we need national security acumen in this post-9/11 era. Also, expect them to tar Huckabee as a tax-hiker (as a governor faced with budget woes and lousy roads in need of repair money, he did sign hefty sales-tax increases on cigarettes and gasoline).

Indeed, fiscal conservatives are already on his case about his economic record. The Club for Growth, an activist group, ran ads last summer assailing Huckabee as a flagrant tax-and-spender, and, late last week, the veteran conservative activist Richard Viguerie (a legend in the movement) slammed Huckabee for similar reasons, calling him “just another wishy-washy Republican -- inconsistent in policy because he’s inconsistent in principle.”

(Note the potential here for a conservative split over Huckabee, between religious right-wingers who like his social positions and Christian values; and economic right-wingers who dislike his tax-and-spend decisions.)

But if Huckabee does well in Iowa and suddenly takes off for real, how long will it take for somebody to bring up the case of Wayne Dumond?

Remember what happened to Michael Dukakis, in 1988, when the Massachusetts governor was pilloried by the GOP for presiding over a prison furlough program that put rapist Willie Horton into the community, with tragic results? Potentially, Wayne Dumond is Mike Huckabee’s Willie Horton.

The short version: In 1985, in eastern Arkansas, Dumond was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years after he was convicted for kidnapping and raping a teenage cheerleader. Some critics thought the sentence was excessive, particularly considering the fact that, while he was awaiting trial in ‘85, Dumond had been castrated by a pair of masked vigilantes. In 1992, state authorities decreed that Dumond should be allowed to petition the state parole board; he then asked to be freed, but the board said no.

Enter Huckabee, who became governor in 1996. Two months after taking office, he announced that he intended to set Dumond free. Shortly thereafter, the parole board did so. Huckabee congratulated Dumond, and told him in a letter, “I feel that parole is the best way for your reintroduction to society take place.”

Due to various logistics, Dumond wasn’t released until 1999. A year later, he moved to Missouri – where he sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman.

When asked about this case recently, Huckabee said, “I did not have this apprehension that something horrible like that would happen…There’s nothing you can say, but my gosh, it’s the thing you pray never happens. And it did.”

Was this a case of Christian forgiveness gone awry? If Mike Huckabee takes off as a candidate – and he still needs a lot more money, if he expects to play in the big primary states on Feb.5 - then he’ll surely be asked to say a lot more.

Auditioning for the blessing

It's a travel day around here, so I'll keep it pithy:

Over the next several days, at the "Values Voter Summit" in Washington, the '08 Republican presidential candidates will be vying for the blessing of religious conservatives. Those traditional gatekeepers of the GOP nomination remain frustrated that they can't seem to find anyone who satisfies their purist sensibilities.

The auditions should be fairly predictable.

Rudy Giuliani will play down his liberal past on social issues, by invoking 9/11 with some frequency and vowing to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court; Mitt Romney will spin his flip-flops (from liberal on abortion to conservative on abortion) as some sort of spiritual awakening, and brag a lot about his family (in a veiled contrast to all the divorced guys in the race); Fred Thompson will say he has always been a consistent conservative, and overlook his own past lobbying efforts on behalf of an abortion rights group; Mike Huckabee will play up his previous life as a pastor, and skip over the fact that donors still don't seem to want to give him any money; John McCain, who's hoping in vain that his listeners have forgotten his 2000 dismissal of Christian conservatives as "agents of intolerance," will paint himself as a man of conviction by contrasting himself with Romney's flip-flops.

(Indeed, here's an excerpt from McCain's speech today: "I have been pro-life my entire public career....That is a personal testament, which you need not take on faith. You need only examine my public record to know that I won't ever change my position to fit the politics of the day.")

Meanwhile, there's one other development that should displease the religious right. The departure today of Sam Brownback - the Kansas senator, plagued with microscopic poll ratings, is dropping out of the race - translates into a rise in the percentage of Republican candidates who actually believe in evolution.

With Brownback in the race, the EA (evolution average) was .556...meaning, only five of the nine candidates said they endorsed evolution. But with Brownback gone, the EA will climb all the way to .625. No wonder the religious conservatives feel that their decades of political toil has yielded insufficient satisfaction.

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But even though Rudy Giuliani continues to have problems with the religious right, there is ample polling evidence that he is a popular with another sizeable segment of the population:

The factually-challenged.

I know that sounds harsh. But, as I mentioned several weeks ago, there is still a huge pool of people who inexplicably persist in believing - despite all the massive empirical evidence to the contrary - that Saddam Hussein plotted 9/11. Last month, a New York Times/CBS News poll determined that 33 percent of Americans believe Hussein was “personally” involved. And last June, a polling firm sponsored by Newsweek put that percentage at 41.

And, according to Times/CBS, take a guess which '08 candidate most strikes their fancy. The pollsters asked these clueless Americans to rate all the candidates in terms of favorability, and the winner was Rudy Giuliani - who has already proved to be a master at rhetorical sleight of hand, by repeatedly implying, a la the Bush administration formula, that all bad guys are indistinguishable...a tactic that also conveniently excuses the Bush team for its ill-fated decision to invade Iraq.

Dreamy Democrats, traveling through time

No wonder the Democratic Congress is saddled with a microscopic approval rating (11 percent, in the latest poll). Consider this week's misadventure:

At a time when the public is hungry for real solutions to a slew of contemporary crises - for starters, the war in Iraq - the House Democrats have been dithering for days about whether they should stand tall and make a courageous statement...about some atrocities that were perpetrated by a country that no longer exists, in an era long dead and gone.

The Ottoman Empire. In 1915.

Needless to say, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the desire to take a moral stand against genocide; indeed, the Armenian-American community has long been urging Congress to officially acknowledge the mass killings of their ancestors, at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, during World War I. And many Democrats, including the current party leaders in Congress, generally believe that American foreign policy should be guided by fixed moral principles - as expressed in their pending House resolution condemning as genocide the Ottoman Turks' behavior 92 years ago.

But, for Democrats, the problem with standing tall against an injustice that transpired 92 years ago is that it makes them look clueless with respect to sensitive national security developments that are unfolding in the here and now. And, with a national election looming, the Democrats can hardly afford to look clueless in the national security realm.

Democrats incensed about the Ottoman Turks of 92 years ago might be better advised to simply rent the DVD of Lawrence of Arabia, because this doesn't appear to be a propitious time to take a moral stand. The pragmatics argue against it. Turkey is a stalwart Muslim ally, a NATO ally that allows us to resupply American troops in Iraq from military bases on its soil. Turkey is also viewed by Israel as a stabilizing force in the region. Turkey is also a crucial player in the movement of oil to the West.

Turkey is also ticked off at America these days, because it doesn't think we have done enough to stop Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq from crossing the border and attacking Turkish civilians; yesterday, in fact, the Turkish Parliament authorized sending Turkish troops into northern Iraq to pursue the rebels - a direct slap at America, which officially lists these rebels' group, PKK, as a terrorist operation.
It's fair to argue that - regardless of the Turks' complicity in the Armenian killings, and regardless of their obstinate refusal to acknowledge same - this is not the best time to be ruffling their feathers.

Such are the complications of realpolitik. When all those security pragmatics are taken into consideration, the Democratic leaders, with their gazes fixed on 1915, come off looking like pie-eyed dreamers.

It should also be pointed out that their moral outrage is fueled in part by domestic political pragmatics. The Armenian-American community has been good to the Democrats, and now they want to cash in some IOUs. (Perhaps if Native-Americans had the same kind of electoral clout, we'd now be seeing resolutions condemning Andrew Jackson for what he did to the Florida Seminoles.)

Armenians vote heavily in Nancy Pelosi's California district, and it's no accident that one of the key resolution sponsors in Adam Schiff - another California Democrat who was elected in 2000 with heavy support from the burgeoning Armenian electorate in Glendale and Burbank.

I can attest to that, because I covered Schiff's race; that race drew national attention, because the incumbent was James Rogan, a key GOP player in the House Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton. At one point, I had lunch with one of the key political operatives in the district - an Armenian named Eric Hacopian. He spelled out the importance of the Armenians as a local swing vote (10 percent of that district's electorate); he talked at length about the 1915 killings, and their desire to back a candidate who would push for a congressional resolution. In his words at the time, "This is a blood issue for all Armenians, it is extremely personal."

Well, Schiff is still pushing the blood issue - it was passed by the Foreign Affairs Committee last week - and it appeared that the resolution could reach the House floor any day now. But suddenly the Democratic leaders are wavering. With some Democrats bailing out, and with others stressing the here and now (Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat: "These are real-life situations, and sometimes your heart has to give in to your head"), Pelosi is now saying that action on the resolution "remains to be seen."

Behold the congressional Democrats: First they come up with a symbolic toothless gesture of idealism that threatens to play havoc with geostrategic realities...then they wobble over whether to pursue their own gesture. That 11 percent approval rating should be safe for awhile.

But to really gauge their performance on this matter, consider the response of President Bush. Speaking yesterday at a press conference, he said this: "With all these pressing responsibilities, one thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire. The resolution on the mass killings of Armenians beginning in 1915 is counterproductive. Both Republicans and Democrats, including every living former Secretary of State, have spoken out against this resolution. Congress has more important work to do than antagonizing a democratic ally in the Muslim world, especially one that is providing vital support for our military every day."

Talk about ineptitude...The Democrats have managed to make even Bush sound wise and sensible.

Rudy and Hillary and Larry

So many developments, so little time:

Rudy Giuliani, whose social liberalism continues to be a drag on his Republican nomination prospects, dearly wants GOP conservatives to ignore that inconvenient truth and focus instead on his national security machismo.

That was the drill yesterday, when he soared like a hawk at the Republican Jewish Coalition confab in Washington. He said, with respect to Iran and its nuclear ambitions, that it's very important for America to keep all its military options on the table. Then he said, for emphasis, that it's very important for America to keep all its military options on the table. He also stressed, in case nobody heard him, that America should keep all its military options on the table. He also wanted everybody to know that "if I am president of the United States, I guarantee you, we will never find out what they will do if they get nuclear weapons, because they're not going to get nuclear weapons," and that's because he'll keep all military options on the table.

He never did address the thorny issue of consequences - such as the likelihood that the cost of a barrel of oil would soar in the aftermath of a U.S. military attack, and that such costs would be passed along to American motorists - but Rudy wants to stay focused right now on looking tough and stoking emotions and playing the 9/11 card in all its permutations...anything to potentially distract conservatives from his tolerant track record on social issues.

But I doubt that his rhetorical willingness to bomb Iran will get him off the hook this Saturday, when he is slated to address the religious conservatives' Values Voter Summit in Washington. Those folks are well aware of his longstanding support for abortion rights and gay rights, and many are already threatening to bolt the GOP if the party nominates a pro-choice candidate. They're clearly less than thrilled about Rudy; a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that only 39 percent of evangelical Christians view him in a "somewhat positive" light, and that only 20 percent intended to back him during the primaries.

If Rudy renounces his pro-choice past, he'll look like just another flip-flopper, and undercut his straight-talking image; if he doesn't renounce it, he risks further alienating a lot of the GOP base (indeed, one Christian right leader endorsed rival Mitt Romney yesterday, pointedly saying that Romney, despite his Mormon faith, fills the bill "both personally and ideologically").

Rudy's intraparty quandary helps to explain why he's focusing so much these days on bashing Hillary. For instance, on Fox News last night, he said: "Honestly, in most respects, I don't know Hillary's experience. She's never run a city. She's never run a state. She's never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people."

That's actually not a bad line of attack, especially coupled with his national security machismo. But it won't necessarily sell with those in the GOP base who see his social liberalism as a deal-breaker. The success of his candidacy will ultimately hinge on whether he can somehow becalm the base without alienating the socially tolerant GOP moderates who predominate in the big early primary states - notably California, New York, and New Jersey.

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Speaking of Hillary-bashing, Barack Obama is pocketing his halo and ratcheting up the rhetoric. Yesterday he basically dismissed her as a poll-driven, conviction-free Machiavelli: "If every move you’re making is based on a static politics where you are looking backwards and 'this is what the polls tell me, this how much room we have to maneuver'...you’ll be a vast improvement over George Bush. But you are not going to deliver on the major challenges, and you are not going to set a broad vision for the country."

He's only doing this, however, because of his ongoing slide in the surveys of likely Democratic primary voters. Hillary's lead continues to widen; in one new poll, she is the favorite of 50 percent of likely Democratic voters - a fairly impressive figure, considering the large field of candidates.

I'd argue that Hillary has Obama right where she wants him: in a box. If he stays above the fray (his preference) and continues to advertise himself as a new kind of non-partisan pol, he'll continue to lose ground. But if he descends into the fray and tries to assail her directly, he'll look like just another partisan candidate - while exposing himself to Hillary's counterpunches.

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Is Larry Craig secretly working for the Democrats, or what? The GOP's albatross surfaced yet again last night (on Matt Lauer's NBC show), and again this morning (on the Today show), defending his john habits, pleading convenient memory lapses, and wallowing in lame denials. At least Mark Foley was wise enough, last year, to quit his House seat and disappear. This guy, by sticking around and keeping himself in the news cycle, threatens anew to damage the battered Republican brand during the runup to '08.

"Matt, I use bathrooms for bathroom's sake...False rumor and innuendo...I go to the bathroom to use the bathroom for bathroom's sake...The facts have just got covered up...It didn't happen...I don't recall that...I don't agree with the (gay) lifestyle. And I've said so by my votes over the years..."

One hour of this. But my favorite part was when Lauer asked whether his fellow senators were shunning him. Lauer asked, "They're not parking in your parking spot?"

Craig: "They better not."

What better metaphor can there be, for an entrenched Washington politician who has pled guilty, has refused to accept the ruling of a state judge, and has compromised his party's purported "family values?" What could be worse for GOP morale than to have a tainted entrenched incumbent fighting in defense of his parking spot?

You're next, Bethany!

Supporters of SCHIP expansion – translation: the grassroots activists who want Congress to override President Bush's veto of the popular, bipartisan State Children's Health Insurance Program bill – are trying once again to put a human face on the issue. They are spotlighting a modest-income Florida couple whose 2-year-old daughter, Bethany Wilkerson, was able to get life-saving heart surgery in 2005, thanks to the SCHIP program.

But, considering how the conservative media/blogosphere assailed the first publicized youngster – 12-year-old Graeme Frost, who received SCHIP-financed hospital care after a serious car accident, and whose parents were promptly slimed by false innuendo about their personal finances – we can only assume that Bo and Dara Wilkerson are psychologically prepared for what might happen next. Perhaps it will be something like this…

TUCKER CARLSON: “Good evening, and welcome to this Fox News emergency special, 'The Wilkersons: Threat or Menace?' I am joined here in the studio by my guests, Bill Kristol – hi, Bill, you look happy, glad the war is going so well – and best-selling author Ann Coulter. Ann, I must say, that dress is good TV. You look absolutely fetching tonight. Where’s the party?”

COULTER: “You mean the Socialist party? I’d be interested in knowing why these Wilkersons are behaving like Socialists. And as for that name - 'Wilkerson’ - doesn't that sound Jewish to you?”

KRISTOL (beaming): “Not necessarily. And, Ann, please remember that I’m Jewish.”

COULTER: “Well, Bill, I’ve always said that you need to be perfected. Would you like to start the Christianization process? Come to church with me?”

(Laughter, crosstalk)

KRISTOL: “Frankly, Ann, I think it’s the Wilkersons who need to get religion about our priorities in this country. First, let me say that this is a great time in America to be a conservative, to stand up for smaller government, to advocate for a muscular America abroad, and surely, as Americans, the Wilkersons should agree with that. The president decided to veto this bill, which, if enacted, would waste billions that could be better spent to aid our fighting men and women in Iraq, as well as our freedom workers at Blackwater. So what the Wilkersons are doing is irresponsible. The key question to consider is, why is their toddler against the troops?”

COULTER: “And when you consider who these Wilkersons really are – it’s a disgrace. I’ve been scanning the blogs, and there are many commenters who say they know this couple, and did you know that the Wilkersons pre-enrolled sweet little Bethany in a posh preschool program, and that they have a chauffer-driven limousine and a vacation home in the Cayman Islands?”

CARLSON: “Really, let’s be honest, it is truly a disgrace that these people have decided to exploit their own child for partisan political propaganda, and that certainly doesn’t speak well of their personal family values, or their skills as parents. I also suspect that a lot of people in St. Petersburg vote Democratic. But with respect to the personal information you just mentioned, that’s amazing! Where did you hear that…”

COULTER: “It’s just out there, for anyone to hear about.”

CARLSON: “…Because I read a quote yesterday from Mr. Wilkerson - Bo Wilkerson is his name - saying that the family income is only around $34,000, and that he has only $67 in his bank account.”

COULTER: “Well, the rest of the money could be in his Cayman Islands account, couldn’t it?”

KRISTOL (beaming): “Conceivably, Ann. But I’d like to get back to this issue of patriotism, and whether the Wilkersons think it is a disgrace that Al Gore won the Nobel Prize. I understand, from news reports, that Bo Wilkerson claims to have only one car, and he refers to that car as a ‘junker.’ First, we don’t know if that’s true, he could have stashed his Audi somewhere so that his daughter could qualify for her socialist heart operation. But if it is true, let’s remember that junkers are not fuel-efficient. Which means they contribute to global warming. It is Bo Wilkerson’s right to pollute if he chooses to. And if he continues to remain silent about Al Gore, if he refuses to speak out and condemn Gore for meddling with the rights of junker drivers, I think that tells us a lot about Bo Wilkerson.”

COULTER: “And I’d like to get back to this name thing. What kind of name is ‘Bo,’ anyway?”

(Laughter)

CARLSON: “You know, there’s a website – and this is true – which says that ‘Bo’ is a popular Scandinavian nickname for both boys and girls.”

COULTER: “Well, that figures, doesn’t it? The Scandinavian countries have long been a hotbed for socialist, welfare-state thinking. Sweden, for instance. That tells us all we need to know.”

KRISTOL: “Not just Sweden, either. Norway is a Scandinavian country. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in Norway. Do the Wilkersons believe that George W. Bush rightfully deserved to win the peace prize this year, for his liberation of Iraq? More importantly, does Bethany believe that?”

COULTER: “Is Bethany walking yet? Or still crawling? And what does that say about her parents? I also notice, in the YouTube ad, that Bethany is shown on a beach. So why is the family beach house conveniently out of camera range?”

CARLSON: “And did you notice that Bethany had her heart operation in a Florida hospital in 2005 – the same year that Terri Schiavo was allowed to die in another Florida hospital? I’d like to know, do the Wilkersons believe that Terri had the same right as Bethany to live a full and healthy life? But we’re out of time. Bill, take us to commercial break.”

KRISTOL (Beaming): “Join us tomorrow night, for a special investigation of the Wilkersons’ political beliefs. Have they put their daughter’s interests ahead of winning the war on terror? Thank you for joining us.”

Al Gore and his aversion to toxicity

Al Gore’s fans are dreaming if they actually believe that he will choose, at this late date in the campaign calendar, to parlay his Nobel Prize into another White House bid. Notwithstanding the requisite buzz, he doesn’t need that kind of grief.

He has long indicated that he has little appetite for the toxicity of modern politics. He undoubtedly remembers the 2000 presidential debates, when the media dwelled on his audible sighs, and he remembers the campaign itself, when he was successfully painted as a serial liar. (George W. Bush had a line in his standard stump speech about how Gore once claimed to have invented the Internet - but that was the actual lie, because Gore had only claimed that as a senator during the ‘80s he had taken the “initiative” to develop the technology. Which was the actual truth.) And he'd rather not be reminded how he outpolled Bush on election day by 543,000 votes, only to lose the presidency when a 5-4 GOP-dominated Supreme Court stepped into a state dispute and stopped the crucial recount.

Speaking of toxicity, Gore can’t even win the Nobel Prize without taking retaliatory heat from conservatives who can’t abide the notion that he has been vindicated. Witness Bill Kristol’s predictable quip yesterday on Fox News, where he sought to discredit Gore and the Nobel Prize in the same sentence (“It’s a prize given by bloviators to a bloviator for nothing”), although he was quickly topped by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who – big surprise – used the occasion to question Gore’s patriotism (the Nobel committee awards its prizes “to people whose politics are either anti-American or anti-Bush”).

But, as a candidate, his foes on the right would’ve been the least of his problems. His primary headache would have been Hillary Clinton.

Taking her on would be tough enough just in terms of the horserace; she is lapping the track at the moment, Barack Obama and John Edwards both having failed to slow her momentum. Even if Gore felt a strong urge to take a late plunge, his prospects for toppling such a well-financed, well-organized frontrunner would not be promising. Indeed, a Gore ally said as much to CNN last Friday.

And, horserace aside, taking on Hillary would immediately alter the Al Gore media narrative. Right now, he is “Al Gore, seer and international icon.” If we was to challenge Hillary for the nomination, the story would quickly become “Al Gore, politician, seeking to settle old scores and avenge his grievances with the Clintons.” That’s a giant step off the pedestal.

It has long been known – and I did a few such reports of my own, back in ’99 – that Al and Hillary were never the best of buddies. The vice president and the First Lady dueled for influence in the Bill Clinton White House for most of the ‘90s, and guess who generally won. Gore was also overshadowed when he ran for president in 2000, because Hillary at the time was making her initial Senate bid, and she soaked up most of Bill’s time, attention, and fund-raising energies. A new Vanity Fair article points out that between June and December of 1999, Bill staged 20 White House events in order to boost Hillary’s political profile, while staging only one event to boost his vice president.

In June of that year, I spoke with ex-White House aide David Gergen about Al and Hillary, and he spoke of “a natural friction” between the two. He said, “As long as the Clintons remain on the stage, it’s difficult for Al Gore to be on the stage, too.”

Little has changed since. Gore has come too far, in terms of rehabilitating his image and reputation, to want to risk it now by crowding the Clintons on the political stage and resurrecting the “Al versus Hillary” media narrative.

The same problem will complicate his impending decision about whether to endorse one of the current Democratic candidates. As an “outsider” who yearns for a new political paradigm, he would probably lean toward either Obama or Edwards, both of whom are painting Hillary as an establishment insider who would ultimately do little to change the Washington fundamentals. But, if he does tender a non-Hillary endorsement, his decision still risks being dismissed as sour grapes from a guy with grievances against the Clintons. And I have long felt that political endorsements are overrated, anyway. I seem to recall that Gore’s endorsement of Howard Dean, on the eve of the ’04 primaries, didn’t exactly sway the Democratic grassroots on the issue of Dean’s electability.

Nor am I convinced that Gore can use his Nobel status to put his environmental issues front and center in the 2008 campaign. The public generally applauds his efforts, but the overriding concerns are still Iraq, the economy, and health care. And no Democratic candidate is so anxious for a Gore endorsement that he or she will agree to endorse the Gore plan for combating global warming (a political suicide agenda that would hit Americans in their wallets).

It would appear, therefore, that Gore’s best option is to continue to lead his current life, with the expectation that he would play a strong educational role in any ’09 Democratic administration. Given the traumas that he was forced to endure seven years ago, that’s not such a bad deal.

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Speaking of political toxicity, emailers have been asking me lately why I have neglected to comment on Rush Limbaugh’s denigration of antiwar Iraq veterans (whom he has derided as “phony soldiers”), particularly in the wake of the conservative attacks on Moveon.org, for its “General Betrayus” denigration. Today, I address the whole issue in my latest newspaper column – although I doubt that my perspective will please those who are caught up in this game of rhetorical tit-for-tat.

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And for those of you who prefer the national game - that would be baseball, of course - today I offer something completely different, a freelance obituary on the New York Yankees.

"A stain on democracy"

Meanwhile, away from the news cycle:

Political analyst Larry Sabato, the academician/author/quotemeister, contends in a provocative new book that the U.S. Constitution is a brilliant yet somewhat "archaic" document in dire need of an update. He says that certain provisions should be revised or even overhauled, in order to address “the new demands of a very different country than the one that existed in the founders' world.”

He pitched his 23 proposals last week at the National Constitution Center – I moderated the panel, which also featured Hofstra University law professor Eric Lane and International Herald Tribune executive editor Michael Oreskes, co-authors of a new book that says the Constitution is sufficiently flexible as it is – and I recall sounding skeptical about the prospects for radical change. (The forum is slated for broadcast on C-Span2 this weekend, at 7 a.m. Sunday and again at 7 p.m.)

Sabato, based at the University of Virginia, is calling for a new constitutional convention, and tossing out all kinds of ideas: changing the composition of the Senate to give greater representation to the most populous states; slapping term limits on all members of the House and Senate; eliminating lifetime tenure for federal judges; giving the president a single six-year term, with an option to seek two additional years in a national referendum; a new provision requiring that all able-bodied young Americans devote two years to national service; and many more.

I suspect that he knows a constitutional convention would be a long shot, and that he is really most interested in getting people to think anew about a document that is widely taken for granted.

At least one proposal, however, seems particularly attractive (and perhaps achievable, if only by legislation): Dropping the requirement that only “natural born citizens” can serve in the presidency. Sabato thinks the job should also be open to naturalized Americans who have been citizens for 20 years. A number of legal scholars and members of Congress concur; John Yinger of Syracuse University, testifying on Capitol Hill three years ago, in support of a reform bill that went nowhere, contended that the constitutional provision that bars the presidency to all foreign-born citizens is “an extreme form of profiling.”

Sabato argues in his book (and argued on the panel as well) that this constitutional provision “is a stain upon our democracy” that currently disqualifies 14.4 million American citizens, including Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. He points out that the provision was enacted at a time when the signers feared the prospect of a foreign monarch coming to these shores, perhaps at the invitation of conniving politicians in Philadelphia; rumors persisted that the Prussian brother of Frederick the Great, and the second son of British King George III, had received various overtures.

Sabato writes: “Fundamental to our national self-image is a belief that here in the United States, however humble one’s origins, anyone can rise to the highest office in the land. Striking the prohibition on non-native-born citizens will be a powerful symbol if America’s rising inclusiveness and equality in the 21st century.” He and other reformers think that 20-year naturalized citizens should be free to run for president, thereby leaving it up to the voters to decide whether they feel comfortable about electing somebody not born on American soil.

But the prospects for reform are dim, because the issue is too politically sensitive. In the aftermath of 9/11, many Americans are instinctively more fearful of foreign influence; in a national poll that Sabato commissioned for his book, 68 percent of respondents opposed the idea of a “foreign-born president.”

(Interestingly, one presidential candidate in the recent past was foreign-born. George Romney, father of current candidate Mitt Romney, ran for the GOP nomination in 1968, even though he had been born in Mexico, where his parents were Mormon missionaries. If he had triumphed during the primaries, the constitutional prohibition would have been front and center.)

It’s also noteworthy that Schwarzenegger, arguably one of the most popular and successful Republicans on the national scene, is nevertheless barred from seeking higher office due to his birth in Austria. Indeed, he was in the front row of the audience, at a GOP presidential debate last May, when the current candidates were asked whether they’d be willing to knock out that constitutional provision. Eight of nine said no – including Mitt Romney (“I’ll give it some thought, but probably not”). That kind of response must have made Arnold proud to be an American.

The true meaning of sacrifice

With respect to the latest Republican presidential debate, which I mentioned here yesterday, it’s worth noting that the questioners missed a golden opportunity to quiz the GOP candidates on a critically important issue.

This exchange, midway through the debate, seemed like the ideal opening:

Maria Bartiromo of CNBC: “Senator McCain, last week on the campaign trail you were critical of President Bush for the lack of asking for sacrifice…from the American people after September 11th - adding that, "Just go shopping," wasn't enough. What would you have asked?

John McCain: “I would have asked Americans, when we were incredibly united…to serve a cause greater than themselves. I would have told them, first of all, consider the military, also the Peace Corps, also AmeriCorps, also neighborhood watches, also volunteer organizations that we would form up all over America -- that way we would all serve this nation.”

That was it. McCain got off easy. Bartimoro moved on – rather than ask the most logical follow-up question:

“But, in terms of asking for sacrifice, Senator McCain, since you were, and continue to be, a strong supporter of the Iraq war, and since you see that war as a vital front in the war on terror, wouldn’t it be prudent and fair to ask today's Americans to help finance that war through a tax increase – the standard American practice ever since the Civil War?”

Perhaps she should have asked all the hawks on stage the same question. No doubt they would have dodged and weaved, but it would have triggered a far more scintillating conversation than the standard GOP wares on display the other day (such as whether the line-item veto is constitutional, an issue that no doubt galvanized the viewing audience). Seriously, are these candidates so committed to the war in Iraq that they would be prepared to ask the current generation of Americans to pay for it?

Politicians in both parties have long required that kind of sacrifice. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, imposed an estate tax on the rich in order to pay for his Union army. Another Republican, William McKinley, did the same to help pay for the Spanish-American war. His Republican successor, Theodore Roosevelt, kept it on the books in case of wartime emergency, saying that “the man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the state because he derives special advantage from the mere existence of government. Democratic presidents raised taxes to pay for World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

George W. Bush has invoked FDR and World War II in order to inspire listeners about the stakes in Iraq, but he never quotes what FDR said five weeks after Pearl Harbor: “War costs money. So far, we have hardly begun to pay for it.” Nor does he quote what FDR said a year earlier, when he warned Americans that they would need to sacrifice in order to shore up the British in their fight against Hitler: “A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes.”

Instead, today’s Americans sacrifice by spending their Bush tax cuts at the mall. Basically – and this too might have been fertile turf at the Tuesday debate, which was supposed to be primarily about economics – the Bush team is paying for this war by putting the tab on the American credit card, by running up the national debt. And burgeoning nations such as China are gaining long-term economic leverage against us by buying up that debt.

It would have been instructive to see whether the GOP hawks were prepared to buttress their war support by asking for substantive economic sacrifice. That might have tested their true commitment to the war. At the least, the exchanges would have been far more valuable than hearing Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney squabble at length over who did what on taxes and revenue way back when.

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Speaking of Iraq, we all remember how the Surge was supposed to inspire the warring sectarian Iraqi factions to move toward political reconcilation, and how that goal remains a pipe dream. The topic came up today at the White House press briefing, after press secretary Dana Perino happened to mention that President Bush had a teleconference conversation early this morning with Prime Minister Maliki.

Perino insisted, of course, that Maliki is "a good man" who is "trying as hard as he can." Then, referring to the Bush-Maliki chat, she added this:

"One of the things they talked about was the frustration that you can have when you're in the executive branch, in trying to push the legislative branch into acting on something that you want to see done."

Yep, just one leader of a democracy commiserating with another leader of a democracy, about how hard it is to deal with unruly legislators. The legislators in one democracy think they can just go ahead and enact health insurance for children, while the legislators in another democracy prefer to aid and abet sectarian strife and murder...it's all part of the challenging process of checks and balances, with those Iraqi lawmakers really acting just like those uppity American Democrats.

Or as Bush himself told CBNC today, "You're seeing a democracy emerge and it's exciting."

A GOP no-no: "You sit down with your attorneys..."

So I was in the midst of multi-tasking yesterday, keeping an ear cocked to the Republican presidential debate that was playing online, when I heard Mitt Romney say the most amazing thing. I had to roll back the transmission and listen again, just to make sure. I even watched his lips move, just to ensure that this wasn’t some sort of trick.

And sure enough, he did say it. Here’s the exchange with host Chris Matthews, with the highlights italicized.

Matthews: “Governor Romney…if you were president of the United States, would you need to go to Congress to get authorization to take military action against Iran's nuclear facilities?”

Romney: “You sit down with your attorneys and tell you what you have to do, but obviously, the president of the United States has to do what's in the best interest of the United States to protect us against a potential threat. The president did that as he was planning on moving into Iraq and received the authorization of Congress.”

Matthews: “Did he need it?”

Romney: “You know, we're going to let the lawyers sort out what he needed to do and what he didn't need to do, but certainly what you want to do is to have the agreement of all the people in leadership of our government, as well as our friends around the world where those circumstances are available.”

Sit down with your attorneys…Go to the lawyers…It’s hard to imagine a Republican candidate committing a more egregious gaffe. After all, Republicans have long delighted in bashing lawyers, as rhetorical sport. They typically take a certain populist macho pride in distancing themselves from the effete hair-splitters (President Bush, umpteen times: “I’m not a lawyer”). Republican pollster Frank Luntz even insisted in a 1998 memo to GOP candidates that “it’s almost impossible to go too far when it comes to demonizing lawyers. Make the lawyer your villain.”

The typical Republican believes that legal niceties are for wimps, that you fight the global evil-doers and run roughshod over dithering congressmen not by sitting with your attorneys, but by channeling John Wayne….which is precisely why, if an ’08 Democratic candidate had ever dared to say what Romney just said, that Democrat would currently be under serious assault from the Fox/Rush/Drudge/Coulter/GOP message nexus.

Never mind the fact that, in a narrow technical sense, Romney was actually speaking the truth, since presidents of both parties do tend to check with legal counsel while weighing constitutional issues. In the shorthand of politics, nuance is the first casualty. One can only imagine how Republican admakers would have responded, in 2004, if John Kerry had spoken Romney’s identical phrases: “Once again, the Democrats have shown that they cannot be trusted to keep us safe. John Kerry thinks we should outsource the war on terror to the lawyers – ‘to let the lawyers sort it out,’ as he puts it. In a dangerous world, America cannot afford that kind of inaction…”

In fact, that’s what a lot of conservatives were saying in 2004 anyway; commentator Barbara Stock at the Renew America think tank mocked Kerry for his alleged belief that “a few lawyers will solve the pesky terrorist problem.” Meanwhile, Jed Babbin over at the National Review wrote that year, “If wars are too important to be trusted to the generals, they are far too important to be trusted to a bunch of lawyers.” (In that piece, he was complaining about how Bill Clinton had consulted with Pentagon lawyers before deciding whether to launch special-ops missions.)

Perhaps conservatives would at least be consistent if they now rebuked Romney for expressing a willingness to consult with lawyers during a national security crisis. Right?

Dream on.

With the exception of a few observers – Matt Hemingway at the National Review website fumed, “What a terrible answer on Mitt’s part…mind-boggingly awful” – most of the conservative commentariat has been predictably benign.

I repeatedly checked The Drudge Report, in the hours after the debate. It’s fair to suggest that if a Democratic candidate had talked about consulting with lawyers, the parsed quote would have been emblazoned in red on the home page. But Romney’s quote was nowhere to be found (last night, by contrast, there was a photo of Hillary in a witch costume).

The generally astute Matthew Continetti, at the Weekly Standard, did suggest that, while “none of the candidates had a bad debate,” Romney “came close when he said he would more or less cede command authority to his lawyers.” But he didn’t elaborate. And even though a blogger at redstate.com did argue this morning that Romney’s words “tells me all I need to know about his qualifications to be commander in chief. In fact, Romney's reply sounded much like what we would hear out of the mouths of liberal Democrats,” he immediately took heat from conservative posters who thought Romney’s words were no big deal.

But even though most conservatives seem to want to excuse one of their own, even for uttering words that they would have condemned from a Democrat, this doesn’t mean Romney will get off scot free. If any rival candidate sees Romney as an impediment and needs ammo to cut him down, the lawyer line might well be resurrected. The Fred Thompson campaign put out a brief mocking email last night, and an official Thompson blogger wondered last night, “Does the Iranian regime respond to subpoenas?”

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And speaking of Fred Thompson, how did the GOP’s purported conservative savior perform yesterday, in his long-awaited debate debut? Some commentators seem to think that he did just swimmingly, just because he remained awake for two hours and managed to survive a Chris Matthews pop quiz by correctly naming the prime minister of Canada.

But suffice it to say that his lines were better on Law and Order. At one point, he let loose with this clearly scripted sound bite: “It’s strange to me to think that the average 20-year-old serving us in Iraq knows more about what it takes for our national security than the average 20-year veteran on Capitol Hill.” (I know it’s de rigueur these days to offer kudos to our troops, and that’s fine - but are we now supposed to believe that they are also endowed with big-picture geostrategic wisdom as well?) And at another point, he sounded like a foggy version of George W. Bush: “The manufacturing industry is, in large part, an international industry nowadays, which means prices are set internationally.”

On the other hand, any 65-year-old man who can stay vertical while listening to a discussion of the Smoot-Hawley tariff probably deserves at least a measure of applause.

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And, with respect to Barack Obama's recent alleged insult to American flag pin wearers everywhere, history shall record that, yesterday, only two of the nine Republicans debaters wore flag pins.

The downside of having your dukes up

While addressing Democratic partisans, Hillary Clinton frequently touts herself as the ultimate stump warrior, a battle-tested candidate who will effectively repel every attack and cede nary an inch to political enemies. But, as evidenced by her behavior at an Iowa event two days ago, this kind of hair-trigger vigilance clearly has its downside.

During a Sunday “town hall” session, Hillary took some questions from the audience (a noteworthy event in itself, because in recent weeks she has generally avoided such interactions). She was soon hit with a zinger from a guy named Randall Rolph, who was disturbed by the fact that Hillary had recently voted for a Senate resolution calling on President Bush to formally designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Rolph voiced his concern that Hillary, by her vote, was essentially providing Bush with a new excuse to foment war with Iran.

Then Rolph delivered the money quote. Referring to Hillary’s Iraq war authorization vote of 2002, he said to her: “Why should I support your candidacy…if it appears you haven’t learned from your past mistakes?”

At first, Hillary in response stuck to substance, insisting that the anti-Iran resolution was merely intended to foster more diplomacy and sanctions, and not to encourage the bellicose members of the Bush war team. But then she fired back at Rolph, by suggesting that he was a Hillary-bashing conspirator who had been instructed beforehand to show up and make her look bad. Referring to the substance of his question, she told Rolph: “Somebody obviously sent it to you.”

Rolph didn’t particularly appreciate the implication that he was an audience plant, that he had not been thinking for himself. He called out, “I take exception. This is my own research. Nobody sent it to me, I am offended that you would suggest that.”

Hillary tried to back off: “I apologize. It's just that I've been asked the very same question in three other places. So let me apologize.” She later added, “I respect your research.”

But none of that erases her initial response, which was to suggest that the adversarial question was evidence of a plot against her. Which is precisely why her first reaction was to push back, hard – in accordance with her dukes-up instincts.

The problem, however, is that Rolph was voicing a concern that is widely shared among antiwar Democrats. An argument can be made that this concern is not warranted – as Hillary told Rolph, the new Senate resolution does not contain any specific language authorizing Bush to attack Iran – but, as her critics point out, Bush attacked Iraq on the basis of the ’02 resolution, even though Hillary now claims it was only intended to foster more diplomacy and sanctions.

In other words, her Iowa questioner didn’t need to have any information “sent” to him by conspirators. All he had to do was swim in the information stream. This Iran issue has been around for several weeks, and it has already surfaced in a Democratic debate. On Sept. 26, John Edwards – clearly referring to Hillary - said this: “There was a very important vote cast in the United States Senate today. And it was, basically, in a resolution calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization…I have no intention giving George Bush the authority to take the first step on a road to war with Iran…(Y)ou cannot give this president the authority and you can’t even give him the first step in that authority, because he cannot be trusted.”

Not surprisingly, Rolph resented the implication that he was merely a conspirator who was out to get her, as opposed to being a thinking citizen. He later told reporters: “"She tried to ... accuse me of using someone else's words and being stupid. And that offended me.” (Hillary did not risk offending anybody else yesterday. She reportedly held four more Iowa events - but took no audience questions.)

She is besting her rivals in the latest Iowa Democratic polls, so perhaps her instinctive reaction on Sunday won’t mean squat when the caucuses finally commence. But if this incident was at all indicative of how she responds to adversarial questioning, that suggests a character trait worthy of greater scrutiny.

"Fashion choice" and the meaning of patriotism

As a foreign correspondent living in London during the early ‘90s, I was always struck by the absence of patriotic display. The Union Jack flag flew from government buildings, but hardly anywhere else. Motorists didn’t plaster the flag on their bumpers; used car dealers didn’t fly it over their merchandise; politicians didn’t pin it to their lapels. I recall asking a Tory member of Parliament about all this, and, after initially looking bemused (his expression said, “Typically stupid American question”), he replied: “There is hardly a need for us to show off, because we rather prefer to fly the flag” – tapping chest – “in here.”

I thought of that exchange this weekend, after reviewing the particulars of the Barack Obama flag pin scandal, a transient fracas that prompted much huffing and puffing among the self-appointed custodians of our national iconography. Trivial as this incident ultimately may prove to be, it nevertheless tells us much about the patriotism divide on this side of the pond.

For those of you who didn’t track the chronology: Last Wednesday, a local TV reporter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa happened to notice that Obama wasn’t flying the flag on his suit jacket and decided to investigate further. (Obama hadn’t been wearing a flag pin for years, but local-affiliate TV people are not known for their preparation.) The reporter asked: “You don’t have the American flag pin on. Is this a fashion statement?”

Obama, rather than lapsing into the usual Democratic posture of hemming and hawing, decided to address the matter in a straightforward fashion: “You know, the truth is that, right after 9/11, I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Oraq war, that (pin) became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism, which is (about) speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security. I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest. Instead, I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great and, hopefully, that will be a testimony to my patriotism.”

The Associated Press picked up his remarks, and, a day later, The Drudge Report went to work, conveniently fudging the time element by making it appear that Obama’s decision was brand new. (Drudge’s headline: “Obama Ditches American Flag Pin,” followed soon thereafter by “Obama Drops American Flag Pin.”) Meanwhile, also on Drudge day, Obama decided to amplify his previous remarks, and push back against his anticipated critics. At an Iowa campaign event last Thursday, he said:

“I haven’t probably worn that pin in a very long time…After awhile, you start noticing people wearing a lapel pin, but not acting very patriotic. Not voting to provide veterans with resources that they need. Not voting to make sure that disability payments were coming out on time. My attitude is that I’m less concerned about what you’re wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart…”

No matter; the defenders of public display were already in high dudgeon. That day on Fox News (big surprise), host Sean Hannity assailed Obama’s decision to go flagless: “What’s bothersome to me here is the American flag on your lapel ought not be politicized.” He was quickly seconded by his guest, former Virginia GOP leader Kate Obenshain, who decided that Obama, notwithstanding his stated concern for the treatment of our war veterans, was actually attacking the troops: “Our men and women are in harm’s way. Somebody who wants to be commander-in-chief should have pride in our country enough to wear the lapel, continue to wear the lapel pin on their jacket during this campaign.”

The next day, a blogger at the conservative Weekly Standard magazine reviewed Obama’s remarks and scoffed, “Wow. If Obama weren’t so sophisticated, we would say he just managed to give offense to millions of Americans who do proudly wear the flag on their lapels.” (In conservative parlance, the word sophisticated is used as a synomym for elitist effete intellectual liberal.)

Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, a GOP talking head named Brad Blakeman decided that the flag-free Obama was not merely undercutting his quest to be commander-in-chief. It was actually worse than that: “He’s running for patriot-in-chief…and if he chooses to take the flag off, it’s a fair issue (for criticism)…The United States flag is not a ‘fashion choice’…Say that to our soldiers who wear it on their uniforms. Do you think the flags on our soldiers’ uniforms are a fashion choice?” (Memo to Blakeman: Obama never described his decision as a “fashion choice.” That was just the TV guy’s glib terminology.)

In the broadest sense, there is a cultural gap between the way patriotism is practiced on the left and the right. Conservatives (unlike their counterparts in Britain) are quite comfortable with public exhibition, with the notion that we should loudly communicate – either in song, flag pins, decals, etcetera – our love of America to others who should feel compelled to reflexively acknowledge our national greatness. Liberals tend to shy away from the visceral, believing instead that patriotism is about asking difficult questions, expressing dissent, trying to close the gap between American promise and American performance. That’s the essence of what Obama was talking about; the backlash against Obama was the visceral impulse in action.

But, aside from this basic cultural divide, the visceral crowd overlooked a fundamental fact: Hardly any of the ’08 Republican candidates wear the flag pin, either.

Somehow, in their rush to assail Obama, they didn’t do their basic homework. At the most recent GOP debate that was attended by eight candidates, only one – Rudy Giuliani – wore a flag pin. Fred Thompson, the ninth candidate and debate absentee, is routinely photographed without a flag pin. Candidate Sam Brownback, the conservative Kansas senator, has a new book out – and he appears on the cover without a flag pin. Nor does John McCain generally wear a flag pin. I assume that Obama’s critics would not view those pin-free candidates as being ill-qualified for the job of patriot-in-chief.

What got Obama into trouble, at least with the right, was his insistence that patriotism should be about substance, not symbols; that politicians should not wrap themselves in symbolism and use that as a substitute for action. His notions might not play well on Fox News, but, at a time when most Americans believe we are heading in the wrong direction, they probably resonate elsewhere.

Assessing the cult of Ron Paul

What are we to make of Ron Paul, the libertarian antiwar gadfly who wound up raising $5.1 million this summer for his quixotic GOP presidential campaign? Is this guy a budding phenomenon, or is he destined to be a footnote?

The feisty Texas congressman has enjoyed a bit of a media boomlet during the past 48 hours, primarily because he nearly matched uber-hawk John McCain in the third-quarter '07 money sweepstakes. But that story line says more about McCain's embarrassing decline than about any incipient Ron Paul juggernaut. The truth is, the odds of an antiwar candidate winning the Republican nomination are roughly equivalent to the odds of George Steinbrenner wearing a Red Sox cap.

To put Paul's achievement in proper perspective, consider this: The top four GOP presidential candidates (including McCain) all basically support the Bush crusade in Iraq. Together, they raised roughly $34 million during the third quarter. Paul is the lone GOP hopeful who opposes the war; for that (and for some other reasons; see below), he garnered $5.1 million.

There is definitely some antiwar sentiment within the ranks of GOP conservatives and conservative-leaning independents. Libertarians, as a matter of principle, resist the idea of big government fighting foreign wars, and Pat Buchanan-style conservatives are instinctively isolationist, as well as skeptical about ambitious dreams to democratize the Middle East. One conservative magazine contended last June that Americans are "tired of the warfare state." But, if the total money tab is any gauge of the overall Republican mood, it's clear that Paul's out-now message appeals only to a limited market.

And I suspect there is only a limited GOP market for a candidate who wants America to pull out of the United Nations (despite the fact that Republicans like to bash the U.N.); who wants America to pull out of most international trade pacts; who wants to eliminate FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, phase out Social Security, and end the federal war on drugs. Mainstream Republicans might indeed dislike the incessant Giuliani/Romney/McCain flip-flops, and many are fighting to stay awake as Fred Thompson continues to underwhelm, but this hardly means they will embrace Ron Paul's inviolate convictions.

In all likelihood, Paul has the potential to make a modest amount of mischief during the early primary season - particularly in a state like New Hampshire, where independents are free to vote in the GOP contest, and where iconoclastic candidates have often been well rewarded (antiwar Democrat Eugene McCarthy, 1968; conservative populist Buchanan, 1992). The war aside, he could serve as a protest vehicle for small-government conservatives who are fed up with Bush's red ink and runaway spending.

And since he has already demonstrated an ability to attract online donors (reminding some observers of Howard Dean), and raise a lot of heck via his presence on YouTube and MySpace, there's always the possibility that Paul could live off the land long after the GOP contest is over - by resurfacing as third-party candidate. He ran once before, in 1988, as the Libertarian party candidate. The party will meet next spring to choose a standard-bearer; in 2004, it was on the ballot in 48 states.

The long-term danger, for the GOP, is that Paul could exploit the fractures in the conservative camp, and attract enough disgruntled voters to undercut the Republican candidate's victory prospects in November '08. This can be accomplished with only a relative handful of voters. Just ask the Democrats about the 2000 race and the role of Ralph Nader.

He knows which way the wind blows

Since I finished yesterday with Bruce Springsteen, why not begin today with Bob Dylan? As the bard once wrote, "You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows."

And that explains Pete Domenici, who has now become the latest Capitol Hill Republican to hoist a wet finger and declare himself gone.

By my count, the New Mexico senior senator (who is expected to bow out officially later today) will be the fourteenth member of his party to opt out of the 2008 election season - five in the Senate, nine in the House. These imminent retirees clearly see no reason to stand and fight, only to risk becoming fresh casualties of the Bush era. Indeed, there are reports that as many as 18 other House Republicans might head for the lifeboats. (The current Democratic retirement tally: None in the Senate, two in the House. The two House guys are leaving in order to run for the Senate.)

Domenici's decision to bail is a fresh blow to Republicans, whose main aim in 2008 is to hold their potential congressional losses to a minimum. They already have to defend the seats of retirees in Virginia, Nebraska, Colorado, and Idaho. And with Domenici off the ballot, the Democrats have a heightened opportunity to stage a competitive race in New Mexico, which has slowly been trending blue - thanks in part to a burgeoning Democratic-friendly Hispanic electorate, and a popular Democratic governor (current presidential candidate Bill Richardson).

With Domenici off the ballot, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (the GOP's strategy headquarters) will have to fight a lot harder just to keep that seat - at a time when the NRSC is raising a lot less money than its Democratic counterpart. And, conceivably, Richardson himself could seek the Democratic nod. According to the filing calendar, he wouldn't have to make a decision until after the early presidential primaries.

The antiwar lobby is trying to take credit for Domenici's departure; as a spokesman for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq crowed late yesterday, "Sen. Domenici is yet another political casualty of the war in Iraq." But that's all wrong. Domenici is actually a political casualty of a separate Bush disaster: the politicization of the Justice Department, as evidenced by the prosecutor purge scandal. At a time when voters are concerned about lax ethics in Washington, Domenici certainly isn't well-served by his key role in the firing of a U.S. attorney, David Iglesias, who had refused to give the GOP a partisan boost at election time.

As we now know, at least eight Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys were bounced from their jobs during the past year, apparently because Bush loyalists in Washington deemed them to be insufficiently enthusiastic about tailoring their work to the needs of the GOP (despite the fact that U.S. attorneys, by definition, are supposed to be nonpartisan in their duties). Domenici, currently the target of a Senate ethics committee probe, was one of the most flagrant offenders.

Shortly before the highly-contested '06 congressional election, in which Domenici protege Heather Wilson was fighting to hang onto her GOP House seat in New Mexico, Domenici called Iglesias at his home. Domenici had sponsored Iglesias, a fellow Republican, for the U.S. attorney post back in 2001. Now he was apparently calling in his chits. He wanted to know whether Iglesias - who was in the midst of a local corruption case - would be ready to indict some local Democrats in time for the election. As Iglesias later recalled under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the conversation went like this:

Domenici asked, "Are these going to be filed before November?" Iglesias replied that he "didn't think so." To which Domenici said, "I'm very sorry to hear that," and then the line went dead. (Such calls are highly improper. When Iglesias went public about this exchange, Domenici at first said, "I have no idea what he's talking about." Shortly thereafter, his amnesia disappeared. He acknowledged making the call, and said that he regretted it.)

But back to the chronology: Right after the '06 election, Domenici complained to Karl Rove at the White House, demanding Iglesias' ouster. Lo and behold, Iglesias' name turned up on a Dec. 7 list of U.S. attorneys targeted for firing. And out he went.

Domenici has some health problems, which undoubtedly contributed to his decision. But politicians weigh all kinds of calculations. If Domenici was reasonably confident that he could cruise to victory in his usual manner, he would not have to test his stamina. But the prospect of becoming a poster boy for the purge scandal...well, that's probably enough to make anybody feel old. And so would the prospect of returning to Washington as a member of the minority party - a factor that other Republicans are weighing, as they channel Dylan and chart the prevailing winds.

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Following up on Monday's post:

Religious right leader James Dobson surfaced today on, of all places, the op-ed page of the New York Times (the epitome of what Dobson likes to call "the secular news media"). He sought to renew his threat, first voiced last weekend, to bolt the GOP (presumably, in the company of his brethren) and back a minority-party or third-party candidate if the party chooses an '08 nominee who supports abortion rights (presumably, Rudy Giuliani).

He said he cares most about whether the Republican candidate can pass his litmus test; he is far less interested in whether the candidate is electable. In his words, "Polls don't measure right and wrong; voting according to the possibility of winning or losing can lead directly to compromise of one's principles...Winning the presidential election is vitally important, but not at the expense of what we hold most dear."

The Christian conservatives, over the years, have issued many such threats, only to stay in the fold at crunch time. Nevertheless, I well recall 1992, when they assailed President George H. W. Bush as a compromiser who had slighted their agenda, and vowed to vote for him in underwhelming numbers. They followed through on that threat, Bush lost his re-election bid, and a Clinton was elected. Dobson's threat this morning - and similar sentiment from many in the GOP base - could be good news in the end for another Clinton.

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And speaking of Republican retirements, here's an update on the Larry Craig chronology. The toe-tapping sex sting defendant - who first vowed not to resign, then declared his intention to resign, then decided not to resign pending his bid to overturn his summer guilty plea, then said he would resign by Sept. 30 if his guilty plea was still in effect, then said he would not resign by Sept. 30 because the plea had not yet been ruled upon - has now received his ruling.

A Minnesota judge has upheld the guilty plea (no surprise there), trashing Craig in the process: "The defendant, a career politician with a college education, is of at least above-average intelligence. He knew what he was saying, reading and signing."

So now Craig will obviously please his embarrassed Republican colleagues and make good on his various promises to resign...

Not!

Craig just posted this on his website: "I will continue to serve Idaho in the United States Senate...I have seen that it is possible for me to work here effectively...When my term has expired (in January 2009), I will retire and not seek reelection."

His GOP colleagues might want to get that statement notarized.