JustOneMinute

OK, Michelle, Who Is "They"?

Michelle Obama on the use of her husband's middle name by his opponents:

Michelle Obama, who often has decried "the fear bomb'' that opponents have used against her husband for his middle name -- Barack Hussein Obama -- said in Canton, Ohio, today that it is happening again and shows why it's so important that he wins election as president.

"They threw in the obvious, ultimate fear bomb," Obama said today of her husband's 2004 Senate race. "We're even hearing [that] now. … 'When all else fails, be afraid of his name, and what that could stand for, because it's different.'"

     The senator's wife said that rivals use innuendo to play on fears. "Just as they're saying it now," she said.

But, she told about 200 supporters this morning at a restored theater in Canton, Obama won despite that "climate of negativity and doubt" in 2004. "We learned, number one, that when power is threatened by real change they will say anything to stop it," she said. "But we also learned that the American people can handle the truth."

OK, who is "they"?  Today's ChiTrib advised us that Alan Keyes, Obama's final Senate opponent, never used "Hussein":

...not even Alan Keyes in his most overwrought, spittle-flecked moments did it during his 2004 Senate run against Obama in Illinois.

...

"We warned him away from using the middle name," replied Bill Pascoe, Keyes' former campaign manager, when I checked with him to see if my colleagues and I had missed something when coming up empty after plumbing our memories and the news archives.

Pascoe told me he and former top Keyes consultant Dan Proft had steered him away with the admonishment that such a gambit would be "rude, uncivil, needlessly provocative and incendiary."

Well, maybe Jack Ryan dropped the ultimate fear bomb before a friendly (to Democrats) judge unsealed his divorce so the press could have a scandal with Jeri Ryan's "I need a payday" divorce allegations.  Jack Ryan left the Senate race in June 2004, but who knows?

Or could it have been one of Obama's primary opponents?  Perhaps a Lexis maven can help me out.  FWIW, the Chi Trib's archive first kicks out a "Barack Hussein Obama" in Dec 2006, criticizing Rush Limbaugh's use of "Barack Hussein Odumbo".  Hmm, Google might have missed that....

MORE:  "Hussein" is the ultimate fear bomb?  I thought the international community had him contained; isn't "Osama", Ted Kennedy's formulation of "Obama", much scarier?

Whatev.  Speaking of scary, let's just call the Senator from Illinois "He Who Must Not Be Middle-Named".

Slam Night At JOM

More poetry, inspired by the passing into memory of Barack "Hussein" Obama:

Voter --
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;--
Thou art thyself, though not a real Hussein.
What's Hussein? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Obama would, were he not too Hussein call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title:--Obama, doff Hussein;
And for Hussein, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.

Obama.
I take thee at thy word:
Give me your vote, and I'll be new baptiz'd;
Henceforth I never will be not Hussein

Voter.
What man art thou that, thus bescreen'd in night,
So stumblest on my counsel?

Obama.
With Hussein
I know not how to tell thee who I am:
Hussein, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee.
Had I my ID, I would tear the word.

Voter.
My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words
Of that tongue's utterance, yet I know the sound;
Art thou Obama and yet not a Hussein?

Obama.
Never Hussein, if my pollster dislike.

This time we are tossing bouquets to the Appalled Moderate.

 

Bush Has A Memory?

Bob Geldof opens a story about his travels to Africa with Bush with this story:

We sat in the large, wood-paneled conference room of Air Force One as she cruised the skies of the immense African continent below us. Gathered around the great oval table, I wondered how changed was the man who said in 2000 that Africa "doesn't fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them."

"Hold on a minute. I said that in response to a military question. Condi! Canya get in here," the President shouts out the open door, leaning back in his chair. The Secretary of State, looking glamorous and fresh despite having been diverted to Kenya to articulate the U.S.'s concern over matters there before jetting back to Rwanda to join her boss, sits down. "Hi, Bob." "Hi, Condi." It's like being inside a living TV screen.

Bush asks whether she remembers the context of the 2000 question. She confirms it was regarding the U.S.'s military strategies inside Africa, but then 2000 was so long ago.

Here is the interview, and Bush was right.  This was the question broaching the topic:

JIM LEHRER: All right. Let's go through some follow-ups from some of the points that you made last night, Governor. On the important issue all the surveys show this to be underlined -- most voters -- the most important issue nationally is how to use our power in this new post-Cold War world. You said you would deploy U.S. troops only when our national  strategic interests are at stake. How are you going to go about deciding when they are?

And eventually:

JIM LEHRER: But does Africa fit in to your definition of strategic           interests?       

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: No. It fits into my definition of economic interest,     and that's why I try to promote free trade. But last night, when we were talking about troops in Rwanda, I would not have committed troops in Rwanda under the circumstances as I know them.

JIM LEHRER: Why not?        

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Well, because it's not -- at some point in time the president has got to clearly define what the national strategic interests are, and while Africa may be important, it doesn't fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them. Now, that doesn't mean that we couldn't have rallied folks such as the United Nations to go help keep warring parties apart in Rwanda, but at some point in time the president has got to clearly define what is in our interests.       

JIM LEHRER: So you would disagree with what Senator McCain said last night, that there are -- there are some times, in addition to strategic interests -- human rights or U.S. values' interests -- for introducing U.S. troops?

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Well, I would never say 'never,' but I am going           to be very hesitant to deploy troops outside those areas that I've defined as our national strategic interests.

 

Obama In '02!

Senator Obama hopes to become President in 2002, if his exchange with McCain on Iraq is a guide:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., continued to attack Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., today for suggesting during a Democratic debate that after withdrawing combat troops from Iraq, Obama, as commander in chief, would be willing to send U.S. troops back into Iraq "if al Qaeda is forming a base" there [see Dem debate transcript].

"The fact is, al Qaeda is in Iraq," McCain said. "Al Qaeda is in Iraq today. If we left Iraq there's no doubt that al Qaeda would then gain control in Iraq and pose a threat to the United States of America. Ask anyone who knows about the situation on the ground in Iraq. I look forward to continuing this debate."

Obama seems to be campaigning on the hope of a national do-over in Iraq:

Obama responded to McCain's comments today at a rally in Columbus, Ohio.

"Well, first of all, I do know that al Qaeda is in Iraq. That's why I've said we should continue to strike al Qaeda targets," he said. "But I have some news for John McCain, and that is that there was no such thing as al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq.

"I've been paying attention, John McCain," he said. "That's the news. So John McCain may like to say he wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but so far all he's done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq that's cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

"I intend to bring [it] to an end so that we can actually start going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan and in the hills of Pakistan like we should have been doing in the first place.That's the news, John McCain," Obama said.

McCain delivered the obvious rejoinder:

In his back-and-forth with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., over Iraq, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Thursday morning sought to portray the Democratic front-runner as representing the Iraq politics of the past by focusing on the decision to invade in 2003 rather than what to do now.

"That's history, that's the past," McCain told attendees at a town hall meeting at Rice University. "That's talking about what happened before. What we should be talking about is what we're going to do now. And what we're going to do now is continue this strategy which is succeeding in Iraq and we are carrying out the goals of the surge, the Iraqi military are taking over more and more of the responsibilities."

Interesting that the old codger is looking forward while the youthful dynamist is looking back.  But is it surprising?  Arianna Huffington writes on "Microtrends and Macrotrends" to explain why Obama is winning but I think she misses an obvious point - Obama is successfully riding the Democratic Party's ongoing 60's flashback in a way that, for example, Mr. Reporting For Duty did not.

Would Obama be a credible candidate if he were white?  Please - he would be the articulate, visionary, son of a mill worker, John Edwards. 

Would Obama be a credible candidate if he had not opposed the Iraq war in 2002?  Of course not.

Obama brings together the most revered people and causes of the Democratic fantasy - he is John Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and supporting him enlists his supporters in both the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.  Heady stuff, especially for the youngsters who missed it the first time around, and we can see why his campaign much prefers to have people looking backwards.

John McCain, Undocumented Alien?

The NY Times is reaching underneath the bottom of their comedy barrel with their latest McCain story - since he was born on a US military base in Panama, it may be that he is not constitutionally eligible to become President:

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

McCain's parents were both American, and due to the operation of other laws McCain has always been considered to be an American citizen, so he has never been naturalized.  However, the gist of the controversy would seem to be, do the other laws which made McCain a citizen trump the somewhat murky language of the Constitution?

The Times also sidles up to the process question - just who might have standing to sue, or how might this be resolved?  Ann Althouse, who surely knows more about the law than I do, offers this:

And this is the point: No one should be seen as having standing to sue. No one who might conceivably file a lawsuit has a concrete and particularized injury that would be redressed through the disqualification of McCain. So there will not be a Supreme Court case interpreting the clause. If the Electoral College ever selects someone who presents this problem, it will be theoretically possible for Congress to reject the choice on constitutional grounds, but, politically, that too is inconceivable.

OK, I can see that Congress would be offered a bite at this apple, and no, I can't see them rejecting a properly-elected McCain (heaven help us if we have a Florida 2000 scenario which results in his, uhh, selection, followed by a Dem majority tossing him back.)

However - why doesn't Mike Huckabee have standing right now to sue the entities that have allowed McCain on the ballot in upcoming primaries?  Isn't it fair to guess that the laws under which these primaries are organized include an eligibility requirement, and isn't Huckabee disadvantaged by having to compete against a guy who may not be eligible?

And why couldn't a similar lawsuit be launched by the DNC to disqualify McCain from the 50 state ballots prior to the election?  Again, these state laws ought to have an eligibility requirement.

Of course,  I would love to see the DNC try this, but I am not counting on them to be that stupid.  But how about some other party that has a candidate on the ballot and is arguably disadvantaged by McCain's presence?  Maybe Ralph Nader's crowd could argue that they have standing try a lawsuit in a couple of important states, like Ohio or Texas.

Is This The End Of "Hussein"?

Geez, if we can't call the Dem front runner "Barack Hussein Obama", I guess my own contribution - "Barack Hussein Il Jong Obama" - is really dead in the water.

Josh Marshall optimistically (but maybe not unrealistically) tries to raise the bar for McCain and create a new media standard - McCain should be held accountable for every bit of sewage that floats by in the right wing gutter this election season.

Interesting.  Ludicrous, of course, but interesting.  And does that make Senator Obama responsible for every bit of left-wing kookiness that floats by?  Fine, then let's ask the Senator to denounce Josh Marshall's shameless linking of John McCain with noted Nazi inspiration Richard Wagner.  From Marshall:

Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can't.

But that's not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in [Shifty?  Barack? Even shiftier...], but we'll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point. They're like the libretto in a Wagner opera, nice for some narrative structure. But it's the score that's the real essence of it, the point of the whole exercise.

McCain's campaign is a Wagner opera?  I deplore the suggestion that noted conservative John McCain's campaign takes any inspiration at all from the man who wrote the soundtrack for the Third Reich.  But I can not say I am surprised since there are folks on the left who still fall down laughing when they hear "Bushitler".

Let's also splash a bit of reality on Dr. Marshall for this:

Don't insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that John McCain's plan for this race doesn't rely on hundreds of Cunninghams -- large and small -- across the country, and the RNC and all the GOP third party groups, to be peddling this stuff nonstop for the next eight months because it's the only way John McCain have a real shot at contesting this race.

McCain can only win by slinging Obama's middle name?  Well, then, let me insult various intelligences by citing the latest Rasmussen poll:

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

With the general election campaign season coming soon, voters currently trust John McCain more than Barack Obama on issues of National Security, the War in Iraq, the Economy, and Taxes. Obama is trusted more when it comes to Reducing Government Corruption. The Republican hopeful has a slight lead over the Democratic frontrunner in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

Don't like Rasmussen?  How about this recent Times poll?

When all voters are asked to look ahead to the general election, Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee, is seen as better prepared for the presidency, better able to handle an international crisis and more equipped to serve as commander in chief than either of the Democratic candidates.

That gives McCain something to build on, one might think.  Shameless left-wing smears notwithstanding.

ERRATA:  Marshall has an UPDATE in which he tries to pretend that he is unfamiliar with Wagner and is writing strictly about the music.  Oy, vey!  Dr. M sure got ignorant in a hurry, if I know more about Wagner than he does.

CLOSING THOUGHT:  Since Dr. M knows nothing about Wagner's history, he may not know the famous Samuel Clemens quip - "Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds".

REALLY CLOSING THOUGHT:  Tough day to Google on "Clemens".  Do include "Samuel", or go right to "Mark Twain", whose essay about Wagner not titled "Fear and Loathing in Bayreuth" is here.

I DEPLORE THIS RACIALLY CHARGED LANGUAGE:  Dr. M used "shifty" as a likely attack word; isn't that troublingly close to "shiftless", which someone somewhere surely associates with a common charge against African-Americans?  Or am I showing my age?  [Hmm, I thought I was kidding, but apparently some lefty somewhere can be relied upon to see anything as racist.]

William Buckley, RIP

William Buckley has passed on.  We are pleased to see that in his Times obit he is no longer a neo-con.  [But now Ayn Rand is a conservative?]

Obama, Clinton, And Farrakhan

Ann Althouse is excellent on the manner in which Hillary turned a near-win into a total loss on the topic of Louis Farrakhan.  I also thought Obama was a pure weasel, but everyone let him off the hook.  In what way was he a weasel?  Please - if John McCain tried to explain that although he had denounced David Duke many times there was no way he could stop Duke from supporting him if that was his choice, people would have burned the stage.  Yet with Obama it's all good.

ONCE BITTEN TWICE SHY:  IIRC, it was in Los Angeles (or vegas?) that Edwards, Clinton, and Obama were asked to name a personal weakness and Obama was dumb enough to do so (he was sometimes disorganized, he admitted; Edwards copped to sometimes caring too much and feeling too deeply, and Hillary 'fessed up that sometimes she got frustrated by injustice in the world, or some such.)

With that as background, I can see why Obama turned an invitation to admit a mistake into a denunciation of the Senate's cowardice on Terri Schiavo (and it is not as if Hillary can press this, since she voted the same way.)  But I agree with K-Lo - for me, not his target audience, it came off badly.

And in addition to coming off badly, it represents a notable re-writing of history, at least as told by the Times:

Senate Democrats were helpful as well. Some were reticent about opposing the Schiavo measure because of the highly charged emotions surrounding it. But Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is an author of the Americans With Disabilities Act, pressed hard for the measure and helped to assuage the states' rights concerns of other Democrats, and the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, ultimately supported the bill as well.

Senate Dems guessed wrong about the politics and didn't want to buck Harkin, an arch-lib.  Fine.  But the Times, and other libs (including Ralph Nader), have had a hard time admitting that earnest libs were on both sides of the Schiavo issue.

And who offered this inflammatory analogy?

Frequently Unasked Questions - what if Terri Schiavo were black?

Are you kidding?  Would Dems be telling an angry black family that (a) states rights are paramount; (b) the Florida courts can be trusted; and (c) the medical community can be trusted to have the best interests of black people in mind?  Uh huh.

Well, she is not black.  Just asking.

That was a while ago.

Ohio And NAFTA

David Leonhardt of the Times has an interesting piece on NAFTA and Ohio hidden in the Business Section.  In last night's debate both Hillary and Obama bashed NAFTA and threatened to withdraw from it if it could not be renegotiated to protect jobs in places like Ohio, so this bit was useful:

The first problem with what the candidates have been saying is that Ohio’s troubles haven’t really been caused by trade agreements. When Nafta took effect on Jan. 1, 1994, Ohio had 990,000 manufacturing jobs. Two years later, it had 1.03 million. The number remained above one million for the rest of the 1990s, before plummeting in this decade to just 775,000 today.

It’s hard to look at this history and conclude Nafta is the villain. In fact, Nafta did little to reduce tariffs on Mexican manufacturers, notes Matthew Slaughter, a Dartmouth economist. Those tariffs were already low before the agreement was signed.

A more important cause of Ohio’s jobs exodus is the rise of China, India and the old Soviet bloc, which has brought hundreds of millions of workers into the global economy. New technology and better transportation have then made it easier for jobs to be done in those places and elsewhere. To put it in concrete terms, your credit card’s customer service center isn’t in Ireland because of a new trade deal.

The Dem Debate

Here is a debate transcript, and I heartily endorse Dan Drezner's live-blog effort, including this:

9:27 PM: I'm glad that the first thing Hillary Clinton will do to improve America's image abroad is inform Canada and Mexico that we'll withdraw from NAFTA unless we renegotiate the trade deal. That'll do wonders. UPDATE: Oh, goodie, Obama agrees. Excuse me while I go bang my head against a wall.

What I find so fascinating is that both Obama and Clinton are saying that NAFTA benefited some parts of the country but not others. This is undoubtedly true, but the policy response to that is not to renegotiate NAFTA -- tougher labor and environmental standards won't affect Ohio's economy. The answer is to expand trade adjustment assistance programs within the United States.

ONGOING REFLECTION:  For about the three hundredth debate we have heard Hillary claim she is more experienced on foreign policy and Obama respond that on the biggest issue of the decade, Iraq, he was right and she was wrong.  Why Hillary beats her head on this wall this way is an ongoing mystery - one might think her "strategists" could have figured out how to respond more effectively to Obama's stock response. 

However!  I am not limited by the constraints felt by a Dem strategist, so let me point out (again) that, although Obama's speech against the Iraq war resolution may be evidence of great good judgment, it may simply be evidence that he is an utterly ordinary and predictable urban black liberal politician:

The two largest minority blocs in the House--the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus--voted overwhelmingly against the resolution. Of 37 African American lawmakers, 32 were opposed, and of 19 Latinos, 15 were opposed.

OK, it's hard for Hillary to deliver that response; it may even be awkward for McCain.  But Obama's view on Iraq was utterly predictable based on his politics and race; that may tell us we need more black urban libs running America (possible!), but it certainly does not indicate that Obama took a bold, risky, and unpopular stand within his political community in order to oppose the war.

So, as a matter of ongoing reflection - would it be worth trying to position the Congressional Black Caucus on Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Desert Storm, and other international experiences, in order to see whether the judgments they made are consistently superior?  And would anyone accept the other link in the chain - that their good (or bad) judgment would be a useful proxy to assess Obama's good or bad judgment?

My guess - his supporters, after decrying the racism of the exercise, will insist that Obama would have backed the CBC any time that, ex post, they were geniuses, and otherwise would have Heroically Defied them.  But don't let my lack of enthusiasm hold you back!

WITHOUT EVEN LOOKING IT UP: On Desert Storm, almost the whole Dem Party was opposed, so I take for granted the CBC was.  Bosnia/Kosovo were led by Clinton so the position of the CBC is not hard to guess; the bombing of Kosovo led to a conservative revolt, so McCain's position there might be worth revisiting (for one side or the other - gulp...).  I shudder to think about Somalia, Rwanda, and Darfur.

Hmm, Earl Ofari Hutchinson tackled Kosovo in 1999 and seems to have street cred.

Looking For Obama

The WaPo offered a laugher of an editorial Sunday, as they tried to figure out Obama's true political leanings:

When the Illinois Democrat talks about bringing together red and blue America, does he mean that he will persuade the red (Republican) part to come around to blue (Democratic) policies -- or does he mean that he will forge a new, centrist answer that will bridge the red-blue divide? Is he a liberal at heart who tacks occasionally to the center or more of a centrist capable of suppressing leftist instincts when political circumstances demand?

It's telling, at this relatively late stage in the nominating process, that the answers are not clear -- at least not to us.

Well, if the answer is not clear it is because the WaPo is in denial of the evidence in front of their eyes.  Let's press on:

It is possible to draw conflicting lessons from his record. As New York Times columnist David Brooks has pointed out, Mr. Obama was not part of the bipartisan Gang of 14 that tried to avert a showdown on judicial filibusters; he was not among the 68 senators voting for a bipartisan agreement on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; he dissented from the part of the bipartisan immigration deal that displeased unions. His campaign platform is orthodox liberal Democratic fare. So is Mr. Obama a standard liberal clad in the soothing language of inclusiveness?

Perhaps, but one could read the record and arrive at a different conclusion. Mr. Obama not only declined to filibuster Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.; he was initially inclined to vote for him, according to The Post's Perry Bacon Jr.

He didn't filibuster Roberts?  Uhh, no one else did, either; PowerLine rolics with this, in a post aptly titled "A Centrist With No One To His Left".  And here is Ed Whelan of NRO:

Whatever Obama’s supposed initial inclinations, the relevant facts are that he voted against Roberts’s nomination, that he voted to filibuster the Alito nomination, and that he voted against the Alito nomination. No senator was to Obama’s left, and in all these actions he went against the Post’s editorial recommendations. It’s passing strange, and particularly telling, that the Post would find in Obama’s approach to the Roberts nomination the strongest evidence of Obama’s possible centrism.

To be fair, the WaPo offers other evidence of Obama's centrism:

Even in the heat of a primary campaign, he has shown some brief glimmers of divergence from the party line: He dared to mention the notion of "merit pay" in an appearance before the teachers union, and he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board that, although he is a "skeptic" about school vouchers, "I will not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn" if research shows that they work.

Bold.  If the day comes when social scientists deliver an unambiguous result, Barack will be ready!

Meanwhile, David Brooks continues to promote McCain's bipartisan record, and The Politico makes a point on which I have been a broken record - Obama, for all his apparent eloquence, is afraid of the national traveling press; that worked OK against control-freak Hillary but does not compare well with McCain.

Finally, this NY Times poll is full of good news for McCain:

When all voters are asked to look ahead to the general election, Mr. McCain, the likely Republican nominee, is seen as better prepared for the presidency, better able to handle an international crisis and more equipped to serve as commander in chief than either of the Democratic candidates.

Obama scores best in ability to unite the country, although as the WaPo points out, it is impossible to figure out what that means.

Grumpy Old Men

The Times delivers a classic correction:

A headline in some editions of The Arts on Monday with an article about the Academy Awards ceremony misstated, in some copies, the title of the film that won best picture. It is, of course, “No Country for Old Men,” not “Old Country for Old Men.”

I await the sequel, "Old School For Old Men".

Halperin's Plan Of Attack For John McCain

Mark Halperin of TIME suggests sixteen things "McCain Can Do to Try to Beat Obama That Clinton Cannot" yet misses a point that belongs in the top two.  David Brooks suggested it, Karl Rove echoed it, and I will summarize it as "When does Obama's bipartisanship begin?"  Here is Brooks:

If he values independent thinking, why is his the most predictable liberal vote in the Senate? A People for the American Way computer program would cast the same votes for cheaper.

...

How is a 47-year-old novice going to unify highly polarized 70-something committee chairs? What will happen if the nation’s 261,000 lobbyists don’t see the light, even after the laying on of hands? Does The Changemaker have the guts to take on the special interests in his own party — the trial lawyers, the teachers’ unions, the AARP?

The Gang of 14 created bipartisan unity on judges, but Obama sat it out. Kennedy and McCain created a bipartisan deal on immigration. Obama opted out of the parts that displeased the unions. Sixty-eight senators supported a bipartisan deal on FISA. Obama voted no.

As to being the most predictable liberal vote, views differ, but Obama's voting record puts him to the left of the median Democratic Senator.

Here is Rove's take on the same argument:

Mr. McCain can now question Mr. Obama's promise to change Washington by working across party lines. Mr. Obama hasn't worked across party lines since coming to town. Was he a member of the "Gang of 14" that tried to find common ground between the parties on judicial nominations? Was Mr. Obama part of the bipartisan leadership that tackled other thorny issues like energy, immigration or terrorist surveillance legislation? No. Mr. Obama has been one of the most dependably partisan votes in the Senate.

...

The truth is that Mr. Obama is unwilling to challenge special interests if they represent the financial and political muscle of the Democratic left. He says yes to the lobbyists of the AFL-CIO when they demand card-check legislation to take away the right of workers to have a secret ballot in unionization efforts, or when they oppose trade deals. He won't break with trial lawyers, even when they demand the ability to sue telecom companies that make it possible for intelligence agencies to intercept communications between terrorists abroad. And he is now going out of his way to proclaim fidelity to the educational unions. This is a disappointment since he'd earlier indicated an openness to education reform. Mr. Obama backs their agenda down the line, even calling for an end to testing, which is the only way parents can know with confidence whether their children are learning and their schools working.

These stands represent not just policy vulnerabilities, but also a real danger to Mr. Obama's credibility and authenticity. He cannot proclaim his goal is the end of influence for lobbies if the only influences he seeks to end are lobbies of the center and the right.

In John McCain, Obama has an opponent who has walked the bipartisan walk for years and paid a political price within his own party for doing so; FWIW, Brooks could have added carbon dioxide regulation (or here) to McCain's list of initiatives that set teeth on edge in his own party.

Why hasn't Obama been bringing "change" to Washington in his four years there?  When, if ever, has Obama actually engaged in the wonderful bipartisanship about which he speaks so movingly?   At the Harvard Law Review?  Jiminy, if he touts his ability to unite the disparate views of a bunch of young would-be lawyers during a televised debate, that will make for Must-See TV.

Now, this is a tricky line for McCain to take, since as he burnishes his appeal to centrists he will also be reminding righties why we have problems with him.  Also, some of his views have evolved (we hope!), as on immigration.  However, if voters want a guy who can talk about change, Obama is a great choice; if they want a guy who has actually reached across the aisle, brought change, and shown the willingness to pay the price, they want McCain.

NOTE:  If Halperin did not completely miss this point, he disguised it here:

14. Link biography (experience/courage) and leadership (straight talk) to a vision animated by detail – accentuating Obama’s relative lack of specificity.

Presidential Posers And Wanna-Bes

Matt Drudge posted a photo of Obama in Kenyan garb and claimed it was being circulated by Hillary's staff; Obama's side slammed the smear, and Clinton's camp sort of denied it, eventually claiming there was no official sanction.

Oh, well - Drudge included photos of other dolled up dignataries in embarrassing native garb while visiting foreign climes (like this), but overlooked this classic photo of John Kerry decked out for a visit to Easter Island.

The Times Hearts Obama (No, Really! Now, Let Me Tell You Where The Sun Rose Today)

The NY Times opens a new line of adoration with a front-pager about Obama's security situation.  Allow me to summarize - since Obama is John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King rolled into one, he needs to be protected from hate-filled righties.  However, "Renegade" (that's his cool Secret Service name) is far too brave to be personally concerned about his safety, and shows a nice common touch (as well as cool urban authenticity, i.e., street cred) by playing basketball with his Secret Service detail.

Gahhh!  The prospect of four years of this sort of press coverage is the best case for a Hillary comeback.  Whatev.  At about paragraph four hundred the Times delivers its "To Be Sure" caveat:

Gerald Posner, author of books on the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. King, said he did not believe that Mr. Obama was under a significantly higher risk than President Bush or Mrs. Clinton. The fears are more openly discussed, he said, because he is the first black candidate to come this close to winning a major party’s presidential nomination.

“Barack scares those of us who think of the possibility of an assassination in a different way,” Mr. Posner said. “He represents so much hope and change. That is exactly what was taken away from us in the 1960s.”

Neither W nor Hillarity represent either hope or change so the prospect of their being wacked is, I infer, less troubling.  Or at least, less newsworthy.

ERRATA:  George Bush is "Tumbler", picked up when he was 34 and Dad was the new VP.  Hillary is "Evergreen"; I smell a Streisand connection.  And since they like to be alliterative with family members, Chelsea was "Energy" when she was a much younger lass.  Reagan was "Rawhide".  More here.

OBVIOUSLY:   Presumably the Times story was sparked by the story from Dallas flagged all weekend by Drudge, but they have chosen not to mention the obvious and are instead presenting a loftier theme.

DALLAS -- Security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena.

The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on.

"Sure," said Lawrence, when asked if he was concerned by the great number of people who had gotten into the building without being checked. But, he added, the turnout of more than 17,000 people seemed to be a "friendly crowd."

GUNS AND BOMBS:  The Times story (and the Secret Service approach) seems to be oriented towards a 60's era lone gunman threat, rather than a more contemporary bomber or suicide bomber.  Does that make sense?  I would guess that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia would prefer to kill McCain and his 100 year commitment, rather than Obama with his early exit.  (Al Qaeda in Waziristan is harder to gauge since Obama wants to boast about attacking inside of Pakistan with or without the permission of the Pakistani government while McCain thinks that we ought to pipe down, at a minimum.)

McCain, Loopholes, And The Times Waltz

Stephen Labaton of the Times, one of the bylined reporters on the Times recent hatchet job on McCain, is back with Lots Of The News That's Fit To Print (But All The News That Advances Our Agenda).  His latest - McCain fought to preserve a loophole at which the FCC was looking askance:

Files and McCain Letter Show Effort to Keep Loophole

By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON — In late 1998, Senator John McCain sent an unusually blunt letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission, warning that he would try to overhaul the agency if it closed a broadcast ownership loophole.

The letter, and two later ones signed by Mr. McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, urged the commission to abandon plans to close a loophole vitally important to Glencairn Ltd., a client of Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist. The provision enabled one of the nation’s largest broadcasting companies, Sinclair, to use a marketing agreement with Glencairn, a far smaller broadcaster, to get around a restriction barring single ownership of two television stations in the same city.

...

On Glencairn, the campaign said Mr. McCain’s efforts to retain the loophole were not done at Ms. Iseman’s request. It said Mr. McCain was merely directing the commission to “not act in a manner contradictory to Congressional intent.” Mr. McCain wrote in the letters that a 1996 law, the telecommunications act, required the loophole; a legal opinion by the staff of the commission took the opposite view.

A review of the record, including agency records now at the National Archives and interviews with participants, shows that Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, played a significant role in killing the plan to eliminate the loophole. His actions followed requests by Ms. Iseman and lobbyists at other broadcasting companies, according to lobbying records and Congressional aides.

 

Dare we ask what the loophole tussle was about?   We dare!  Let's boldly tread where neither Mr. Labaton nor his editors want to go - Glencairn was arguably a sham minority-owned enterprise at a time when the US government and the FCC smiled on minority owned enterprises. 

And how do I know this?  Well, the Times archives are a valuable resource, although I don't think for a moment that Mr. Labaton or his editors needed to access them to glean this fact.

My guess - presenting McCain as lobbying for minority owned enterprises left the Times feeling a bit awkward.  It may well have been the case in 1996 that, regardless of whether Glencairn was a sham, Congressional intent had been to reserve this loophole for other, legitimate (or anyway, politically correct) minority-owned stations.

We can rely on the Times to cover this angle as soon as they are sure they can spin it to hurt McCain.  However, their current story lacks any of the words "black", "African-American", or "minority".  Meanwhile, a Kossack has some useful background, including this wrist-slap of Sinclair and Glencairn when the FCC finally ruled for/against them in 2001.

FWIW:  Edwin Edwards, notional owner of Glencairn, did not have a record of FEC contributions that caught my eye - Dingell, Murtha, Lewis, Clyburn, and Gephardt were on the list with McCain and Burns.

WHERE IS THE ROMANCE?  Like Ms. Bumiller, Mr. Labaton has dropped the romantic entanglement angle in characterizing his recent story:

At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. McCain denounced an article in The New York Times that described concerns by top advisers a decade ago about his ties to Ms. Iseman, a partner at the firm Alcalde & Fay. He said he never had any discussions with his advisers about Ms. Iseman and never did any favors for any lobbyist.

Because the original Times story was all about the ethics.  Uh huh.

Chiling News About Encrypted Data

Interesting news for folks who think their encrypted data is safe:

SAN FRANCISCO —  A group led by a Princeton University computer security researcher has developed a simple method to steal encrypted information stored on computer hard disks.

The technique, which could undermine security software protecting critical data on computers, is as easy as chilling a computer memory chip with a blast of frigid air from a can of dust remover. Encryption software is widely used by companies and government agencies, notably in portable computers that are especially susceptible to theft.

...

In a technical paper that was published Thursday on the Web site of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, the group demonstrated that standard memory chips actually retain their data for seconds or even minutes after power is cut off.

When the chips were chilled using an inexpensive can of air, the data was frozen in place, permitting the researchers to easily read the keys — long strings of ones and zeros — out of the chip’s memory.

“Cool the chips in liquid nitrogen (-196 °C) and they hold their state for hours at least, without any power,” Edward W.  Felten, a Princeton computer scientist, wrote in a Web posting. “Just put the chips back into a machine and you can read out their contents.”

     

I'm waiting for the movie, when Tom Cruise can explain it to me.

There Will Be Oscar Coverage

I Boldly Predict an Oscar quip something like "Also up for an award is 'No Country For Old Men', that fabulous documentary about an Obama rally."

We'll see.  More accurately, you will see; I left the NBA after Michael Jordan and the Academy Awards after Gandalf.

Backpedaling At The Times, Or, Where Has The Romance Gone?

I am finally reading the Friday Times account of McCain's Thursday press conference and denial of the Times hatchet job and a couple of things make me think the Times is backpedaling on the sex scandal part of their non-story [and the Times Saturday story reinforces my point; see UPDATE].

First, the follow went to Elisabeth Bumiller, who seems to be on the regular McCain beat, rather than to any of the reporters bylined on the original tale.

Secondly, Ms. Bumiller does not seem to want to admit that it was the Times that presented this as a sex scandal - here we go, with emphasis added:

TOLEDO, Ohio — Senator John McCain on Thursday disputed an account in The New York Times that top advisers confronted him during his first presidential run with concerns about his ties to a female lobbyist.

...

Asked if he had ever had a romantic relationship with the woman, Vicki Iseman, Mr. McCain responded, “No.” He described his relationship with Ms. Iseman as that of “friends” and said he last saw her “several months ago” at an event.

Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, stood at his side throughout the news conference....

The couple were responding to an article on Thursday that said Ms. Iseman’s recurring appearances in 1999 at fund-raisers, in Mr. McCain’s office and at campaign events had alarmed some of his top advisers, prompting several to warn him that his association with her could threaten his reputation as a scourge of special interests. The Washington Post also reported on Thursday that members of Mr. McCain’s inner circle of advisers had confronted him directly about his ties to Ms. Iseman.

Mr. McCain said he had never been involved in such discussions. “I don’t know if it happened at their level,” he said. “It certainly didn’t happen to me.”

Wait a second - where did the allegation of a romantic entanglement go?  Other than noting a question at the press conference, it has disappeared - nowhere does Ms. Bumiller acknowledge that the Times itself reported on allegation by two disgruntled former staffers of a romantic link.

If the Times has that angle nailed down, as editor Bill Keller claims, they ought to be able to instill in Ms. Bumiller enough confidence to repeat the allegation.  Gutless.

UPDATE:  On Saturday Ms. Bumiller describes the story's effect on McCain's fund-raising.  What story?  Well, this story:

...an article about Mr. McCain’s close ties to a female lobbyist who did business before the senator’s committee.

Folks inclined to read between the lines are left to imagine that the lobbyist's gender can only be important for one reason.  Is that sexist?  Can't be, or the Time wouldn't have run it.

Pick Your Punchline

Everyone should find a laugh in the long Times chat defending their hatchet job on McCain.  I am only partway through but my fave so far is this "Let The Woman Answer That" handled by Jill Abramson:

Q. If the real story is the appearance of impropriety by Senator McCain when facilitating donor's interests, why include the sexual innuendo? Wouldn't the implicit accusation of adultery have been better served as its own article, once there was sufficient evidence to support it? Does this story rely on the assumption that the presence of women in male-dominated industries, such as politics or business, inherently creates the perception of impropriety? Why deliberately show Ms. Iseman in a party dress? Were there no available pictures of her in professional attire?

— Joseph Genereux, Pasadena, Calif.

A.: ...Documents are always useful in reporting, but they are not required. The Times story was not about a romantic relationship. It was about a senator who had been embroiled in scandal, then rebuilt his career as a reformer and concern among his aides that his relationship with Ms. Iseman was putting that career at risk.

Certainly the story in no way said or suggested that women in male-dominated professions create the perception of impropriety.

— Jill Abramson

I'm almost thinking that if the Times didn't exist as the pinnacle of smug self-rightousness, we would need to invent them.  Almost.

Oh, well - most of their readers deserve them.

Obama Versus The Milbloggers

As a proud member of the Right Wing Noise Machine (or are we now the Freak Show?) I can only say "Ouch".  IMHO, Jake Tapper gets the goods from the Obama campaign and squelches folks like this at the Weekly Standard.

For flavor let's go with the WS lead:

There is a lot about Obama's story that makes no sense.  Let us start with the opening line:

"You know, I've heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon--supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq."

Well, captains command companies, not rifle platoons. A rifle platoon is normally commanded by a 2nd lieutenant, sometimes (if short handed) by a senior sergeant. So for starters, Obama betrays a woeful ignorance of military organization and the chain of command.  Then he remarks that the platoon was under-strength because 15 of its men had been "sent to Iraq." Sorry, the Army doesn't work that way. Platoons are organic units, consisting of three rifle squads, a heavy weapons squad, and a headquarters section. You can't break it up. It is the smallest building block in the infantry that can conduct fire-and-movement tactics.

Tapper talked to the Obama people, got ahold of the captain in question, and delivered this:

The Army captain, a West Point graduate, did a tour in a hot area of eastern Afghanistan from the Summer of 2003 through Spring 2004.

Prior to deployment the Captain -- then a Lieutenant -- took command of a rifle platoon at Fort Drum. When he took command, the platoon had 39 members, but -- in ones and twos -- 15 members of the platoon were re-assigned to other units. He knows of 10 of those 15 for sure who went to Iraq, and he suspects the other five did as well.

The platoon was sent to Afghanistan with 24 men.

"We should have deployed with 39," he told me, "we should have gotten replacements. But we didn't. And that was pretty consistent across the battalion."

As I said, "ouch".

MORE:  As I said, Ace is made of sterner stuff, and notes that Tapper's story does not back Obama's claims on the topic of captured ammo and equipment.

And here is the AP:

ABC News said it talked to the unidentified captain, whose account of shortages in Afghanistan was for the most part accurately summarized by Obama, although not verified.

The captain said, however, that the unit did not go after the Taliban for the purpose of getting their weapons, but sometimes used those weapons when some were captured.

BUT THEN AGAIN:  Phil Carter notes that a certain amount of scavenging is part of war, but takes Obama side.

Go Long Softballs - Times To Respond To Reader's Queries On McCain Hit Job

The Time reporters and editors will take questions from their readers about the McCain hatchet job.

Let me get started with what I assume will be typical of the questions they actually deign to address - how could any serious article about John McCain fail to denounce his ongoing support of the war in Iraq and his claim that we will have troops there for a hundred years?

The Tines is fired up and ready to go at askthetimes@nytimes.com.

Now, if I thought for a nano-second they would take this exercise seriously, I would ask them how much new information they accumulated between the initial December rumors of this story and the actual February publication.  For instance, we are offered two anonymous sources alleging a romantic involvement between McCain and the lobbyist, with denials from everyone else and no supporting evidence; was the story even weaker in December, but diligent reporting unearthed a second source?  Or, if the story was that weak in December, what details emerged to make it stronger?

As if they will respond.

And do recall my official editorial position (and I saw that James Taranto of the WSJ had the same notion) - this story came too late to hurt McCain for the nomination and too early to affect the election.  Romney and Giuliani have the real beef about timing; McCain's (very legitimate) beef is that the story should never have been run.

Subterranean Obama Blues

Here is another ripple beneath the surface of the Obama campaign - Ben Smith of The Politico reports that Obama is unrepentant about his association with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers. 

For one of the most jarring intersections of date and interview that I have encountered, check this NY Times profile of Bill Ayers from Sept 11 2001.  With the smoke of the World Trade Center visible for forty miles, Times readers could ponder these insights:

September 11, 2001
No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen

By DINITIA SMITH

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.

...

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

In his book Mr. Ayers describes  the Weathermen descending into a ''whirlpool of violence.'' 

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ''Even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.'' He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive.

Just another Friend of Barack.  Ayers and Obama sat on the board of the Woods Fund for a time; Tim Novak of the Sun-Times found a conflict of interest scandal of sorts there.  And one does wonder how Obama managed to rise through the mean streets of Chi-town politics without smudging himself.

 

The Times' McCain Scandal - Timesman Stephen Labaton Covered This Eight Years Ago

Gabriel Sherman of The New Republic has a long piece on the background to the Times' reporting and publishing of their McCain "scandal" involving the FCC and a comely young lobbyist for Paxson.  However, a key bit of info is omitted by TNR - Times reporter Stephen Labaton, who has a byline on the outrage du jour, mustered a couple of front-pagers reporting in numbing detail on the McCain-Paxson connection back in Jan 2000, although that attempt at scandal was quenched by a McCain document dump.  Consequently, this latest hit piece is Mr. Labaton's second bite of the apple; if the Times story slides past the Paxson details (as noted by Megan McCardle and others), it is not because the Times reporters were unaware of them, but rather because they quit on the ethical "scandal" eight years ago.

Some flavor:

McCain Urged F.C.C. Action On Issue Involving Supporter

By STEPHEN LABATON

Published: January 6, 2000

Senator John McCain, who has made fixing the corrosive influence of money in politics the cornerstone of his campaign, twice demanded in recent weeks that a regulatory agency take action in a matter that ultimately benefited a major contributor to his presidential campaign.

Or the next day:

January 7, 2000
Issue for McCain Is Matching Record With His Rhetoric

By STEPHEN LABATON

Eleven years ago, Senator John McCain defended himself against ethics accusations for his ties to a corrupt savings association and a campaign contributor by saying that he had performed a legitimate constituent service when he met with regulators who were preparing to seize the institution.

And eight years later, here we go again.

Mr. Kleiman, evidently unwise to the ways of Washington, asks this:

Is it routine for a Senator from Arizona to pressure regulatory agencies on behalf of companies based in Florida?

Let's see what Mr. Paxson himself had to say about this, as quoted by Stephen Labaton on Jan 6, 2000:

Mr. Paxson said he had given money to many politicians, and was involved in one fund-raiser in Florida that was the largest ever for Democrats in that state.

''I'm a political person,'' Mr. Paxson said. ''Why? Because I happen to be in a business that politics is very heavily involved in.''

My FEC search on Lowell Paxson shows many donations; the tilt is Republican but I notice donations to Democrats John Dingell, Charles Rangel, Ed Markey (House Dem and Telecom Subcommittee Chair), Bob Graham, Harry Reid, Bill Nelson, Daniel Inouye, Mark Foley (oops!), Max Cleland, and Ernest Hollings, as well as many Republicans.  Gee, is it normal for a Florida businessman to make so many contributions to politicians of both parties from around the nation?  Sure, if his business is politically sensitive, as Mr. Paxson averred.

Back in 2000 McCain defused the issue with a document dump, as James Risen reported on Jan 9:

January 9, 2000
Responding to Criticism, McCain Releases Letters
By James Risen

Senator John McCain of Arizona released hundreds of letters today that he has sent to federal agencies under the jurisdiction of his powerful Senate committee, including more than a dozen involving the businesses of contributors to his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mr. McCain said he was acting to defuse criticism of his interventions before the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of companies regulated by that agency, one of many supervised by the Commerce Committee, which he has headed since 1997.

In sheer volume, the release of more than two years of committee correspondence was both a remarkable display of openness and an effort to show that there was nothing unusual in what Mr. McCain has done by writing to agencies that regulate the companies whose employees have supported his campaign.

''If people view them in their entirety, they will see that I have acted on one fundamental principle, to protect the consumer,'' the senator said today while on a campaign swing through South Carolina. ''The overwhelming majority of these communications are: 'Please act, please act.' ''

...

The letters to the Federal Communications Commission show that in several instances, Mr. McCain sought help for companies in telecommunications and related fields that have also given to his presidential campaign.

But officials from both the McCain campaign and the Senate committee stressed today that the letters were sometimes sent without prompting from lobbyists and contributors, and that they reflected Mr. McCain's longtime policy positions. Some were also written jointly with other members of the Commerce panel, including Democrats.

Risen didn't brandish a smoking gun, and a month later the Times kissed and made up with a McCain The Maverick piece:

February 13, 2000
THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE SPECIAL INTERESTS; McCain Broke With His Party in Licensing Flap

By JOHN M. BRODER AND DON VAN NATTA JR.

I'm surprised that Gabriel Sherman of TNR missed all this backstory to the backstory.  Here is how Stephen Labaton is presented in the current TNR story:

The McCain investigation began in November, after Rutenberg, who covers the political media and advertising beat, got a tip. Within a few days, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet assigned Thompson and Labaton to join the project and, later, conservative beat reporter David Kirkpatrick to chip in as well. Labaton brought his expertise with regulatory issues to the team...

And a bit later:

Of the reporters in the room, Bennett knew Labaton the best. In the 1990s, Labaton had covered the Whitewater investigation, and Bennett viewed him as a straight-shooting, accurate reporter who could be reasoned with.

I would be shocked if Bennet was not also aware of Labaton's early work on the Paxson-McCain story.

So, let's try for a Big Finish - the Times dropped these torpedoes in the water in 2000 and misfired then; now they are back, with a piece heavy with innuendo and padded by chit-chat about the Keating case.  But eight years ago they gave up on the ethical scandal, and their sourcing for the sex scandal probably would not pass muster at the National Enquirer.

Props to Greg Sargent, who correctly notes that if the Times wrote this thin a story about a Democrat, lefties would leap from tall buildings.

 

 

The Times' McCain Scandal - Sex Or Ethics?

Times endorsed Republican front-runner John McCain now has to deal with innuendo from the Times - allegedly he got too cozy with an attractive young telecom lobbyist back in 1999 and may have done her political favors or, well, received romantic favors.

The WaPo has a me-too follow which focuses on the political favors.  Here is the understated version:

John Weaver, who served as McCain's closest confidant until leaving his current campaign last year, said he met with Vicki Iseman at the Center Cafe in Union Station and urged her to stay away from McCain. Association with a lobbyist would undermine his image as an opponent of special interests, aides had concluded.

Members of the senator's small circle of advisers also confronted McCain directly, according to sources, warning him that his continued relationship with a lobbyist who had business before the powerful Commerce Committee he chaired threatened to derail his presidential ambitions.

Let's get the steamier treatment from the Times:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

Jim Geraghty is not impressed by this attempt at journalism; apparently the Times has been waltzing around this story since at least December 2007.

Noam Scheiber of TNR writes that "The story reads to me like it had originally been much more ambitious, but had its guts ripped out somewhere along the way", and he should know - apparently TNR will have a piece online tomorrow covering the Times foot-dragging on this story; said article may have forced the Times hand.

Quel clown show.  We will know more when the TNR piece is out but one hypothesis is that an irate Timesman did not want his story spiked.  He leaked some of the Times in-house ruminations to  a friendly lib outlet, et voila!  Geez, isn't that what Matt Drudge is for?

OK, impact on McCain?  Well, it offsets the hit he took when the Times endorsed him.  OTOH, social conservatives who already didn't like him probably won't like this.  The timing is too late to derail his nomination and too early for the general election, which has worked well.

As to the question of inappropriate political favors, the Times ought to try and persuade us that McCain ended up doing favors for Ms. Iseman's clients that he might not otherwise have done or that were otherwise inconsistent with his political philosophy.  Otherwise, where are we - a lobbyist talked to a pro-business Republican who came out in favor of business.  Hold the front page.

These people at All The News That Advances Our Agenda really have no shame.  But you can't hold the front page for that, either.

Attacking Obama

I am tapping out my link-free cocktail party talking points of probable attack lines against Obama.  Help me out!

1.  Can We Settle For Picking A President, Not A Messiah?
It's wonderful that Mr. Audacity of Hope has got Scarlett Johannson all acquiver - the poor dear was no doubt looking down a long, lonely road to a gray horizon until Barack saved her.  But really, can't we just pick a President?  This Cult of Barack is creepy.

2.  Commander in Chief of a Cub Scout Troop - Maybe.
This guy is ready to command the US military in wartime?  Please.  Kennedy wasn't ready - ask the folks who survived the Bay of Pigs debacle.  Let's add that Bill Clinton was not ready to be President, since not all the whackos at Waco were inside the Davidian compound but neither Reno nor Bill seemed to be in charge.  Or ask about Mogadishu that fall.

3. Barack, Barack, what have you done lately, or ever?
Chris Matthews had fun with this; won't be the last time.

4.  When Does The Bipartisanship Begin?
David Brooks offered a fruitful variation on the "What, if anything, has Barack accomplished (I have a free thirty seconds)" question - why has he ducked the big bipartisan pushes of the last few years?

Where was Barack when the Gang of 14 teamed up to move judges through the Senate?  McCain was there!

Where was Barack when the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill was stumbling through the Senate?  McCain was there!

Where was Obama when roughly 20 Democratic Senators joined the Republicans in trying to update FISA?  McCain was there!

The reality is that McCain has practiced the sort of bipartisanship Obama has merely preached, and has the political scars to prove it.  Do we want the guy who does a great job of talking the talk, or the guy who has walked the walk for years?

5.  We Are The Change We Have Been Waiting For (Or Am I The Walrus?)
Some of Obama's rhetoric desperately needs to be mocked.  We can assume that the Saturday Night Live folks will go AWOL on this but perhaps others will pick up the slack.  We are the change we have been waiting for?  Uh huh, and John McCain is the KeyMaster.  Or is he the Merovingian?

6.  Down With MiddleClassedness
Obama's minister surfaced a few weeks back; hard to believe he is gone for good.

Help me out.  I really think it is Obama's hard luck to be squared up against McCain.

McCain Bombs Barack Without Permission

From the LA Times:

McCain blasts Obama as 'naive'
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, close to clinching the GOP nomination, called Sen. Barack Obama "naive" today and faulted the Illinois senator for waffling on an earlier commitment to abide by public financing limits.

One day after Obama scored double-digit victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii in his drive toward the Democratic presidential nomination, McCain blasted him for advocating a bombing of Al Qaeda hide-outs in Pakistan. "The best idea is not to broadcast what you're going to do, that's naive," said McCain, who also questioned the very notion of "bombing Pakistan without their permission."

...In a conference call with reporters to respond, Obama foreign policy advisor Susan Rice said that McCain was "misrepresenting and distorting Barack Obama's positions" and argued that the Democrat "never suggested bombing an ally."

"McCain promises more war in Iraq," she said. "Obama will end the war in Iraq and focus on terrorists in Afghanistan."

Unless Obama has repudiated his foreign policy speech of last Aug 1 (link 1, 2), I fail to see how McCain has misrepresented and distorted his position.  Here we go from Obama, Aug 1 2007:

I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005 (see NY Times). If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.

Well, the proposed 2005 raid was more than just bombing - it was a Special Ops "snatch and grab" scheme to capture some top terrorists.  Is the Obama press flack arguing that McCain's distortion is the description of "bombing" only?  Ridiculous.

And it is hardly as if McCain is opening a new line of attack here - Obama was roundly derided by his fellow Dems when he floated this notion last summer.

James Robbins of NRO provided more background on the reality of US operations in Waziristan and environs:

The decision not to go ahead with the 2005 mission was regrettable — assuming it would have succeeded, that is. But Senator Obama’s umbrage notwithstanding, that was not the end of the game. Instead we chose to fight smarter rather than harder. Over the next two years there followed a series of much less risky missile strikes on the same type of targets. On May 7, 2005, high-ranking al Qaeda operative Haitham al-Yemeni was taken out by a Hellfire missile attack in North Waziristan. On December 4, 2005, Hamza Rabia, reportedly al Qaeda's #3, met the same fate. On January 13, 2006, four al Qaeda operatives were eliminated in a similar manner in Damadola. This attack narrowly missed al-Zawahiri, but killed his son-in-law, Abdul al-Maghribi, who helped run al Qaeda media operations. Al-Zawahiri was again targeted (unsuccessfully) on October 30, 2006, in a missile strike against an Islamic school in Chingai, Pakistan.

All of these attacks were plausibly deniable, and none took place with Pakistan’s permission, at least not publicly. In fact the Pakistanis found ways to explain away around the obvious, such as stating that one of the explosions was not the result of a missile strike but simply an accident while the terrorist was making bombs.

Note that in each case the U.S. was using actionable intelligence (defined as intelligence that triggers the execution of pre-planned defense and security capabilities already identified and enabled). So there is nothing very innovative in saying we will act on that which is actionable; that is U.S. policy. There is also no reason to believe that sending troops rather than missiles in would have led to better outcomes. In fact they would probably have been much worse since the U.S. would have had to explain not only the failure to take down the intended target, but also the incursion itself.

Watching Obama try to persuade McCain and the rest of us that he is ready to command US forces ought to be fun.  And with Hillarity paving the way, who knows where this road will take the Dems?

LOOKS LIKE McCAIN HAS LOST THE LIBS:  Matt Yglesias and Joe Klein score this for Obama.  Joe Klein is especially droll here:

And, in fact, Obama was merely saying that he supported current U.S. policy.

Well, McCain's point in the La Times (but not the speech to which Klein referred) was that a key part of US policy is "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies".

Economic Mobility

A new report is out on economic mobility and the Times slant is that things aren't all that grim... yet, anyway:

Higher Education Gap May Slow Economic Mobility

By Erik Eckholm

Economic mobility, the chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades, a study being released on Wednesday says.

The authors of the study, by scholars at the Brookings Institution in Washington and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, warned that widening gaps in higher education between rich and poor, whites and minorities, could soon lead to a downturn in opportunities for the poorest families.

The researchers found that Hispanic and black Americans were falling behind whites and Asians in earning college degrees, making it harder for them to enter the middle class or higher.

“A growing difference in education levels between income and racial groups, especially in college degrees, implies that mobility will be lower in the future than it is today,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican official and welfare expert who wrote the education section of the report.

...The report is at economicmobility.org.

The report is here.

Hmm.  The section on intergenerational mobility straddles the issue - most research shows no strong trend but some points to a decline in mobility, we are told.

Since Paul Krugman tackled this very topic a few days back, let's hear from him:

Mainly, however, excuses for poverty involve the assertion that the United States is a land of opportunity, a place where people can start out poor, work hard and become rich.

But the fact of the matter is that Horatio Alger stories are rare, and stories of people trapped by their parents’ poverty are all too common. According to one recent estimate, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have almost a 50 percent chance of staying there — and almost a two-thirds chance of remaining stuck if they’re black.

"Horatio Alger stories are rare".  OK, from the Times today:

There is some good news. The study highlights the powerful role that college can have in helping people change their station in life. Someone born into a family in the lowest fifth of earners who graduates from college has a 19 percent chance of joining the highest fifth of earners in adulthood and a 62 percent chance of joining the middle class or better.

Evidently, if Horatio Alger can rally himself to and through college, success is not so rare.  However:

In recent years, 11 percent of children from the poorest families have earned college degrees, compared with 53 percent of children from the top fifth.

My math tells me that if 11percent of bottom-quintile kids go to college and 19 percent of that group end up in the top quintile, we are talking abut 2 percent of all bottom-quintile kids making it to the top.  I will grudgingly acknowledge that "rare" is not outrageous in that context. 

As to reasons:

Mr. Butler said experts were likely to disagree about the reasons and, hence, on policies to improve mobility. Conservative scholars are more apt to fault cultural norms and the breakdown of families while liberals put more emphasis on the changing structure of the economy and the need for government to provide safety nets and aid for poor families.

“We may well have an economy that rewards certain traits that are typically passed on from parents to children, the importance of education, optimism, a propensity to work hard, entrepreneurship and so on,” he said.

To the extent that the economy rewards those traits, he added, “you’d expect the incomes of children to track more with that of their parents.”

 

Hillarymandias

We continue our coverage of Hillary's Wisconsin Wipeout:

Hillarymandias

I met a pollster from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand, one in Texas...., one near Canton,
  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose brow, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
  The electorate that mocked them, and the press that fed;
  And on the pedestal, these words appear:
  My name is Hillarymandias,   
  Look on my resume and campaign fundraising, ye fellow Democrats, and despair!
  Nothing else remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
  The lone and level sands stretch far away. Heh.

Many thanks to BumperStickerist, who is writing for the ages.

Exiting Wisconsin

Hard to see from this Wisconsin exit poll just what Hillary hopes to build on - she wins narrowly among white women and the over 65-set and has no obvious strength anywhere else.  And cheap shot artists will wonder whether it is old white women that carry the two aforementioned demographics for Hillary.

Rural voters went 53-45 for Obama; urbanites went for him 62-35.

Hillary split high school grads 49-49 and lost every other educational group.

Folks who thought the economy was "poor" (35 % of respondents) went for Hillary by a whooping 50-47; groups with a brighter view backed the Baritone.

Ethnically, the electorate was about 8% black and 4% Latino.

I have no doubt she will soldier on, but why bother?  And why bother us?

Mama Mia! McCain Can't Take A Chance On ABBA

Per Matt Drudge, Big Mac is having trouble with a campaign song:

He battled the Vietcong but now John McCain has apparently come a-cropper against the Swedes.

The Republican candidate, who had already been banned by John Mellencamp, the American rocker, from using his hits 'Our Country' and 'Pink Houses', found out that he has few fans in Scandinavia when he tried to adopt Abba's "Take a chance on me" as his campaign song. After running into difficulties with the Swedish supergroup, McCain lamented to reporters on board his plane that it wasn't as easy to play the song as he thought.

“It gets expensive in a big hurry and if you’re not careful you can alienate some Swedes,” he joked.“If word gets out to Stockholm that we’re using Abba music, then there’ll be a
worsening in U.S.-Swedish relations.”

Oh, come on - "Take A Chance On Me"?  That will be his Waterloo.

Fortunately, I feel a song coming on - for McCain the only real choice is "My Way", Frankie style (forget the King.)  That is no more generationally ghastly than "Take A Chance" and I know McCain has sung My Way in a boozy bar at closing time.  And how do I know this?  Uhh, because he is a white male over age 50? 

Somewhat more seriously, if McCain's advisers are semi-serious, they ought to check the Tony Bennett collection for a tune - old but hip is McCain's targeted niche.  (I advise against "Who Can I Turn To When Nobody Needs Me").  I wouldn't rule out "Jimmy Mack (When Are You Coming Back) either.

Let's see, I should spread the wealth.  If Hillary is dead set against "It's My Part (I'll Cry If I Want To), then "The Way We Were" by Babs ought to work - it captures Hillary's only demographic (aging white chicks) and plays to the backward looking angst of her whole campaign.

And for Barack?  My choice would be "Sweet Talking Guy", but I'll bet his campaign would prefer to go in a different direction.

This was all so much easier when Big Al went with the peppy "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon, obvious lib.

Democrats Looking For Their Pride

Auto-hyperbole?  Michelle Obama has never before, as an adult, been proud to be an American:

Michelle Obama today said that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction.”

Hmm.  Well, lefties haven't been proud of this country since we stole it from the Indians Native Americans, so imagine my non-surprise.  Just don't question their patriotism!  They love America for what it might become, someday, if only the Great Unwashed would heed them.  But pride?

I say that with the exception, fortunately, of Taylor Marsh, long-time Hillarity supporter and sometime Obama-basher.  Here we go, as T Marsh seizes on Michelle's miscue to promote her own fidelity to country:

Michelle Obama Does Not Speak for Me

The love I have for this country does not depend on a political campaign predicated   on the notion of "change."

The love I have for this country does not depend on one person, certainly not   some politician   with a slogan that others have used, which he has re-used.

The love I have for this country does not depend on aiding the winning of someone for president, without a clue what he or she is offering in the guise of one word, "change."

The love I have for this country does not depend on ignorance of what patriotism   requires to serve a personal goal.

My uncle Dick certainly didn't serve his country and get battle fatigue in   WWII so people could pick and choose pride in this nation based on personal   association to some politician, forgetting the greater glory we all serve through   our country's ideals.

...

The love I have for this country knows no political party bounds.

...

The love I have for this country makes me an American first, a Democrat second.   Never before in my life have I been more aware of this fact than I was after   I thought long and hard about Michelle Obama's comments, not able to brush them   aside, though that was my first instinct and said so, only to hear her words   flash before me again and again, finally causing something to rise up deep inside   me to scream NOT THIS AMERICAN.

She has more, but her gist seems to be, she loves this country, and Michelle Obama does not speak for her.  But does Hillary Clinton?  This stuck in my craw from the Los Angeles debate last Jan 31, so let's roll the transcript, with emphasis added:

CLINTON: ... But, ultimately, this is really about the American people. It's about your lives. It's about your jobs, your health care, whether you can afford to send your children to college, whether you'll be able to withstand the pressure of the rising interest rates on a home foreclosure that might come your way, and whether we're going to once again be proud of our country, and our leadership, and our moral authority in the world.

Ms. Marsh notwithstanding, I have a hard time reading that any other way than, Ms. Clinton is not currently proud of her country and thinks most Democrats feel the same way. 

I can see righties making hay with the Obama quote, although Ms. Obama is not the candidate.  But Taylor Marsh ought to look to her own candidate before making these bold pronouncements. 

PILING ON:  Plenty of moms love their kids even when they are sitting in jail and are not an immediate object of parental pride.  Is Ms. Marsh confusing love and pride in her tirade?

DEMOCRATS ABROAD, CIRCA 2003:  Back when men were men, or at least, Joe Biden and Ron Silver were.  Not to mention Colin Powell.

Send Krugman To The Catskills

After pounding Obama for months (this December column used "naive" and "fantasies"), Krugman is now fretting that a media backlash may swamp Obama in the general election.  A commenter at Kevin Drum's site has as good a guess as any as to what may have triggered this combination of synapses in Krugman's cranium:

You're effing kidding us, right, Kev?

The leader of the anti-Obama untruths squad, Krugman, is worried about an anti-Obama backlash?

Surely what he meant to write is that he is worried that his efforts to foment an anti-Obama backlash won't bear fruit in time to save HRC, and that he is lamenting his misfire now in order to build an alibi for himself against future charges that he is one of the lying MSM jackasses who gave the general election to the GOP.

Foe the record - I first predicted an Obama backlash in January, and again more recently, so two cheers for both me and stopped clocks everywhere.

But this intrigues me - David Brooks takes a turn today; Dahlia Lithwick thumped the Obama Phenomena a few days ago; and Jake Tapper wrote about the Cult of Obama cult two weeks back.

But in each case a significant line of attack is not against Obama as much as it is against his madly enthusiastic supporters.  This solves a problem for the reporters, who are cheerfully thrashing crazed collegiate yuppies rather than a Noble Black Man, and poses a puzzler for Obama - just what is he supposed to do, have less enthusiastic supporters?  More yawning and less applause at his rallies?

Brooks does go after Obama with this:

How is a 47-year-old novice going to unify highly polarized 70-something committee chairs? What will happen if the nation’s 261,000 lobbyists don’t see the light, even after the laying on of hands? Does The Changemaker have the guts to take on the special interests in his own party — the trial lawyers, the teachers’ unions, the AARP?

The Gang of 14 created bipartisan unity on judges, but Obama sat it out. Kennedy and McCain created a bipartisan deal on immigration. Obama opted out of the parts that displeased the unions. Sixty-eight senators supported a bipartisan deal on FISA. Obama voted no. And if he were president now, how would the High Deacon of Unity heal the breach that split the House last week?

Need I emphasize the obvious?  When it comes to reaching across the aisle, John McCain has a record of doing what Obama has a record of talking about.

THE NICKNAME PRIMARY:  David Brooks tries a couple of tags for Obama - I notice the Hope Pope, the Changemaker, the High Deacon of Unity, and the Presence.

However, I want dibs on Baritone Obama - goes with the Barack/Barry name, plays off the Important Yet Mellifluous Voice... oh, forget it, if I have to explain it's not working.

What's The Matter With Willie?

Why is Matt Drudge headlining this photo of Willie Nelson and calling it "The End"?

Oh, wait...

Well, here is more Willie, and a mystery - has anyone ever seen this two together?

We are breaking the big ones here.

CAN'T LET GO:  Timesman James C. McKinley also has some fun with the news of Fidel's resignation:

[Fidel Castro's] record has been a mix of great social achievements, but a dismal economic performance that has mired most Cubans in poverty. He succeeded in establishing universal health care, providing free education through college and largely rooting out racism.

Kidding?  How, exactly did he "largely" root out racism - declare it to be illegal?  Geez, maybe Hillarity could mandate an end to racism in this country while mandating universal health care - there's a twofer!

And I adore the "free" college education - does this education just fall out of the sky like rain?  I'm just guessing that even in a poor country, someone pays for it somehow, through taxes on something.  As to the notion that the Times might recognize this, or somehow associate high taxes with poor economic performance - what am I saying?

In An Alternate Times-World (Old Times There Have Been Forgotten)

With Obama as a launching point Timeswoman Kate Zernike writes about Presidential charisma; at one point she takes up the question of whether Kennedy's charisma could have pushed his Civil Rights legislation through the Congress, or whether (as Hillary noted in New Hampshire) it took the more pragmatic dealmeister, LBJ.  However, Ms. Zernike goes historically and hysterically awry with this:

When Mrs. Clinton talked about how it took Johnson as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to achieve the rights legislation, Ms. Goodwin said, “she was absolutely right.” Johnson’s great mastery was to get the support of Southern Republicans. “It required his understanding of absolutely every single senator,” Ms. Goodwin said. “They were a team. Without Martin Luther King agitating the country and J.F.K. picking up the bill there would not have been that pressure on the Congress, and without L.B.J. there would not have been a bill.

Ms. Goodwin is not quoted as lauding Johnson's mastery of the Southern Republicans, so I am left believing that to be Ms. Zernike's extrapolation.  However, per Wikipedia, there were darn few Southern Republican available to vote, and all opposed the Civil Rights Act.

Let's see - in the House, where the outcome was not in doubt, Southern Democrats opposed the original bill by 87-7; Southern Republicans opposed it by 10-0.

In the Senate, where many thought the bill would be killed in committee or filibustered to death, Southern Democrats opposed the bill by 20-1; the lone Southern Republican Senator also opposed the bill.

For these purposes, "Southern" means a member of the 11 Confederate States of America.

Baffling.  Maybe Ms. Zernike is referring to border state Senators, but the story from the Deep South was nothing like she presented here.

Obama's Appeal (The Secret Thereof)

Allow me to expand on my notion that Obama is the Mirror of Desire (Mirror of Erised to you Harry Potter fans out there) in which people see what they most want to see.

Obama's basic message is that he is a smart and reasonable guy who will reach out to people representing a wide range of views and bring them together to bring about "change".

But what people actually hear is something somewhat different, namely, "Obama is smart and reasonable and he will listen to me; since my ideas are smart and reasonable, he will ultimately embrace them as his own".

This creates a very different dynamic from the typical political campaign.  Rather than trying to convince a majority of voters (primary or general election) that his ideas are superior, Obama simply needs to convince a majority that their ideas are superior.  Should be doable!

And how has Hillary been combating this?  Not effectively.  Her basic approach has followed the traditional campaigner's plan of marshaling programs tailored to appeal to 51% of voters.  By and large, the upshot will be that folks who agree with her will figure they will get their way with either candidate; folks who disagree with her will favor Obama.  Not helpful.

Ms. Clinton has also argued, in admirably straight-faced fashion, that Obama lacks the experience to actually deliver on his ethereal "agenda" but that she, as one of the most polarizing and hated politicians in America, is poised to deliver on a sweeping range of programs.  As if.

What Hillarity needs to do, if Obama is foolish enough to oblige her, is trap Obama in a morass of specificity - "Where's the beef?" worked for Walter Mondale against Gary Hart in 1984; time has nearly run out for Ms. Clinton but it may yet work here.

To accomplish this work Ms. Clinton needs to enlist the press; she needs to emulate John McCain and talk their ears off, with the hope that the press will switch to fawning on the "New Hillary" and turn against Obama as lacking substance.

If the result is to goad Obama into delivering a briefcase (or boxcar) of details about a million programs, he may lose his central appeal as his supporters are forced to reconcile his vision with their own.  If Hillary, allied with the press, can transform Obama into just another programmatic politician with ideas that attract some and alienate others, she will at least be playing a game she has a chance of winning.

MORE:  If I were advising McCain, this tactic of Obama's wouldn't worry me much - McCain has a track record of actually doing what Obama is just talking bout.

Wrong About Everything Except One Important Thing

Ms. Lithwick at Slate wonders if it can be cool to back Obama when everyone is doing it and links to this from Hanna Rosin:

Thirdly, the worrisome thing about Obama is that people see in him what they want to see.

This old piece of mine predicting that Fred Thompson would defeat Al Gore for the Presidency is not exactly one for the Eerily Prescient files [yet others Keep Hope Alive for a Gore-Obama ticket!], but it did correctly identify Barack as the Democratic Mirror of Desire (That is the Mirror of Erised to Harry Potter fans.)

And I agree with both of these secret Hillary backers - the Obama "Yes We Can" video is either madly uplifting or creepily cultish.

Traditional Saturday Open Thread

Periodically my computer goes down but I have had time to notice this from ABC and the companion bit here.

Chop The Body And The Head Will Fall

John Lewis and other black leaders are re-thinking their early support of Hillary, which will certainly upset the superdelegate math at the Dem convention.  This is obviously bad for Hilary, but is it unexpected?  Let's have some calm perspective from Andrew Sullivan:

If Lewis's original endorsement of the Clintons was a huge blow to Obama, then his reversal is an even bigger blow to the Clintons. The Obama campaign has now not only built a rival machine to the Clintons', it is poaching loyalists. A figure like Lewis also brings, for good reason, a vast moral credibility with him. He gives permission - even encouragement - for other Clinton super-delegates to move to prevent a bruising and bitter fight through the spring. It's a tipping point.

Michael Crowley of TNR thinks it is bad for Hillary, but maybe not so bad as Halperin thinks:

Obviously this is a nasty development for Hillary. Among other things, it's one more reminder of Bill's reduced stature with his former African-American allies. It hurts. But an event that cuts her odds in half? That's how I would describe a big loss in Wisconsin. Not this.

Well.  First of all, in terms of perception, these switches further promote the notion that the SS Hillary is going down and it is time for sensible folks to gather their belongings and disembark.  Such a perception also makes it less likely that John Edwards, for example, would endorse Hillary - how often do people talk about rats boarding a sinking ship?  Sometimes momentum is the perception of momentum.

However, are these switches by black leaders any kind of a surprise?  In the glorious history of the US Congress, how often has a representative backed a notion that (a) looks like a loser, and (b) is overwhelmingly opposed by his constituents?  With 80-90% of black voters backing Barack, who really thought that these black superdelegates would try to hold the line for Billary if Barack looked like a possible winner?

Thirdly, Barack grew up as a community organizer, which means he grew up with a belief in the power of bottom-up pressure.  I am not privy to his campaign strategy but I doubt he lost sleep wondering whether these black leaders would come around once he won over their neighborhoods and demonstrated his viability.

Finally, I very much wonder whether a John Lewis endorsement of Barack would have been valuable to Obama last fall.  Remember, Barack has been intent as presenting himself as something other than merely a black candidate (see the "Keep Hillary Alive" spin here); a string of early endorsements from prominent civil rights legends would have been counter-productive (although Oprah's cross-over appeal was welcomed).

Now I suspect that Obama's advisers would have been happy if John Lewis had stayed neutral earlier in the race.  However, the way John Lewis' position has evolved really has broken perfectly for Barack: early on, Barack avoided the label of "the black candidate", since Lewis and other prominent blacks were backing Hillary; late in the game, the Lewis shift can be presented by the Obama camp as the latest sign that Hillary's apocalypse is upon us.

I don't for a moment suggest that Lewis' behavior was scripted in advance, but if I were an Obama strategist, this is pretty much how I would have scripted it.

Salvaging Hillary

The WSJ covers the reorganization of the Hillary campaign.  Weirdly, nowhere in this story about her latest desperate strategy do we see a mention of a shift in their approach to the media, which remains my suggested plan for bailing out Billary.

Consider - Ms. Clinton wants to engage Obama in yet more debates, in the hope that her superior wonkishness and grasp of every detail under the sun will sway not-yet-benumbed voters.  Could work!  But it can't work if Obama won't actually show up, and apparently he won't, at least not in Wisconsin.

Well, let us reason together - what other audience is available that might be impressed by Hillary's superior grasp of policy?  Hint - they are trapped at the back of her plane and desperate to speak to her.  Hillary ought to take a mad chance and actually talk to the press pack as though they are humans and see what happens.  McCain has been working this shtick for years with great success, and I daresay Hilary is wonkier than he (but less engaging and authentic...).

Now, for this to work Hillary would have to overcome sixteen years of paranoia about the press, some of it deserved.  But the press jackals would be thrilled with a new storyline that gave them a chance to write about the rejuvenated, accessible, charming, humorous Hillary, and I won't have to read it because I will poke my eyes out after the first story.  And if dealing with the media en masse is too daunting, honoring favorites with exclusives or small sit-downs is another tried and true tactic the Clintonistas can employ.

Now, Obama does not lack for charisma and may respond with his own schmooze offensive.  But do keep in mind - the press *may* be poised to wonder whether Obama has real substance behind the flash, and may press him to the borders of wonkery, where he risks embarrassment.  But the mainstream media has carried Obama and McCain this far, so it would be foolish of the Clinton camp to under-estimate their ability to help out Hillary.

MORE:  From the WSJ, I thought this was silly:

Still, it's possible the tumult, including the staff shakeup, could be just what the limping Clinton campaign needs. John McCain dumped his campaign managers last summer when his candidacy seemed to be tanking. Now he is the strong Republican front-runner.

Hmmph - the race was young and McCain's rivals self-destructed.

Jason Zengerle of TNR is having more fun with this story than I am.

RELATED:  When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose - Chris Cillizza of the WaPo wonders whether Hillary should go negative.  Ezra Klein wonders whether Hillary will rip the party apart in a fight over superdelegates.  Since we are talking about the Clintons, self-interest and self-preservation will rule - they may have to destroy the party in order to save it.  But could Hillary be content as New York's Senator for life?

She Comes To Bury Hillary...

As Hillary melts away the rationales for supporting her need to be rationalized away.  MoDo tries to bury the feminist "time for a woman" argument:

A Flawed Feminist Test

...We’re not just in the most vertiginous election of our lives. We’re in another national seminar on gender and race that is teaching us about who we are as we figure out what we want America to be.

It’s not yet clear which prejudice will infect the presidential contest more — misogyny or racism.

Many women I talk to, even those who aren’t particularly fond of Hillary, feel empathy for her, knowing that any woman in a world dominated by men has to walk a tightrope between femininity and masculinity, strength and vulnerability.

...

I know that the attacks against powerful women can be harsh and personal and unfair, enough to make anyone cry.

But Hillary is not the best test case for women. We’ll never know how much of the backlash is because she’s a woman or because she’s this  woman or because of the ick factor of returning to the old Clinton dysfunction.

...

As a possible first Madame President, Hillary is a flawed science experiment because you can’t take Bill out of the equation. Her story is wrapped up in her marriage, and her marriage is wrapped up in a series of unappetizing compromises, arrangements and dependencies.

Instead of carving out a separate identity for herself, she has become more entwined with Bill. She is running bolstered by his record and his muscle. She touts her experience as first lady, even though her judgment during those years on issue after issue was poor. She says she’s learned from her mistakes, but that’s not a compelling pitch.

Obviously, MoDo is saying nothing new to the many, many people who never understood why promoting the Boss's Wife represented a triumph of the feminist ideal, and never thought that rejection of Hillary corresponded to rejection of all women in politics.  But there are certainly people (OK, women) in need of a eulogy for their feminist vision, so it was nice of Ms. Dowd to step up.

The Roger Watch

Let's have a Clemens thread.  He is not convincing me, but neither is McNamee.

That said, I will say again - based on his body type (large), workout regimen (exhaustive), career longevity, and career rejuvenation, Clemens seems like a perfect fit for a steroids-use profile.

One flaw - he was 40-39 in his last four years with the Red Sox; his revival was immediate at Toronto, where he won back-to-back Cy Youngs in 1997-98.  However, McNamee only alleges that he first became involved with Clemens and steroids in the second Toronto season.

If we had someone telling us that Clemens became a user immediately upon arriving in Toronto, the story would fit better.  Instead, we are left trying to explain Clemens' revival in his first year in Toronto.  My guess - McNamee's story is that Clemens always supplied his own steroids and relied on McNamee for injections and advice, so Clemens may well have had some other
supplier and injector a year earlier.

Bonus Question - is his head bigger now?  Here are Roger '85, Roger 2002, and current Roger.

MORE:  Per this stats jockey, Clemens did not age in a surprising fashion.  However, this analysis accepts the '97 season as legit, and I am dubious.

Faux-mentum For Barack At The Times

Adam Nagourney of the Times reports on the primaries and makes the same mistake Matt Drudge did  - both boosted Barack over Billary by forgetting that African-American women vote.  Here is Mr. Nagourney, with the LOL error in the third paragraph (emp. added):

Surging, Obama Makes His Case

By Adam Nagourney

WASHINGTON — The lopsided nature of Senator Barack Obama’s parade of victories on Tuesday gives him an opening to make the case that Democratic voters have broken in his favor and that the party should coalesce around his candidacy.

Mr. Obama’s triumphs capped a week in which he went undefeated in states across the country, in many cases by big margins, over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

And his strength on Tuesday sliced across nearly every major demographic line, with one element standing out: in Virginia and Maryland, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls, he beat Mrs. Clinton among women. 

As I noted yesterday, Obama won among all women way back in South Carolina - Ms. Clinton's heretofore unshakable base (and seemingly not stirred) has been white women, especially older white women.  Telling us that Ms. Clinton lost among women in states with a high proportion of black voters stopped being news after the South Carolina primary on January 26.

Incredibly, and even though Ms. Clinton was endorsed by the Times editors, there is no compensating "to be sure" paragraph buried further down.  Let's cut to Jonathon Weisman of the WaPo; he creates some faux-mentum for Barack but eventually allows reality to creep back in:

Obama's thrashing of Clinton in the two states yesterday raised the possibility that her coalition is beginning to crack, three weeks before she reaches what will probably be more friendly territory in Ohio and Texas.

Obama won among men, among women and among union voters. He won big among the affluent, educated voters in the District's suburbs, but he also won convincingly among rural voters and small-town Democrats.

...

Clinton still pulled more votes from white women, but that advantage was neutralized by Obama's popularity among white men.

As a quickie on the WaPo - since blacks can be found in rural areas and many are neither affluent nor possess a college degree, Obama won among the rural and less-educated in South Carolina.  If Barack were winning among rural and small-town whites Mr. Weisman would have a story.

But back to women, and let's have some number, please:  In South Carolina, Obama was backed by 22% of white women; Edwards got 36% and Billary earned 42%.  Among all women, however, Obama collected 54% to Clinton/Edwards 46%.  South Carolina had 55% black turnout on the Democratic side, and 78% of black women backed Barack.

In Maryland, 37% of voters were black; 82% of black women went for Barack, as did 38% of white women (Hillary got 56% of the white chicks).  On net, Barack won the woman's vote by 55-41.

In Virginia, 30% of voters were black; 86% of black women went for Barack, as did 47% of white women (Hillary got 53% of the white chicks).  On net, Barack won the woman's vote by 60-39.

Now, there is plenty for Ms. Clinton to worry about here - white women are clearly hopping off her bus and heading to Obamaland, apparently to the tune of "Where The Boys Are".  However, Mr. Nagourney's report that Barack's victory among all women represents a major shift is simply not accurate.

So why the faux-mentum at the Times?  I am reluctant to rule out bone-headedness, but let's also identify the possibility that the Times editors are re-thinking their endorsement of Hillary and trying to bond with their young, affluent, college-educated readers.

FISA Follies

Obama may become the Nutroots heart throb du jour - he voted (and lost) with Chris Dodd to strip retroactive immunity from the new FISA bill; Hillary may be tough enough to battle Republicans but she wasn't tough enough to actually get to the Senate floor and get on the sinking ship - her vote was "Not present". 

Hmm, that was sort of my proposed Obama strategy.  Let's see, more votes to come, and Obama can spin the telecoms immunity as something other than civil rights for terrorists. 

Opposing the main bill will be trickier, from a general election perspective; supporting it will be trickier today. Let's see - if he supports the big bill having also supported the Dodd amendment, he can claim he worked for an even better bill but reluctantly settled for this as better than nothing.  The Nutroots will see through it like glass, and the rest of us can cry "waffle" - I say Obama needs to go all in and oppose the final bill.  It's suicide, but it's delayed suicide... unless he can get Dodd, or some suitably credible lefty Dem, to support the final bill as well.  Kennedy was with Dodd on this round - will Kennedy flip to cover Obama?

Right, who's waffling now?  OK - Obama either opposes the final bill or drags Kennedy, Dodd, or a Big Lefty into the same "Yes to Dodd, Yes to the bill" position and hides behind them [Wrong!  See below].  Ms. Clinton buffs her Kennedyesque appeal by posing somewhere reading "Profiles in Courage".

Ms. Malkin is following this.

MORE:  Re "See through this like glass" - the Metaphor Masher repair guy is racing to my rescue like a white knight on a gallant steed... and he better hurry.  Obviously.

THE AUDACITY OF VOTE:  Duh!  Obama could just scuttle into the night and, with Hillary, go with "Not Voting" on the final bill.  Does she have an extra copy of "Profiles in Courage" handy?  These two want to lead America but they can't even lead their own party.

NUTROOTS BONUS:  Sen. Jim Webb voted for the bill, the boot-licking Bush-kissing craven.

Train, Tracks, Impending Wreck

David Brooks notes two impending train wrecks that will vex either President Obama or President Hillary, to wit, what to do about Iraq, and what new Federal programs to fund.

Briefly, the base will want the Iraq policy to be "Out Now, or Sooner" but the tactical success of the surge may make that politically impossible (darn that George Bush and his foolhardy commitment to victory!).  And here is Brooks on spending:

Which brings us to second looming Democratic divide: domestic spending. Both campaigns now promise fiscal discipline, as well as ambitious new programs. These kinds of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too vows were merely laughable last year when the federal deficit was running at a manageable $163 billion a year. But the economic slowdown, the hangover from the Bush years and the growing bite of entitlements mean that the federal deficit will almost certainly top $400 billion by 2009. The accumulated national debt will be in shouting distance of the $10 trillion mark. With that much red ink, the primary-season spending plans are simply ridiculous.

It’d be 1993 all over again. The new Democratic president would be faced with Bill Clinton’s Robert Rubin vs. Robert Reich choice: either scale back priorities for the sake of fiscal discipline or blow through all known deficit records for the sake of bigger programs. Choose the former, and the new president would further outrage the left. Choose the latter and lose the financial establishment and the political center.

This is the debate that Democrats have been quietly rearguing during the entire Bush presidency. The left wing of the party is absolutely committed to winning it this time. It will likely demand the clean energy subsidies and the education spending, the expensive health care coverage and subsides to address middle-class anxiety. But no Democratic president can afford to offend independent voters with runaway spending. No president can easily ignore the think tank establishment, which is rightfully exercised about the nation’s long-term fiscal health.

It would be another brutal choice.

I sense the frustration on the left.  Time was when Republicans like Bob Dole were reliable tax-increasers for the welfare state - Dems would vote for hopefully popular new programs and Bob Dole, fretting about budget deficits, would vote for tax increases to fund them.

Now Republicans have reversed that dynamic - Clinton-Gingrich balanced the budget so that Bush could cut taxes, and Dems were left waiting for their big payoff of new programs (OK, they got the Medicare drug program, but not as they wanted it).

If I were a lib I think I would have little interest in a balanced budget.  But if I were a lib I would probably be running from room to room holding scissors or other sharp objects, so why ask me?

Drudge Misleading About Hillary's Plight (Hold Front Page!)

Here's a shocker - Matt Drudge has a misleading Hillary-bashing headline:

POLL: OBAMA TAKES LEAD AMONG WOMEN IN MD, VA

That links to this American Research Group poll showing us that, as advertised, Obama does lead among all women.  But this is not news - in South Carolina, as I strain to remember that far back, Obama carried the female vote by 54-30.  Why?  He won among black women by 78-20 but lost among white women by 42-22 (Edwards also got 36 percent of the white women).

Folks have been wondering whether, with Edwards out, Obama can top Hillary among white men; her "unshakable base" has been white women, and it would merit a headline if Obama led in that demographic.

So does he, in the latest ARG poll flagged by Drudge?  They don't provide that specific cross-tab, but eyeballometric inspection or a bit of spreadsheet tom-foolery says "no".

Here we go: 

In Maryland, Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton among men 58% to 32% (42% of likely Democratic primary voters) and Obama leads Clinton among women 53% to 42%. Clinton leads Obama among white voters 51% to 39% (59% of likely Democratic primary voters) and Obama leads Clinton among African American voters 81% to 16% (38% of likely Democratic primary voters).

Well - this year Clinton has always done better among white women than among white men; if she leads among all whites, we can be sure she leads among white women.

However, Hillary's slight lead over Obama among the slightly larger white group is more than offset by his much greater strength among the slightly smaller black group; hence, his overall lead, both in the overall result and among women.

It does appear that the "0 for the rest of February" scenario mentioned a few days back is developing nicely, with resultant hard times for Hillarity. 

A Sidebar On "Obama Unplugged "

Dean Barnett, writing in the Weekly Standard, tells us that Obama sans a teleprompter is a much less impressive speaker.  However, I have my own thoughts about this passage:

His spontaneous comments eschewed the conciliatory and optimistic tone that has made the Obama campaign such a phenomenon. It looked like the spirit of John Edwards or Howard Dean had possessed Obama every time he vamped. While Paul Krugman probably loved it, this different Obama was a far less attractive one.

At one point, Obama launched an improvised jeremiad against the current administration that took special note of the recent revelation that he and Dick Cheney are distant relations:

"Now I understand some of the excitement doesn't have to do with me. I know that whatever else happens whatever twists and turns this campaign may take, when you go into that polling place next November, the name George Bush won't be on the ballot and that makes everybody pretty cheerful. Everyone's happy about that. The name of my cousin Dick Cheney won't be on the ballot. That was embarrassing when that news came out. When they do these genealogical surveys, you want to be related to somebody cool. So, but, his name went be on the ballot.

"Each of us running for the Democratic nomination agrees on one thing that the other party does not--that the next president must end the disastrous policies of George W. Bush. No more Scooter Libby Justice! No more Brownie incompetence! No more Karl Rove politics."

None of this was in the prepared text. And all of it was a marked departure from the kind of successful campaign that Obama has run. One can imagine Obama, if he thought things through more fully, using the revelation regarding Cheney as an occasion to note something vapidly uplifting like how in America, we're all part of the same family.

I'll accept that none of this was in the prepared text.   However, I saw Obama live and un-teleprompted at a high school event before the New Hampshire primary and he used almost those exact words there, so I query "marked departure".  That said, Obama managed to turn the Cheney-bashing into a big laugh line - had I blogged about it (I nearly did, but my time-management being what it was...) I would have reported it as follows:

The name of my cousin Dick Cheney won't be on the ballot. That was embarrassing when that news came out. When they do these genealogical surveys, you want to be related to somebody cool - someone like Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King... or Tom Brady.  So, but, his name went be on the ballot.

Obama also included the "No more Scooter Libby justice" line, at which point one of my companions, knowing well my habits and vices, asked whether I was still feeling the inclusion and outreach.  I was not, but promised I would be feeling it again as soon as I finished a few more eye rolls.

My takeaway at the time was that Obama was having a bit of fun with some red meat, a vital part of any campaigner's diet; I didn't lose sleep worrying that his heart was in it.

Mow this recent speech was given at the Virginia Jefferson-Jackson dinner - maybe Obama just couldn't think of any cool Virginians off the top of his head (it was a Jefferson-Jackson dinner, so there were subtle hints...) but had the tickling sense that "Abraham Lincoln" might not have been precisely the right name to invoke.  I blame deficient staff work!  And Obama's own flawed madrassas upbringing, of course - when in doubt, go with "Derek Jeter".  E.Z.

MORE:  Of course Derek Jeter is not from Virginia, but they wish he was.  Michael Jordan is comparably iconic, but those Virginia basketball fans can't be trusted to get over the North Carolina thing.

PILING ON:  The Politburo has a YouTube clip and challenges folks to judge Obama's unprompted speaking skills for themselves; he also heard the same "My cousin Dick Cheney" story in Hartford.

Krugman Jumps The Shark, Assails The Shark After Lauding The Shark

Krugman's latest column is a laugher in which he explains that Barack Obama is the New Nixon. Geez, Nixon - gained fame during a popular Administration, dogged by scandals real and imagined, hated by the other side - who is Krugman supporting again?

Krugman's imaginative plot twist produces repeated kicks to Krugman's left buttock by irate commentators from that side of the spectrum.  Krugmania first:

In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, running against Dwight Eisenhower, tried to make the political style of his opponent’s vice president, a man by the name of Richard Nixon, an issue. The nation, he warned, was in danger of becoming “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland.”

The quote comes from “Nixonland,” a soon-to-be-published political history of the years from 1964 to 1972 written by Rick Perlstein, the author of “Before the Storm.” As Mr. Perlstein shows, Stevenson warned in vain: during those years America did indeed become the land of slander and scare, of the politics of hatred.

And it still is. In fact, these days even the Democratic Party seems to be turning into Nixonland.

...

Supporters of each candidate [Billary or Barack] should have no trouble rallying behind the other if he or she gets the nod.

Why, then, is there so much venom out there?

I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody.

Well.  First of all, Krugman presents this venom as a bad thing. Yet it was only a few weeks ago that he derided Barack for being overly conciliatory and lauded John Edwards and FDR for being divisive:

At one extreme, Barack Obama insists that the problem with America is that our politics are so “bitter and partisan,” and insists that he can get things done by ushering in a “different kind of politics.”

At the opposite extreme, John Edwards blames the power of the wealthy and corporate interests for our problems, and says, in effect, that America needs another F.D.R. — a polarizing figure, the object of much hatred from the right, who nonetheless succeeded in making big changes.

Over the last few days Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards have been conducting a long-range argument over health care that gets right to this issue. And I have to say that Mr. Obama comes off looking, well, naïve.

So, is Krugman making any sense at all?  Why ask me?  Let's hand the mike to some folks from the left; Ross Douthat of The Atlantic can start us off:

With friends like Paul Krugman, Hillary Clinton doesn't need enemies...

Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings:

Paul Krugman's column today is just bizarre...

...

Note to self: whenever someone writes an article that doesn't reference any specific individual, just a mindset attributed to an entire group of people, beware.

I have no doubt that most of the venom that Krugman sees comes from Obama supporters. He has, after all, been on an anti-Obama tear for several months now. But he is an economist, and economists should know enough about basic social science techniques to be able to ask: am I working from a genuinely random sample? In the case of, say, Krugman's email, the answer would have to be: no.

Next question: are there any better sources of information out there? Well, yes. For one thing, there are the Super Tuesday exit polls:

"Nearly two-thirds -- 72 percent -- of Democratic voters said they'd be satisfied with Clinton as the nominee, and 71 percent said they'd be happy with Obama."

Or, to put the same point slightly differently:

"Just 49 percent of Democrats who voted for Clinton said they would be satisfied if Obama won, while just 52 percent of Obama voters said they would be satisfied if Clinton won."

Note that there's a lot of room between being "satisfied" and being venomous.

Isaac Chotiner of TNR:

Paul Krugman's shockingly incoherent column today, 'Hate Springs Eternal,' begins by darkly referencing the Nixon years...

Oh, well - Krugman is a creature of this era of extreme political partisanship, and has demonized those with whom he disagrees for decades [see Kuttner v. Krugman].  Just now it is Obama's turn, but McCain will be identified as the locus of all evil (and corruption!) soon enough.

 

Too Little Planning, Too Few Troops

The NY Times gets ahold of a non-classified 2005 RAND study about the US effort in post-war Iraq:

After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called “Rebuilding Iraq.” RAND researchers provided an unclassified version of the report along with a secret one, hoping that its publication would contribute to the public debate on how to prepare for future conflicts.

But the study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key.

A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war. That assessment parallels the verdicts of numerous former officials and independent analysts.

The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.

The Defense Department led by Donald H. Rumsfeld was given the lead in overseeing the postwar period in Iraq despite its “lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution.”

The State Department led by Colin L. Powell produced a voluminous study on the future of Iraq that identified important issues but was of “uneven quality” and “did not constitute an actionable plan.”

Gen. Tommy R. Franks, whose Central Command oversaw the military operation in Iraq, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what the military needed to do to secure postwar Iraq, the study said.

This is troubling:

One serious problem the study described was the Bush administration’s assumption that the reconstruction requirements would be minimal. There was also little incentive to challenge that assumption, the report said.

“Building public support for any pre-emptive or preventative war is inherently challenging, since by definition, action is being taken before the threat has fully manifested itself,” it said. “Any serious discussion of the costs and challenges of reconstruction might undermine efforts to build that support.”

Even paranoids have real enemies and even pessimists have valid objections.

Too few troops to provide security or seal the border:

General Franks’s command, the study asserted, also assumed that Iraq’s police and civil bureaucracy would stay on the job and had no fallback option in case that expectation proved wrong. When Baghdad fell, the study said, American forces there “were largely mechanized or armored forces, well suited to waging major battles but not to restoring civil order. That task would have been better carried out, ideally, by military police or, acceptably, by light infantry trained in urban combat.”

A “shortfall” in American troops was exacerbated when General Franks and Mr. Rumsfeld decided to stop the deployment of the Army’s First Cavalry Division when other American forces entered Baghdad, the study said, a move that reflected their assessment that the war had been won. Problems persisted during the occupation. In the months that followed, the report said, there were “significant tensions, most commonly between the civilian and military arms of the occupation.”

The poor planning had “the inadvertent effort of strengthening the insurgency,” as Iraqis experienced a lack of security and essential services and focused on “negative effects of the U.S. security presence.” The American military’s inability to seal Iraq’s borders, a task the 2005 report warned was still not a priority, enabled foreign support for the insurgents to flow into Iraq.

As to why this was not published, the official story is that the Army was not satisified; the unofficial spin was that the Army generals did not want to antagonize Rumsfeld.  That strikes me as too pat - a report that also criticizes the White House and the State Dept really does stray from the initial assignment, which was to help the Army assess out how to improve its own conduct.

 

Sunday Open Thread

I see on Drudge that some new states have checked in with primary/caucus results - looks like Obama is flying and Hillary's crying (again).