GO, RICK SANTORUM, GO!

I'm in sympathy with Kos's suggestion that Michigan Democrats cross over to the GOP race to vote for Mitt Romney (although somebody needs to tell Kos that it's hard to do something like this surreptitiously when you announce it in a public forum to 800,000 readers).

I like the idea not because I enjoy pranks or want to sow confusion in the GOP, but because, if John McCain wins Michigan, he may be on a glide path to the Republican nomination -- he's also leading in South Carolina, and if he wins both those states, his apparent momentum will probably mean the GOP race is over. (UPDATE: SurveyUSA says he's leading in Florida by 8 points.) I'm with Steve Benen and Tom Hilton: I worry about McCain more than any other Republican candidate. If you look at head-to-head matchups, he beats Clinton and is tied with Obama. No other Republican does as well against the Democrats.

So I'm delighted to read what Rick Santorum said to Hugh Hewitt in an interview a couple of days ago:

You know, I think right now, we're looking at the media trying to make Barack Obama the president, and make John McCain the shill for him. And I don't see, I think they know that John McCain can't win this election, and they know…it's probably the best chance for them to do it.

...John McCain will not get the base of the Republican Party. I mean, there was a reason John McCain collapsed last year, and it's because he was the frontrunner, and everybody in the Republican Party got a chance to look at him. And when they looked at him, they wait well, wait a minute, he's not with us on almost all of the core issues of...on the economic side, he was against the President's tax cuts, he was bad on immigration. On the environment, he's absolutely terrible. He buys into the complete left wing environmentalist movement in this country. He is for bigger government on a whole laundry list of issues. He was…I mean, on medical care, I mean, he was for re-importation of drugs. I mean, you can go on down the list. I mean, this is a guy who on a lot of the core economic issues, is not even close to being a moderate, in my opinion. And then on the issue of, on social conservative issues, you point to me one time John McCain every took the floor of the United States Senate to talk about a social conservative issue. It never happened.

... John McCain looks at things through the eyes, on these kind of domestic policy issues, looks at it through the eyes of the New York Times editorial board, and accepts that predisposition that if you are not, if you stand for conservative principles, there’s some genetic defect.

Ouch -- that last one's really gotta hurt.

This isn't coded criticism by a political midlister known only to insiders and mavens -- it's a full-on assault by a nationally known figure.

More like this, please. (And so what if he's dead wrong about McCain's general-election chances? I'd love for him to mislead Republican voters that way.)

I want to see Rick Santorum on every Sunday talk show and prime-time cable news program in America. I want him to get a massive op-ed in a big-circulation newspaper. If I were a millionaire, I'd want to buy full-page ads in The New York Times and USA Today to spread his message.

It's pathetic. In every election cycle, Republicans eviscerate Democrats; in most election cycles --like the one we're going through now -- Democrats eviscerate Democrats. But no one ever seems to lay a glove on Republicans (well, maybe in 2006), and no Democrat even seems to be trying to criticize McCain -- a guy we know the press worships.

Sow confusion among Republicans? I want the Republicans to do that to themselves.

I HAVE A BETTER IDEA: HOW ABOUT NOT RUNNING AT ALL? FOR ANYTHING?

Nobody (or at least nobody outside his inner circle of coat-holders) really wants Mike Bloomberg to get involved in this year's presidential race -- even some of the people who gathered in Oklahoma with him earlier this week to discuss a third-party presidential candidacy backed away from endorsing him -- but he's just soldiering on regardless; Unity08 seems to be morphing into a Draft Bloomberg movement, and his people (or someone) got AP to write about his efforts to "microtarget" possible voters, which put speculation about his candidacy on the front pages of two local papers yesterday.

And now today, from The New York Sun -- which loves the idea of a Bloomberg presidency -- we have an alternate scenario.

The headline is

Bloomberg for No. 2 Spot Is Tempting for Some

-- but it's not at all clear from the story who those "some" might be (other than Bloomberg's own posse and the Sun itself):

As Mayor Bloomberg eyes a run for president, candidates from both parties are likely eyeing him -- and his billions of dollars -- for the no. 2 spot on a ticket.

Spoiler alert: The assertion that candidates are "likely eyeing him" isn't supported by anything in the story. We're told that Bloomberg has bags of money. We're told a #2 slot "would allow him to stay in the national spotlight and spearhead initiatives in areas he has focused on as mayor, including the environment and public health." And we're told this (which, I must confess, I fell for recently):

A breakfast at a Midtown Manhattan diner in November set off a torrent of speculation that an Obama-Bloomberg ticket could surface this year, and talk of a possible partnership between Senator McCain and Mr. Bloomberg began when the Republican candidate praised the mayor's record on education during a debate on December 12.

Also this (which is true):

A former opinion columnist for the New York Times, William Safire, predicted in a piece that ran in the Times on December 31 that Messrs. McCain and Bloomberg would team up.

But we're never given any evidence whatsoever that any candidate is seriously looking at him as a running mate.

Let's dispense with the McCain scenario first: He's looking more and more like the eventual GOP nominee -- but he's engendered widespread disgust among some members of own party, who think he's a "RINO." Why would he pick someone else who's going to alienate the base, someone who was a Republican In Name Only and then insulted the party further by dispensing with even the Republican name? As has been demonstrated repeatedly, McCain can simply pick someone satisfactory to the base (or even a base favorite), secure in the knowledge that the media will never write about that person's extreme right-wing positions as if they're extreme -- that's the way politics works in America. McCain won't need Bloomberg -- he could easily pick, say, Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee and still get centrists' votes (alas).

Obama, I'd say, wouldn't pick Bloomberg for the simple reason that Bloomberg brings nothing to the ticket whatsoever (except money, which Obama is perfectly capable of raising all by himself). In what red state is an unmarried Jewish socially liberal New Yorker who's originally from Boston going to help him?

Forget it. Not gonna happen. But I'm sure Bloomberg enjoys the flattery, and we'll see if the Sun is eventually rewarded for it in some way by the mayor.

ANOTHER DISPATCH FROM A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Peggy Noonan today, writing about Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of Iowa and the run-up to New Hampshire:

... national reporters and editors, liberated by what they thought her impending demise, rushed to get on record as never having liked her.

Oh, yeah, right -- because, prior to that, the press had been so upbeat and positive about Hillary Clinton's ambition and Hillary Clinton's honesty and Hillary Clinton's financial probity and Hillary Clinton's ability to play well with others and Hillary Clinton's hair and Hillary Clinton's voice and Hillary Clinton's relationship to her freaking cat. So, yes, that brief moment of press negativity about Clinton represented a real change, didn't it?

IT'S OK IF YOU'RE A PENIS-AMERICAN

New York Times campaign coverage:

... "We're going to make sure this state gets on the move again," Mr. Romney said. "I care about Michigan. For me, it's personal. It's personal for me because it's where I was born and raised."

Earlier in the day, after hearing from a voter who recalled his father, Mr. Romney choked up momentarily, according to a pool reporter who was present. "He was a great man, and I miss him dearly," Mr. Romney said....

What? Romney "choked up"?

HE FAKED IT! HE PLANTED THE QUESTION! ANYONE WHO VOTES FOR HIM IN MICHIGAN AFTER THIS IS JUST LETTING EMOTION SUBSTITUTE FOR COMMON SENSE! WE'RE AT WAR -- IS THIS HOW HE'LL TALK TO KIM JONG-IL?

A DISPATCH FROM AYN RAND BIZARRO WORLD

The New York Sun editorizes today about Hillary Clinton's campaign:

Mrs. Clinton claims she learned from her mistakes the last time around on health care reform, but it's hard to see how demonizing drug companies and health insurers during the campaign would set her up for a successful overhaul of the health-care system on her second try. Americans anxious about the economy want a president who will help our corporations prosper, not one who will depict vast risk-taking, innovative, and dynamic sectors of American business as public enemies.

Oh, right -- that's what Americans are really thinking as they talk about health care: Please don't do anything mean and nasty to those risk-taking, innovative, and dynamic drug and insurance companies! I beg you -- anything but that! I'd much rather die of a treatable illness!

Sure, Americans do often forget the differences between themselves and the rich, especially when fed a steady diet of misleading propaganda (see: "death tax"), and, yes, you can scare Americans with the phrase "socialized medicine," but during the first Clinton term, Big Medicine knew that it had to create a sense that the real victims of Hillarycare would be ordinary folks. Hillarycare failed not because Americans loved the drug and insurance companies, but because America thought Harry and Louise were going to have to get their cancer treated by jackbooted bureaucratic Stalinists.

This follows a gloss on Clinton's New Hampshire victory speech:

She said she would deliver on the promise that "the government will be of the people, by the people and for the people, not just the privileged few."

It was an echo of Vice President Gore's Robert Shrum-influenced disaster of a 2000 Democratic convention speech in Los Angeles, in which the Democratic Party's candidate for president vowed to take on, "Big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the HMOs," and said the president "is charged with the responsibility of fighting for all the people, not just the people of one state or one district, not just the wealthy or the powerful, all the people; especially those who need a voice, those who need a champion, those who need to be lifted up, so they are never left behind."

Gore's "disaster of a 2000 Democratic convention speech"? You mean, the one that helped give him an eight-point convention bounce? Which was followed by a solid popular-vote win?

Oh, sorry -- there I go forgetting my GOP/Randian dogma and reverting to facts.

GAIL COLLINS: EVERYBODY'S UPPER MIDDLE CLASS!

Gail Collins, writing about Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire victory in today's New York Times:

... My own favorite theory is that this week, Hillary was a stand-in for every woman who's overdosed on multitasking. They grabbed at the opportunity to have kids/go back to school/start a business/become a lawyer.

... for one moment, women knew just how Hillary felt, and they gave her a sympathy vote. It wasn't a long-term commitment, just a brief strike by the sisters against their overscheduled world.

Yeah, that's right -- the whole thing can be seen as a reaction by women who know what it's like to try to quiet a crying baby while reading urgent e-mails from clients on their BlackBerrys.

Here's the reality, from John Judis on election night (emphasis mine):

I've looked at the current Democratic exit polls....

Here are the groups in which Obama enjoyed a significant margin over Clinton: men, young voters (18-24), voters making more than $50,000, voters with post-graduate education (a good indication of professionals), independents, first time voters, voters without religious affiliation, men without children and single men, voters who said they were getting ahead financially, voters who thought the war in Iraq was the most important issue, who wanted change, and who wanted someone who could unite the country.

Here are Clinton's groups: women, particularly married women, voters over 40, voters making less than $50,000, voters without a college degree, union voters, Democrats, Catholics (an important constituency for the Democrats), people very worried about the economy, voters who thought the economy was most important, voters who valued experience, and voters who evaluated candidates on whether they "care about people like me." ...

I'm not trying to disparage upscale women who multitask, nor am I suggesting that less affluent women don't have to multitask. What I'm saying is that less affluent women are invisible to Collins. When you say "women," Collins thinks, "women of my sociocultural status." It looks as if Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire because of support from women who aren't of Collins's sociocultural status, women whose existence Collins doesn't even acknowledge.

****

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal also crunches the numbers:

In New Hampshire, Mrs. Clinton scored best with women who had lower incomes and less education as opposed to highly-paid, educated women. Half of women who earn between $15,000 and $30,000 voted for her, compared to 29% for Mr. Obama. Just 31% of women with post-graduate degrees voted for Mrs. Clinton, however, compared to 43% for Mr. Obama.

(But note the supporting quotes in the Journal story: they're from four professional women, a college student, two politicos ... and one waitress. What was I saying about less affluent women not being acknowledged?)

HILLARY AND CATHOLICS

At The New Republic's Open University blog, Casey Blake is puzzled:

John Judis notes one interesting development last night that deserves more attention than it will probably get: Hillary seems to have won the Catholic vote in New Hampshire.

What that means is not altogether clear. I'd like to see the correlation with class and gender. She may have won with older, blue-collar Catholic women. But given her identification with abortion, it still comes as a surprise....

The obvious point to make is that New England is full of Catholic Democrats who readily vote for pro-choice candidates, many of whom are Catholic as well, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry being the most obvious examples. And I can assure you, as someone who's pushing fifty and was raised Catholic in Boston, that the church of my youth was not the church of Rick Santorum and Antonin Scalia -- it wasn't obsessed with abortion and non-marital sex when I was growing up (which is when, I suspect, many of the Catholic Hillary voters were also growing up). The church's leadership may be increasingly fixated on abortion and stem cells and homosexuality these days, but the rank and file in New England doesn't share those obsessions (note, for instance, that Providence, Rhode Island, which was more than 70% Catholic in 1990, has an openly gay mayor, David Cicilline). Some Catholic leaders may be trying to turn the church into nothing more than a fundamentalist denomination that happens to have a pope, but the showy moral finger-wagging of the evangelicals just isn't New England's style.

SELF-PITY: IT'S OK IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN

It wasn't a pleasant task looking for something of value in the steaming pile of ordure that is Maureen Dowd's latest I-hate-Hillary column. However, I did spot one sentence that points to an insight, even if the passage itself isn't actually insightful. It's this, about Hillary's recent displays of emotion:

But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up.

"Nixonian"? That's not really accurate. Self-pity in politics isn't Nixonian -- it's Republican. Nixon personalized it, but Republicanism has, for most of my lifetime, been a matter of group self-pity.

Read Ann Coulter whining about liberal domination of everything in American life ("The liberal catechism includes a hatred of Christians, guns, the profit motive, and political speech.... Heresy on any of these subjects is, well, heresy"). Read Power Line on the current occupant of the Oval Office ("It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.") Listen to any talk radio host or Fox News bloviator railing against liberal domination of the media, even as he wins his time slot handily. Hear about America's "war against Christianity" -- a subject about which the best-known book is titled Persecution. And if you're into collectibles, pick up an old lapel button that says, "ANNOY THE MEDIA -- RE-ELECT PRESIDENT BUSH" (that was Poppy's slogan, but no Republican would have thought it unseemly for Junior to have distributed buttons saying the same thing).

This isn't just a Republican campaign tactic -- Republicans talk like this every day. And the political world doesn't think it's unseemly at all -- whereas if Democratic politicians try to rally voters by complaining about government policies that favor the rich and powerful, they're accused of engaging in "class warfare," even though they're speaking the truth. And if Hillary Clinton herself complains about being the target of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," she's accused of divisiveness if not clinical paranoia, even though there really was such a conspiracy.

When Hillary Clinton feels sorry for herself, it leads to banner headlines. When a Republican feels sorry for himself, it's just business as usual.

IS MIKE BLOOMBERG SMILING JUST A BIT?

He's itching to run third-party, as a self-appointed antidote to polarization, but he seems unlikely to do so if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. An Obama win in the Democratic race was starting to seem inevitable -- until the votes started coming in last night. I think that makes Mike happy.

And in the GOP, yes, the allegedly non-polarizing John McCain is looking much stronger, but really, so is Huckabee -- he's leading in Florida according to a new poll, he's strong in Michigan, and, of course, he's leading the GOP nationally according to Gallup. Yet there's no sign that any non-secularist A-list candidates in the Republican race are thinking of dropping out, so Huck really could win quite a few states against a still-divided field.

Huckabee-Clinton? Dare Mike hope?

A THEORY ABOUT HILLARY'S WIN

From dnA:

In the Iowa Caucus, when white voters didn't have the privacy of the secret ballot, they went for Obama. In New Hampshire, they're free to express how they really feel.

dnA invokes the Bradley effect:

...in which statistically significant numbers of white voters tell pollsters in advance of an election that they are either genuinely undecided, or likely to vote for the non-white candidate, but those voters exhibit a different behavior when actually casting their ballots.

I dunno. Maybe? I've felt lately that there's been less of that -- Harold Ford's narrow loss was predicted in the polls as I recall, for instance -- but maybe it really is back.

One of dnA's commenters thinks too many independents went to the GOP side to vote for McCain (and argues that "the 'politics of addition' stuff is pure fluff ... it just never, ever works"). As for me, I know quite a few older women and there really is a passionate group-solidarity feeling about the Clinton campaign; the Clinton vote isn't made up just of people who'd be equally happy with several of the Democrats.

But I put the Bradley-effect theory out there for you. What do you think?

****

UPDATE: Also see this follow-up from dnA.

Meanwhile, Jeff Fecke at Shakesville has the best post on just what could have made women say, "Enough already."

RUDY CAMPAIGN CRATERS; I OWE STEVE BENEN AN APOLOGY

I expressed skepticism about his theory, expressed more than once at the Carpetbagger Report: that "the more people see of Giuliani, the less they like him." Apparently that's exactly right:

Giuliani Sinks to Fourth in Florida

A new Datamar poll in Florida finds Mike Huckabee leading the Republican presidential primary race with 24% support, followed by Mitt Romney at 20%, Sen. John McCain at 18% and Rudy Giuliani now back in fourth place at 16%.

Two months ago, Giuliani led the GOP race....

I'll say. Check out the purple line on the graph here -- that was Giuliani. He absolutely dominated the race in Florida as late as November. No more, apparently -- and that's after he announced a strategy of concentrating on Florida.

Oh, but about that strategy:

Though former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has generally attributed his poor showing in New Hampshire to a campaign strategy that focuses on larger, delegate-rich states holding later contests, statistics compiled by ABC News indicate that he was clearly competing to win in the Granite State as hard -- if not harder -- than many of his rivals.

Statistics compiled by ABC News Political Unit and ABC News' team of off-air reporters indicate that Giuliani held more events in this first-in-the-nation primary state than any other Republican except for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in neighboring Massachusetts. He also spent more on TV ads than anyone except for Romney and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

... Giuliani's effort here has been Herculean. Romney held 176 events in New Hampshire through Tuesday, primary day, while Giuliani held 126. That's considerably more than McCain, who held 104, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who held 93.

...It turns out that Giuliani was plenty committed. It was the voters of New Hampshire who had issues.

There are other explanations. I think McCain (for non-evangelicals) and Huckabee (for evangelicals) have become what Giuliani seemed to be to some voters -- now that the war over the immigration bill is forgotten, voters reconsidering McCain are probably feeling that he does the cheerleading for the get-tough-on-Islamofascists position better than Rudy, while, for fundies, Huckabee is the secular saint Rudy seemed to be when voters envisioned him walking away from Ground Zero covered in dust.

Whatever's going on, Rudy should drop out now -- or at least stay home (maybe his numbers will get better that way). He won't, though.

CLINTON WINS

If I understand correctly, from the discussion in Chris Matthews Land at MSNBC and from the comments at Free Republic (which bear more than a passing resemblance), the conventional wisdom is now officially changed from "Getting teary-eyed was a sign what a washed-up has-been she is" to "Getting teary-eyed was a typical devious ploy by the evil Clinton, and it worked like a charm."

****

...and in a bar somewhere, Matt "Talk of Hillary Exit Engulfs Campaigns" Drudge is getting weepily blotto with Joe "McCain's Lost Weekend" Klein, after which they'll hop in a car and wrap it around a telephone pole. Or so I'd like to believe.

McCAIN'S VICTORY SPEECH

For the love of God, America, please tell me we're not going to have another president who refers to the various anti-American groups in the Arab/Muslim world as "an enemy" -- i.e., using a singular noun -- as if a secular groups and religious groups, anti-American Arabs and anti-American Persians, Shiite opponents and Sunni opponents are all one differentiated group of ragheads from Terroristan. Dammit, that's the kind of willful ignorance that got us into this Iraq mess in the first place.

Not that the GOP runners-up did much better. Hey, Mitt and Huck, I know you're just reciting your party's boilerplate, but I have a newsflash for you: People in other countries love their families. People in other countries work hard. People in other countries are patriotic.

Republicans. Feh.

****

UPDATE: McCain's exact words:

And as we confront this enemy, the people privileged to serve in public office should not evade our mutual responsibility to defeat them because we are more concerned with personal or partisan ambition. Whatever the differences between us, so much more should unite us. And nothing should unite us more closely than the imperative of defeating an enemy who despises us, our values and modernity itself.

I suppose you could say he's referring to al-Qaeda. So why is he so pleased that we're fighting in Iraq?

POLITICAL ANALYSIS FROM A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Right-wing pundit Thomas Sowell:

When it comes to personal temperament, Governor Romney would rate the highest for his even keel, regardless of what events are swirling around him, with Rudolph Giuliani a close second.

Yes, New Yorkers, you read that right: In Thomas Sowell's parallel world, Rudy Giuliani has an "even" temperament.

The simplest response to that is one word: ferrets.

MAYBE IT'S JUST THAT A CLINTON IS NEVER A FRONT-RUNNER

Or that the media never wants a Clinton to be a front-runner. I think that plus sexism plus some of her own weaknesses plus a desire on the part of voters for a big break with the past explains Hillary Clinton's current struggles, not -- as Gloria Steinem says in today's New York Times -- pure misogyny:

Women Are Never Front-Runners

THE woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father -- in this race-conscious country, she is considered black -- she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.

Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?

... If the lawyer described above had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago....

I can't give a definitive answer to the question of whether "Achola Obama" could have made it to the Senate, or to the top of the Democratic heap in the presidential contest, but to me, yes, it's imaginable. I'm a quarter-century younger than Steinem; by now, I'd say I've spent most of my life in a society in which female accomplishment (and acceptance of at least a select few members of many "outsider" groups) seems normal. (And I'd point out that Carol Moseley Braun was recorder of deeds in Cook County, Illinois, when she was elected to the Senate.)

I'll note that a black woman with a funny name did, in fact, make it to the top of a Marist national poll of Republicans in February 2006:

Republicans' top picks for their party’s presidential nomination also include a woman: Although Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she is not interested, she is a top contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Most Republicans would like to see her on the campaign trail in 2008 and would back her candidacy against the current Democratic frontrunners....

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice receives 22% among Republicans and Republican leaning independents as does former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Senator John McCain. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Governor Mitt Romney, Governor George Pataki, Senator Bill Frist, Senator George Allen, Senator Chuck Hagel, Congressman Tom Tancredo, and Senator Sam Brownback trail....

And although she lost to Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in a hypothetical '08 matchup among respondents surveyed, she beat John Kerry.

Steinem writes:

I'm not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That's why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love.

Except that by writing this piece and sending it to The New York Times, Steinem is helping to stir up precisely the kind of friction the news media love.

And I don't agree with this:

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

I'd say she's seen as divisive by her Clinton-ness. I'd say her critics start with that, then pile on whatever's at hand, both legitimate criticism of her as an individual and, yes, a hell of a lot of boilerplate sexism. But Clinton-hate is the seedbed.

Nor do I agree with this:

... What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

I'm sorry, but Steinem is living in the past -- yes, it's an overdue breakthrough that we finally have a woman who could really be elected president, but that doesn't make voting for a woman a radical act. What's happening is that the groupthink of the system has caught up with the mood of the country, a large portion of which doesn't think having a female president is a radical notion.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers....

Well, we simply can't break all the barriers at once -- no candidate who's currently running is non-white, non-male, and non-establishment.

Actually, Condi Rice comes closest -- but I sure as hell am not going to vote for an architect of Bush's foreign policy, if she emerges from a brokered GOP convention as the nominee, just so I can help break some barriers. And I trust Steinem feels the same way.

JUST LIKE BILL CLINTON AND HAROLD FORD, EXCEPT FOR THE BEING-IN-THE-SAME-ROOM-WITH-THE-WOMAN PART

Wow, right-wingers really are desperate. Barack Obama is surging and they really, really want to follow time-tested character-assassination scripts in dealing with him, but they're having trouble making the scripts work in his case.

But that doesn't mean they're not going to try. Today, via Memeorandum, I see that a righty blog from Wisconsin has posted a big hubba-hubba picture of former Star Trek: Voyager star Jeri Ryan, all curves and blond tresses, accompanying the following:

The Woman Who Changed the World

...After unsuccessfully challenging strong Democratic incumbent Bobby Rush in a Congressional primary in 2000, Obama returned in 2004 to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald.

... Obama ... had a formidable challenge in Republican Jack Ryan. Ryan was an impressive candidate....

Yet Ryan had a problem -- during the campaign, he was going through a messy divorce from actress Jeri Ryan, of "Star Trek: Voyager" fame. Details of Jeri Ryan's testimony contained lurid details about Ryan forcing his wife to go to sex clubs in Paris. These details were toxic to Jack Ryan's campaign, and he saw his poll numbers plummet -- eventually, Republican leaders pressed Ryan to quit the race, fearing he was toxic to the statewide ticket.

Eventually, Ryan bowed out, leaving the Illinois Republican Party to find a candidate to run against Obama. This led to the national embarrassment of Alan Keyes moving to Illinois to run.

...The rest is history.... it's fascinating to think that the salacious testimony of a woman scorned could one day fundamentally alter the path of the world in which we live. Without it, Barack Obama could still be sitting in the Illinois statehouse, planning his next political move.

Oh, that's genius: The text says the black guy didn't deserve to get where he is on his own merits, while the picture links the black guy, in your mind, with a hot blond chick. It's a racist two-fer -- and the sex part doesn't even require any actual sex, or even that the black guy and the hot blond chick have even met. We've gone from Clinton actually having sex with Monica Lewinsky to Harold Ford just attending a Playboy-sponsored party to Obama being linked in your mind with a blonde who was married to his opponent.

This got picked up first by a righty radio host from Wisconsin, Charlie Sykes (he didn't even post the text, just a link and the picture), by the midlist righty blog Uncorrelated (two pictures, the one that's in the original post and a huge shot of Ryan in skintight Borg wear from the TV show) ... and, now, by Michelle Malkin (no picture at the post, but the sidebar at her main page does tease with side-by-side photos of Obama and Ms. Ryan).

The good news is that they're really struggling to find ways to smear Obama. The bad news is that they'll never stop trying.

HOW THEY'LL TRY TO BEAT HIM

If, as seems increasingly likely, Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, won't the press just do to him what's usually done to Democratic presidential nominees (especially if he's running against Saint McCain)?

Yeah, probably. But how exactly? After they get over their initial wave of Obamamania and remember he's a dirty Democrat, how are the journalists going to try to bring him down?

Well, here's a New York Times blog post. It quotes Obama at a campaign appearance today. And although Obama said nothing at all that was Clintonesque, here's the headline:

Obama's Thinking About Tomorrow

That's one trick they'll pull: They're going to try to say, He's Bill Clinton all over again. Ewwww, Slick Willie Version 2.0. A young, smooth-talking guy with sex appeal. We can't have that, can we?

I realize people like Bill Clinton, but it seems to me that they heard they hated Bill and Hillary so much in the past year that it was part of the reason Hillary lost her lead and now probably won't get the nomination. Can journalists (with GOP talking-point help) turn a non-Clinton into (their stereotype of) a Clinton?

We'll see.

STUPIDEST BLOG POST OF THE YEAR SO FAR

Dan Riehl, in response to Drudge's "news"flash predicting a possible early exit from the race by Hillary Clinton:

...One cannot be re-born until you die. What better way to do it than to plant the story of your demise, eventually pinning it on the underhanded dealings of a presumably noble competitor's campaign? Nothing like sucking the wind out of your competitions headline grabbing success with a staged funeral that doesn't take place. I don't buy it at all.

Yeah, that makes so much sense, Dan: Vast numbers of people (righties, lefties, pundits) slaver at the prospect of kicking Hillary and her husband when they're down -- so she would strategically plant a story that says, effectively, "I'M DOWN!" Oh, that would be so shrewd, wouldn't it?

Yeah, just imagine: You're in a race in which many voters would be perfectly content with several of the front-runners -- yet now the polls are showing that human nature is kicking in and voters are gravitating toward the new apparent leader. So you'd make him look even more like a winner and yourself as even more like a loser? Wow. That's just brilliant -- and so likely to succeed.

Dan must be imagining that front-rank political strategists pursue campaign success the way some (mostly male) placers of personal ads pursue true love, i.e., by making themselves sound as awful as humanly possible ("Bitter, unsuccessful middle aged loser wallowing in an unending sea of inert, drooping loneliness looking for 24 year old needy leech-like hanger-on to abuse with dull stories, tired sex and Herb Alpert albums"). That, of course, works so well in the romantic sphere. Is that what you're thinking, Dan? Is that what you'd do (in one of these situations or the other)?

RON PAUL WILL ABSOLUTELY RUN THIRD-PARTY

OK, I have no solid evidence of that -- but isn't that the usual meaning of this weasel-phrase?

...For weeks rumors have swirled that Paul, who trails his opponents in national and state polls, will eventually run as an independent or libertarian candidate.

"I have no intention of doing that," Paul told The Trail....

Of course, I don't know why he's bothering with the standard dodge, when Mike Bloomberg seems to have rewritten the rules on this kind of white lie -- on New Year's Eve, Bloomberg told Ryan Secrest, "No, I will not run for president," yet there he is in Oklahoma today, bearing cheesecakes (Junior's, judging from this picture) and clearly seeking a third-party endorsement from like-minded "third way" types who are getting on in years and really should be watching their cholesterol. But Ron Paul's kinda old-school, which explains, I guess, why he sticks with the time-honored wording for his non-denial denial.

And by the way, if you missed it over the weekend, please note that the crowd at Alexander Cockburn's CounterPunch seems really enthusiastic about the right-wing kook. Just what we need -- a Ralph Nader who's not even right on as many as two issues.

"OBAMBI," VERSION 2.0

I actually don't think this was written with malign intent (it's by a Massachusetts playwright and the woman he sometimes collaborates with, not by any of the right's usual hatchet-people) -- but, given how desperate Republicans are to find a way to recalibrate their '08 campaign now that Hillary Clinton seems far from inevitable, I think Rupert Murdoch's New York Post decided to publish it today with malign intent:

BAM: OUR 1ST WOMAN PREZ?

... it's not only Obama's policies and strategies that appeal to women. He is like a woman: slim, good looking, with long elegant fingers, appealingly dressed -- all terms more typically ascribed to female candidates.

Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel: Obama fit right in for reasons beyond race.

Hillary has long been accused of androgyny -- trying to sound like a man, flexing her rhetorical muscle -- but on Thursday night it was Obama who won the androgyny sweepstakes.

...Women are gravitating to Obama out of ... the desire to invite him to our book club, join him for coffee or have him coach our child's soccer team. He embodies many of the positive characteristics we tend to regard as feminine: sensitive and empathetic, seeking to find common ground and minimize conflict, not taking power for granted. We've yet to catch Obama beating up an opponent.

... Bill Clinton, who was famously dubbed America's first black president, provides a useful typecasting precedent. By the end of this year we might indeed have our first woman president -- but not necessarily Hillary.

The writers of this piece, as I've said, don't seem to be right-wing apparatchiks. Yes, Lucy Berrington used to work at Murdoch's Times of London, where she did write a piece about British women converting to Islam, but that article was sufficiently non-alarmist that it's been reprinted at this pro-Islam site; more recently, I find a soft Boston Globe story with her byline, about the similarities between house-hunting and boyfriend-hunting. Her collaborator, Jeff Onore, is a Massachusetts-based playwright, poet, and "sinister/humorous" singer/songwriter. It's conceivable that these two read Michelle Malkin every day with their morning coffee, but I doubt it.

But the piece is highly useful to Murdoch. The Post wasn't about to hold it until after New Hampshire because, I think, he'd still like Hillary to be the nominee (easier to beat, more conducive to selling newspapers and drawing right-wing eyeballs to his media properties). Also, right-wingers are desperate for lines of attack in the case of Obama -- I think they sense they can't attack him directly (at least in above-the-radar media outlets) as a black man.

Calling him a woman is perfect -- it's the exact opposite of the usual racist attack on black men's sexuality, and yet it has perfect plug-and-play compatibility with the usual attack on Democrats. And the specific argument -- that his charisma shows he's weak and testosterone-deficient -- is Rovian in the way it turns Obama's greatest strength into a weakness.

Maureen Dowd, I suspect, just sent Berrington and Onore a gift basket, because reading their article made it possible for her to knock out her next column in ten minutes.

EVEN I HAVE MORE OF A LIFE THAN THIS GUY

Can't somebody find Alan Keyes a simple, harmless hobby? As far as I know, this (from alankeyes.com) is not a joke:

Iowa GOP refuses to report Keyes votes

DES MOINES, Iowa -- The Iowa Republican Party has neither counted nor reported the number of votes for Alan Keyes in the GOP caucuses held Jan. 3.

"We didn't have the electronic means to record the tallies for Keyes, so we can't yet report to the public how many votes Keyes got," said John Lund at the Iowa GOP headquarters in Des Moines. "We can't report the Keyes votes until we've double-checked each individual paper ballot."

Meanwhile, the Iowa GOP widely reported the vote tallies of all other candidates, including Tom Tancredo, who got 5 votes despite having quit the race.

"I personally traveled with Alan Keyes across Iowa, and we met scores of Keyes voters. It's totally unfair these citizens' votes are now being withheld from the public," said Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt. "This is tantamount to election fraud."

"I voted for Alan Keyes," said Siena Hoefling of Calhoun County. "It's ridiculous they didn't report my vote. Each precinct could have easily called or emailed the vote tallies to headquarters, so they should have been counted by now."

..."This resembles a 'communist-style' approach to electoral politics," said Stephen Stone, chairman of Alan Keyes for President. "In the former Soviet Union, political officials limited voters' choices in a way that created merely the illusion of democracy, without the reality. Any undue interference with free and open elections, of the sort we think we just witnessed, is un-American." ...

No one has counted the "scores" of Alan Keyes votes! (Yet.) It's a national scandal! Clearly we live in a Stalinist dictatorship!

Scrapbooking, Alan. I hear scrapbooking is very relaxing. Chess. Bowling. Anything. C'mon, Alan -- you need something new to occupy your time.

AH WIMOWEH AH WIMOWEH AH WIMOWEH AH WIMOWEH

Maureen Dowd says a lot of things about Barack Obama in today's column, but I find it odd that the first thing she says is this:

The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again.

Hmmm -- a lion? Why a lion? What's going through her head?

Could it be something like this?

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight
In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight....

Maybe I'm reading too much into her words, but it's an odd metaphor, no? I suspect Dowd can't look at Obama without thinking about the jungles of the Dark Continent or whatever.

Oh, and this column marks the third time she's used the phrase "smooth jazz" in reference to Obama. Make of that what you will.

****

Oh, but Dowd doesn't spare Hillary Clinton, of course:

She claimed that she disliked the red state, blue state terminology -- "We are one country," she said, echoing Obama -- even as she added that she should be the nominee because she's the best one "to withstand the Republican attack machine."

What she doesn't mention is that she knows how to fight off the Republican attack machine because she and her husband were so adept at revving it up.

Translation: Bitch asked for it.

MORE LEFTIES FOR RON PAUL

Oh, good grief -- here's Alexander Cockburn in The Nation (subscription required):

...my favorite [presidential candidate] remains Ron Paul, rock-solid against war and empire and the neoliberal corporate state. He's a principled fellow who's won passionate support (and millions in modest cash contributions) from ordinary Americans. I recently drove down I-5 from Washington through Oregon to Northern California, and "Ron Paul" signs were almost the only ones I saw. I like the look of the people behind them.

The case for Paul as a candidate leftists can and should support is powerfully made on our CounterPunch website by Jeff Taylor, a onetime Wellstone enthusiast.... As Taylor writes, "Not only does Ron Paul represent Jeffersonian values usually termed 'conservative' or 'libertarian' today (fidelity to the Constitution, frugal government, states' rights, Second Amendment, national sovereignty), but he is also a leading example of support for Jeffersonian positions nowadays described as 'liberal' or 'leftist' (e.g. opposition not only to the Iraq War but to war in general, anti-imperialism, ending the federal war on drugs, hostility to the Patriot Act and other violations of civil liberties). This accounts for the wide appeal of the Paul campaign. It's precisely the sort of trans-ideological, cross-generational populist-libertarian-moralist coalition that I was hoping to see with a Feingold presidential campaign."

Yikes. And here's that Jeff Taylor article. I like this part:

In April 2007, Obama told the CCGA, "I reject the notion that the American moment has passed. I dismiss the cynics who say that this new century cannot be another when, in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt, we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. I still believe that America is the last, best hope of Earth. We just have to show the world why this is so." Spoken like a true neoconservative.

Yup, FDR was a neocon.

And I love the way Taylor dismisses all the real problems with Paul: Ignore the racist messages that have appeared his name because the people who call him a racist are from the corporate media; ignore his belief in the brutalities of laissez-faire capitalism because principled old Paul "opposes both the warfare state and the welfare state"; ignore "the stray neo-Confederate" and "the middle-class woman in Peoria concerned about the unconstitutional monetary system" and "the yahoo in Mississippi who thinks multiculturalism is destroying our traditional culture" who support Paul because powerful corporate interests are worse; etc., etc.

Go read the Taylor article. It worries me, because I think it's very possible that Paul will run a third-party race and I'm still not with the Democrats-can't-lose program in '08. (And that's true even if Huckabee's the nominee -- have you seen the poll results from head-to-head matchups at Real Clear Politics? Huckabee's within 5 points of Clinton and, in some polls, is as little as 5 points behind Obama, and he does better against Obama than Romney does.) I made a flip remark yesterday about voting for Nader, but really, I'm not going to go third party -- but I'm afraid a disturbingly large number of lefties might, and for Paul more than Nader.

****

UPDATE: Very good comments thread. Jeff, really -- don't try to defend Ron Paul's opposition to the Civil War, or disbelief in evolution, and expect a positive response here.

CONGRATULATIONS, BARACK OBAMA

Soon it will be your picture here.

CLASS WARFARE: IT'S OK IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN

David Brooks today:

[Brack Obama has] made John Edwards, with his angry cries that "corporate greed is killing your children's future," seem old-fashioned. Edwards's political career is probably over.

David Brooks, three paragraphs later:

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize....

...Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders' ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street.

So Obama is a Man of the Future because he rejected that tired old John Edwards class anger. And Mike Huckabee is a Man of the Future because ... he embraced class anger.

Thanks for clearing that up, David.

POOR MIKE BLOOMBERG

I'm sure he wanted to go into his ego-trip confab in Oklahoma next week with a strong showing by either the "angry" John Edwards or the "polarizing" Hillary Clinton, as a contrast to his soothing political hermaphroditism. Alas for him, the only Democrat who came out looking like a winner was the "post-partisan" -- a guy Bloomberg pointedly avoided criticizing in a snark session held just before the caucuses:

With unusually dismissive language, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg offered tart assessments of his potential presidential rivals at a news conference on Wednesday, suggesting they are offering meaningless bromides rather than serious answers to the problems confronting the country.

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Bloomberg delivered his critique in language that was both sharp and coy, and likely to draw more attention as he prepares to head to Oklahoma for a conference that is widely viewed as a possible launching pad for a third-party presidential bid.

At one point, Mr. Bloomberg appeared to take aim at his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, saying that candidates need to explain how they will fight terrorism.

"'I'm going to be tougher than the next guy' is not an answer to what you would do," the mayor said at the news conference, which was officially held to announce a drop in teenage smoking rates but veered toward the Oklahoma trip in response to a question by a reporter.

On health care, Mr. Bloomberg took a veiled swipe at former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who signed a measure requiring residents to obtain insurance or face penalties but has since distanced himself from some parts of the legislation.

"One guy had a plan that we don't know if it will work, but then he walks away from his own plan," Mr. Bloomberg said.

And on trade, the mayor seemed to be taking a dig at Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying, "Some people are in favor of free trade and then walk away from it."

...Mr. Bloomberg ... stayed away from comments that could be read as critical of Senator Barack Obama, with whom he held a well-publicized breakfast at a Manhattan diner a month ago....

Bloomberg seemingly got better news from the GOP caucus, where the much-mocked Mike Huckabee was the big winner -- but (yes, I'm perfectly aware of the fact that Lord Atrios doesn't want me to take this theory seriously) it's seems quite possible that the mainstream pundits are right (or are creating a self-fulfilling prophesy) and a big defeat for Romney paves the way for an even nastier defeat in New Hampshire, this time by John McCain, who (especially with the entire political establishment pulling for him and much of the GOP worrying about losing a November landslide) might then have a serious shot at the nomination.

Kevin Sheekey, the Bloomberg political aide who's known at City Hall as the "deputy mayor for running for president," has, as The New York Sun notes today, "said he will urge the mayor to run if 70% of Americans are convinced the country is on the wrong track and 40% have an unfavorable view of the Democratic and Republican candidates." Oops! Tough luck for Bloomie if McCain emerges victorious from the GOP scrum, because he's the only major candidate in either party who's under 40% disapproval in a recent Rasmussen poll (he's at 27%).

I'm far from sold on the McCain scenario, and I'm still not sure Clinton won't recover and defeat Obama. But a McCain-Obama race, with pundits gushing about both candidates' potential for cross-party outreach (even if McCain doesn't actually do anything of the sort, apart from possibly picking Lieberman as his running mate), would really be a nasty trick for fate to pull on the desperate-to-run Bloomie.

Then again, maybe Obama will run with his breakfast buddy Bloomberg. Can you imagine? McCain-Lieberman versus Obama-Bloomberg? I can. And if that happens, even I might have to pull the lever for Nader.

POOR MARK HALPERIN

...and John Harris. Last year they published a book called The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008. Remember the premise?

...Our conclusions all return to the same place. The long reigns of the Bushes and the Clintons are not a curiosity. They are more than a historical accident. These families have dominated American politics because, over years in the business, they have learned specific principles and practices. We call these the "Trade Secrets" of modern politics. The race for the presidency in 2008 will be framed by the examples of the past two people to hold the job. Cumulatively, their Trade Secrets are a formula: The Way to Win.

...Clinton and [Karl] Rove understand how to win elections better than anyone of their generation.

...This is an effort to identify and explain the strategies and techniques of those who have won presidential elections and policy battles over the past generation, and identify their singular skills....

Well, Rove is gone and, on the morning after the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton is the Democratic front-runner, and the front-runner over in the GOP is a guy whose campaign has been, until recently, essentially devoid of seasoned political slicksters. Who knows The Way to Win now?

Oh, and how's that "Matt Drudge Rules Our World" thing going? Well, on December 11, The New York Observer noted this about Halperin and Harris's good pal Drudge:

...Drudge has an unusually close relationship with a senior Romney strategist, Matt Rhodes....

A year ago, Rhodes signed on to Romney's campaign. Since then, Drudge-watchers have noted Drudge's consistent refusal to hype--and in many cases to even mention--negative stories about Romney.... Since last week, Drudge has unleashed a torrent of screaming, anti-Huckabee headlines, culminating in today's "exclusive" (which cites one unnamed Democrat) about the Democrats' supposed hope that Huckabee will emerge as the G.O.P. nominee.

At least on the GOP side, their cozy little world has been blown apart. Golly, I'm so sad for them. Aren't you?

OUR HORRIBLE SYSTEM: GET USED TO IT

Isn't it a good thing that we're starting to recognize the awfulness of our way of picking presidential nominees? Isn't it terrific that, as AP reported a couple of days ago, nearly eight in ten Americans oppose the disproportionate influence of Iowa and New Hampshire?

Well, no, not really. There's grumbling now, but it's no different from the grumbling about the Electoral College that took place after Al Gore beat George W. Bush by half a million votes. What happened after that? Absolutely nothing.

I could also mention the frustration of Naderites who said that if there'd been an instant-runoff voting system in 2000, votes for Nader wouldn't have hurt Gore. Hmmm -- whatever happened to that groundswell of grassroots support for IRV?

Here's the thing: It's highly unlikely that any of these systems will ever be reformed, for the simple reason that nobody is angry enough about them to want to spend months, years, maybe a decade or more, in an all-consuming struggle to change them. In each case, there are people who'll dig in their heels and defend the status quo; by contrast, few people will want to put their lives on hold to fight for reform. And that's what it would take -- that plus an alternative to the present system that could withstand the objections of defenders of the status quo and of sneering pundits, who don't see much need to reform the system because politics for them is mostly sport rather than the way democracy happens.

Oh, there is one thing we could try, at least in the case of Iowa and New Hampshire: straight cash bribes.

I'm not joking. The two states aren't going to give up their privileged status unless they get something in return, so why not bow to the inevitable and find the cash -- a lot of it if necessary -- in general tax revenues or party funds to rescue our system? I guarantee they'll fight to the death otherwise, and win. I think it would be money well spent, just because, once in my lifetime, I'd like to have some small say in who gets to run for president, and I assume you'd like that, too.

C.I.S.S. (Candidate in Satan's Service)?

Until I read this blog post from Justin Jeffre at Talk to Action, I wasn't aware of Bill Gothard. Gothard is a fundamentalist Christian whose hydra-headed organization includes a home-schooling program that, according to a recent Denver Post article, includes "strict teachings [that] prohibit rock 'n' roll." This is mentioned in the Post article because Matthew Murray, the shooter at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs -- who was a death-metal fan -- claimed he was subject to Gothard home-schooling.

Gothard, interviewed by the Post, unequivocally ascribed Murray's crime to the music:

Ultimately, Gothard blames rock music for Murray's murderous rampage.

"That is the most contributing factor," said Gothard, who is based in a small town south of Chicago. "It'd be important to see the connection between his passion to rock music and how it ultimately brought this on."

Gothard said whenever he gets calls from parents having trouble with their kids, he asks about what they listen to. "In every case, (the kid) is listening to rock music," he said.

Pretty much what you'd expect to hear from a guy who offers "Ten Scriptural Reasons Why the 'Rock Beat' Is Evil in Any Form" (example: "VIII. THE 'ROCK BEAT' OPPOSES GOD’S COMMAND NOT TO MIX LIGHT WITH DARKNESS").

So, er, who's Gothard's favorite presidential candidate?

Well, Justin has found out -- and he wants Gothard to know that the answer disturbs him:

Today I'm asking you to save the eternal soul of the man you support to be the next President of the United States - Mike Huckabee.... you and Governor Huckabee are longtime associates and ... you were photographed together at a recent "Huckabee for President" campaign event at a Houston home.

...Though it's been widely reported in the media, it may have escaped your attention that Gov. Huckabee not only loves rock music, he plays bass guitar in a rock band! I have located numerous photographs of him engaging in this activity. I must warn you that these images may disturb you, but you may click here to view them.

...For decades, you've been blaming rock music for society's problems. Now's your chance to make an international public statement, courtesy of your good friend, Rockin' Mike Huckabee. What do you have to say to this man who consistently violates one of your most cherished "Basic Life Principles," a man you want to be leader of the free world?....

Funny -- I would think this was an example of that "moral relativism" I've heard so much about, but I'm pretty sure moral relativism is limited to secular-humanist evildoers like me, whereas Christians like Gothard and Huckabee believe strictly in Absolute Truth.

ARE VOTERS RATIONAL?

I wish John Edwards were a Republican. I like what he says.

--Mayor Jim Olson of Winterset, Iowa, on ABC News last night

I hear some Republicans comment that they could support John Edwards, and I would think it's mainly his desire to break this stranglehold by big business, which I suppose is the drug companies and insurance industries and those kind of things.

--Fred Peel, retired county sheriff in Shipley, Florida, on NPR this morning

Actually, I was expecting that I would be more attracted to some Democrats, so it's very unusual that I'm here. I'm intrigued that he's in a rock band, and plays bass. He's just a fascinating human being.

--independent Iowa voter Florence Klein, who works in a natural foods store, at a Mike Huckabee campaign event, also on NPR this morning

None of this surprises me. I'll concur with Digby's response to the Rasmussen poll showing John McCain with the largest overall favorable rating of all the presidential candidates: "I can't tell you how many liberals I've talked to recently who say they'd like to vote for McCain. He's a 'straight shooter' don't you know." I used to hear that a lot about Giuliani as well. A year ago, I was surprised when Curt Schilling of the Boston Red Sox, a born-again Christian, told the Boston Herald that in 2008 he'd vote for either John McCain (whom he's since endorsed) or Barack Obama ("If they are both on the ticket it will be a tough choice"); now it doesn't seem unusual at all.

And don't get me started about lefties for Ron Paul: In the last month, I've been in both Woodstock, New York, and Taos, New Mexico, two epicenters of unreconstructed hippiedom, and the only political signs I saw endorsing presidential candidates were for Paul.

So, what the hell, maybe Obama's "post-partisan" message isn't crazy or foolishly conciliatory. Maybe he's just shrewdly tapping into the ideological incoherence of the electorate. His campaign denies buying ads on the Drudge Report, but the ads showed up there anyway; maybe advertising there would be perfect appropriate for him, given the electorate's lack of ideological coherence and his apparent appeal to voters who would be expected to disagree with him on many issues. If his campaign didn't place the ads deliberately, maybe it should have.

Of course, maybe the big winners among "post-partisans," at least tonight, are going to be John Edwards and Mike Huckabee -- who aren't post-partisan at all. Maybe we're crazy to expect it all to make sense.

WHY GIULIANI LOST

Josh Marshall and Steve Benen are feeling quite a bit of schadenfreude at the apparent collapse of Rudy Giuliani's candidacy. I agree that the prognosis is grim for Rudy's campaign -- but I'm not sure I accept Steve's argument "that the more Republicans voters see Giuliani, the less they like him," or the sense many people have that Giuliani never had a chance.

For one thing, he's still in the lead or near it in just about every national GOP poll. That's meaningless, of course, given his troubles in early states, and obviously he once led by much more -- but really, how many people thought a year ago that he would even be doing this well? The conventional wisdom then was that was so out of the GOP mainstream on so many issues that he'd be eaten alive; instead, he's still (if barely) a front-list candidate.

I'd argue that Giuliani simply ran a crap campaign.

The truth is, there's not much evidence that he knows how to win any tough election. He lost his first mayoral run, in 1989; in 1993 he was running in a city suffering from crime, crack, and recession, against an incumbent whose status in the city was roughly what Jimmy Carter's was in the country in 1980. Yet Giuliani squeaked by David Dinkins in '93, winning 51%-48%. (And no, being a Republican wasn't the kiss of death -- Fiorello La Guardia and John Lindsay had won mayoral elections as Republicans in New York.)

Giuliani won handily in 1997, but crime was down (locally and nationally) and the economy was booming, in the city and elsewhere. By contrast, when he was planning to run for Senate against Hillary Clinton in 2000, as a recent New York Times article made clear, he was an unfocused, undisciplined candidate who probably would have suffered an embarrassing loss if cancer and scandal hadn't forced him out of the race:

...As spring arrived, Mr. Giuliani had yet to give a major speech on federal issues. He was barely campaigning upstate. Mr. Giuliani dismissed the concerns of Republican leaders, explaining that he, unlike Mrs. Clinton, had a full-time job....

Mr. Giuliani headed upstate, for a Republican dinner in Binghamton. He spoke for exactly 22 minutes, stood for an eight-minute news conference, and then turned for home. Less than a week later, he abruptly canceled four upstate events because, he said, he wanted to attend the rescheduled opening game of the Yankees....

By the time Mr. Giuliani stepped in front of the cameras to announce he was dropping out, Republicans had already concluded that the mayor would not stay in the race: indeed, many were praying he would not. His cancer seemed almost beside the point.

Evidence of his lack of interest had been building for months: the erratic campaign schedule, his treatment of upstate voters, the public way he was carrying on his relationship with Ms. Nathan. His poll numbers were sinking (a New York Times/CBS News poll taken after the Dorismond episode found Mrs. Clinton leading the mayor by 10 points statewide), and he had become a punch line on late-night talk shows....

Part of his problem may be that he doesn't work with experienced pros who might be able to bring their campaign experience to bear to save him from himself. He likes yes-men and loyalists, regardless of their level of expertise; the big kahuna in his campaign is 38-year-old Tony Carbonetti, an old family friend who's never done any political work of any kind for anyone else.

And Giuliani made one mistake he absolutely couldn't recover from: He decided to blow off Iowa and New Hampshire. Giuliani compares the campaign to a nine-inning baseball game, insisting that it won't be won in the early innings; that's absolutely the wrong analogy. Trying to win a nomination without genuflecting before the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire is like trying to open a business in a Mob neighborhood and refusing to pay protection money. You might have a hell of a business plan, but you're not going to make slow, steady progress into the black if they burn down your store the first month you're open.

Smart campaign people could have told Rudy that -- but he probably wouldn't have listened anyway. And it's good thing to, because, litmus tests or no litmus tests, he's still the kind of messianic jerk Republicans love, and I still believe he could have, God help us, been a contender.

SURELY YOU WOULDN'T WANT OUR NEWS DIVISION TO BORE YOU WITH ACTUAL NEWS

An ex-network news guy talks about the post-9/11 executive decision to try to keep America stupid (and, presumably, primed for any nonsense the Bushies were ready to serve up):

A former "Dateline NBC" correspondent claims that in the aftermath of September 11, the network diverted him from reporting on al Qaeda and instead wanted him to ride along with the country's "forgotten heroes," firefighters.

John Hockenberry, who was laid off from "Dateline" in early 2005, wrote in this month's Technology Review that on the Sunday after the September 2001 attacks he was pitching stories on the origins of al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism. He claimed that then-NBC programming chief Jeff Zucker, who came into a meeting Hockenberry was having with "Dateline" executive producer David Corvo, said "Dateline" should instead focus on the firefighters and perhaps ride along with them a la "Cops," the Fox reality series.

According to Hockenberry, Zucker said "that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine." ...

More:

Another bombshell is Hockenberry's claims that General Electric, NBC's parent company, discouraged him from talking to the Bin Laden family about their estranged family member. Hockenberry asked GE, which does business with the Bin Laden family company, to help him get in contact with them. Instead, a PR executive called Hockenberry's hotel room in Saudi Arabia and read a statement about how GE didn't see its "valuable business relationship" with the Bin Laden Group as having anything to do with "Dateline." ...

Yeah, GE's a defense contractor, but I'm not sure how much political calculation is involved here. I'm more inclined to suspect network-news groupthink, according to which Americans want nothing but mush and simple emotions -- bathos, outrage, maybe a little titillation or cat-stuck-in-tree regression to childhood -- in their nightly fare. The corporations that own the other networks aren't defense contractors, yet hard news is scarce and pabulum is everywhere.

Whatever the reason, in a country that gets a disproportionate percentage of its news from TV, broadcasters' failure to give provide adequate news and information in the aftermath of 9/11 created a compound problem: People weren't learning what they needed to know, but the phony seriousness of the TV news operations made people think they were getting what news there was, so they didn't think they had to hunt elsewhere for real information.

Whether by accident or design, it was the ideal environment for the half-truths and outright lies of the Bush administration.

Hockenberry's article can be read here and here.

****

UPDATE: Bafflingly, I see that Michelle Malkin is linking the Hockenberry article; "[t]ons of readers are sending" it to her, she says. For the love of God, why? Why would right-wingers care?

I know, I know: It's an article of faith on the right that mainstream news is monolithically liberal (or worse; in an unrelated sidebar, Malkin reproduces the NBC logo in red, with a hammer and sickle replacing the C -- subtle as a flying mallet, Michelle -- because NBC won't air Ari Fleischer's Freedom's Watch propaganda ads). But fer crissakes, there's nothing liberal about refusing to do stories on al-Qaeda because you'd rather do content-free human-interest nonsense intended to turn firefighters into flavor-of-the-month heroes.

And Michelle, excuse me -- the post-9/11 "news" environment set the table perfectly for precious war in Iraq. Why on earth are you complaining? What if, thanks to a vigorous press, America had actually come to a genuine understanding of the difference between the ultrafundamentalist jihadis and the highly secular Saddam, or grasped that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were what Bush said Iraq was vis-a-vis jihadist terrorism? Surely you wouldn't have wanted that, Michelle. So count your blessings, for heaven's sake. Get down on your knees and thank God the press kept us stupid, so your agenda could sail through, and 19-year-olds could get killed in the streets of Baghdad thinking they were avenging the victims in the towers.

POVERTY IN AMERICA: THE CEOs

I've written about this before, but today the tear-jerker is on the front page of The New York Times:

Customers, Not Brokers, Profited in an Odd 2007

The brokers' customers did reasonably well. The brokers did not.

That is not the usual way of Wall Street. Two-thirds of a century ago, a best seller asked, "Where are the customers' yachts?" It noted that somehow the brokers always made money, even when their customers suffered. And so it has been for most of the years since then.

But not in 2007.

...In 2007, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index rose a respectable 3.5 percent, and high-quality bonds performed well as long-term interest rates fell.... Commodity prices continued to boom, and many foreign stock markets also did very well.... By and large, the customers of the big financial firms had reason to be pleased.

But not the bosses. The chief executives of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch were forced out, while Morgan Stanley's chief will go without a bonus for the first time anyone can remember....

So we're being told that the CEOs of Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley didn't make money. They didn't do reasonably well. They didn't profit.

Ahem:

Ex-Merrill Lynch CEO to walk out with $161.5M

Merrill Lynch's departing chief executive, Stan O'Neal, will walk away with $161.5 million in stock, options and retirement benefits, the company said Tuesday....

O'Neal left with a $131.4 million equity package of stock, options, restricted shares and restricted units. His restricted stock and restricted stock units will continue to vest on their original schedules, the company said.

He also has retirement benefits worth $24.7 million, while his deferred compensation stands at $5.4 million, according to the company. He will be entitled to an office and an executive assistant for up to three years.

Since O'Neal will keep his options and his stock grants, he could do even better if the stock rises under a new CEO, said James F. Reda, a compensation consultant. A $10 jump in the stock under new management could mean $30 million for O'Neal....

Ahem:

Ex-Citigroup chief to exit with bumper payoff

Charles "Chuck" Prince, the deposed head of Citigroup, is in line to walk away from the Wall Street giant with a total pay, perks and shares payout worth just under $100 million, it has emerged.

The payout for Mr Prince, who stays on as a consultant until the end of the year, include a pro-rata cash "incentive award" currently estimated to be worth $12 million.

It also includes $10,716,469 in restricted share awards and $16,046,703 in stock options that will automatically vest at his departure.

Mr Prince, whose exit was sealed late last week, already owns 1.61 million shares in Citi, currently worth about $53 million....

And as for poor John Mack of Morgan Stanley, well, yes, he does have to scrape by on his McDonald's-level base pay of $800,000 for the past year -- but only after receiving an all-time-record $40 million bonus the year before.

I know, I know: You're supposed to keep score differently for guys like this. Well, fine -- but don't abuse the language by describing their financial situation the way you'd describe the fate of an ordinary schmuck who's actually broke.

****


UPDATE: "$800,000" link replaced. Oh, and MSN MoneyCentral says that's "$800,000, not to mention $3 million in dividends from Morgan Stanley stock."

"OUR VALUES TRAMPLED"? WHAT DOES HUCKABEE MEAN BY THAT?

Earlier today, the Newshoggers posted a new ad about abortion from Mike Huckabee. Here it is:



The script is basically Christian-conservative boilerplate -- except for one odd phrase, which I've highlighted below:

"The pro-life position was the one espoused by our Founding Fathers when they said that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. The first one they listed was life. Nobody has a greater level of intrinsic worth or value than another person. Being unborn doesn't make you less valuable. Maybe instead of having our values trampled all over every single day and night, we would express to America what those values are: family, life, freedom -- those things matter to us. Always has, always will."

Is the key issue here really abortion -- or is it respect?

I think it's the latter at least as much as the former -- this ad is about cultural conservatives from less sophisticated parts of the country feeling sorry for themselves because their mores don't prevail everywhere in America, and because they think we evil urbane types condescend to them.

I'm reminded of what Rick Perlstein wrote in Sunday's New York Times Magazine about Harry Dent, the Democrat-turned-Republican aide to Strom Thurmond and, later, Richard Nixon who had a great deal to do with winning the South for the GOP:

...Dent claimed his truest passion was healing the South's wounded regional pride: the shame at being condescended to by Yankees....

In his 1978 memoir, "The Prodigal South Returns to Power," Dent wrote that his politics were never racist. "The aim of the Southern strategy," he claimed, was merely "to have the South treated just like any other section of the U.S.A." ...

Dent later acknowledged the racial poison in the Southern strategy, as Perlstein notes -- but that doesn't mean Dent was being purely disingenuous when he invoked regional pride. The Southern/rural side in America's permanent civil war is always worked up about pride, always seething with resentment of us snooty Yankee sophisticates. The issues change, but the battle remains the same.

****

UPDATE: I see that CNN is worried that we might have missed the point:

For the second time in the past two weeks, presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has aired a commercial in which a Christian symbol appears in the background.

In the campaign ad, Huckabee is addressing members of the Iowa Christian Alliance, an organization whose symbol is the ichthys which appears on a banner that is shown prominently at the open and close of the 30 second spot....

Er, Huckabee used to be a religious-right preacher, and the overt content of this ad is a religious-right message. Why does CNN think the important thing to take away is the sinister super-secret coded message in the background -- which, by the way, is hiding in plain sight? (See also Phil on this subject a couple of days ago.)

THE ENDLESS MIND-BOGGLING IDIOCY IS GOOD FOR US

In today's New York Times, Adam Nagourney says that photo finishes in the Iowa caucuses might leave the nomination races even more muddled than they are now.

But, he concludes, there's a bright side:

...None of this is meant to suggest that such an outcome would mean that what has taken place here over the past year is insignificant. Quite the contrary. Watching these candidates, Democrats and Republicans, deliver their final speeches, take the last rounds of questions from Iowans and shake the hands of supporters one more time, it is apparent that most of them are much better at campaigning than they were a year ago.

Mr. Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, an old Iowa caucus hand who has moved here to help out in the final days, said as much in explaining why he would be comfortable with even an inconclusive outcome. "The experience here in Iowa," he said, "has been tremendous for the entire campaign."

Yes, that's supposed to make us happy. America has endless, stupid, mind-numbing, trivia-obsessed campaigns, and we're supposed to be pleased that the potential Leaders of the Free World are now better at waging precisely such endless, stupid, mind-numbing, and trivia-obsessed campaigns than they were a year ago. We're supposed to applaud their mastery of all the wrong skills.

I'm not one of the "post-partisan" Pollyannas who think we can all get along politically and sing "Kumbaya," but do you ever wonder whether there's more bickering, more obstinacy, more drawing of lines in the sand in our politics than there could be simply because our elected officials spend so damn much time running for office? If you spend that much time contesting, aren't you inevitably going to think that fighting rather than negotiating and compromising is the normal way to proceed? Isn't it possible that the partisanship would be reduced somewhat if we just shortened the damn campaigns?

But campaigning endlessly and turning trivial differences with opponents into irreconcilable breaches is, apparently, what American democracy is all about. At least that's what I learned yesterday during a layover while watching William Bennett hold forth in a CNN segment on Mike Bloomberg's possible third-party run:

BENNETT: ... I think this is -- you know, it's a free country. You can do it if you want to do it. Right now, I think it's kind of a stinker thing to do. People have been working very, very hard, you know, for a year or more, going to every town in Iowa, every town in New Hampshire -- because this is the what we -- the way we believe democracy works.

Look, there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical about a Bloomberg candidacy -- I gave a few in the previous post -- but the only people outside Iowa and New Hampshire who think our horrible campaigns are the way they are "because this is ... the way we believe democracy works" are William Bennett and all the rest of the dug-in careerist politico scum. The rest of us hate our campaigns. We might pass on Bloomie, but not because he dared to reject our precious system for picking a president.

THE BUCKETS-OF-MONEY LIST

I was annoyed last year when David Ehrenstein, in an L.A. Times op-ed, described Barack Obama as a "Magic Negro" -- an idealized figure who, in whites' fantasies, could emerge from nowhere and magically heal what was believed to need healing. Ehrenstein wasn't entirely wrong about how some whites view Obama -- but I thought he was wrong to single Obama out as a politician whose supporters regard him as possessing "magic." Highly successful pols of all races are looked at that way (trust me on this -- I'm from a city where the JFK photos had pride of place in many homes, including my Italian-American grandmother's, for years if not decades after the assassination). Even as Ehrenstein was writing, Rudy Giuliani was positioning himself as the Magic City Slicker, able to tame Hitlery and Islamofascists the way he tamed squeegee men, and the fact that he's still leading (if barely) in some national polls, in a party whose core members have little in common with him, tells me that that the ability to inspire a belief in magic doesn't require a whole lot of melanin.

The Magic Negro, Ehrenstein tells us, is a Hollywood stock character, often played by Morgan Freeman; Freeman has a new movie out called The Bucket List, in which (I'm told -- I haven't seen it) he plays an "an intellectual who was forced by family obligations to become an auto mechanic ... wise, baritonal, and eloquent." In the movie, he and stinking-rich Jack Nicholson decide to use their declining years to do all the things they've dreamed of doing before they kick the bucket.

The Bucket List comes to mind when I read about the oldsters who plan to meet in Oklahoma next Sunday. Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, David Boren, Gary Hart, John Danforth, Christie Todd Whitman -- you can't help thinking this is a group of people who all have the same one-item bucket list: "Become president." And though the Washington Post article about the confab describes former senator Boren as the host and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article focuses on Nunn, it's clear that the whole point of this is to rally around Bloomberg, who's one of them but who is believed to have agency because, unlike them, he still wins elections, and is stinking rich to boot. He's their Magic Moneybags.

I hear from people like Andrew Sullivan that there's a profound desire in America for an end to partisan sniping, and that, in fact, the desire is greatest among Generation X-ers and their juniors. If that were true, you'd think there might be a few one- or two-term former elected officials (or unsuccessful candidates) under fifty, or even under forty, at the Bloomberg confab -- young post-partisans who see a new world just waiting to be born and seek help from wise snowy-haired sages in bringing the new into being. But no -- the group consists solely of the decidedly aged.

Some people really believed this would be the election cycle that ended poisonous partisanship; instead, what we have is the partisanship expanding so much that it's now gone intramural. Primary seasons can get ugly, but this is the first one I can remember in which it seems utterly impossible for any of the people who could really win the nomination (Obama and Clinton, Huckabee and Romney) to mend fences and join up as a ticket, for reasons that have nothing to do with political stances and everything to do with how much the candidates seem to hate each other.

So I think we're stuck with anger and partisanship. And yes, I think Bloomberg will join the race -- Ross Perot with a posse -- as the guy who's angry at anger, thus increasing the anger quotient.

Happy New Year. New posts soon...