Is it real?

Why are so many political reporters so cynical about the candidates they cover? Well, Jonathan Martin today rightly wonders whether any of the attacks made by candidates on each other in party primaries are sincerely meant, or are just for show--and shows what he means by going back to some old John McCain primary quotes.
(Not only does this help us understand cynicism, but it also makes me worry even more about John McCain. Does this guy realize how stuff like the below makes him look?):

Which gets me to the purpose of a primary.

After going at it hammer and tong, candidates would just as soon erase what was said and focus on the general election.

Implied is that, ya know, it was all sort of a show and we didn't really mean it.

Such is what John McCain would have us think about his nasty race against Mitt Romney of just a few weeks ago.

But just as when the stray blow does connect in the wrestling ring, there were some real shots taken in that race that can't easily be dismissed.

This is what McCain said on January 28th, the day before the decisive Florida primary: "The truth is, Mitt Romney was a liberal governor of Massachusetts..."

Nearly two months to the day, McCain said this yesterday while traveling with said liberal governor: "He came to a very liberal state [Massachusetts] and campaigned as a conservative and governed as a conservative."

So, which is it?

If it's the latter, should we just discount whatever is said in a primary as not meaning anything?

Now you know why reporters always like to extract a grudging pledge during the nomination battles that, whatever happens, a given candidate will ultimately endorse the the nominee.

Will anybody be left standing, or watching?

So for the Democrats' most recent debate, the audience fell to less than 1 million. Meanwhile, Republicans in South Carolina are advancing the date for their debate, which is leading to a chain reaction in New Hampshire and in Iowa--the first votes for the 2008 presidential primary nominations may be cast in December 2007. We may already be seeing the first signs of campaign fatigure. Imagine what it'll be like by November 2008.

Catfight!

A different kind of attack ad.

Voices of moderation

From CQ Today, concerning another Washington battle over the budget: "“They’ve been stalling,’’ said John W. Olver, D-Mass., chairman of the House Transportation-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee. “They are nihilists. They are jihadists.”

Protecting John Doe, terrorist tipster

Hmmm. I'm surprised Democrats have been so resistant to this: "After nearly a week of intense, behind-the-scenes wrangling, congressional negotiators late Tuesday agreed to include in the pending Sept. 11 security bill sweeping liability protections for citizens who report to authorities suspicious activity they fear might be linked to terrorism. The "John Doe Protections" provision is meant to address the so-called "Flying Imams" case wherein six Muslim clerics in March sued passengers aboard a U.S. Airways flight because the passengers reported them to authorities, leading to their detention. The clerics were later cleared but their lawsuit, many lawmakers feared, would discourage future vigilance among the flying public.
The Sept. 11 security bill is a top Democratic priority and Republicans fought hard to include the passenger immunity protection, creating common cause with Connecticut Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the conference committee that is knitting together the House and Senate bills." I found this info here. i see Rudy Giuliani meanwhile had no hesitation in endorsing this provision.

Short memories

Washington politicos continue to wander about in the wake of the other night's slumber party. Hmmm, but note this, from the article: "After the results were tallied, Reid asked GOP leaders to accept simple-majority votes. When they refused, Reid announced that the debate would be suspended, possibly until after Labor Day or until Republicans dropped their filibuster. He called the 60-vote requirement "a new math that was developed by the Republicans to protect the president."

Really. I seem to remember that, when the Republicans were in the majority not long ago and trying to (for example) confirm conservative judges, Democrats and Harry Reid had no compunction about using the filibuster.

Update on yesterday's slumber party

Well, let's see, so what did the Democrats' accomplish yesterday?

Well, Republicans defeated their bill seeking an early withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
Turns out that Harry Reid wasn't even there for most of the snoozefest--he slept through much of it.

Reid's "strategy" gave Senator John McCain the opportunity to give what was at times a brilliant speech, defending the need to stay in Iraq, on the Senate floor---you can find the text of it here.

And overall, Reid's overall strategy was eviscerated by the wily Republican from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell---Ed Morrissey explains how:

Here's what Reid wanted. He knew that he didn't have enough votes for a quorum; he only has 49 Democrats available, with Tim Johnson's disability. Reid counted on Republicans forcing an end to the session by having a single member present to challenge for a quorum. No votes could take place without one, including the instruction motion to the Sergeant-at-Arms to arrest recalcitrant members and drag them back to the chamber. That would have allowed Reid and the Democrats to accuse Republicans of dodging the debate, calling them cowards to take the spotlight off of their insistence on retreat.

Many expected the Republicans to do just that, but it turns out that Mitch McConnell is a little smarter than Harry Reid. Instead of denying Reid a quorum, the Republicans showed up for the debate, perhaps charged up by John McCain's earlier speech on the floor. Once Reid figured out that the Republicans would not give him the satisfaction of walking out the door, he caved. In fact, Reid didn't even bother to attend his own No Snooze Until We Lose party after the first instruction motion, choosing to hit the sack instead while Republicans took the podium all night long.

The Democrats' slumber party

It's a rather silly gambit--the Democrats want to debate the Iraq war all night. To highlight...what? That the Bush administration disagrees with you? What a shock. Well, not to worry--some conservatives have found some good slogans for the Dems' venture. For example:
No Snooze Until We Lose." Or: "No Sleep Until We Retreat.”

Mrs. Edwards hassles Hillary

Her criticism of Senator Clinton can be found in this Salon interview, here; as Drudge is reporting, Elizabeth Edwards said in part: "Sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women's issues...I'm not convinced she'd be as good an advocate for women. She needs a rationale greater for her campaign than I've heard..."

Hmmm. What's going on here? Several things, I think: 1] Senator Clinton remains the frontrunner among Democrats for the 2008 party presidential nomination. John Edwards right now sits 3rd, at best. The Edwards campaign needs to knock Hillary down a bit, to create a buzz. One way to do that is to attack. 2] But John Edwards doesn't want to attack himself. That would look too "divisive" and "negative." 3] Plus, maybe he doesn't want what would appear to be, among many Democratic and liberal women, the negative connotations of a man attacking a woman. So 4] have his wife do it. And how can the Clinton campaign retailiate? It won't be easy to do so. After all 5] Elizabeth Edwards has cancer.

Interesting strategy; we'll see what happens. UPDATE: likely the above is part of a concerted strategy to have Mrs. Edwards play a larger role in her husband's campaign, in order to boost his standing among Democratic women. See for example the latest Edwards campaign ad, which features his wife.

Wild man James Webb

The Senator from Virginia shows his temperamental, angry side again (remember his little flare-up last winter at the White House, when President Bush tried to ask about his son?).

If Senator Webb thinks these displays impress a lot of people, I suspect he's mistaken.

Rolling with the polls

Three very early polling numbers concerning the 2008 presidential election caught my eye.
1] On the Democratic side, Senator Hillary Clinton continues to lead in New Hampshire--but not by much. She leads Barack Obama only by 27%-23%. Not much of a lead; the Clinton campaign has tried so mightily to make Hillary seem as the "inevitable" winner. So far, it's not succeeding.
2] People say Rudy Giuliani can't win the GOP nomination, or that he's badly slipping. I dunno-here, an American Research Group poll has him, nationally, leading the field by 13 points. And
3] in state polls, in Pennsylvania Giuliani leads the Republican field by 26 points. He also leads in Ohio.

There's a long way to go, but 2008 shapes up as a very interesting year. Hillary is not inevitable. And Rudy can win.

Who?

Admit it, that's what you said when you saw the headline for this story.

And that's why he's dropping out...

Whispers caught on tape...

Both John Edwards and Hillary Clinton would like to exclude rinky-dink, third-tier candidates from future Democratic presidential debates. No surprise there. Some buzz about it for the past day or so. But remember--most ordinary Americans won't care about this. It's too inside-baseball, political-junkie-ish. Always remember that most ordinary Americans are too busy with the details of their daily lives to care mush about this kind of stuff.

More hate speech...

And it comes from what you'd think would be an unlikely source:

Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams came from Ireland to Texas to declare that President Bush should be impeached. In a keynote speech at the International Women's Peace Conference on Wednesday night, Ms. Williams told a crowd of about 1,000 that the Bush administration has been treacherous and wrong and acted unconstitutionally.
"Right now, I could kill George Bush," she said at the Adam's Mark Hotel and Conference Center in Dallas. "No, I don't mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that."

Whither the McCain campaign?

The political world is abuzz today over the resignations of two top staffers to the presidential candidacy of Senator John McCain; some details here. This, on top of the Arizona senator's relatively poor fundraising numbers and other staff layoffs announced recently, has some wondering if McCain is about to quit the campaign.

My prediction: don't bet on it. Remember the McCain temperament and personality. He's feisty, he's stubborn, he loves to go for broke and to do exactly what conventional wisdom would tell him not to do. At times, this has led him in my opinion into some unwise moves; it was stupid, not to mention suicidal, for him in 2000 to basically wage a frontal assault against religious conservatives; and this year's immigration bill didn't deserve McCain's stubborn support. Now, however, being down in the polls and already pronounced dead by some pundits, McCain will think he's got this situation right where he wants it. With nothing to lose, he can shoot from the hip and do whatever he wants; the revival of the Straight Talk Express, etc etc etc. You can hear it now. So he won't quit.

But he won't become the GOP nominee, either.

Quote of the day

From a recent piece by the LA Times' Ronald Brownstein on the record so far amassed by the Democratic majority in Congress: "Relentless argument and sparse achievement isn't an ideal formula for success."

To be fair, that's something that needs to be said to congressional Republicans, too.

Barack Obama's money: another view

Have to admit, Michael Tomasky here makes a good point: "Political insiders in America are virtually unanimous: Barack Obama came out of the starting gate like gangbusters but ever since has been a disappointment, performing listlessly in debates and losing (some) ground to Hillary Clinton in poll after poll. So what's the matter with these 250,000 people who keep giving his campaign money, to the point that he out-raised Clinton (in usable dollars) for the second straight reporting period? Do these people have no respect for the experts?"

And these donors haven't maxed out; they can still give Obama more money down the line. Maybe too the younger people backing Obama haven't shown up in polls. The key question: will all these donors (remember, folks, the average presidential candidate usually at this point has 60,000 donors, tops!) translate into primary votes?

Political junkiedom dept.

By the way, if you haven't read, or at least read about, long-time Democratic Party political consultant Bob Shrum's tell-all memoir, check it out (here for example is an interesting review).

Shrum claims for example that John Edwards wanted to vote against authorizing war with Iraq in 2002; but he let political consultants (including Shrum) talk him into it. In 2004, he suggests that John Kerry really wasn't all that thrilled with choosing Edwards as his running mate; but in the end chose him anyway. FUNDAMENTAL lesson: in politics, you really gotta go with your gut. Be real!

He's in the money...

Senator Barack Obama certainly has the money to compete with Hillary Clinton. That's now a done deal. But will he be able to compete? I still have the impression that what he stands for, the issue voters will associate with him, remains fuzzy. "Turn the page", "it's time for a new politics", "an end to partisanship" is not a sufficient platform. Fundamental: to get elected, ya gotta stand for something real.

...but it's still about "them."

Former President Clinton tries to make this campaign not about him. Problem is, even if it's not about him, it's about her, about "them." I'm not the first to wonder if voters will really want over 20 years of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton. Call it Bush-Clinton fatigue, even though I sometimes think W. gets too much blame.