Bush-Cheney versus a timorous cacophony of voices

President Bush and Vice President Cheney can be excused for thinking that the U.S. Congress is as consequential as a fly that hovers and buzzes before zipping away. Because they are basically right.

Ex-congressman Cheney, in particular, understands that the legislative branch, hampered by both its rules and the divergent political interests of its members, is notoriously incapable of acting in unison or speaking with one voice. And its deference to the White House has grown far more pronounced in the half century since World War II and the onset of the Cold War. So when Cheney confidently tells CNN that Congress won't stop the escalation of the war in Iraq, he is (finally) uttering something true.

Let’s just take stock of where things stand at the moment, as Congress continues its struggle to find some words, or maybe some actions, to express its opposition to, or skepticism about, Bush’s decision to ramp up U.S. involvement in the Iraqi civil war. (Cheney thinks that any congressional gesture “would simply validate the terrorists’ strategy,” but let’s go wild and assume, for the purposes of this blog entry, that our elected lawmakers do have the right, as members of a democracy, to offer an opinion about a war that also appears to be troubling roughly 75 percent of the American electorate.)

Even with respect to the option that senators most prefer – empty talk, in the form of a non-binding resolution – the Democrats are fractured as usual.

There are red-state senators who don’t want to be perceived as picking on Bush too harshly, for fear of alienating centrist voters back home; this camp includes Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who is discomfited by the Biden-Levin-Hagel resolution, which declares that Bush’s escalation “is not in the national interest.” Moderate Democrats, wary of empty tough talk, prefer empty mild talk – as exemplified by Virginia Republican John Warner’s proposed resolution. This camp also includes Ken Salazar of Colorado and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, although they might actually go for the empty tough talk, if it can somehow be merged with Warner’s empty mild talk. Even though Warner doesn't want to merge.

Then there’s another Democratic camp, comprised of ’08 presidential candidates who are mindful that liberal antiwar voters wield considerable clout in early primary states. Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd (both of whom enabled Bush in 2003 by voting to authorize the war, and now seek to make amends wherever possible) not only support Biden-Levin-Hagel, but want to go further, by capping the number of troops via legislation or amendment. They are joined by another ’08 hopeful, Barack Obama.

Then there’s another Democratic camp, comprised of liberals who don’t have to worry about facing a national electorate – for instance, Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold, who doesn’t think that even capping the troop tally goes far enough. He’s planning a hearing next Tuesday that will explore whether Congress has the right to sever funding for the war itself. Congress does have that right, actually. Cheney and his dwindling band of Capitol Hill loyalists are happy to point this out. They have been goading the majority Democrats to take that route, so that the GOP can brand the Democrats as being “against the troops.”

But the congressional Republicans are all over the place, too:

There are the bitter-enders, such as Texas Senator John Cornyn, who is readying his own empty-talk resolution, which declares that the Decider’s escalation plan “should be given a reasonable chance” to work. There are the political calculators, notably ’08 candidate John McCain, who is trying to balance his Bush-friendly hawkishness with his own proposed resolution, which would put the burden on the Iraqis to demonstrate progress via benchmarks. There are the escalation skeptics who are nevertheless too timid to sign on to Biden-Levin-Hagel, because (in the words of Minnesota senator Norm Coleman) they don’t want to be seen as “taking a shot at the president." After all, rank and file Republican voters are not known for their antiwar fervor; the White House is reportedly trying to remind GOP senators of this fact.

In other words, we have a deeply unpopular president, who’s sitting somewhere around 30 percent in the polls, and the purportedly co-equal branch of government is not only incapable of taking any real action, it’s essentially tongue-tied as well. The polls also show that, by roughly 30-point margins, most Americans want Congress – not Bush – to take the lead on Iraq policy. But the Bush war team knows full well that this will never happen.

One big reason is that Congress has been complicit in this war all along. Most of the people currently serving have voted to authorize the war money from the very beginning, with virtually no strings attached. I have read a number of pieces by legal scholars who argue that Bush’s legal authority to wage this war has been repeatedly validated by those congressional actions, and would thus be very difficult to reverse. (And political analyst Walter Shapiro, who points out that Congress in 1971 repealed its 1964 Vietnam war authorization vote, to no avail.)

These empty-talk resolutions are slated for full debate during in early February, with the possibility of horse-trading on language that will do nothing to arrest Bush’s escalation strategy. (A test vote on Biden-Levin-Hagel is slated for this Tuesday.) Thus far, in other words, I have seen nothing that would shake me from the opinion I expressed in a print column last Nov. 2, on the eve of the midterm balloting: “In terms of forcing our elected leaders to roll up their sleeves and find a feasible way forward, this election might have no more impact than a speed bump at a demolition derby.”

I don’t want to suggest that empty talk serves no purpose, however. Congressional restiveness over Vietnam, which played out over a period of about seven years, helped shape public opinion against the war (or, at the least, it helped validate antiwar sentiment in what Richard Nixon liked to call “middle America”). But today, antiwar sentiment is already the mainstream opinion; it’s Congress which is struggling in fits and starts to catch up.

It remains to be seen whether Congress can tame its cacophony of voices and find its footing. That may require a measure of courage that the institution has long been reluctant to display, especially in wartime. But Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, seeking support for the stronger anti-escalation resolution, has been pleading with his timorous colleagues to put themselves on the line, for a change.

Let’s call it the quote of the week: “If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes.”

Greasing the skids for the richest candidates

Any presidential candidate who lacks star power and celebrity cachet will not be happy about the momentous changes soon to be wrought upon the ’08 primary season.

For those hopefuls without deep pockets or high name ID (Democrats Tom Vilsack and Christopher Dodd, for instance), it’s not good news that four big, delegate-rich states – New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, and California – now seem poised to move their primaries to the earliest possible date on the calendar, Feb. 5, hard on the heels of the opening contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.

Which means that the nominees may well be known by the first week in February. (Memo to any of my Pennsylvania readers who might wish to play a role in the primary season: Your votes will be rendered more meaningless than ever.)

This latest manifestation of the phenomenon known as “front-loading” means that all White House aspirants will be forced to run a punishing gauntlet that seems guaranteed to kill off virtually everyone who is not prodigiously financed and universally known.

Imagine the task that apparently lies ahead: Candidates will have to spend a small fortune just to do well in the crucial opening round, because a poor showing in those small states will spell certain doom – and then, without respite or time to raise new money, they will have to switch gears and immediately compete in some of the most expensive media markets in the nation. (Take New Jersey, for example. There are no network affiliates in New Jersey. To run TV ads there, candidates have to book time on the stations located in New York City and Philadelphia.) And that doesn’t even include all the travel, as candidates and their entourages hurl their weary bodies from tarmac to tarmac, coast to coast.

This “front-loading” problem – in which late-calendar states feel compelled to move up their dates in order to gain some clout and attention, not to mention economic benefit – has been around for nearly a quarter century, and it keeps getting worse. Political experts keep lamenting the problem at symposia, and the political parties keep insisting that they will bring order to the calendar by spreading out the contests. To no avail. Indeed, the situation right now is so fluid (the less charitable word is chaotic) that some of those big states might even try to go earlier than Feb. 5.

It seems downright quaint to talk about 1992, when political observers were lamenting the fact that Bill Clinton had virtually clinched the Democratic nomination at such an early point in the calendar....April 7. That was considered outrageous, a betrayal of the traditional weeding-out process that once stretched from late winter to early June. (One of the big reasons why upstart Ronald Reagan nearly derailed President Gerald Ford during the '76 primaries was because there were as many as three weeks between each major primary, thereby allowing Reagan to reload and raise more money in order to keep going.)

The calendar was further compressed in 1996, and the parties were widely blamed for not doing enough to stop the front-loading. In truth, however, they didn't want to stop it. As Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, explained to me in January of that year, "The national parties like the idea. They've had an increasing desire to get behind a single candidate earlier in the game, to come to a conclusion earlier, to try and prevent the eventual winner from suffering a protracted death-by-a-thousand-cuts. The parties don't want long, fratricidal seasons that leave people embittered. So the idea is, foreclose the possibility of last-minute candidacies, limit the field."

So it goes for 2008. And no wonder the public financing of presidential campaigns is in its last throes (as I wrote here two days ago). Given the fact that accelerated front-loading requires candidates to spend as much money as possible in a large number of states at the earliest point in the calendar, there’s little incentive to accept public money for the primary season – because such acceptance requires the candidates to obey a spending ceiling. How is it possible to compete effectively in eight states between mid-January and early February, when hampered by a spending ceiling?

Actually, let me amend that last paragraph: There’s little incentive for celebrity candidates with universal name ID to play by the public-financing rules.

Those who have the requisite fund-raising prowess to opt out of the reform process – notably Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, and perhaps John Edwards – seem best positioned to survive the front-loaded calendar. Those lesser-known candidates who have no choice but to accept the public money are not nearly as well positioned to compete and survive. In politics, as in society as a whole, the gap between rich and poor appears to be widening.

Which brings me to John Kerry, awkward segue notwithstanding.

All the tea leaves were telling him to forego another bid: Kerry is still being blamed by the Democratic rank and file for losing a winnable election (indeed, Democrats are not known for giving their losers a second chance; that hasn’t happened since Adlai Stevenson got the party nod in 1956). Kerry can’t compete for money with the Clinton juggernaut. Kerry can’t bond with a crowd as well as Obama. And the accelerated front-loading of the calendar would have aggravated all these deficiencies. (Kerry's people insisted yesterday that his decision was not motivated by his miserable poll ranking. Yeah, right.)

But, for me, what really seals Kerry’s fate as yesterday’s guy is the rise of Jim Webb. The new Virginia senator has swiped Kerry’s market niche, as the Democrat who can best combine war vet credentials and effective political rhetoric. As he demonstrated in his televised rebuttal to the State of the Union speech, Webb (who, unlike Kerry, opposed the Iraq war from the outset) can state his point of view in simple declarative language, devoid of any Kerryesque qualifiers:

“The president took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the Army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command....we are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable – and predicted - disarray that has followed."

If Kerry can’t even win the Senate competition for the title of “macho Democrat,” then it’s tough to see how he would fare any better in a presidential race.

Jay Leno last night alluded to the fact that Kerry had correctly detected the lack of a public groundswell for his return. He joked, “Finally – a politician who listens to the American people!” Indeed, it can at least be argued that, unlike the man who beat him in 2004, Kerry does seem capable of recognizing and processing factual reality.

This is not a botched joke

Bulletin: John Kerry opts out of the '08 presidential race. More on this later.

The State of the Union, from top to bottom

Wow, where to begin? Let’s start at the very beginning, and proceed chronologically.

President Bush’s political predicament was best illustrated by the tableau behind him. As he got ready to deliver his subdued State of the Union address, he was flanked, over his right shoulder, by Dick Cheney, perhaps the only elected leader at the moment who is more unpopular than Bush is; not to mention the fact that Cheney had his name bandied about all day during the Scooter Libby perjury trial, which threatens to turn into a circular firing squad. And Bush was flanked, over his left shoulder, by Nancy Pelosi, whose rise to the House speakership can be directly attributed to Bush’s ruinous war of choice in Iraq.

Most State of the Union speeches (a purely 20th-century contrivance, mandated nowhere in the Constitution) are pretty worthless, no matter which party occupies the White House, and this one was no exception. Every president pledges to work in a bipartisan manner, and it’s only a matter of time before the pledge is breached.

Bush managed to do this – perhaps inadvertently – within the first 30 seconds. He talked up the “wisdom of working together,” and then (according to the written transcript) he proceeded to “congratulate the Democratic majority.” The problem was that when he spoke the sentence, he extended congrats to “the Democrat majority” – the standard GOP pejorative that ticks off Democratic lawmakers every time. And, as Bush would soon make clear while talking about Iraq (the dark cloud that hung over the chamber), he doesn't really believe in the "wisdom" of working with people who view his war as a disaster and insist that he change course.

(During the ’06 State of the Union speech, he also pledged to work with Democrats “in a spirit of goodwill and respect” – yet, by October, he was out on the campaign trail contending that the congressional Democrats were soft on al Qaeda.)

Back to the ’07 speech. Moments after uttering his pejorative, and still on the bipartisan theme, Bush said that “our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on, as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done.” An interesting line, given the fact that, during the GOP majority reign, he was perfectly comfortable with the strategy of never crossing the aisle. The Republicans reigned by maximizing votes among their own people and stiffing the opposition. They often refused to let the powerless Democrats see proposed legislation until the final moments prior to passage, and they often refused to allow Democrats to offer amendments. But now that the Democrats are in control, Bush wanted to make it clear that he expects them to cross the aisle and engage the GOP.

Bush soon moved on to budgetary matters, noting that “what we need to do is impose spending discipline in Washington, D.C.,” another interesting line, given the fact that he and his GOP Congress jacked up spending to heights not seen since the glory days of LBJ. Then he added, “Together, we can restrain the spending appetite of the federal government,” again trying to hold the Democrats to a standard that he didn’t insist upon when his side had the power.

This pattern held as he took up the issue of earmarks, those special interest goodies slipped into bills under the cloak of secrecy at the eleventh hour. The GOP Congress ran roughshod with this practice, and he never said a word. Yet now he declares, “The time has come to end this practice…and cut the number and cost of earmarks at least in half by the end of this session.” One wonders whether he would be setting such a goal if the GOP Congress had managed to weather the November elections.

He then turned his attention, briefly, to the need for Social Security reform. He did it in one paragraph, sticking to generalities. It’s a sign of his waning political fortunes that he said nothing whatsoever about his onetime crusade to partially privatize Social Security. Last year he at least mentioned that he wanted to set up a “commission” to study the idea further. This year, not even a word about that.

(Nor, by the way, did he say a single word about post-Katrina New Orleans. In last year’s speech, he lauded his reconstruction program and declared that “a hopeful society comes to the aid of fellow citizens. But Katrina is a sore subject. A House Republican investigation has assailed the White House for “a failure of leadership.”)

Shortly after the passing reference to Social Security, Bush moved on to health care. He stated: “A future of hope and opportunity requires that all our citizens have affordable and available health care.” Do those words have the ring of déjà vu? Here’s what he said last year: “We must confront the rising cost of care…and help people afford the insurance coverage they need.” And here’s what he said in 2004: “We must work together to help control those costs and extend the benefits of modern medicine throughout the country.”

How he expects to achieve this year what has eluded him when his own party ran the Congress in previous years is surely a mystery. And the proposals he suggested are dead on arrival anyway. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that the Democrats will back his idea of taking away federal Medicaid money intended for public hospitals and other safety-net providers, and using that money to help people buy private health insurance.

Immigration reform – specifically, a guest worker program aimed at putting illegals on a path to citizenship – is probably his best shot at working well with Democrats. After mentioning health care, he moved to immigration and said, “We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals.” The Democrats liked that line. This time, most of the Republicans sat on their hands. On this issue, Bush remains in trouble with his security-first conservative base.

(Nor will his religious conservative followers be happy with the speech, which said nothing about protecting the family from gay marriage, or protecting the culture of life. As they should know by now, the Bush team merely views that stuff as red meat for the election season.)

Then Bush moved on to the energy issue – and got in trouble again, at least with anyone who is not afflicted by amnesia. He lamented the fact that “for too long our nation has been dependent on foreign oil.” The problem is, he utters a variation of this line, and calls for ambitious solutions, in almost every State of the Union address. In 2002 he said, “This Congress must act to encourage conservation.” In 2004 he urged Congress to “promote conservation.” In 2005, he urged “affordable, environmental responsible energy.” In 2006, he said we need to “dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy.” In 2006, he also talked about the wonders of using “switchgrass” to make clean fuel; this year, he shortened it to “grass.”

The words are always nice, but, meanwhile, our foreign oil dependency keeps getting worse. In Bill Clinton’s final year in office, 58 percent of our oil came from foreign sources; last year, it was 70 percent.

A few minutes later, after referring in passing to “the serious challenge of global climate change,” a line that dismayed a number of Republicans who still believe global warming is a hoax, Bush moved into the more treacherous realm of foreign policy. He took care to speak about the threat of global terrorism in terms that all could agree with. Indeed, when he said that “we owe a debt of gratitude to the brave public servants who devote their lives to finding terrorists and stopping them,” Nancy Pelosi sprang to her feet so fast (signaling her fellow Democrats to do likewise and thus demonstrate their toughness credentials), that one could have sworn that Cheney had placed a tack on her seat.

But soon came the familiar Iraq escalation arguments. He said again that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki and his people have “promised” to get tough with sectarian violence in Baghdad, that they have “pledged” to confront the bad guys, even those who are politically allied with them. But he again said nothing about a Plan B, in the highly likely event that Maliki doesn’t make good on his promises and pledges. And, fighting from his own political bunker, Bush still sought to draw a line in the sand. He suggested that the failure to support his view of the mission “is to ignore the lessons of September 11.”

Translation: He still thinks he commands the 9/11 high ground, and that if Democrats – and renegade Republicans – pass a resolution condemning his escalation, they will be guilty of dishonoring the memory of that day. That’s quite a gutsy presumption on his part, considering the fact that, at this point, support for his war strategy may soon consist of his wife, his dog, and Joe Lieberman.

One other line about the war, and about the bygone days of his political prowess, is worth a mention. He said near the end of his speech that “we went into this largely united in our assumptions…” Note that he didn’t say “united in our view of the evidence.” As we now know, all too well, there was no consensus evidence of WMDs. But there were certainly “assumptions” by the administration that WMDs did exist, and it was those mistaken assumptions that were sold to the Congress and general public.

It is the memory of those assumptions that has put the Democrats in charge, and left Bush in a plaintive state (on his troop plan, “I ask you to give it a chance to work”). He is not likely to be indulged in the way he would like. Democratic Senator James Webb, delivering his party’s rebuttal last night, said that if Bush doesn’t agree to a new Iraq strategy, the Democrats "will be showing him the way." Which is akin to warning Bush to get out of the way. Such is the mood in Washington that no mere State of the Union address can hope to dispel.

The decline and fall of campaign reform...and Republican unity

In less than 12 hours, President Bush will deliver a State of the Union address to an increasingly hostile nation. Most of his proposals will be dead on arrival (because his opponents now control both chambers, and because even many of his ostensible GOP allies are moving toward open revolt on Iraq); and most of what he says will be quickly forgotten (because State of the Union speeches typically have the staying power of tissue paper). But while we await this less than momentous event, here are a couple noteworthy items:

THE MONEY CRISIS
Stories about campaign finance reform tend to bore most people. Americans typically decry the rising costs of campaigns, and the influence of big money in politics, but they rarely want to read up on the details, probably because it’s pretty dry stuff. I am speaking from experience here; having written countless campaign finance stories over the past 17 years, I rarely receive so much as a single email (or, in the old days, a single letter) in response.

But what’s happening today is surely worth a mention. There’s no sexy way to say this, because it’s not a sexy topic: The post-Watergate campaign finance reforms are dying a slow and inexorable death. And Hillary Clinton is the latest candidate to mess with the oxygen supply.

These reforms, enacted in the mid-1970s, were designed to cleanse presidential campaigns by ensuring that private donors and big-money interests would not hijack the process. The idea, which has governed every election since 1976, was to bankroll the presidential race through public financing. Candidates have been able to raise private donations in order to establish their initial viability, but, during the primary season, they have typically opted to accept money from the federal treasury (“matching funds”), and to accept a federally-mandated ceiling on spending. And for the general election in November, the deal has been that the major party nominees forego all private donations, and instead finance their entire autumn campaigns with federal money (equal amounts to each nominee, in order to theoretically level the playing field).

That’s how the game has generally worked. The first big crack in the structure, however, occurred in July of 1999, when GOP hopeful George W. Bush announced that he would not abide by the primary season rules in 2000. He refused federal funds – and the spending ceiling that went with it – and instead opted to privatize his primary campaign. He was raising so much private donor money that he figured it would cramp his style to accept public financing.

This was a major event at the time – as campaign reform watchdog Larry Makinson told me that July, “Bush’s decision is the equivalent of Russia exploding the hydrogen bomb” – and it has since become common for candidates to refuse public money during the primary season, in favor of raising private dough and spending as much of it as possible. Both John Kerry and Howard Dean stiffed the reform route in early 2004.

Bush, at least, did adhere to the reform rules during his two general election campaigns, accepting public money and obeying the public spending ceiling in the autumns of 2000 and 2004. Kerry did the same for his autumn ‘04 bid.

But now we have the next major crack in the structure, the second and larger hydrogen bomb explosion: a candidate who is signaling long in advance that she will not abide by the reform rules in an autumn election.

Hillary Clinton, in her candidacy announcement over the weekend, made it clear that if she does win the ’08 Democratic nomination, she will privatize her autumn campaign, leaving her free to raise as much private money as she wants, and to spend as much as she wants. The math is easy to grasp: The federal money for an ’08 autumn campaign will be capped at about $83 million for each candidate, but she figures that she easily raise more than that amount in private donations. No doubt she won’t be the only major candidate to figure this out.

It’s not hard to see why all this is happening. For starters, the Internet has made it far easier than ever for a candidate to raise a lot of money in private donations virtually overnight. More importantly, the amount of money offered by the feds can’t begin to keep pace with the ever-ballooning costs of campaigning. By law, the public money is pegged to the rate of inflation – but campaign costs far exceed the rate of inflation. Hence, the growing candidate aversion to the reform rules. If both major candidates “opt out” during the ’08 autumn season, the reforms are effectively dead and the concept of the level playing field will die with it.

One solution, of course, would be for the feds to tinker with the rules and offer considerably more public money. But here is where human nature comes into play:

Taxpayers provide the public money for presidential elections. Taxpayers do this by checking a box on their income tax returns, earmarking $3 for the federal presidential campaign kitty. The problem is, hardly any taxpayers volunteer to do this anymore. In other words, even though most Americans say that they want campaign reform, they don’t want to help pay for it.

A quarter of a century ago, nearly 30 percent of taxpayers checked the box and put campaign money into the federal treasury. The percentage today? About nine percent.

I first noticed the declining participation rate back in 1990, when it had fallen to about 20 percent. I spent some time in Washington, asking people about this downtick, and the answers I heard back then are probably equally relevant today. For instance, Fred Wertheimer, a veteran reformer, said: “The day you pay your taxes is not the day you’ll think most highly about financing your political leaders.” One Capitol Hill aide said that most people don’t like the idea of financing the negative ads that wind up on their TV screens. And Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin summed it up this way: “People feel like they’re victims of the process, that politics isn’t something to participate in. It’s something that is done to them.”

These feelings persist, which is why Hillary Clinton and any other candidate who stiffs the general election rules isn’t likely to pay any serious political price. As a Democratic strategist named Michael Meehan told me in the winter of 2003, “Most voters don’t care about this stuff. Just the editorial page readers.”

True enough. But when the reform rules die, and the money arms race spirals totally out of control, and we wind up some day with one nominee seriously outspending the other nominee during the autumn campaign, voters will have arguably forfeited the right to complain.

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THE REPUBLICAN REVOLT
The decline and fall of the Bush administration continues apace, now that bellwether Republican senator John Warner has announced his opposition to Bush’s Iraq troop escalation. Yesterday afternoon, while introducing his own non-binding resolution condemning the Bush plan, Warner said this:

“The American G.I. was not trained, not sent over there — certainly not by resolution of this institution — to be placed in the middle of a fight between the Sunni and the Shia and the wanton and just incomprehensible killing that’s going on at this time.”

Not so long ago, if this kind of remark had come from the mouth of a Democrat, the Bush team would have been busy condemning that person as a wimpy defeatist who was intent on giving aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden. But that’s tough to do at the moment, with Bush sinking in the polls to Jimmy Carter levels. It’s also tough to do when the speaker is the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, somebody who did yeoman duty for the Bush team back in 2003, willingly echoing their prewar talking points on cable television night after night.

Some of the best liberal bloggers are uncomfortable with Warner’s condemnation resolution, precisely because he was such a Bush water-carrier back in the day. Glenn Greenwald, for instance, has unearthed a prewar gem, in which Warner went on CNN and (in response to the usual tepid questioning by Larry King) announced that the absence of any solid WMD evidence, during the prelude to war, should be considered proof that Saddam Hussein was actually hiding his arsenal somewhere:

“(Our inspectors) have not uncovered anything…(Hussein) has become very skillful to keep these manufacturing base of weapons of mass destructions active, mobile and beyond the ability of any inspections to really catch it. And this is proof of it.”

Also, some in the antiwar community aren’t happy that Warner’s resolution language isn’t as strong as the language in the other resolution, the one offered by Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Chuck Hagel. The latter declares that Bush’s “escalating” of the conflict “is not in the national interest.” The former states that “the Senate disagrees with the plan to augment our forces.” (Augmentation is Condoleezza Rice’s preferred word.)

But these distinctions aren’t what matters most. The bottom line is that, regardless of what words are employed, the rank and file Republicans are moving toward open revolt. Warner’s journey from loyalist to dissident is proof of this. And even the normally compliant House Republicans, having read the election results and pondered the polls, are suddenly rediscovering the concept of accountability; GOP leader John Boehner suggested yesterday that Bush report back on the situation in Iraq every 30 days.

So don’t expect many verbal hurrahs this evening, even from within Republican ranks, when Bush invokes Iraq during the State of the Union. At a time when Republicans are focused on saving their political hides, and about being branded as the Iraq war party, paying homage to an unpopular lame duck is not a prudent strategy.

Hillary and history: The chase has begun

This blog post was revised and expanded on Sunday night and Monday morning.

We interrupt the weekend to announce that Hillary Clinton has joined the '08 presidential race. Or, more specifically, she announced today that she has officially decided to explore the possibility of joining the presidential race: "As a senator, I will spend two years doing everything in my power to limit the damage George W. Bush can do. But only a new president will be able to undo Bush's mistakes and restore our hope and optimism."

By the end of next January, just one year away, we will probably know whether she is destined to become the first female nominee in American history. Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina - the opening venues - will provide her with the requisite momentum...or slam on the brakes.

She's aiming her appeal at Americans "who work hard and play by the rules," as she said in her announcement. Shades of 1992...that line is verbatim from her husband's first campaign, and serves as a reminder that she is offering America a return to the House of Clinton (as opposed to the House of Bush). This might be comforting to many voters. On the other hand, a lot of Americans may well roll their eyes at the prospect, noting with some weariness that those two Houses have already reigned since January of 1989.

But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of her announcement was the format: a video message on her website. By delivering the big news from a cozy sofa, in an intimate setting, she was clearly seeking a personal connection with the viewer, and thereby hoping to undercut her image as "a cold, calculating woman" (the negative perception articulated on Sunday morning by Brit Hume on Fox News). Indeed, her campaign is promising more online video chats.

But the online announcement afforded her another advantage: By foregoing the usual faux campaign rally, or announcement via press conference, she avoided exposing herself to inconvenient questions from political reporters, who would have asked about Barack Obama, Iraq, and the husband whose skills as a performance artists exceed her own. Via online video, she can manage (at least for awhile) to control her message and sidestep what Bush has called "the filter." Indeed, the video chat may be the wave of the future.

Her weekend timing is also noteworthy. Her declaration this morning comes just days after Barack Obama's candidacy announcement (translation: "Grab some bench, rookie, because the slugger is taking the spotlight. Just watch those flashbulbs go off when I swing"). Despite the Obama feeding frenzy, she is by far the favorite candidate of rank-and-file Democratic voters; in the latest ABC-Washington Post poll, 41 percent cite Clinton as their prime choice. Only 17 percent say Obama, and 11 percent name John Edwards.

It can be argued that such a national poll is misleading; after all, the crucial first stops on the primary circuit are Iowa and New Hampshire, and Clinton is currently trailing her rivals in state polls. But she has yet to campaign energetically in either locale. That's about to change. She also has $14 million in the bank to help her get up to speed, and sufficient fund-raising prowess to sustain herself - without the need for public matching funds - during the primary season and beyond. (On the other hand, with regards to Iowa and New Hampshire, it will be fascinating to watch her attempt to conduct person-to-person retail politics in restaurants and living rooms, while being trailed by the largest media phalanx in modern history).

But it's equally important to note that she has officially gone public about a candidacy on the eve of President Bush's State of the Union speech on Capitol Hill. She has purposely placed herself front and center in a news cycle normally dominated by the Decider. She's not set to deliver the official Democratic rebutal - that task will be performed by Virginia Senator Jim Webb - but whatever she does say in the aftermath of Bush's address will be scrutinized as never before.

Regarding the ongoing skepticism over whether Clinton is electable in '08, the latest Newsweek poll puts her in a statistical dead heat with each of the likely Republican rivals (although, as the figures show, Obama and Edwards also stack up fairly well). Perhaps the most striking stat - and one that the Clinton people had better pay attention to - is the sentiment among independent swing voters, when asked to choose between Clinton and John McCain. She gets only 43 percent of the swingers, and he gets 49 percent. That's not very impressive, considering the fact that McCain for many months has been panting after the religious right vote, and pushing for the troop escalation plan that is opposed by most Americans.

Indeed, Clinton has been working overtime to capture the middle on Iraq. Her basic take is that Bush's war has been poorly executed. The left and the center are basically in agreement on that, as far as it goes. She opposes the troop escalation, and she wants to "cap" the number of troops, but she won't vote to cut off money to the troops already on the ground. She's clearly to the right of Obama and Edwards on the war, when she is not simply being vague; in her weekend announcement, she said "Let's talk about how to bring the right end to the war in Iraq," without giving us even a clue about how she would define a "right end."

But her caution on Iraq will hardly innoculate her from GOP attack. In fact, war hawk/conservative analyst Bill Kristol is already calling her troop-cap proposal "dangerous foolish." On Fox News this weekend, he also assailed her as "totally irresponsible."

How an unapologetic cheerleader for the Iraq disaster can presume to attack somebody else as "irresponsible" is surely a mystery, and that prompts a thought: Why should we assume that a fresh round of GOP attacks on Clinton will work this time, given the fact that her attackers have lost so much of their credibility since the day when Bush wore his flight suit? In the end, it will all come down to what those aforementioned independent voters think.

In Clinton's defense, here's a new memo from her pollster, Mark Penn, who argues that - surprise - she is indeed on track to win a general election. Penn takes a veiled swipe at the untested Obama:

"Some of the commentators look at the ratings of people who have not yet been in the crossfire, and say they might have a better chance. Recent history shows the opposite. The last two Democratic presidential candidates started out with high favorable ratings and ended up on Election Day (and today) far more polarizing and disliked nationally....Hillary is the one potential nominee who has been fully tested....Hillary is the only one able to match or beat the Republicans after years of their partisan attacks on her."

Is Penn right? Talk amongst yourselves.

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Meanwhile, in a print column this weekend about Obama, I tried to tackle the predictable question, "Is America ready for a black president?" by hopefully writing in a non-predictable manner.

Be forewarned: I mentioned in passing that some GOP activists have been trying to draft Condoleezza Rice, but that Rice had "averred." Turns out, I used the wrong word. As an eagle-eyed reader pointed out in an email, "averred" signifies a positive reaction; he suggested that I should have used "demurred" to signify that she was not interested in a draft. He's right.

Remember how we claimed that our critics were unpatriotic coddlers of the terrorists? Forget what we said

Yet another reason to question everything the Bush administration says:

Until Wednesday of this week, the president and his surrogates were absolutely adamant about the need to conduct a warrantless domestic surveillance program and to choose their surveillance targets with no oversight from anybody. After the secret operation was exposed by The New York Times, they repeatedly insisted that, in a post-9/11 world, national security would be imperiled if they were forced to submit their surveillance requests to a special court, as mandated by a 1978 federal law.

But, exercising their usual partisan spirit, they went further. They repeatedly contended that anybody who opposed their point of view – in other words, anybody who thought that the Bush administration should obey the law – was essentially aiding the terrorists and weakening America.

The examples are too numerous to mention. But here’s President Bush last October, politicizing the issue during the ’06 midterm election campaign: “The stakes in this election couldn’t be more clear. If you don’t think we should be listening in on the terrorist, then you ought to vote for the Democrats. If you want your government to continue listening in when al Qaeda planners are making phone calls into the United States, then you vote Republican.”

Yet now, lo and behold, the Bush team has suddenly announced that, henceforth, they will voluntarily submit their surveillance requests to the special court, as mandated by federal law.

Which basically means that all their previous rhetoric impugning the patriotism of their critics has been rendered inoperative.

It’s probably not a complete belly-up capitulation, of course, because Bush officials won't say whether they would still do what they wanted if the court turned them down. But it’s nevertheless a striking development, which prompts a number of questions: Why the change of heart? Is the country safer today than it was yesterday, thereby making it safe for the Bush administration to obey the law? And does this mean that all the critics, who were deemed to be soft on terrorists prior to Wednesday, have now been retroactively restored to partiotic citizenship?

It doesn’t take a political science degree to chart the change of heart. Those Democrats who were once painted as threats to national security are now running Capitol Hill, courtesy of the ’06 election. And a lawsuit against the warrantless program has reached a federal appeals court in Cincinnati, with arguments scheduled for early February.

If the Bush administration truly believes that critics of its program are imperiling national security, it would still be making those arguments, as a matter of principle. Instead, it has dumped that rhetoric down the memory hole. Which probably means that it never really believed the rhetoric in the first place.

In fact, when attorney general Alberto Gonzales testified on Capitol Hill yesterday, he sought to erase the past by insisting that the administration had never intended to imply that the Democrats were against all surveillance of terrorists. Democratic senator Russ Feingold asked, “Do you know of anyone in this country, Democrat or Republican, in government or on the outside, who has argued that the United States government should not wiretap suspected terrorists?…Do you know of anybody in government who has said that?” And Gonzales replied, “No.”

I refer you back to the Bush remark quoted earlier. This administration still hasn’t grasped the fact that, in the cyberspace era, whatever it asserts today can be measured against what it said yesterday.

The administration’s rhetorical U-turn brings to mind Emily Litella, the Gilda Radner character on the original Saturday Night Live: “What’s all this about Democratic appeasers?…Never mind.”

Most noteworthy, however, is the scream of pain emenating from Bush’s defenders on the right. They really did believe that rhetoric about how the critics were coddling terrorists. They repeated it on cable TV and on the blogs, arguing as well that The Times should be prosecuted for treason. And they believe it now, arguing as a matter of principle that a terrorist-fighting executive branch should be unfettered in its actions. So they basically feel today that the Bush administration has hung them out to dry.

Here’s conservative lawyer and legal analyst Mark Levin: “For the Bush administration to argue for years that this program, as operated, was critical to our national security and fell within the president's Constitutional authority, to then turn around and surrender presidential authority this way is disgraceful. The administration is repudiating all the arguments it has made in testimony, legal briefs, and public statements. This goes to the heart of the White House's credibility. How can it cast away such a fundamental position of principle and law like this?”

This goes to the heart of the White House’s credibility….Finally, an issue that the right and the left can agree on.

The GOP's choices: sullen acquiesence or outright rebellion?

President Bush has become such a drag on his party’s fortunes that those who are lugging his baggage can’t resist venting their frustrations.

Case in point: Conservative columnist Robert Novak, who has good GOP sources, writes today about “the sense of impending political doom that clutches Republican hearts,” and quotes a party strategist who says, “Iraq is a black hole for the Republican party.” Then Novak writes this: “One nationally prominent Republican pollster reported confidentially on Capitol Hill after the president's speech that if U.S. boots are still on the ground in Iraq and U.S. blood is still being spilled there at the end of (this) year, the GOP disaster in 2008 will eclipse 2006.”

Hence the focus today, and in the weeks ahead, on the best political story in Washington: The distinct possibility that a sizeable number of Republican lawmakers – worried about their own future prospects, cognizant of growing antiwar sentiment back home, and convinced that the Bush White House is in its last throes – will dump the Decider and vote for a bipartisan congressional resolution opposing his plan to feed 21,500 more soldiers into the Iraq fire.

That kind of thing doesn’t happen very often; congressional Republicans, far more often than their Democratic counterparts, tend not to be rebellious. The GOP political culture stresses discipline and respect for hierarchy, and these values are most strongly exhibited when the GOP has one of its own in the White House.

Extraordinary circumstances are required for Republican foot soldiers to stand up and defect. In fact, this has not happened en masse since 1974, when they felt compelled to bail out on Richard Nixon as the storm clouds of impeachment were drawing closer. In the end, a delegation of Republicans, led by senators Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, trekked to Nixon’s office and told him that he had lost his party’s support, that the rank and file – forced to choose between loyalty to him, and loyalty to the ticked off folks back home – had chosen the latter.

The current situation isn’t exactly analogous, of course, because (notwithstanding the desires of some anti-Bush activists), the president is not facing impeachment. He is, however, facing a potential vote on a bipartisan resolution that would (a) symbolically humiliate him, (b) denounce his handling of the mission on which he has staked his legacy, and (c) basically reduce him to
relevence via veto pen for the rest of his tenure.

The resolution (text included here) was introduced yesterday, with co-sponsorship from Republican senator and Army veteran Chuck Hagel; on ABC this morning, Hagel said, “To feed more American troops into this bloodbath is wrong.” The measure – which currently states that “it is not in the national interest of the United States to deepen its military involvement in Iraq” – has no teeth. It can’t force Bush to do anything. But, if passed with sizeable Republican support (and there have been reports that as many as a dozen of the 49 senators could back it), it would amount to a vote of no-confidence. When votes like that are conducted in parliamentary democracies such as Britain’s, the people in power lose their jobs.

Here’s the mood that Republican lawmakers are facing right now: According to the latest Fox News poll, released this afternoon, six in 10 Americans currently oppose the Bush escalation plan (the same share reported by other polls this week). More strikingly, in the Fox survey, 57 percent said they would vote not to finance the increase in troops. Even 32 percent of Republican respondents feel that way. (Maybe this helps explain the glaring omission in GOP chairman Ken Mehlman's farewell speech this afternoon. I checked the text. Not once did he utter the word Iraq.)

So it’s not surprising that Bush keeps inviting Republican lawmakers to the White House for chats about the political way forward; and that Republican leaders on Capitol Hill keep pulling the lawmakers into closed-door meetings. This is the equivalent of trying to frantically bail water from a leaky vessel.

The latest behavior from Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki isn’t going to make these Republicans feel any better. The one assurance sought by the GOP lawmakers is that the additional troops will be sent for a good reason, that Bush’s willingness to escalate will be matched by Maliki’s willingness to clean up his own act and go after the Shiite militias (his own allies) that are part of the problem. Yet Maliki yesterday indicated that he would prefer a reduction of U.S. troops within the next three to six months; and that he, as leader of a sovereign nation, doesn’t like it whenever Bush and his surrogates suggest that the Iraqi government had better shape up or else.

Here’s the money quote from Maliki: "Such attacks by the Bush war team “give morale boosts for the terrorists and push them toward making an extra effort and making them believe they have defeated the American administration.” Note the irony. At the White House this week, Bush spokesman Tony Snow has been busy updating the old Karl Rove argument, suggesting that the impending Senate resolution might be tantamount to aiding terrorist morale….and here is Bush’s client, the guy we are banking on to make the escalation plan work, accusing Bush of aiding terrorist morale.

No wonder Bush’s water-carriers in the congressional leadership have failed to assuage the rank and file. Nonpartisan political analyst Charlie Cook said the other day that he wouldn’t be surprised if as many as 60 to 65 senators (there are only 51 Democrats) wind up backing the resolution, which may require some rewording in order to get more Republicans on board. Then the House would push its own equivalent measure.

It would appear, at the moment, that the best Bush can hope for is that the vast majority of Republicans simply take a vow of silence, or that they grumble skeptically with muted voices, or that they bob and weave and stall in the hope that maybe the Democrats will overreach. None of those options constitutes the kind of full-throated roar of approval that Bush used to expect back in the day. But right now sullen acquiescence is the best he can get. That’s what happens to a president when his political capital is spent.

Hillary Clinton and the "lonely middle"

Much the way Vietnam played a major role in the 1968 Democratic presidential campaign – driving wartime leader Lyndon Johnson into early retirement, bringing antiwar senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy into the race, and ultimately dooming LBJ loyalist Hubert Humphrey – Iraq figures to be front and center in the 2008 Democratic race. Indeed, it’s already clear that the political fortunes of the candidates will hinge on how well they navigate the preeminent issue of our era.

And the waters may be quite treacherous, because the Democratic contestants will feel great pressure to move leftward, at least during the primary season. Democratic voters are more outspokenly antiwar than the rest of the electorate; as a CBS News poll reported after President Bush’s escalation speech last week, only 14 percent of Democrats favor sending more troops to Iraq, whereas 31 percent of all Americans back the Bush troop hike. And on the general question of either reducing or eliminating the U.S. troop presence, 67 percent of Democrats support those options; among all Americans, the share is only 46 percent.

I was reminded of all this today while monitoring Hillary Clinton’s comments on the NBC and CBS morning shows. She will be squeezed more than her chief rivals; as she tells the New Yorker magazine, "I find myself, as I often do, in the somewhat lonely middle."

Unlike Barack Obama, who can trace his opposition to the war back to 2002, when he was still a state senator, Clinton voted for war authorization. And unlike John Edwards, who as a senator did vote for war authorization in 2002, she has not renounced that vote by calling it a mistake. She seems most concerned with establishing centrist credentials for the general electorate (and, frankly, a female candidate may feel it is doubly important not to seem “soft” on national security), whereas her more antiwar rivals appear to be more in tune with the primary electorate.

On the morning shows, fresh from her latest tour of Iraq, she spoke directly to the public’s general frustration with Bush’s disastrous war of choice. Aside from the dwindling share of Bush loyalists in the general electorate, it’s clear at this point that most Americans – liberals, centrist independents, Republican moderates – would have no truck with Clinton’s reference to “this very bad mission that the president is engaged in.” And Clinton also acknowledged the sentiment on her left flank by talking a lot about “capping the number of American troops as of January 1,” and about the long-term folly of continuing to sustain a troop presence “in the midst of a civil war.”

But that’s where she drew the line. Despite strong support among Democratic voters for a fixed withdrawal timetable, she spoke only of withdrawing our soldiers from Iraq “eventually.” (By contrast, Edwards is calling for the “immediate” withdrawal of as many as 50,000 troops. He is also reportedly topping the polls in Iowa, the first pit stop in the ’08 derby, where antiwar sentiment among Democratic caucus goers is traditionally strong.)

Also, Clinton this morning neglected to explain exactly how she would “cap” the number of troops, leaving the impression that she would prefer not to confront Bush directly. [UPDATE at 5:25 p.m. Clinton did announce this afternoon that she intends to introduce a Senate bill that would cap the troops, as well as require Bush to seek congressional OK for any additional troops.]

On NBC this morning, she was also purposely evasive when asked whether she would favor cutting off Bush's war money. She replied this way: “The president has enormous authority under our constitutional system to do exactly what he is doing. He does have the money already appropriated in the budget (for the escalation)” – whereupon she deftly changed the subject to Afghanistan.

That answer won’t satisfy the antiwar left; in a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of the Democrats opposed to the Bush escalation would like to see Congress cut off his war money. But there is no such majority support across the board. Among all Americans who oppose the Bush escalation, only 43 percent want Congress to cut off Bush’s war money. Clearly, Clinton is hesitant about getting too far in front of the general public sentiment; the White House may be running low on good arguments about Iraq, but there is still some political potency in the charge that a money cutoff would be tantamount to undercutting the troops.

It also should be pointed out that Obama, the media darling of the week, is just as hesitant about a money cutoff. He was asked three days ago on CBS whether he supports such an option. He replied, “We need to look at what options do we have available to constrain the president, to hopefully right the course that we're on right now, but to do so in a way that makes sure that the troops that are on the ground have all the equipment and the resources they need."

Translation: No.

Edwards has the upper hand, at least for now. Since he’s not in the Senate anymore, he can attack his rivals from the left flank, and goad them into taking decisive action, without the need to cast a vote on anything. (For instance, he's pushing for a cutoff of troop escalation funding.) The danger for Democrats, in the longer run, is that all the candidates, in the hunt for primary season voters, may feel compelled to move leftward, to the point where it becomes difficult to seize the center for the general election.

Actually, there may be no such danger if the Bush’s Iraq adventure continues to worsen and centrist opinion becomes virulently antiwar. But, for now anyway, the Democrats may need to heed this warning from the smartest strategist in the party, who happens to be married to Hillary Clinton. As he told the New Yorker last year, “it would be really crazy if the antiwar element in our party thought that the most important thing to do was to beat up Democrats…”

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Meanwhile, President Bush gets our quote of the day. Here is our chef-in-chief, talking about his war last night on PBS:

“I don't quite view it as the broken egg. I view it as the cracked egg – that – where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg.”

At last! An entire blog entry that barely mentions Iraq

You may have never heard of Wayne Allard, but he is a significant political figure this morning, if only because his imminent departure from the U.S. Senate brightens Democratic prospects for retaining control of the chamber two years hence.

The Republican senator from Colorado announced yesterday that he would not seek a third term in 2008, thereby keeping his promise to serve only two. Maybe he planned all along to honor his pledge. On the other hand, prevailing political realities in Colorado probably made it easier for him to pull the ripcord on his parachute. The fact is, he would have been forced to endure a difficult and costly re-election race – at a time when Democrats are ascendant not only in Colorado, but elsewhere in the interior western states.

Indeed, the Democrats announced just last week that they would be holding their 2008 national convention in Denver, in part to advertise the party to westerners who, until fairly recently, were deemed to be loyal Republicans. For various reasons (both ideological and demographic), voters in the region are taking a fresh look at the Democrats.

The facts speak for themselves; in Colorado, for example, the Democrats now control the governorship and both state legislative chambers for the first time in four decades, and they hold four of the seven U.S. House seats. They also hold one of the Senate seats (Ken Salazar, elected in 2004), and they were expected to seriously threaten Allard if he ran again in 2008. But now, with no incumbency trappings to worry about, the Democrats have enhanced their chances for an open-seat pickup – and strengthened their national prospects for holding the Senate, particularly since the GOP has to defend 21 of the 33 seats on the ballot in ’08.

The GOP in Washington yesterday put out a statement about Colorado, quickly drawing a line in the sand: “Republicans will retain the seat currently held by Sen. Allard and (we) will do everything in (our) power to ensure the principles of fiscal responsibility and limited effective government returns to the people of Colorado in November 2008. The voters of Colorado supported Pres. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 and again over Senator John Kerry in 2004, and Republican statewide registration is 36 percent compared to 30 percent for Democrats - ensuring Republicans a strong advantage in 2008. Retention of this seat is now a top priority..."

But even before Allard opted to bail on schedule, the Democrats had been talking up the interior West, as potentially fertile turf for their ceaseless quest to become more than just an East Coast/ West Coast party. Just six years ago, Republican governors ran all eight states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming); today, Democratic governors run five. The landscape still seems daunting in national elections – President Bush swept all eight states in 2004 – but some Democratic analysts today argue that an attractive ’08 Democratic candidate could be seriously competitive in five of those states (aside from Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming), thereby easing the pressure on Democrats to crack the solid Republican South.

Their reasons for optimism can be attributed to a number of factors: a large influx of California emigrants, many of whom, while fiscally conservative, are also more tolerant on social issues than the southern-flavored national GOP; a large influx of new Hispanic voters, many of whom dislike the GOP’s hard line stance on immigration; the ongoing presence of traditional western conservatives, whose leave-me-alone libertarianism clashes with the national GOP credo that big government should be utilized to police private behavior; and a growing pragmatic feeling, particularly around major urban centers such as Las Vegas, Denver, and Albuquerque, that government should indeed have a role in solving urban problems and ameliorating the worst aspects of suburban sprawl.

The average voter, of course, wouldn’t articulate the factors that way. I think that Rick Allaire, a Coors brewery worker, probably said it best last month, as he recalled his ’06 vote during a chat with a political reporter: “I figured, hell, why not give Democrats a shot. How much worse can they do?”

That’s the kind of voter that Democrats need to enlist in ’08, both in the presidential race and in the Colorado Senate race. But if Democrats tap candidates who can be easily stereotyped by the GOP as traditional eastern liberals, they may well wind up undercutting their own quest for the interior West.

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Speaking of candidates, Barack Obama filed the initial paperwork today for his ’08 White House bid. Notwithstanding the fact that he is a senator, it’s clear that he plans to position himself as an “outsider” who is fed up with the usual partisan bickering in Washington. (That has been the preferred candidate stance, dating back to Jimmy Carter’s initial wanderings in 1975.) Therefore, he will paint himself as being above the fray, as a transformative figure and a breath of fresh air. From his statement today:

“I've been struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics….The decisions that have been made in Washington these past six years, and the problems that have been ignored, have put our country in a precarious place….But challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics. America's faced big problems before. But today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions.”

Translation: I am “new politics,” while Hillary Clinton is a symptom of the “bitter and partisan” old politics. I am part of the solution, she is part of the problem.

The early contours of the Democratic race are already apparent. Obama and ex-senator John Edwards are positioning themselves as outsiders (on Sunday, Edwards, another announced candidate, lectured Capitol Hill Democrats about being too timid on Iraq, declaring that "silence is betrayal"). They seek to contrast themselves favorably with Hillary (the six-year senator, and eight-year First Lady during the bitter and partisan ‘90s) during this crucial early phase, when the donors and activists are busy kicking the tires.

I predict that, with Obama now on board, the odds of an accelerated Hillary Clinton candidacy announcement are approximately 99 percent.

Dick Cheney goes for the gut

It was instructive yesterday to hear Dick Cheney expound at length on the Iraq war, during his visit to Fox News. He actually performed a valuable public service, by reminding all Americans that he is still the power behind the throne, and that he and the members of his neoconservative network are still determined to use that power as they see fit, even though the ’06 voters signaled otherwise.

The neoconservatives who originally sold George W. Bush on the alleged virtues of a regime change in Iraq have been somewhat diminished by the misadventures of the past four years, but many are still ensconced in Cheney’s office, and they hold a number of key positions on the National Security Council. They are also influential at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, which helped develop the troop escalation plan.

Their determination to proceed has not been shaken by the adverse public mood, nor by the inconvenient truths of empirical reality – as evidenced by Cheney’s defiant comments on Fox, notably this one: "I think if you look at what's transpired in Iraq, we have, in fact, made enormous progress."

If Democrats and restive Republicans on Capitol Hill truly want to gauge the seriousness of the impending battle over Iraq policy, they might be well advised to study the Cheney transcript. It was patently obvious that he is the engine that powers the Bush vehicle. He is the steel in Bush’s spine. Even after a decisive repudiation on election day, he is still willing to say the things that not even Karl Rove is saying these days – notably, that anyone who assails the Bush administration’s troop escalation plan is merely validating “the al Qaeda view of the world.”

That was one of his sound bites yesterday. There were many others, including his argument that the current debate over Iraq is more about anatomy than ideology. To wit: “If the United States doesn’t have the stomach to finish the job in Iraq, we put at risk what we’ve done in all of those other locations out there…We have to prevail, and we have to have the stomach for the fight…(Al Qaeda is convinced that) the election campaign last fall, all of that, is evidence that they’re right when they say the United States doesn’t have the stomach for the fight…”

Perhaps most Americans would forego the Pepto Bismol if they had substantive reasons to be confident about the workability of the troop escalation plan that Cheney helped to hatch. (New reasons to feel queasy, here.) But, beyond assuring host Chris Wallace yesterday that the Bush administration has been “very direct” with the oft-recalictrant Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, Cheney refused to say what the U.S. would do if the escalation plan flops and the bloodshed continues unabated.

“Time will tell,” said Cheney. “We’ll have to wait and see.” (Translation: There goes another year.)

Wallace then asked, “What do we do if (Maliki) doesn’t live to his promises” – namely, to go after the murderous Shiite militias that are controlled by his Shiite allies? Wallace basically asked whether Bush and Cheney have a Plan B.

Cheney replied: “I’m not going to get into that, Chris. We’ve got a good plan.”

Wallace, to his credit, then asked a variation of the same question. And Cheney replied, “I’m not going to go beyond what I’ve said. We’re focused on making this plan work.”

Wallace tried again: “But it’s not an open-ended commitment?”

Cheney: “We’re focused on making this plan work.”

And perhaps stomachs would not be so queasy if most Americans had confidence that an error-prone administration was suddenly exhibiting more competence. On the contrary, Cheney made it clear yesterday that he would prefer to rewrite history rather than acknowledge past error.

A number of experts, for instance, have faulted the Bush war team for failing to anticipate or combat the burgeoning sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. But Cheney’s view, expressed yesterday, is that none of this violence occurred “until the spring of ’06,” after al Qaeda operatives bombed a famous Shiite religious landmark.

Cheney’s claim, however, is factually inaccurate. There was plenty of evidence in 2005 that Shiite death squads were precipitating sectarian violence – thanks in part to the Shiite government that came to power in the wake of the January ’05 “purple finger” elections. Here’s one passage from a Knight Ridder article, on Feb. 27 of that year: "Shiite Muslim assassins are killing former members of Saddam Hussein's mostly Sunni Muslim regime with impunity in a wave of violence that, combined with the ongoing Sunni insurgency, threatens to escalate into civil war. The war between Shiite vigilantes and (Sunnis) is seldom investigated…”

But perhaps the most revealing moment occurred midway through the interview when Wallace asked Cheney about the recent election day verdict: “By taking the policy you have, haven’t you, Mr. Vice President, ignored the express will of the American people in the November elections?”

Cheney: “I don’t think any president worth his salt can afford to make decisions of this magnitude according to the polls. The polls change every day – "

Wallace: “Well, this was an election, sir.”

Cheney: “Polls change every day, week by week…You cannot simply stick your finger up in the wind and say, ‘Gee, public opinion’s against; we’d better quit.’”

Consider that exchange for a moment. One can certainly have a legitimate debate over whether policies should be subjected to a popularity contest; indeed, John F. Kennedy (with great assistance from his ghostwriter Ted Sorenson) won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “Profiles in Courage” which lauded some political leaders who had followed their consciences rather than popular opinion. But Cheney’s offhand dismissal of elections in general – equating them with fluctuating public opinion polls – is another matter entirely. His comments should serve as fair warning to administration critics that he and his ostensible superior in the White House will never feel compelled to change course in Iraq just because the will of the people wishes it so.

Cheney made it perfectly clear yesterday that Democrats and dissenting Republicans on Capitol Hill will get nowhere if they merely pass non-binding resolutions condemning the troop escalation (“it would not affect the president’s ability to carry out his policy”). He essentially signaled administration critics that only a fight over the purse strings, or an outright constitutional clash, would really get his attention.

The White House seems fully prepared for a confrontation, lawyering up for a court showdown over the national security prerogatives of the commander-in-chief. The Democrats, by contrast, are not. The big question, as Democrats chart their own new way forward, is whether they will have the “stomach” to take on the likes of Dick Cheney.

Goodbye to "surge," hello to "augmentation"

It’s a pity that George Orwell can’t be with us to witness the latest White House word play.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Capitol Hill yesterday to defend her boss’ decision to dispatch 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. While insisting that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his fellow Shiites were on board with the Bush plan (a dubious claim, by the way), she introduced the latest in Bush administration terminology:

“They know that the augmentation of American forces is part of that plan.”

She then attempted to elaborate: “Now, as to the question of ‘escalation,’ I think that I don’t see it, and the president doesn’t see it, as an escalation. What he sees – ’’

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel then felt compelled to interrupt, probably because, at this point, most Americans aren’t particularly impressed with how President Bush sees things. He asked her, with some astonishment, “Putting 22,000 new troops, more troops in, is not an escalation?”

To which Rice replied, “Well, I think, Senator, escalation is not just a matter of how many numbers you put in. Escalation is also a question of, are you changing the strategic goal of what you’re trying to do?…I would call it, Senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad.”

So there it is. At least in Decider circles, surge is out and augmentation is in. This battle over words may seem trivial, but it is not. Language is powerful. Whoever captures the language has the power to frame an issue. Which is why the Bush camp has now unveiled augmentation, a word that sounds more benign than escalation, which still carries the stench of a certain lost war in the jungle.

The Bush administration has long understood the importance of word play, which is why, among many examples, it has long sought to redefine the privatization of Social Security as a push for “personal accounts” (because the word personal has a more positive connotation). Similarly, the urge to push the friendlier word surge (a burst of electrical power) stemmed from a war council desire to cushion the blow of a new troop hike.

Orwell, the British journalist/commentator/novelist, understood this impulse more than six decades ago. In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” he argued that because our leaders often have little interest in candor, “political language has to consist largely of euphemism.” He also wrote: “Politics otself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred….When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

Well, the general atmosphere is bad today, and language is suffering. Back in mid-November, Bush administration sources told The New York Times that any decision to hike the number of troops would be dubbed “the surge option.” By the end of that month, most of the Washington press corps had adopted the government’s preferred term. And on Christmas Day, The Wall Street Journal confirmed the Times account, reporting that “White House aides and senior Pentagon commanders have chosen an unusual term to describe the addition of the extra troops…”

Interestingly, the word was first used in the press as the word is supposed to be used: to signify (in the words of my Wesbster’s dictionary) “a short, sudden rush.” NBC News on Nov. 21 referred to a “short-term surge.” ABC News one day later referred to a “temporary surge.” But, as the weeks passed, the adjectives were dropped – and not just by the mainstream media. A Dec. 27 headline on the liberal Huffington Post website announced: “White House Pushes for Iraq Surge.”

Even though there were no empirical indications, prior to Bush’s speech on Wednesday night, that the troop hike would be short in duration, the Bush war team’s preferred word continued to surge through the information pipeline.

A few commentators tried to object; on Jan. 5, CNN’s Bill Schneider pointed out that “Surge sounds temporary….Escalation sounds long-term,” and five days later, on the eve of Bush’s speech, conservative columnist Tony Blankley pointed out in The Washington Times: “The troops would surely be in theatre for an idefinite period. The words escalation, reinforcement of higher sustained troop levels would all be honest. The word surge is deceptive.”

Yet even after it was clear, from Bush’s speech, that the new troops would be incrementally added over a period of months, and with a no exit timeline – in other words, the exact opposite of “a short, sudden rush” – some in the media have persisted in using surge. The U.S. News and World Report website headlined this: “Democrats Seek to Block Surge Funding.” The website ABCNews.com headlined, “Leading Edge of Troop Surge Has Arrived in Baghdad.” They have been joined, of course, by a number of Bush allies, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who used the word on a cable news show following the president’s address.

Escalation clearly has some Vietnam baggage, and it’s undeniable that Democrats are using it in order to equate Bush with another Texas president who became politically isolated in the wake of an unpopular war. But it’s also undeniable that the dictionary definition of escalation (“to increase in intensity, magnitude”) clearly trumps surge as an accurate depicter of the Bush troop push. Which is why the latter word may not survive over time, even though it fits so nicely in a headline.

No wonder Condoleezza Rice introduced augmentation. Fearing the loss of surge, the Bush war team apparently felt that it needed a backup. The problem, however, is that most Americans no longer seem inclined to back or believe the Bush team, no matter what words it chooses to use. Rather, they would probably prefer to believe George Orwell, who in his essay famously warned, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

The new way forward is to kick the can

President Bush made it abundantly clear in his White House address last night that he intends to dump his Iraq disaster into the lap of his ’09 successor. The new way forward is actually Operation Kick the Can Down the Road.

By announcing to his dwindling Republican base that he is sending 20,000 more troops to help shore up what he persists in calling the “young democracy” – indeed, the Republican base was his intended TV audience, since relatively few others support him on Iraq anymore – Bush signaled that the expenditure of American blood and money will continue until the day that he packs up and moves out.

His basic prescription is for more of the same, on an open-ended basis. By sending more troops and insisting on better behavior from the young democracy, he hopes that the situation in Iraq will improve “over time.” He said that the young democracy needs more “breathing space” in order to succeed. He wants Americans to understand that “the year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice and resolve.” (Given the fact that his overall handling of Iraq is supported at this point by roughly 25 percent of all Americans, it would appear that the majority’s patience is irreversibly exhausted.)

The most noteworthy aspects of his TV address were the things he omitted. He said nothing about how long those additional troops would stay in Iraq. He offered no evidence that the Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, would really take the crucial step of cracking down on the Shiite militias that are pivotal players in the sectarian civil war. All that Bush could offer us was Maliki’s “pledge” to do so (“Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated”). Bush said at one point that we “will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced,” but he didn’t say how he would respond if Maliki spends the year dragging his feet.

Much of the speech was devoted to cut-and-paste passages from the past. He said that our “victory” in Iraq (what victory?) would not look like the kind of victory that “our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.” But he’s used those lines many times before, notably in a speech back in December of 2004. Elsewhere, he extolled the building of democracy in Iraq – “the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy, by advancing liberty across a troubled region” – in words that seemingly had been lifted straight from the tattered neoconservative handbook. It’s debatable at this point whether the neo credo is broadly popular even within Bush’s Republican base.

Another passage was intended as a sign of Bush’s newfound humility: “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” Some in the press reported last night that Bush had admitted making blunders. Actually, he didn’t. He was merely employing the politician’s time-honored shell game of using the passive voice (“mistakes have been made,” somewhere at some point by somebody unspecified), then manfully accepting “responsibility,” only because that’s where the buck stops. He went passive again a few minutes later: “Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed…There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents.”

There were not enough American troops? Well, whose fault was that? Bush didn’t say. But we already know it was Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld – extolled recently by Bush’s vice president as the greatest defense secretary in history – who at the outset squelched the military brass who were urging more troops. Most notably Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, who did his urging up on Capitol Hill - and was subsequently nudged into early retirement.

Rhetorical passivity aside, one passage in the Bush speech was actually quite provocative. Consider this one, buried in paragraph 19: “Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

That sounds like Bush is prepared to widen the U.S. commitment in Iraq and take on the neighbors (as opposed to talking to those selfsame neighbors, as recommended by James Baker’s Iraq Study Group). That passage might also be read as a provocation to the Democratic Congress; perhaps he is daring the Democrats to contest his constititional authority to widen the war. Considering the fact that roughly 70 percent of Americans now oppose Bush on Iraq (according to the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll, conducted after his speech), it's at least clear that Bush, in his fealty to the "young democracy" abroad, appears to care little what most people think in the old democracy here at home.

Yet one does wonder whether he has the requisite fighting resources to do everything he apparently intends – or whether he is merely going to stretch the military even further, with no good results. It’s noteworthy that his 20,000-troop hike is actually only half of what the hawks at the American Enterprise Institute think tank originally recommended. Many military experts doubt that Bush’s number is remotely enough to help quell the Baghdad region violence (especially since, at any given moment, as many as 75 percent of those 20,000 soldiers are either sleeping, eating, or generally off duty). So, all told, a case can be made that Bush’s escalation is both too much and not enough.

No alternative proposals are emanating from the prospective GOP ’08 frontrunners. For the moment, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani are echoing rival John McCain’s escalation endorsement. This makes sense, politically. Most of the voters who still back Bush on the war happen to be the same folks who can be expected to vote heavily in the ’08 presidential primaries, particularly in often-pivotal South Carolina. These three candidates know sticking with Bush now is a no-lose proposition: If the “surge” somehow works, they get kudos from the base for being so supportive in the president’s time of need; if the “surge” flops, they get kudos for giving a failed lame duck the benefit of the doubt.

(Although, interestingly, candidate Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who is a religious-right favorite, declared yesterday that he opposes the “surge.” Politically, he might be betting that even the base is getting increasingly fed up.)

Some of Bush’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are discomfited at the moment. Those people have to run for office again in 2008. Norman Coleman, the Minnesota senator who is up for re-election in a blue state, assailed the Bush plan yesterday on the Senate floor. He is a barometer of moderate GOP sentiment, along with perhaps a dozen others, including Maine’s Olympia Snowe, Oregon’s Gordon Smith, and Ohio's George Voinovich (who today told Condoleezza Rice, "You're going to have to do a much better job" and said that Bush could no longer count on his support). These senators are ripe pickings for the majority Democrats, who are readying a non-binding resolution condemning Bush’s move, and who fully expect to split the GOP ranks and draw enough Republicans to further isolate Bush politically.

But that strategy is mere symbolism; Bush can theoretically kick the can down the road even if Gallup finds that his popularity has dwindled to Laura and his dog. Bush knows this, which helps explain why, in his speech last night, he threw down the gauntlet to the congressional Democrats. He argued that if U.S. troops are sent home, as “many” want him to do, the result would be “mass killings on an unimaginable scale.”

There are reports today that the Democrats, using the power of the purse, might seek to withhold “surge” money, or to attach conditions to such money. At the very least, beginning today, the Democrats will conduct investigatory committee hearings on the war - focusing on what comes next, and trying to get straight answers from this administration.

But, at the end of the day, and without letting Bush off the hook for the disaster that he has created, the Democrats, in the longer term, will still need to address the challenge that Bush posed last night: If the “surge” is a bad idea, and if staying in Iraq is a bad idea, are they prepared to simply wash their hands of the bloodbath that may well ensue?

Setting the stage for the urge to surge

Operation Iraqi Freedom
Mission Accomplished
Stay the Course
Adapt to Win
Plan for Victory
New Way Forward

The first five slogans are inoperative. But tonight, in yet another allegedly pivotal speech on Iraq, President Bush will declare that the sixth slogan is now operative.

With scant seconds remaining on the game clock, and facing fourth down and 50 on his own five-yard line, Bush is determined to throw the ball deep and simply hope for the best. But at this point the odds are heavily stacked against an immaculate reception. (OK, that exhausts my ability to employ football metaphors. Everyone else seems to be using the poker analogy.)

It does take a fair amount of gumption to decree a new troop escalation, in the face of deep skepticism or outright opposition from, among others, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Abizaid, British ally Tony Blair, gung-ho conservatives like retired Lt. Col. Oliver North (“Sending more U.S. combat troops is simply sending more targets”), the majority of the people in red-state Utah, the majority of ’06 midterm election voters (who mistakenly assumed that their votes would sway the Decider), at least 10 Republican senators, and a landslide majority of the American people (who are currently telling pollsters that Bush is wrong).

Therefore, one cannot reasonably imagine how the president expects to achieve victory in the art of public persuasion. His spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that Bush needs to “bring the public back to this war and restore public confidence in support for the mission,” but it’s hard to see how he can pull that off, given the fact that at this point most Americans either disbelieve his arguments, or have simply tuned him out.

And don’t just take my word for it. Read this verdict: “He has little credibility left on Iraq.” That’s the word from David Keene, veteran conservative Washington activist and the longtime chairman of the American Conservative Union.

Keene wonders whether the public will be receptive to Bush, given the fact that it “has heard too many different and conflicting reasons for our initial invasion.” (Such as the purported Saddam-al Qaeda connection, which was dismissed by the 9/11 Commission; and the purported weapons of mass destruction stockpile, which was disproved by factual reality.)

Keene is also asking himself “why dumping more young men and women into a disastrous mess will do anything but make it worse.” Indeed, lest we forget (or not even realize), Bush in the recent past has tried several troop “surges,” none of which have worked – primarily because his friend the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is closely allied to the top Shiite warlord in the ongoing sectarian civil war.

Those Americans who are still tuning in Bush might well be advised tonight to listen closely to his remarks about Maliki. It is clear that no last-ditch U.S. troop escalation can begin to turn the tide unless the so-called “unity government” in the “young democracy” demonstrates that it is truly willing to take serious political steps for peace. For this to happen, Maliki would have to take on his political benefactor, cleric Muqtada Sadr, who runs one of the most violent Shiite militias.

Is Maliki really willing to do this, after balking so often in the past? Has he communicated this to Bush? Can Bush persuade TV viewers tonight that, this time, things will really be different? And how can Bush assure us that the United States is now imposing strict “benchmarks” on Iraq, at the same time that he keeps insisting that Iraq is “a sovereign nation?”

There are other questions that Bush won’t address tonight. To wit: If this “surge” doesn’t work, what’s plan B? (Or, perhaps more accurately, Plan Z.) It would be valuable to know the answer, since it does not appear that Bush can be deterred from his chosen course of action, notwithstanding the thumbs-down verdict in the voting booth. The potential downside of being a Decider, acting in defiance of overwhelming public sentiment, is that he risks permanent imprisonment within the bubble of his own making.

And don’t just take my word for it. As conservative commentator Tod Lindberg said yesterday in the Washington Times, the Bush escalation plan is his “last stand," and “if it fails, there will be no one else to blame.”

I withhold the balance of my remarks until after Bush’s TV address tonight.

Fresh evidence of the McCain recalibration

As part of our continuing series on John McCain’s politically calculated conversion to Bush Republican orthodoxy, consider his interview the other day on Bloomberg Television.

Political commentator Al Hunt brought up the issue of Iraq, and asked the alleged maverick whether, in this era of severe budget deficits, he would support raising taxes on some wealthy Americans in order to help pay for this war, which is now costing America (or, more specifically, our children and their children) roughly $2 billion a week. Here’s how McCain replied:

“I’m not sure what the point would be. I would ask them to make other sacrifices, but I’m not sure I would want to raise their taxes just because we’re in a war.”

I'm not sure I would want to raise their taxes just because we’re in a war….There it is: the Bush orthodoxy in action, the argument that we can fight a major war and still have a free lunch at home – a concept that is unique in American history. Taxes were hiked during the Vietnam war, during the Korean war…but let’s go farther back:

Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, raised taxes on the wealthy in order to finance his war; he did this, in part, by introducing the tax on inherited wealth (the same tax that Bush and his allies have long been trying to shelve). Lincoln also signed the first bill introducing the income tax, responding (in the words of author Steven Weisman) to a “widespread demand in the North for sacrifice, especially from the wealthy.”

The inheritance tax expired after the war, only to be brought back four decades later by Republican president William McKinley, who needed it to help pay for the brief Spanish-American war. And the top rate of the income tax was raised precipitously by Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1917, to help pay America’s 19-month tab for World War I; as Wilson put it, “The industry of this generation should pay the bills of this generation.”

And a quarter-century after that, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate even higher. In a State of the Union speech, delivered as war clouds loomed, he said: “I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes….I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program to be paid for from (more) taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes.”

But McCain knows that if he was to quote FDR, and suggest that the amount of sacrifice in wartime should be tied to one’s “ability to pay” – in other words, if he was to behave as an actual maverick – he would be toast in the 2008 Republican primaries. If he was to suggest that rich Americans should actually pony up to help pay more for the war that he so vocally defends, just as rich Americans have done in the past, he would quickly lose the support of all those well-heeled Bush campaign donors whom he has been assiduously courting.

Better to let them keep their money, politically speaking. Indeed, they have gotten even richer during the Bush wartime era. In a report released the other day by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, households in the top one percent of earnings have fared best from the Bush tax cuts. Their effective individual tax rates dropped from 24.2 percent in 2000 to 19.6 percent in 2004 – roughly twice the rate cut that went to middle-income families.

There once was a time when McCain was known as a budget-balancing conservative. During the 2000 GOP primary season, when he was competing against Bush for the nomination, he repeatedly contended that Bush’s massive tax cut plan was too big and too risky for the economy; indeed, he countered with a more modest tax cut plan of his own, one that would have directed most of the savings to families with modest incomes. And in 2001, on the Senate floor, he even voted against the first wave of Bush tax cuts.

But many rich GOP donors and Bush loyalists have very long memories; in their eyes, McCain’s past behavior is proof that the man can’t be trusted. Hence his overriding desire to curry their favor during this crucial pre-primary phase. Hence his declaration to Al Hunt that the notion of taxing the rich to pay for a costly war is some kind of alien concept (in his words, “I’m not sure that that’s connected”). Hence his acceptance of the Bush Republican proposition that it is preferable to shift the financial burden for the war on terror to those who today are too young to be taxpayers, and to those not yet born.

It was Woodrow Wilson, 90 years ago, who said of his generation of Americans that “the war must be paid for and it is they who must pay for it, and if the burden is justly distributed…they will carry it cheerfully and with a sort of solemn pride.” But clearly such words are of no use to McCain. In his wooing of the GOP establishment, invoking historical precedents will get him nowhere. His first priority right now is simply to get with the program.