Next Draft... Paul Rieckhoff, the ex-Army lieutenant who served as an infantry platoon leader with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq and gave the Democrat's rebuttle to one of President Bush's radio addresses, has co-founded an organization called Operation Truth. From its web site , the group looks fairly non-partisan. Among other things, the site warns that the current overstretching of the military is going to lead to a draft. But it doesn't actually say that a draft would be a bad thing. For what it's worth, I happen to think it'd be a good thing. (I've talked to a quite a few ex-military folks who agree with me, by the way.)

Calling RE/MAX... Earlier this year, Ben Wallace-Wells argued in The Washington Monthly that the fragile economic recovery could be brought down by a collapse of home prices. As evidence that there is indeed a housing bubble, he noted economic studies showing that in the nation’s twenty or so most overheated housing markets (where about half of all housing wealth is located), the rise in home prices has far outstripped increases in rents and personal incomes—classic signs of inflated housing values. Alan Greenspan long denied the existence of a housing bubble and indeed helped engineer it with his low interest rate policy. Today, however, he issued a warning:

“In response to a question about soaring house prices, Greenspan conceded that in some areas prices have outstripped growth in incomes and rents. ‘This observation raises thew possibility that real estate prices, at least in some markets, could be out of alignment with the fundamentals.’”

Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much....When I saw the rather large banner, "What Did the 9-11 Commission Say About Saudi Arabia?" across the top of my Washingtonpost.com screen, I said to myself, well, that's gotta be an ad by the Saudis. And, sure enough, if you click on the ad, you jump to a page where our helpful friends at the Saudi Embassy (you know, the one protected by Secret Service agents...) tell us that there is no evidence that the Saudi government funds al-Qaeda, that the Saudis have, in fact, been hunting down that rascal Osama bin Laden for quite some time now, and other interesting tidbits about how great the Saudis are. I don't know about you, but that sets my mind at ease.

Two Can Play That Game....Before the Democratic Convention, you may recall, Republicans played a little game they like to call "Inflating Expectations for Other People," telling any reporter who would listen that they fully expected John Kerry to come out of Boston with a 15-point poll bounce. What's been clear over the past six months to anyone who reads polls is that the country is not only firmly divided, but a good 90 percent or more of voters seem to have already made up their minds.

So the whole idea of a phantom 15-point increase in Kerry's favor was ridiculous from the start. This campaign is going to move in increments of two or three points, with a final push at the end from those infamous swing voters who don't start paying attention until they're holding a butterfly ballot up to their face, and maybe not even then. (For a great take on swing voters, read this Alan Wolfe op-ed that appeared in the New York Times in 2000. As Wolfe puts it, "There is something wrong with a system that listens the most to those who care about the nation the least.")

The Kerry campaign has now decided to join the same game, sending out a mass email from pollster Mark Mellman, who notes that, "Following their conventions, the average elected incumbent has held a 16-point lead, while winning incumbents have led by an average of 27 points." Ooof.

Experience tells us that Republicans will prepare for the Convention (not to mention the debates) by implying that their guy will be lucky if he can walk to the podium without tripping over his untied shoelaces. It worked in 2000. But, to point out the obvious, Bush wasn't president then. He now has to simultaneously project command of the office and a lack of confidence in his ability to match up against this John Kerry fella. Maybe they can still pull it off this time. But Democrats should keep the pressure on to raise the bar high.

You Can Take Off the "Free Matt" T-Shirts Now ....Well, that's a relief. Time magazine White House correspondent (and Washington Monthly contributing editor) Matt Cooper is no longer being held in contempt in the investigation into who leaked former CIA operative Valerie Plame's name. Cooper, who had faced 18 months in prison, gave a deposition to prosecutors yesterday after Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby released him from a promise of confidentiality.

That's good, because risking imprisonment for a principle is one thing. But going to jail for Scooter Libby? That's just not right.

Nader Raided... A friend of mine with wide experience in politics and national security was telling me, apropos of the GOP's attacks on Kerry's medals, that this whole race will ride on whether the Kerry camp is willing and able to practice what my friend calls the political "black arts." I hope he’s wrong, and not because I’m so squeamish. I lived for 13 years in Chicago, where I thoroughly enjoyed watching, covering, and on occasion playing Chicago-style politics. It’s just that the stakes in this race are so huge and the president’s record in office so obvious, I would expect (hope?) that most voters would make their decisions on the merits. Also, outside places like Chicago, whose politics are a vestige of a previous era, today’s Democratic supporters and operatives simply aren’t comfortable with ruthless political tactics the way their GOP counterparts are.

That said, I as not disheartened to read in today's Washington Post this anecdote about the difficulties Ralph Nader is facing getting on state ballots:

“In Oregon last month, Nader attempted to round up 1,000 supporters in a day to sign a petition -- one way to get on the ballot in that state. But Democratic activists packed the hall and then declined to sign on, leaving his petition a few hundred names short. His campaign must collect 15,300 signatures by today, and it has accused local Democrats and union officials of threatening petition gatherers with jail time if they turn in names that prove fraudulent.”

Could it be that at least some Democrats are getting back at least some of their political toughness mojo? I’d be interested to know of any other examples.

Group grope... To connect some of the dots of the discussion by Matt Yglesias, Atrios, and my colleague Amy (see below) about the president's curious sudden dislike of 527s. The group his campaign set up to cover the legal and political expenses of contesting the 2000 Florida recount was, yes, a 527. I don't know if that group, the Bush-Cheney 2000, Inc-Recount Fund, ever ran adds. But it did come close to running afoul of a law designed to force 527s to disclose their donors. And, tellingly, the disclosure law it almost broke was put in place just before the 2000 general election as a direct response to the mysterious appearance during the GOP primaries of yet another 527, Republicans for Clean Air. That group ran ads bashing John McCain's environmental voting record and praising then-Gov. Bush's. Not only were the facts in the ads a stretch, but because there was at the time no disclosure requirement, no one knew who was paying for them. The mystery was solved by the New York Times, which eventually revealed the donor to be Dallas billionaire and Bush-backer Sam Wyly. The final irony, Public Citizen's Craig Holman tells me, is that those same disclosure requirements are what made it possible for the New York Times last week to pretty quickly figure out the web of Bush cronies who supported the anti-Kerry swift boaters.

I Hate You and I Hate Your $24 Million....Matt Yglesias makes a good point: Why does Bush keep trying to pretend that 527s are all evil liberal fronts for the Kerry campaign? He and his wife support any number of conservative 527s, including the National Federation for Republican Women, whose magazine cover they currently grace. And Lord knows they benefit from them.

The National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee -- two 527s that are, um, Republican -- raised a whopping $24 million in July at the "President's Dinner," one of the largest fundraising events of the year that stars the big man himself. $24 million. I guess those 527s can come in handy sometimes after all.

What Was That About Trial Lawyers?....Remember the good ol' days, when Bush tossed off blatant applause lines in his State of the Union address, skewering trial lawyers while the networks immediately cut away to a shot of John Edwards sitting patiently? When the GOP came out swinging, calling Edwards "a disingenuous, unaccomplished liberal and friend to personal injury trial lawyers" just minutes after his selection as Kerry's running mate was announced?

You may have noticed, however, a curious silence on the subject in Republican circles lately. Wasn't this supposed to be a slam-dunk issue the Bush/Cheney camp could use to tar Edwards as a fake populist? Apparently not. According to an article in today's Washington Times -- "GOP Reluctant to Criticize Edwards Over Tort Reform" -- Republican strategists are worried that continued attacks on Edwards' trial background could backfire. Because it's not as if Edwards had no clients. And their stories are pretty darn compelling. Pretty darn television-worthy, in fact.

Who would have thought? Well, the The Washington Monthly's own Josh Green, for one. Back in 2001, Green predicted that Edwards' background as a trial lawyer would not be the liability that salivating Republicans hoped it would. In a Monthly essay, Green wrote:

Edwards is uniquely situated to refute Bush's attacks on trial lawyers and tort reform because he's the living embodiment of how a trial lawyer can serve a regulatory function in the face of misbehaving corporations, cities, and professionals. Indeed, attacking him is one of the surest ways for Bush to inadvertently highlight his own greatest vulnerability: the perception among voters that he's a shill for corporate America. As Carlton Carl, the trial lawyers association spokesman, is quick to point out, "People hate insurance companies more than they hate lawyers." By reprising the '98 Senate race at the national level, Republicans play to Edwards' greatest strength.

Beware Of DINOS?....I'm usually of the opinion that Democrats should take all the help they can get on their way to reclaiming majority party status in the U.S. Senate. That means supporting anyone to the left of Zell Miller. Sure, sometimes you get self-financed millionaires who have never rubbed together two policy thoughts. And sometimes you get a vaguely corrupt hack or two. But on balance, it's better than a world in which Bill Frist runs the Senate, all the while doing the bidding of Karl Rove.

Still, it can be tough to sit idly by and watch while Democratic hopefuls tack hard to the right in an attempt to win seats in conservative states. My Oklahoma informants tell me that the Democratic Senate candidate there, Congressman Brad Carson, is currently running television commercials that highlight his support of the partial-birth abortion ban and his opposition to gay marriage. I don't expect him to be out in front defending abortion and gay marriage -- that could be political suicide in a state like Oklahoma. But it's one thing to hold pragmatic conservative beliefs, it's quite another to aggressively run on them.

There's no question that Carson would be a more liberal addition to the Senate than rabidly conservative Tom Coburn, the Republican contender who has mused about the virtues of using the death penalty on doctors who perform abortions. And I'm not advocating a purge of Democrats-In-Name-Only as Republicans have done. Still, if Democrats want a caucus that eventually looks a little less like John Breaux, they need to figure out how to play offense on cultural issues.

Offense vs defense... So where are we in this swift boat controversy, what’s likely to happen next, and what ought to happen next?

The answer to the first question is pretty obvious: The Kerry camp, though damaged by the allegations, has all but won on the merits. In the last couple of days, several mainstream press investigations—see here, here, and here—have (despite a certain conventional even-handedness) undermined most of the key charges made by the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans For Truth that John Kerry didn’t deserve his medals. The SBVFT argument has been further damaged by new testimony from previously silent eyewitnesses who back up Kerry’s version of the events that led to his first Purple Heart and his Silver Star. A series of suspicious-if-not-quite direct connections, and one spot-on one, have been established between SBVFT and the Bush campaign. And Kerry seems finally to be hitting back.

If that were the end of it, one could argue that this whole controversy might ultimately rebound to Kerry’s benefit. It could become, in the minds of voters, yet another example of the president aligning himself with a pack of politically convenient untruths. And if that happens, Kerry ought to be able to turn the tables—for instance, by asking all decorated war veterans in America what they’d feel like if someone started publicly asserting that they didn’t deserve their medals. (In fact, the Boston Globe makes this point in its Sunday editorial.)

But of course that’s not the end of it. Starting this week, SBVFT begins airing commercials attacking Kerry’s 1971 Senate testimony—a line presaged on the Sunday shows by former Sen. Bob Dole. It has long been understood that Kerry’s greatest potential Vietnam-related vulnerability is his leadership of an anti-war veterans group. In Karl Rove’s playbook, the attack on Kerry’s medals was just a softening-up exercise prior to the real assault. As Maureen Down puts it: “The White House must tear down [Kerry’s] heroism before it can tear down his patriotism.”

What I find infuriating about all this is that Kerry’s willingness to protest the war is an essential part of what, to my mind, makes him one of the great heroes—indeed, perhaps the greatest hero--of that era. Here’s a guy who, as a college student, understood and expressed publicly serious and well-founded doubts about the wisdom of America’s Vietnam strategy. Then, unlike many others of his generation, he put his doubts aside and his life on the line in order to do what he could to make his country’s policy a success. Then, having seen first hand that his initial suspicions were correct, and that the line coming out of Washington—that victory was just around the corner, that the “Vietnamization” strategy was working—was a lie, he stood up and told the public the unvarnished truth. In my book, that’s three morally courageous acts in a row. And that’s not counting the thankless but vital roles he played in investigating and ending the POW/MIA controversy, opening relations with Vietnam, and improving federal services for veterans. Name me one person in public life today who negotiated the moral minefield of Vietnam with greater courage and sure-footedness.

And yet, a couple weeks ago, when I asked with a friend working on the Kerry campaign why they weren’t framing Kerry’s protests in this way, my friend said that the polling suggested that American’s just weren’t prepared to hear that argument; that too many voters still think that protesting the war was a dubious act; and therefore the less said about Kerry’s role in those protests the better.

I could sympathize with this line of reasoning, even if I didn’t like it. But it seemed to me questionable then, given the predictable trajectory of GOP attacks. And now it’s clearly a dead letter. The campaign has a simple choice: on the issue of Kerry’s role as a Vietnam War protest leader, they can play defense or offense. The choice is as obvious as the argument the Kerry camp should be making. We are currently involved in a war in Iraq that is failing because policymakers in Washington have miscalculated and lied—to themselves and to the American people. In November, do we choose a president who has approved these miscalculations and trafficked in these lies, or one who, throughout most of his career, has calculated correctly and spoken the truth?

Homer Bound... In filling in for Kevin this week, I had to promise not to reveal where he's spending his vacation. All I'll say is that I'm sure he's enjoying the baklava.

Just kidding. I don't actually know where Kevin is. But I do know that if I were on vacation this week, I'd be in Greece watching the Games.

Well, to be honest, I'd probably be in my hotel room in Athens, flipping TV channels trying to figure out how the swift boat controversy was playing on the Sunday shows. As much as I adore Greece and the Olympics, right now I find the battle to win athletic medals less gripping--and far less consequential--than the effort to question John Kerry's medals. This is an Homeric story. It's about war, blood, death, comradship, envy, history, memory, politics, philosophy, and courage both moral and physical. It's got a (to me) cowardly but powerful villain; a hero who is clever, serious, valliant, and flawed; and a fascinating set of supporting characters. It involves lies and honesty in a tragic, ill-prosecuted war--themes directly relevant to today. And the stakes--control over the mightiest country on earth at a time of genuine crisis--couldn't be higher. On Face the Nation this morning, host Bob Schieffer gave one of his hurrumphy-but-journalistically-safe pax-on-both-your-houses closing monologues about how the American people want to hear about the issues, not about who did what in a war 35 years ago. This is one American who disagrees.