Romney and Giuliani Party On

Two Republican losers are in Denver this week, jockeying for TV face time and puckering up to their new best friend, John McCain.

In the primaries, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney ran neck and neck for the title of Most Shameless, America's Mayor with his 9/11 posturing and the former Massachusetts governor setting world records for pandering to the Radical Right by flip-flopping on gays, abortion and other social issues.

Now they are gate-crashing the Democratic convention like clowns from Comedy Central. Romney is angling for VP on the Republican ticket, accusing Democrats of playing "the politics of envy" by harping on McCain's multiple homes, while modestly pointing out he himself has only four.

Who knows what Giuliani wants in a McCain Administration? Attorney General? The six-figure lectures fees must be drying up.

A Noun, a Verb and POW

In the Democratic debates, Joe Biden famously dismissed Rudy Giuliani with: “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11...there’s nothing else."

Now, Biden may have the chance to do the same for his Senate friend as John McCain's campaign reflexively parrots POW to any questions raised--about how many homes McCain owns, about whether or not he was in a "cone of silence" at the Saddleback Forum, even the gaffe of suggesting his wife Cindy enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest.

As Maureen Dowd puts it, "His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength--and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his POW experience--by flashing the POW card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements."

Giuliani abruptly discovered a voter expiration date for cashing in on 9/11. Will McCain's campaign discover that it is, in the World War II term, "a bridge too far" from the Hanoi Hilton to the White House?

"While McCain’s experience was heroic," Dowd asks, "did it create a worldview incapable of anticipating the limits to US military power in Iraq? Did he fail to absorb the lessons of Vietnam, so that he is doomed to always want to refight it? Did his captivity inform a search-and-destroy, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, 'We are all Georgians,' mentality?"

McCain has opened the door to such questions by putting his POW experience so close to the center of his campaign. He suffered for his country three decades ago, but does that qualify him to end its pain here and abroad in 2009?

Cash-and-Carry Candidate Is Back

Rudy Giuliani, who parlayed his 9/11 TV performance into a $100 million consulting business and six-figure fees for speeches before flopping as a presidential aspirant, is now offering to "appear at fund-raisers around the country for G.O.P. candidates. But there is a catch: He wants some cash out of the deal."

Giuliani is telling the National Republican Congressional Committee and Congressional candidates that if he makes appearances, he wants the candidates to help him pay off his $3.6 million presidential campaign debt.

Giuliani, who was too busy raking in speaking fees to attend meetings of the Iraq Study Group, wants to recover the $500,000 he lent his own campaign.

Leading Republicans are not thrilled by his latest offer. “In a year when our candidates are struggling to raise money, this is just another burden,” said a party strategist. “This is not about helping the party. This is about helping Rudy Giuliani.”

But America' Mayor has endorsed John McCain and will undoubtedly make appearances for him. No word about how much he will charge.

Romney Redux?

Now that John McCain's hair has been mussed a bit by New York Times reminders of his ties to lobbyists, Mitt Romney may be rethinking his decision to suspend his campaign in order not to "be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

According to Los Angeles Times political columnist Andrew Malcolm, "Josh Romney, one of former Gov. Mitt Romney's five sons, says it's 'possible' his father may rejoin the race for the White House, as a vice presidential candidate or as the Republican Party's standard-bearer if the campaign of Sen. John McCain falters...Because he suspended rather than terminated his campaign, Romney still retains control of the nearly 300 delegates he's already won."

Mike Huckabee will be thrilled to hear that Romney may want to be a part of surrendering to terror after all. Maybe they can get Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson to come back for a Republican roast of McCain with Rush Limbaugh as MC.

Is Rudy Through?

On Wednesday morning, either Rudy Giuliani or John Zogby is going wake up with a big headache. Running fourth in the state on which he has bet his presidential chances, Giuliani is nonetheless sure he's going to prevail in Florida's Tuesday primary.

"We're going to win this election by getting the vote out," Giuliani said at a pizza parlor in Port St. Lucie yesterday. "If we win here, we're going to win the nomination."

Zogby disagrees. "Giuliani is becoming less and less of a factor," he said yesterday, his poll showing John McCain and Mitt Romney tied at 30 percent, Mike Huckabee at 14 and Giuliani at 13, with only 9 percent of voters undecided.

For Zogby, who missed Hillary Clinton's late surge in New Hampshire, another blown call could be professional suicide, so it's safe to assume that his level of confidence in the Florida figures is high.

If he's right, the Giuliani comedy of errors will end this week. After leading in the national polls for a year and raising tons of money, America's Mayor decided to snooze through the early primary states and stake everything on the Sunshine State and its population of New York retirees.

By the time he started campaigning, Giuliani was caked with mud from scandals over his erstwhile partner Bernard Kerik and police protection for his current wife while he was still married to her predecessor.

Meanwhile, McCain, Romney and even Huckabee had picked up momentum, and in the past week, Giuliani lost a couple more points, perhaps as a result of his retired base reading the New York Times endorsement of McCain, sideswiping Rudy thus: "The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power...Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking."

If Zogby's figures hold up, Giuliani's best move would be to get out and get behind McCain. For a career prosecutor, Attorney General would not be a shabby consolation prize, if he could weather confirmation hearings about the shadowy clients of Giuliani Partners.

The Experience a President Needs

Democrats will surely nominate a senator, and if John McCain can't go all the way, Republicans will name a former governor or super-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who insists that a president needs executive experience to run the Executive branch.

History suggests otherwise. In 1960, Richard Nixon used that argument against John F. Kennedy and, in the early months of JFK's Administration, it looked like Nixon might have had a point as the new President mishandled the Bay of Pigs disaster.

But Kennedy trumped his inexperience with two crucial qualities: He took responsibility for his mistakes and learned from them, in contrast to George W. Bush, whose resume as an executive did not help him do either, and Nixon who... But you know the rest of that story.

Instinctively Kennedy surrounded himself with the best people ("You can't beat brains," he would say) and insisted on hearing all sides of an argument before he made a decision, as he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Those qualities would satisfy even Giuliani, who wrote a book about leadership but has had trouble practicing his own principles, as his Bernard Kerik albatross and the bitter 9/11 complaints of New York fire fighters suggest.

For a President Obama or McCain, the first days in the Oval would not be a test of management skills. What will count is their vision for America and determination to translate it into political reality. Voters are instinctively doing the right thing by focusing on that.

Revelations

Pat Robertson has returned from his annual State of the Universe meeting with God, and there is good news:

"What I'm praying about is China. I'm asking for 250 million in China. We haven't had that breakthrough yet but I think we're going to get it. God's going to give us China. And China will be the largest Christian nation on the face of the earth. They're going to come to Jesus."

In November, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network received heavenly guidance that led him to endorse Rudy Giuliani as the best candidate for President to defend the country against “the blood lust of Islamic terrorists.”

The devout 76-year-old Robertson claims the ability to leg press 2000 pounds. Is it possible that God is pulling Robertson's leg?

Running in Place

Thursday night we will finally have some numbers, but will they tell us anything about where this bizarre election race is going?

Duration aside, the sight of more than a dozen people running for the White House this past year has seemed more an exercise in attrition than a political marathon--candidates huffing and puffing on treadmills, some falling off (Giuliani) and then climbing back on (McCain and Edwards), some watching each step carefully (Clinton and Romney) while others flaunt their freshness by picking up the pace (Huckabee and Obama). Fred Thompson strolls at the lowest setting, and Ron Paul runs around outside the gym, cussing out the machines.

But is any of this getting them--or us--anywhere? The rapid rise and fall of poll numbers suggests that, instead of choosing, voters are still shopping around and changing their minds as they watch and wait for someone to get off the track to nowhere and head in a direction that inspires them to follow.

Unless some of the candidates start taking such risks instead of pandering to their bases, they will keep running in circles until we finally pick a president out of exhaustion rather than with hope for the future.

Rash Judgments of 2007

If journalists are historians in a hurry, bloggers are first responders, dashing to each disaster in search of finding some sense, but there are times when smoke gets in our eyes.

For your entertainment and my mental health, herewith a few of the year's least prescient posts, out of more than a thousand, where this witness arrived at the scene and got it wrong:

In January, there was hope the proposed Surge would isolate Bush in his madness, followed by a fantasy that voters might look for authenticity in the next President, perhaps in a series of substantive debates.

Last spring, with all respect to the man's honor and integrity, there were qualms about John McCain's losing it. (Now in Iowa, he is being called the "Comeback Codger.")

Gen. Petraeus was compared to Eisenhower and seen as "the man who could end the war," but he ended up doing more than anyone else to prolong it and gave Congressional Republicans enough cover to keep backing Bush without fear of losing their jobs in next year's elections.

When Karl Rove resigned, the MSM and blogosphere were urged to stop paying attention to the "biggest bottom feeder of our time and look ahead to putting back some semblance of decency into American politics." (He's a columnist for Newsweek now.)

In September, it seemed that Fred Thompson's playing it cool could be a winning strategy, but he turned out to be playing it comatose.

As late as mid-November, Rudy Giuliani looked as bulletproof to scandal as Bill Clinton was in 1992. A few weeks later his poll numbers were diving in a mudslide of revelations.

Blogging is an attempt to share thoughts and feelings, to connect with others, but sometimes the medium delivers a defective message. Sorry, mea culpa and a resolution to try to do better. Happy New Year!

Republican Perfection Police

In defending his client from the latest smear-by-whisper in the '08 campaign, John McCain's lawyer says he “was the victim of false, vicious rumors about his personal life” during the 2000 South Carolina primary, and that “rumors and gossip damaged his campaign and may have cost him the election.”

So the spirit of Karl Rove lives on in whatever dirt is at the bottom of Matt Drudge's "revelations" about a story McCain's people have tried to persuade the New York Times not to publish.

In the Republican moral universe, human frailty is a disqualification for President, so the last two candidates standing are Mike Huckabee, the man of God, and Mitt Romney, he of the unblemished personal life.

For a while, his 9/11 aura kept Rudy Giuliani afloat, but the weight of personal imperfections finally dragged him down in the polls, and Fred Thompson has not shown enough orthodox Republican zeal to make up for his actorish womanizing and trophy wife,

In their neo-Victorian fervor, the GOP gave us the exemplary personal life of George W. Bush as an antidote to Bill Clinton's waywardness, and now it seems that nothing less will do for '08.

As the protagonist of Jean Anouilh's "Waltz of the Toreadors" observed about the original Victorians, propriety demanded that couples be seen serenely swimming through life side by side and, if there was a need to relieve oneself, it had to be done under the water, out of sight.

Today's Republicans are keeping that ethos alive with a vengeance.

Family Gathering

The Presidential candidates are beginning to look like relatives who came for the holidays and stayed too long.

At first it was just going to be the kids--Hillary, Barack, Rudy with his newest wife, and John, if he wasn't on one of his trips to Iraq. But then all kinds of kin you invite but don't expect to come started showing up.

Nephew Mitt drove up with a dog on the car roof, told all kinds of stories about where he'd been and got into a beef with Rudy about the people who were doing the yard work.

Great-uncle Fred arrived late and went up to the guest room for a long nap.

Cousin Mike came in from the cold and started eating everybody's lunch.

After Barack got reclusive Aunt Oprah to show up for appetizers, Hillary called Chelsea and her mother, and the old homestead started filling up like the Marx brothers' stateroom.

Somewhere in the attic, Ron Paul is checking his e-mail on a laptop, and who knows what all those distant relatives are yakking about in the basement?

It's great to have a big family, but how long are they all going to hang around?

Giuliani's Single Slip-Up

Life imitates old movies. On "Meet the Press" today, when asked about recommending Bernard Kerik, his friend of ill fame, to President Bush as director of homeland security, Rudy Giuliani, for the only time in an hour of questioning about multiple counts of public and private misfeasance, admitted he "made a mistake" in not vetting his old friend and associate carefully enough while at the same time claiming good judgment 95 to 99 percent of the time.

Stanley Kubrick did this better and funnier in the 1964 movie, "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

Asked by President Merkin Muffley how Gen. Jack D. Ripper, who is about to blow up the world, was not detected as a psychotic by the foolproof "human reliability tests," Gen. Buck Turgidson replies: "Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir."

President Giuliani couldn't have said it better.

Brain Checks for the Candidates

In the 1960s, a New York Times ad headlined "1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to Be President" led to a $75,000 court judgment against a magazine by Sen. Barry Goldwater.

It now turns out that the publisher was prescient in making the mental health of candidates an election issue but lacked the technology to do it properly.

In today's Los Angeles Times, neuropsychiatrist Daniel Amen proposes a brain scan for potential presidents, arguing that a "national leader with brain problems can potentially cost millions of people their lives."

Dr. Amen's diagnosis: "Three of the last four presidents have shown clear brain pathology. President Reagan's Alzheimer's disease was evident during his second term in office...President Clinton's moral lapses and problems with bad judgment and excitement-seeking behavior--indicative of problems in the prefrontal cortex--eventually led to his impeachment."

As for George W. Bush, it looks dire. Dr. Amen, lacking Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography for the patient, nevertheless suspects "our current president's struggles with language and emotional rigidity are symptoms of temporal lobe pathology."

Dr. Amen, drawing on his long-distance diagnoses of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, is worried about "Rudy Giuliani's messy personal life, John McCain's temper and Hillary Clinton's inability to seem authentic."

He wants to check them out in one of his four conveniently located clinics or, failing that, they can at least answer 101 questions for the online interactive self-test on his web site. The future of mankind may be at stake.

Here Comes Huckabee...

Last week's news is translating into this week's poll numbers.

A new national Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll today shows Mike Huckabee threatening the national lead of Rudy Giuliani, who is apparently being damaged in voters' eyes by the montage of scandals building up around his campaign.

Nationally, Guiliani's lead has shrunk from 32-7 percent in October to only 23-17 now. Meanwhile, Huckabee seems to be solidifying his lead in Iowa where 60 Iowa pastors, some of them former backers of Sam Brownback, have endorsed the ex-Governor of Arkansas.

Huckabee leads Giuliani 20-18 percent when Republicans are asked which candidate says what he believes rather than what voters want to hear. Fifty-two percent say Giuliani's pro-abortion stance doesn't bother them, and 73 percent are untroubled by Romney's Mormon faith, an issue he will address in a speech tomorrow night.

As the primaries get closer, so does the race for the Republican nomination.

The Right Choice for an Empty Oval Office

Fred Thompson may be onto something. Today's New York Times puzzles over his "sleepy, unconventional" approach to pursuing the presidency, noting, "Indeed, what has defined his campaign recently has to a large degree been his absence from the trail."

But the Senator/actor who got his start during the Nixon impeachment may be putting his experience to good use. After the trauma of an administration that tried to do too much, the country was ready for a vacant Oval Office or, failing that, an innocuous president like Gerald Ford and then a low-key Jimmy Carter, who was perplexed by the "national malaise."

With the high-energy Rudy Giuliani imploding in scandals, laid-back Fred Thompson may be foxier than he seems. As an antidote to Bush's imperial presidency, he may be showing voters how little he would do to make them anxious or fearful.

His ambling through primary states could be just the ticket for the times. Before the debate, he had a week with only one retail campaign event: a “meet Fred” in the back room of a Southern Carolina barbecue restaurant with no music, food or even chairs. A hundred voters stood for three hours before he arrived for a few remarks and half a dozen questions. Less than 30 minutes later, he left.

At the Florida state convention, other candidates blustered for half an hour or more. Thompson chatted for four minutes, leaving one supporter to say, “We were all hoping he would say something we could get behind, but there was nothing.”

Republicans, his campaign manager sums it up, will have decide whether they want "the Energizer Bunny or a consistent conservative."

At this rate, if Fred Thompson gets the nomination, he may nod off during debates with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and doze all the way to the White House.

If voters want a restful President, he's their man.

The Rudy Mud Keeps Rising

With Bernard Kerik as a character witness, Mr. 9/11 is fast becoming the most ethically challenged Presidential candidate since Bill Clinton came on the scene with a reputation as "Slick Willie."

Giuliani's sleight of hand about the hidden tryst fund that had taxpayers underwriting his courtship expenses enhanced his image this week as the guy with a green eyeshade who inspires other poker players to keep cutting the cards and calling for fresh decks.

To explain why hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses for his security, presumably to protect against terrorists in beachwear while the Mayor was courting Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, were buried in accounts of obscure city offices, Giuliani fell back on that old reliable, a "political hit job." It was only done to speed up slow payments from the Police Department, he claims.

Kerik, Giuliani's police commissioner now under federal indictment for tax fraud and corruption, backs his former boss and business partner. “There would be no need for anyone to conceal his detail’s travel expenses,” Kerik insists.

But the current and former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says he knows of no problems with the delay of payments before Giuliani was mayor or afterward.

Blogger Big Tent Democrat, a lawyer, points out related charges that the Mayor's then-mistress, according to a former city official, "used the PD as her personal taxi service," the same practice that led former NY State Comptroller Alan Hevesi to resign as prosecutors were preparing to indict him for felonies over using state employees to chauffeur his wife.

The New York Times, overflowing with Giuliani's truth abuses, did an omnibus piece yesterday about his penchant for "misleading statistics" to claim accomplishments during his tenure as mayor that are "incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong."

In coming weeks, there will be more Giuliani mud, some of it from Manhattan fire fighters over 9/11, much of it no doubt inspired by Fred Thompson's New York Chairman, Alfonse D'Amato aka Sen. Pothole, whose day job is lobbying for the Poker Players Alliance to overturn a federal ban on internet gambling. D'Amato is an expert on sleaze.

At some tipping point, this rising tide of sewage could overwhelm the Republican front runner's campaign. If not, we might have a President to make Bill Clinton look like Snow White.

Geographic Long Shots

Deep in the bowels of some Las Vegas super-computer, what are the odds against a 2008 Presidential contest between a former Governor of Arkansas and a former First Lady of Arkansas? Or a three-way race involving a Mayor, a former Mayor and a Senator from New York?

A Living Rebuke to Today's Politics

You might sum up what's wrong with this process of picking a president in two words: Joe Biden. Why is he stuck in single digits?

In an interview with Judy Woodruff on PBS' News Hour last night, Biden was a reminder of the kind of candidate that old-fashioned, smoke-filled-room politics of the past century would often produce: experienced, knowing, comfortable in his own skin, someone to be trusted without being idealized.

Not always. There was Nixon, of course, but there were also FDR, Jack Kennedy, Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson and even Truman, if you overlook the cronyism.

Biden is a throwback to those days in refusing to play the Hillary-Rudy-Romney game of pandering from the heart. In Iowa, he is running a tongue-in-cheek ad about the phrase often heard in Democratic debates, "Joe's right," and he has been--about Iraq (after trusting Bush in 2002) and most domestic issues based on more than half a lifetime in Congress.

Peace to those cynics who will pop up with "plagiarism" and "shoot from the hip," but Biden seems to have learned from past mistakes and personal losses to emerge not sadder but wiser and optimistic. He deserves a closer look.

The old pols who used to pick candidates were a nasty, often crooked, lot, but they were realists who didn't fall for sound bites, test-panel slogans and shifty commercials. Nobody wants them back, but there must be a better alternative than this.

Maybe the YouTubers tonight will show us the way.

Hillary: The Case for Humility

The other day, Andrew Sullivan distilled his and America's '08 dilemma into a choice "between fear and loathing. I loathe Clinton; I fear Giuliani."

The Rudy side of the equation is easily quantified (see below), but the hatred of Hillary Clinton, not only Sullivan's, but that, if polls are to be believed, of close to half of all Americans, is more complicated.

A visitor from another planet might see her as a former First Lady of undoubted intelligence who stood by her husband in a pre-election sex scandal, was later victimized by another in the White House and then went on to an independent political career and the brink of nomination for president. As they used to say on Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Critics call her cold, calculating and ruthless but, in some political circles, those are qualities deemed vital in a president. Among the less sophisticated, there is a resentment over exploiting her spousal status that overlooks George W. Bush's leveraging of his filial tie into the White House.

But underneath all that, I would suggest, is a vague rage at her sense of entitlement, the unquestioning attitude toward her right to be President, the confidence she projects of having somehow earned it by claiming her White House years as executive "experience."

That Achilles' heel has, in recent days, been exploited by her opposition, as in Barack Obama's observation, “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”

In some ways, Sen. Clinton may have damaged her own campaign narrative by framing the choice as experience vs. change. Some of those experiences are turnoffs for voters, who might be impressed by strong stands on issues that concern them but see her waffling only as reinforcement for the feeling that she takes her succession for granted.

Humility is not high on the list of qualities the electorate wants in a president, but modesty could go a long way in offsetting the arrogance Hillary Clinton projects and, in a general election, it might serve her well against Rudy Giuliani, who is over-endowed with it to the point of frightening Andrew Sullivan:

"His obsessive loyalty to aides, his reflexive defense of the security and police forces, his discomfort with any argument smacking of civil liberties, his mean streak, his desire to extend his own term of office as New York City mayor, his authoritarian, meddling instincts, and his frequent, hotheaded outbursts: all this make giving him the Cheney-style presidency a huge risk."

Hillary haters and supporters, take note.

In-Fighting by Innuendo

They're trying something new in this political campaign--subtlety. The '08 candidates are using this unlikely weapon out of fear that voters may be turned off by the customary sledgehammer attack ads.

So reports Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post, citing commercials that ooze with good feelings about themselves but hide embedded barbs for their rivals.

A Romney ad features his super-wholesome family, hoping to remind viewers that Giuliani has been married three times with a second divorce that has left him alienated from his children.

"It's just essential," Romney intones, "to have a home where faith, where love of country, where determination, where all these features that are so much a part of American culture are taught to our kids."

Giuliani stresses his record as a mayor and prosecutor while telling voters they "are not going to find perfection" and, on the stump, suggests that candidates like Romney who don't admit mistakes in their lives may make some big ones in the Oval Office.

In his commercial, Obama says the country needs "a real honest conversation" about Social Security. "I don't want to put my finger out to the wind and see what the polls say," he reminds us, an oblique reference to Hillary You-Know-Who.

John McCain attacks pork-barrel spending by citing Clinton's effort to obtain $1 million for a Woodstock museum, noting that he missed the 1969 music festival because he "was tied up at the time" while the screen shows him as a wounded prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Political strategists seem to have concluded that blatant Karl Rove attack ads and Swift Boat commercials may backfire this time, but there is no guarantee that snide will be better. After being fed red meat for so long, voters may not lap up pablum.