Clinton and Obama Take Command

It's 3 AM for the Hillary Clinton campaign, the red phone is ringing but there's no one to answer because they're all too busy squabbling among themselves.

On the brink of disaster, the putatively more experienced candidate for Commander-in-Chief has fired her campaign manager, muzzled her husband and chief strategist Mark Penn and, according to the New York Times, set out to overhaul an organization that has "set itself apart for its level of disorder and dysfunction."

The unkindest cut of all is an implied comparison to George W. Bush as an executive:

"Mrs. Clinton showed a tendency toward an insular management style, relying on a coterie of aides who have worked for her for years, her aides and associates said. Her choice of lieutenants, and her insistence on staying with them...was blamed by some associates for the campaign’s woes. Again and again, the senator was portrayed as a manager who valued loyalty and familiarity over experience and expertise."

The surprise on the other side has been the quick-response style of the supposedly dreamy Obama and his cohorts. Campaigning in Mississippi, he has been accusing Clinton of using "Republican tactics" against him.

“When in the midst of a campaign you decide to throw the kitchen sink at your opponent because you’re behind,” he says, “and your campaign starts leaking photographs of me when I’m traveling overseas wearing the native clothes of those folks to make people afraid, and then you run an ad talking about who’s going to answer the phone at three in the morning, an ad straight out of the Republican playbook, that’s not real change.”

Even mild-mannered former Sen. Bill Bradley, who ran in 2000, is striking back on his behalf, accusing the Clintons of “lying” to win.

“The bigger the lie, the better the chance they think they’ve got. That’s been their whole approach,” Bradley told a reporter. “She’s going to lose a whole generation of people who got involved in politics believing it could be something different.”

Heading down the stretch for the nomination, it's clear that Obama is going to be no John Kerry in response to swiftboating from opponents in either party.

Troubling Questions About Spitzer Scandal

The New York Times, which failed to make a sex-scandal charge against John McCain stick, has settled for the scalp of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, exposing his involvement with high-priced prostitutes that will likely lead to his resignation.

Spitzer, whose career was built on bull-in-the-china-shop pursuit of corporate malfeasance as Attorney General of New York and whose term in Albany has made him less than lovable, will get little sympathy from politicians, the press and most of the public, but journalistically, there are some troubling questions.

"Mr. Spitzer’s involvement with the prostitution operation came to light in court papers filed last week," the Times reports today, citing unnamed "federal authorities" and "officials," although Spitzer was not named in the affidavit by Assistant US Attorneys.

The case started with IRS investigation of "suspicious transactions" about possible bribery, but it soon became clear from wiretaps authorized by the US Attorney General (Alberto Gonzales?) that Spitzer's financial gyrations involved sex rather than official corruption.

The prostitution ring is now being prosecuted, but Spitzer's legal exposure seems limited to possible charges of "a crime called structuring" that involves concealing of payments and sources.

What, then, justifies the outing of Spitzer at this point by anonymous federal officials and the Times of activity that so far has not been deemed illegal and does not involve his duties as Governor?

Spitzer's leaving office in this situation would be in sharp contrast to two Senators who remain in their positions, Louisiana's David Vitter, who admitted patronizing prostitutes last year, and Larry Craig, who pled guilty to soliciting men's room sex but was defended by the ACLU on the basis that it was private behavior.

John McCain is likable and Eliot Spitzer is far from lovable, but does that difference justify his destruction by front-page exposure of personal misbehavior?

Desperate Househusband

Not easy to boggle the public mind these days, but Bill Clinton seems to have done it again by appearing on the Rush Limbaugh show on the day of the Texas primary.

The former President did not have intercourse with that man himself, who was suffering from a convenient case of one-day flu after urging his listeners to cross over and vote for Hillary Clinton on the theory that Barack Obama would be harder for Republicans to beat. A substitute interviewer did the deed.

Andrew Sullivan's reaction: "Now just wrap your mind around this: the Clintons were happy to support a cynical, partisan Republican campaign to wound the Democratic front-runner, and they were brazen enough to go on the Limbaugh show to do so.

"There also seems little doubt that Republican mischief played a real role in affecting the results."

Several days later Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson complained about Obama's "attacks" on his candidate: "I for one do not believe that imitating Ken Starr is the way to win a Democratic primary election for president."

His target, the former President, is making Starr look like a pussycat.

Back to the Political Future

"I don't belong to any organized party," Will Rogers liked to say, "I'm a Democrat."

Imagine Jon Stewart in a cowboy hat, twirling a lariat and talking with a nasal twang. That was Will Rogers in the 1930s, the most popular political satirist of his time, who did monologues back then on the idiocy of the Washington power structure.

Imagine what he would have to say about superdelegates, caucuses and the Florida-Michigan brouhaha.

“Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats," Rogers explained. "If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.”

Nothing changes, except to get funnier--and sadder. The cowboy nailed it all by observing, "The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected."

When Washington lawmakers wanted to put up a statue of him, Rogers agreed but only if it were facing the House Chamber, so he could "keep an eye on Congress." It's the only one facing the entrance and, according to Capitol guides, Presidents rub his left shoe for good luck before entering to give the State of the Union Address.

The old cowboy would get a kick out of that.

The Audacity of Dope

In today's New York Times, William Kristol invokes the Reign of Terror in advising John McCain to follow Danton's lead in picking his running mate.

Coopting Obama's keyword, Kristol urges the Republican nominee to show audacity and "upend the normal dynamics of this year’s election" with a bold vice presidential choice like Gen. David Petraeus, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or--wait for it--"a hawkish and principled Democrat like Joe Lieberman."

As one of the Connecticut Independent's constituents, I am reduced to paraphrasing Henny Youngman, "Take my Senator--please."

Kristol's reasoning: "If any Republican can defend conservative principles and policies, at once acknowledging Bush’s failures while pivoting to present his own biography and agenda to the voters, McCain can.

"Still, he’ll have to take risks."

One of them would be listening to loony advice from the likes of Kristol, who has only recently become McCain's new best friend and is now urging on him the wisdom of the French Revolution: “Il faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.”

McCain may want to keep in mind that Danton ended up under the guillotine.

Our Wobbly War on Terror

With President Bush's would-be successors squabbling over Iraq, they are neglecting the main threat of terror that will face one of them taking office next January.

In Pakistan, Musharraf is on his way out as leaders of the two dominant parties agree to reinstate the judges he fired and try to strip him of crucial powers.

"Afghanistan is slipping toward failure," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden warns. "The Taliban is back, violence is up, drug production is booming and the Afghans are losing faith in their government. All the legs of our strategy--security, counter-narcotics efforts, reconstruction and governance--have gone wobbly."

The schedule of staying or going in Iraq is dominating the foreign policy debate in the presidential campaign, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are becoming more urgent.

"If we should have had a surge anywhere," Sen. Biden wrote last week in the New York Times, "it is Afghanistan...In six years, we have spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction only what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq."

The border area between the two countries, according to Biden is "a freeway of fundamentalism: the Taliban and Al Qaeda find sanctuary in Pakistan, while Pakistani suicide bombers wreak havoc in Afghanistan."

The Bush-Cheney strategy of relying on Musharraf's unreliable assurances about rooting them out is collapsing, but this Administration is unlikely to face that fact.

Biden sums it up: "The next president will have to rally America and the world to 'fight them over there unless we want to fight them over here.' The 'over there' is not, as President Bush has claimed, Iraq, but rather the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Voters should be pressing Sens. McCain, Clinton and Obama to tell them what they are going to do about that.

Pyrrhic Victory, Anyone?

Amid two tiny wins yesterday--in the Wyoming caucuses and the taking of Dennis Hastert's House seat by an Obama admirer--his supporters and Hillary Clinton's were hard at work to snatch defeat from the jaws of expected Democratic victory in November.

After the candidate's claim this week that only she and John McCain had crossed "the commander-in chief threshold," Clinton's campaign generalissimos were e-mailing journalists a memo headed "Obama's Iraq Plan: Just Words":

"Once again, it looks like Senator Obama is telling voters one thing while his campaign says those words should not to be mistaken for serious action...

"Senator Obama has made hard end dates about Iraq a centerpiece of his campaign and has repeatedly attacked Senator Clinton for not being clear about her intentions with regard to troop withdrawal.

"It turns out those attacks and speeches were just words. And if you can't trust Senator Obama's words, what's left?"

His campaign fired back: "The Clinton campaign has publicly admitted that the only way they can still win this election is by tearing Barack Obama down. They have called their attacks the 'kitchen sink strategy'...The result has been a constant barrage of attacks about Senator Obama's record that they know full well aren't true. And yet they repeat them, over and over again, day after day, in an attempt to deceive the American people..."

Well said, word warriors. Those people taking notes are from the Republican swiftboat squad, who will be happy to immortalize them, no matter which Democrat wins the nomination.

Huckabee, Health and Fitness Guru

The biggest winner among the 2008 losers is fielding job offers from cable news networks, but there is a better career move available. Richard Simmons turns 60 this summer, and Mike Huckabee is the perfect candidate to fill his tights, metaphorically speaking.

Unless he plans never to run for public office again (Is the Pope Baptist?), the worst thing Huckabee could do is leave a trail of political bread crumbs to YouTube him to oblivion (multiply "a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God" by thousands).

Instead, the man who stepped out of a fat suit five years ago and began running marathons would be the ideal TV proselytizer against America's obesity epidemic, as he was in Arkansas and elsewhere before coming down with White House fever.

With his communications skills, the author of "Stop Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork" would be the sensation of daytime TV, regaling audiences with stories about how, as a 300-pound Governor in 2003, he sat down at a cabinet meeting and broke the chair while inspiring them to slim down and stay healthy, even as he himself did throughout the fast-food temptations of a Presidential campaign.

He might not make Mitt Romney money, but Huckabee could earn enough to avoid having to lecture for pay, as he did over the last year, if he makes another run for the White House.

If he decides to do it, the Governor could profit from his Don Imus moment two years ago. When the I-man told him he looked "emaciated," Huckabee made a little concentration-camp joke that did not go over too well with Jewish advocates.

Like Richard Simmons, Governor, just keep it upbeat.

Home Wrecking: Victims and Walkaways

The housing crisis started out looking like a death in the family but is now resembling divorce as well. Added to the record numbers of Americans losing their homes because they can't make the mortgage payments are others who can afford to but decide to cut their losses and default voluntarily.

The category of walkaways is made up of speculators as well as new homeowners who were lured by introductory rates into buying bigger homes than they can afford.

"Some financial advisers," the Wall Street Journal reports, "are even encouraging homeowners who are upside down to consider foreclosure, which they see as a purely financial decision with limited negative consequences...(A) web site started in January that offers foreclosure counseling to homeowners advises that borrowers who default on one mortgage can typically get another mortgage between two and four years after a foreclosure. Then, 'before you know it, you will have this behind you and a fresh start!'"

As the politicians ponder ways to ease the crisis with rate freezes and subsidies, the emphasis is on the more than 900,000 households now in involuntary foreclosure, up 71% from a year ago, according to a survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

But as home prices continue in free fall, it will be necessary to separate the victims of predatory loan practices from those who saw a free lunch and are now walking out without paying the tab.

Fannie Mae, the government sponsor of loan guarantees, is working on harsher penalties for walking away, pursuing some borrowers in court and lengthening the time between when borrowers default and when they become eligible again for a Fannie Mae-backed loan.

"Of course, we will make exceptions for extenuating circumstances, like divorce or death," says a Fannie Mae executive. "But who we are trying to get are the people who can afford to make payments but have decided not to."

The Posthumous Diary of Heath Ledger

In an era of fake memoirs, Esquire now gives us a new variation on masturbatory journalism--the fictional diary.

For "a conceivable chronicle of Heath Ledger's final days," the editors explain, "writer Lisa Taddeo visited the actor's neighborhood, talked to the store owners and bartenders who may have seen him during his last week, and read as many accounts and rumors about the events surrounding his death as possible. She filled in the rest with her imagination. The result is what we call reported fiction."

Others might call it exploitation, but the magazine has been inventing new ways of excavating reality for half a century since the days of the New Journalism, when Harold Hayes turned novelists like James Baldwin and Norman Mailer into reporters, and journalists like Tom Wolfe into novelists.

In those days of digging for more than surface truth, there was a minor figure named A. J. Weberman, who can be seen now as a media prophet. Starting with Bob Dylan, Weberman's way of deconstructing celebrities was to scour their garbage for clues to their essence. It got to the point where J. Edgar Hoover was reported to be having agents surreptitiously remove his and put out fake garbage to throw reporters off the scent.

Ms. Taddeo's "diary" is in that tradition, an attempt to turn detritus into journalistic art, starting with an invented warning by Jack Nicholson to "stay away from the god damn pills" to a coda on celebrity:

"I don't know how it will be for you, but for me, you wake up one more time and everything is really bright, like a flashbulb. Everything is clear as vodka. And then you go back to sleep again. One last punch-drunk opening of the eyes is what you get, and guess what--it's enough.

"So hey, buddy, why so serious? Chin up. It's all part of the plan."

Esquire's circulation plan perhaps, but we can only hope they don't start teaching this stuff in journalism schools.

The Drudges' Generation Gap

They are digital gatekeepers, but the father runs an online library and the son is the proprietor of a news whorehouse.

Outing Prince Harry in Afghanistan and showing Barack Obama in Muslim garb are the latest triumphs of "the world's most powerful journalist," as the UK Telegraph now dubs Matt Drudge, stretching the definition of all three words.

In an era when clicks are currency, Robert Drudge's refdesk.com, "Fact Checker for the Internet," is clearly outvalued by his son's millions of links to facts, factoids and junk news from everywhere.

The story is familiar by now--Young Drudge's Dickensian youth of abject intellectual and psychological poverty and his Horatio Alger ascent after a despairing father gave him a cheap computer--the 7-Eleven years, the psychiatric treatment with Jewish Social Services, the climb back to become manager of a CBS gift shop, the rummaging for scoops in the Hollywood City trash cans before cleaners fed them to the shredders...

A 21st century success story best summarized by the Great Summarizer himself: "24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a 12-month year, 10 years a decade, 10 decades a century, and 10 centuries a millennium, as far as a chip can see, wire services from all over the world move raw data ... all over the world!

"I can access, edit, headline and ... link to it all!

"Throw it up on a website and wait for you to come.

"For seven pre-millennial years, I've covered the world from my Hollywood apartment, dressed in my drawers.

"I've reported when, how, and what I've wanted...

"There's been no editor, no lawyer, no judge, no president to tell me I can't...

"Technology has finally caught up with individual liberty."

As Mel Brooks' Max Bialystock would say, "When you've got it, baby, flaunt it!" But Drudge might want to take a look back at his 20th century counterpart, Walter Winchell, who owned the world of gossip with his punchy phrasing and unfettered "reporting" back then.

Another of today's icons, Larry King, who succeeded the gossip master at his newspaper job, recalls: "He was so sad. You know what Winchell was doing at the end? Typing out mimeographed sheets with his column, handing them out on the corner. That's how sad he got. When he died, only one person came to his funeral."

Sic transit... Wait, I have to check the exact quote on Robert Drudge's web site.

Family Counseling for the McCains

Irony is now officially dead as Karl Rove advises John McCain in today's Wall Street Journal to "share a personal narrative about his life, values and inner beliefs" with voters.

Eight years ago, Rove and his crew concocted their own for McCain and shared it widely in South Carolina before the 2000 primaries that helped seal the nomination for George W. Bush--a man emotionally damaged by his years as a POW with a wife addicted to pain killers, the father of an illegitimate, interracial child.

As recently as last June, Mrs. McCain told a reporter that her family was still dealing with the "emotional fallout," that Bridget, their adopted daughter who was born in Bangladesh and was then 15, learned about the accusations while Googling her own name and went to her mother in tears.

“She wanted to know why President Bush hated her,” Mrs. McCain said. “And I had to explain to her that it wasn’t the president that hated her, that no one hates her...I had to explain to her how nasty campaigns can be.”

Now Bush is embracing McCain in the Rose Garden, and Rove is telling him how to swiftboat Obama and Clinton. "Nasty" seems like a pale word.

Florida and Michigan: The Children's Hour

We're in the Democratic sandbox again, with the kiddies wrestling over the toys and their National Committee nannies telling them to play nice and follow the rules.

But Florida (Republican) Governor Charlie Krist and Michigan's Jennifer Granholm are being soccer moms asking for the scores to count, even if their little angels were a bit out of bounds. The Obamas are yelling foul, and the Clintons are in cheerleading mode.

How the hell do we get into these messes? Is there something in Democratic genes that foredooms us to internecine strife and sibling bickering?

Now that Florida and Michigan have smashed their primary playthings, do we buy them new ones or send them to their rooms without dinner? What's the best way to teach them to share with others?

Beats me, but the party elders better get Uncle Al Gore and any other sane relatives they can find to arbitrate this bickering before the rest of the country decides that Grandpa John McCain doesn't look so bad after all.

One solution might be to take away half of the kids' allowances and make them promise never to do it again, but if history is any guide, they will keep squabbling until bedtime.

Liars and Fabulists

The continuing hoo-ha over the latest publishing fraud, the Valley girl who posed as a druggie gang member, brings up the question of where to draw the line between writers with vivid imaginations and out-and-out liars.

Truman Capote, who invented the non-fiction novel, was not always the most fact-checkable of journalists. As his editor and friend, I found he had a storyteller’s way with the truth. His writing and even his casual conversation abounded in astonishments, wondrous coincidences and weird juxtapositions.

He would tell colorful tales, unlikely but not necessarily untrue, often at the expense of macho figures: how Marlon Brando tried to get him into bed after an all-night interview in a Japanese hotel; how during the filming of "Beat the Devil," he bested Humphrey Bogart, who persisted in calling him Caposy, at arm-wrestling for $150 and sealed the humiliation of the actor, known for his nightclub brawls, by using judo to put him flat on his back.

But Capote was a novelist at heart, and his talent earned him some leeway as a fabulist in matters of little moment. In fact, the writing of "In Cold Blood" was, in part, a challenge he set himself to tell a journalistically pure story that would have the richness of his fiction. He knew the difference.

Today's fake memoirists either don't know or don't care, and their publishers are hard-pressed to verify their authenticity in an industry with a tradition of trusting writers to be truthful.

Under the headline, "Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud," the New York Times today reports the dismay of editors and agents who are embarrassed to find themselves vouching for lying writers.

Yet, a freelance reporter, who wrote a profile of the fake gang girl for the Times itself, did not question her story.

“The way I look at it," the reporter explained, "is that it’s just like when you get in a car and drive to the store—-you assume that the other drivers on the road aren’t psychopaths on a suicide mission.”

Sadly, the clubby world of book publishing is not in Kansas any more. It will have to do a lot more checking up on who is behind the curtain before putting into the book stores the story of the latest self-styled Wizard of Oz.

Obama's Move to Disarm Clinton

If he wants to end it sooner than later, Barack Obama should announce now that he intends to ask Hillary Clinton to share the Democratic ticket with him.

Clinton herself opened the door for such an invitation today. Asked about the possibility on CBS' "Early Show," she answered "that may be where this is headed, but of course we have to decide who is on the top of the ticket."

That decision has already been made by the voters and, in the coming days, will be ratified by the defection of superdelegates. With her "35 years of experience," Hillary Clinton is a seasoned enough politician to know that.

For his part, Obama has been reaching out far enough to indicate that he might ask Republicans like Chuck Hagel and Dick Lugar to serve in his cabinet as Secretaries of Defense and State. Making a move toward Clinton would not be that much of a stretch for a candidate whose theme has been uniting the country.

He can start with the Democratic Party. A declaration that he wants Hillary Clinton to run with him need not be coupled with the demand for an immediate answer, but it would relieve Obama of any pressure to go negative against Clinton and help disarm her recent tendency to tear him down.

In 2000, George W. Bush claimed he was a uniter. This year, Obama can prove that he is one and go a long way toward the White House by doing it.

Comeback Kid, the Sequel

Just as John McCain starts his do-over of the 2000 election, Hillary is hoping for a rerun of that 1992 Clinton classic, "The Comeback Kid," but the script and casting present problems.

Yesterdays wins will keep her onstage, but Barack Obama is no Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown to be overtaken in the late primaries, her timing is off and TV gigs on Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show won't do as much as the 60 Minutes soap opera about Gennifer Flowers did to turn things around back then.

Moreover, this Clinton faces a dilemma her spouse did not have to deal with--the risk of tearing her party apart with attacks on a front runner that the Republicans can put to good use if Obama wins the nomination.

In the red phone commercial and statements pairing her experience with McCain's in contrast to Obama's sparse resume, the former First Lady is on a scorched-earth march that won't overcome the deadly delegate math she is facing and that may damage her standing with a party desperate to wrest the White House from those who have taken the country into a devastating war and on to the verge of economic disaster.

Sequels seldom live up to the originals, and Hillary Clinton is not enough of a political artist to give us a Godfather II.

Bush's Embrace: Can McCain Bear It?

He will go to the White House today to be anointed by the man he detested four years ago to the point of considering John Kerry's offer to be his running mate and, in the following year, leaving his party to become an independent.

As the newly minted nominee, John McCain last night offered his arguments against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but at the core were reruns of his bitter battle with Bush eight years ago.

"Americans," McCain declared, "aren't interested in an election where they are just talked to and not listened to; an election that offers platitudes instead of principles and insults instead of ideas; an election that results...in four years of unkept promises and a government that is just a battleground for the next election.

"Their patience is at an end for politicians who value ambition over principle, and for partisanship that is less a contest of ideas than an uncivil brawl over the spoils of power."

That sounds more like an indictment of Bush and Rove than a description of what is involved now in opposing either Clinton or Obama.

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination will have to hammer at the contradictions that John McCain faces in running as the successor of a President whose policies and practices he abhorred, who botched a war more badly than the one McCain suffered in and who attacked his family in 2000 with personal smears against his wife and child that still rankle.

Have a nice lunch at the White House, Senator.

A Birthday Memory

Seventy-one years ago, on my Bar Mitzvah day, I went to the movies to see the elegantly beautiful British actress Madeleine Carroll and, on the day the Jewish religion declared me a man, I fell hopelessly in love with the most golden shiksa of them all.

A decade and a war later, at my alma mater, City College of New York, I was doing publicity for the Institute of Film Techniques, a grandiose name for a few courses started by Hans Richter, an avant-garde filmmaker who had fled the Nazis. Since the Academy Awards ignored them then, I suggested the Film Institute select the best documentaries of the year. He happily agreed and started to round up his friends as judges.

Looking at his list, unaware that my subconscious was groping toward divine fulfillment, I suggested the jury would benefit from adding a name, a big Hollywood name, a movie star name. We pondered for a while, but my subconscious had been reading the New York Times. Who was in New York, just retired from films, about to take her fourth husband, a tycoon at Time Inc.? Did it surprise my subconscious when her name came to my lips? Madeleine Carroll.

She agreed to do it. On the day of judging she appeared, a well-dressed woman of forty, but I was seeing her in soft focus, her shimmering hair framing lips, eyes and cheekbones that had inflamed a boy's heart. We sat together in the dark, shoulders touching, for six hours, her perfume flooding my senses. If she was bored by the unreeling of banal images by sensitive filmmakers with foundation grants, she never showed it.

In a sneering documentary about Hollywood materialism, the camera unsteadily panned million-dollar homes, with the narrator intoning, "This is Beverly Hills, a rich community with well-kept lawns..."

She turned and put her lips to my ear, her hair brushing my temple.

"And well-kept women," she whispered.

After the lights came on to end my dream, Madeleine Carroll took my hand in farewell with a dazzling smile.

She was the first of Alfred Hitchcock's blonde goddesses in the 1930s and, after her sister was killed in a World War II bombing raid, she had stopped acting to work in field hospitals as a Red Cross nurse, receiving the Legion d'honneur for bravery in France.

I still see that smile in my dreams and on Turner Classic Movies.

Unbelievably Fascinating Lives

When George W. Bush starts on his memoirs next year, he could find inspiration in a new trend--faking it.

The latest made-up life story is by a 33-year-old Valley girl named Margaret Seltzer who concocted a critically praised account of life in South Central LA as a half-white, half-Native American girl in a drug and gang culture, published last week as "Love and Consequences" by Margaret B. Jones.

The love et al were fake, but the consequences real as her publisher had to withdraw all copies from the book stores. Before that, it was a Holocaust memoir and two years ago an Oprah-touted best-seller about drugs and addiction by James Frey that turned out to have been invented.

Since our 24/7 news culture has made real life seem so drab, it's understandable that a new generation of writers would be compelled to invent alternate realities, but when I was a book publisher, we called it fiction.

Ms. Seltzer now admits she wrote her book "sitting at Starbucks" in South Central and drinking in the atmosphere. President Bush has been doing the same in the White House, and there is no reason he shouldn't be able to turn out a narrative as gripping as hers. But he will have tone down Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales if he expects anybody to believe it.

A Head of State for Hard Times

Seventy-five years ago today, Franklin D. Roosevelt took office to end a Depression and face an oncoming war. Now, voters are choosing a President to resolve a war and stave off a Depression.

In these hard times, Americans will take their chances on the first woman or African-American or the oldest president ever. Back then, they were relying on the first Chief Executive who could stand only with braces on his legs and spent most of his time in a wheel chair.

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself," FDR said in his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, but that night, two million Americans were homeless and banks in 32 states closed and could not reopen the next morning.

Compared to then, the choice now is less daunting, but it nonetheless marks another turning point in how the country is to be governed and who will lead the way and set the tone.

Roosevelt, despite his infirmity, brought energy and hope to the White House and changed the direction of American politics for half a century. Nothing that momentous may happen in this election, but after eight years of disastrous leadership, something important is at stake again.

Tonight, we will get a clearer idea of who will be entrusted with the job of leading us through the first hard times of this century.

Obama, Scooter Libby and Saddam

The six-degrees-of-separation game starts today as Antoin Rezko goes on trial for corruption, prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald, Scooter Libby's nemesis, after being jailed for violating his bail terms by taking $3.7 million from a British-Iraqi billionaire previously convicted of smuggling arms to Saddam Hussein.

Barack Obama is on the far margins of this ripe stew of Chicago corruption, but Hillary Clinton's top campaign advisor and the Wall Street Journal, among others, are eager to smear him with the overflow.

Obama's campaign has returned $150 million of Rezko contributions, and the candidate himself has called "boneheaded" his involvement with the slumlord in the purchase of his own home in 2005. But that may not be enough to deflect pressure to explain more fully.

“Now the trial is beginning, and I think it will be more difficult for him to avoid these various serious questions,” Howard Wolfson, the Clinton communications director, told reporters last week. “(I)f the shoe were on the other foot...I’d be having to answer them to people who are very serious investigative reporters who know the right questions to ask and don’t take ‘no comment’ for an answer.”

In the Journal today, columnist John Fund predicts, "Mr. Obama will eventually have to talk about Illinois, if only to clear the air. After John McCain last month was attacked for cozy ties to lobbyists, he held a news conference and answered every question. Hillary Clinton held a White House news conference on Whitewater and her cattle futures. Mr. Obama must do the same for questions about Mr. Rezko and 'the Chicago way' of politics. If he doesn't, they may increasingly haunt his candidacy."

Obama's meteoric rise carries with it the threat of a media backlash against his unvetted history, and opponents in both parties will do their best to make Rezko an albatross to weigh him down. After tomorrow's primaries, he would do well to try to cut it off as he races from here to November.

Beatifying Bill Buckley

It is no disrespect to the memory of a remarkable man to marvel at the efforts of disciples he left behind to elevate him to conservative sainthood.

The latest gush is from William Kristol in today's New York Times, asserting Buckley "helped many of us realize there were far richer intellectual traditions available than 20th-century liberalism even dreamed of" and crediting him with the rise of Reagan followed by "victory in the cold war, a revitalized economy and a renewed nation."

Last week, David Brooks was almost at a loss for words, but not quite. "I don’t know," he wrote, "if I can communicate the grandeur of his life or how overwhelming it was to be admitted into it. Buckley was not only a giant celebrity, he lived in a manner of the haut monde. To enter Buckley’s world was to enter the world of yachts, limousines, finger bowls at dinner, celebrities like David Niven and tales of skiing at Gstaad...He took me sailing, invited me to concerts and included me at dinners with the great and the good."

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan celebrated Buckley as a "complete American original, a national treasure, a man whose energy was a kind of optimism, and whose attitude toward life, even when things seemed to others bleak, was summed up in something he said to a friend: "'Despair is a mortal sin.'"

Among conservatives, only Andrew Sullivan spoke a truth rare among all the superlatives by asking, "(A)m I the only person who found Buckley close to unreadable a lot of the time? I never read his fiction, but his nonfiction was packed the endless sentences, ridiculously long words, and meaning that sometimes took several reads to excavate. I don't know how many times I finished a Buckley column with the thought: what on earth was he trying to say?"

For benighted liberals like me, there was an even more basic problem. For all the conservative blather about our latte-drinking elitism, Buckley was the most elitist figure of his generation, growing up in inherited luxury with a monstrous sense of entitlement and disdain for those who did not share it.

As he dazzled the likes of Kristol, Brooks and Noonan, the rest of us saw only brilliant rationalizations for the politics of selfishness and "Dieu and Mon Droit." Not quite "Let them eat cake," but not too far removed from it.

But speaking ill of the dead may be churlish and ungracious. Let Noonan have the last word about "the defender of great creeds and great belief": "Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels take thee to thy rest."

What a Difference a Year Makes

Last March 4th, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, arms linked with civil rights leaders, were reenacting the 1965 march in Selma, united in declaring their debt to the non-violence of Martin Luther King. Today, they are at the precipice of divisions that could be suicidal for their party in November.

In Obama's grasp for the nomination and Clinton's last stand in Texas and Ohio, identity politics are threatening to tear the Democrats apart--accusations against him of Farrakhan sympathies to unnerve Jewish voters, paired with countercharges that the Clinton campaign is fueling them by distributing a photo of Obama in Muslim garb. Voters are being targeted by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status and any other demographic that could prejudice them

Last March, Hillary Clinton was telling worshippers at Selma's First Baptist Church that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 today "is giving Senator Obama the chance to run for president. And by its logic and spirit...yes, it is giving me that chance.”

Before the march, Obama praised both Clintons and said of the coming political campaign, “We don’t have time for other folks to divide us.”

But the conventional wisdom of inciting demographic splits among voters has overrun those promises to bring them together in rejecting the extremes of the Bush era and attract Democrats of all stripes, along with Independents and disillusioned moderate Republicans.

Tomorrow should be the tipping point. With those critical primary prizes in the balance, will the results mark an end to the divisiveness or fuel continuing contention to give John McCain, against all logic, a chance to enter the White House as Bush Lite?

Oldest New President Ever

John McCain had a senior moment in Texas the other day. “I’m a proud conservative liberal Republican,” he said in a speech, then catching himself up, “conservative Republican. Hello? Easy there. Let me say this: I am a proud conservative Republican...”

If he wins in November, John McCain will be 72, three years older than Ronald Reagan was when elected--in his own description, "older than dirt, with more scars than Frankenstein." A Gallup Poll shows voters are worried about that.

As his senior by a dozen years, I am duty-bound to offer advice and encouragement. "Old age is a shipwreck," Charles de Gaulle once famously said, but he wasn't talking about himself. He was president of France until he passed 88 and was forced out of office for trying to marginalize the Senate that was blocking his iron whims.

New research shows that age is not disabling if you stay active, and since he got out of that Vietnamese prison, nobody has accused John McCain of being sedentary.

Moreover, another study finds that, contrary to the belief that older people are more “set in their ways,” individuals age 60 and older change their attitudes on controversial issues more significantly than people under 40. McCain himself has been living proof of that in the past year, outdone only by Mitt Romney.

So here's to the septuagenarian Senator. I won't be one of them, but grumpy old voters may come out in force for him next November--if the weather isn't too bad.

Wakeup Call on the Red Phone Ads

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been running dueling commercials about who is better suited to be President when the phone rings at 3 A.M. with news of a terror attack.

Wrong question. While it's important to have a White House occupant who will respond, rather than keep reading "My Pet Goat" to school children, that moment will call for coordinating a response based on intelligence, military and diplomatic information and advice rather than pulling an answer from a backlog of experience in his or her head.

Good judgment, intelligence and emotional balance are the qualities that will be needed. (Read Robert Kennedy's account of the Cuban Missile Crisis for an idea of how it's done.)

What's crucial is what happens before the red phone rings. Whoever takes office next January will have to overhaul a politically decimated, dysfunctional Homeland Security apparatus headed by a Director who uses physiological metaphors about possible threats and keeps putting his foot in his mouth as he does.

In the White House, the new President will need a staff with brains and expertise rather than cunning on how to win the next election.

Any candidate who claims to be a savior when the phone rings in the middle of the night is selling snake oil.

The Subtext of '08

What do we know about voters' desires after watching them winnow down a score of presidential candidates to three?

To start, George W. Bush has ruined their taste for the usual white middle-aged male, or we wouldn't be left with a woman, an African-American and a Senior Citizen who doesn't play well with others in the political sandbox.

What the survivors have in common is that, among the choices available, Clinton, Obama and McCain seemed the least likely to lie to them all the time, a rarity for most voters under 40 after their years of Bill Clinton when the testosterone was high and Bush all the time.

"Authenticity" became the buzz word, and a sensed lack of it in Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards, among the others, certainly played a part in their elimination. Obama and McCain are obviously who they are, and even Hillary Clinton, although faulted by some for calculation, is no chameleon.

When the Obama-Clinton choice is made, authenticity will give way to a ramped-up argument about experience vs. change, particularly if Obama is the Democrat candidate. At the edges there will be "too liberal" and "not conservative enough" grumbling, but the essence of the campaign will be how far voters want to go in escaping the Bush years to find something better.

McCain will offer some variations on conservative orthodoxy and a new, improved Iraq war rather than a rejection of its rationale. Either Democrat will promise not just to shuffle the deck on the economy and the damage to individual rights but go back to the traditional rules of the game and get out of a misbegotten war as quickly as possible.

When the shouting is over and the ballots are counted, we will have an unfamiliar figure in the White House--a woman, an African-American or the oldest maverick ever--not the stereotypical middle-aged man from Central Casting.

That much has already been decided, and it would be hard for anyone to fault the electorate for that.

Petraeus, al Maliki and Angelina

If reconciliation is going slowly in Iraq, an OpEd piece in today's Washington Post suggests an overlooked answer--box office appeal.

As a good will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Angelina Jolie writes about her meetings with Gen. Petraeus and Prime Minister al Maliki, both of whom promised to provide more resources to help resettle the 2 million Iraqis who are refugees in their own country and the additional 2.5 million who have fled, mostly to Syria and Jordan.

Now, Jolie calls on "the presidential candidates and congressional leaders to announce a comprehensive refugee plan with a specific timeline and budget as part of their Iraq strategy."

Gen. Petraeus has said we "can't kill our way out of Iraq,"
but kindness may be an effective weapon

Cynics will see this as photo-op diplomacy, but since nothing else is working, why not? Bring on the superstars, if they can be passionate and persuasive about turning a botched war toward humanitarian efforts.

Obama's Parenting Advice

While Hillary Clinton reminds voters that, if she wins, they can tell their daughters a woman can be President, Barack Obama is going deeper into parenting advice.

After a programmatic answer about issues in education to a mostly African-American audience in Beaumont, Texas, according to Shailagh Murray of the Washington Post, Obama asked, "Can I make this one last point?" and went into a riff about the role of parents.

"It's not good enough for you to say to your child, 'Do good in school.' And then your child comes home, you've got the TV set on, you've got the radio on, you don't check their homework, there's not a book in the house, you've got the video game playing.

"So, turn off the TV set, put the video game away, buy a little desk. Watch them do their homework. If they don't know how to do it, give them help. If you don't know how to do it, call the teacher. Make them go to bed at a reasonable time. Give them some breakfast."

As the crowd cheered, Obama asked, "Can I get an 'Amen' here?"

"Since I'm on a roll, if your child misbehaves in school, don't cuss out the teacher. You know I'm right about that. Don't cuss out the teacher, do something with your child. I'm speaking the truth. I'm telling you, I won't just tell you what you want to hear."

From there , he turned to nutrition.

"We can't keep on feeding our children junk all day long, giving them no exercise," he said. "They're overweight by the time they're four or five years old and then we're surprised when they get sick. And then we expect that they're going to get treated for things like adult diabetes that children never used to get...But now kids as young as 8, 9, 10 years old are getting it because they are obese. So part of what my health care plan does then is we work with parents, work with families to change nutrition habits.

"Look, I've got a 9-year-old daughter and a 6-year-old daughter, so I know how hard it is to get kids to eat properly, but I also know that if we are...letting kids drink eight sodas a day--which some parents do--or eat a bag of potato chips for lunch or Popeye's for breakfast -- y'all have Popeye's down in Beaumont? All right...I know! That's why you're all laughing. I caught you out. You can't do that! Children have to have proper nutrition."

For years, Hillary Clinton has been saying that it takes a village to raise children properly. Now Obama is taking it further and telling them how.

Prince Harry's Excellent Adventure

His grandmother sent him there, and the Drudge Report is bringing him back. For ten weeks, the young man who is third in line for the throne has been soldiering in Afghanistan as the British press honored what used to be called a gentlemen's agreement not to tell the world about it.

But the web site that outed Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky adventure has done the same for Prince Harry by citing an article in an obscure Australian magazine, “Prince Harry Fights on Front Lines in Afghanistan.”

So much for the Prince's war. The headline in today's Guardian reports: "Army prepares to evacuate Harry after news blackout fails."

Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, the British chief of staff, said he was “very disappointed” that “foreign Web sites” had posted the story without asking for permission “in stark contrast to the highly responsible attitude that the whole of the U.K. print and broadcast media, along with a small number of overseas, who have entered into an understanding with us over the coverage of Prince Harry on operations.”

In ten weeks of combat duty, the royal lieutenant has apparently been serving as a spotter to direct air strikes against the Taliban and, now that the secrecy lid is off, the excitable British press is picturing him behind machine guns and babbling such news as "The 23-year-old Household Cavalry lieutenant killed up to 30 of the enemy on his frontline tour by directing at least THREE air strikes."

In a pre-departure interview, Prince Harry told the UK Times that the Queen, his grandmother, "told me I’m off to Afghanistan...and she was very pro me going."

Now Drudge is bringing him back.

W. C. Heinz

The man who died today at the age of 93 wrote about courage and grace under pressure better than anyone of his time.

Bill Heinz was idealized by generations of writers who in the new millennium were still reading his books, articles and collected columns.

We met when I edited a piece of his about Lew Jenkins, a Depression kid from Texas who fought his way up to lightweight champion and then lost everything, breaking his body in motorcycle and car crashes and coming into the ring hurt and drunk.

Bill ran into him during World War II when the former champion was in the Coast Guard landing invasion troops and later after he won a Silver Star as a foot soldier in Korea at the age of 36. The article was the best I worked on during my time at Argosy, a picture of a man who knew how to fight but not how to live with what is called success.

In 1958, Bill wrote a piece for me at Redbook about a young boxer who killed his first opponent in the ring. His novel, "The Professional," had just been published to good reviews, but some critics and readers were put off by the ending. The hero does everything right but loses the big fight in a quirk of fate and then learns to live with it. Fight stories are not supposed to reflect a tragic sense of life.

Ernest Hemingway called it the only good novel about a boxer he had ever read. But what mattered to Bill most did not get into the blurbs. It was the only time I saw him allow himself a moment of pride as he told me:

"Hemingway said he knew it had to end the way it did, but when he got to the last chapter, he threw the book across the room."

Bill Heinz's subject was grace under pressure. He wrote about football coach Vince Lombardi, surgeons in the operating room and Martin Luther King's march on Selma. Along the way, he did a little book about a trauma unit in Korea called "MASH."

The Mideast Money Drain

With the economy in a nosedive, the Democratic Congress is beginning to turn its anti-war focus on the dollars that are being drained by Bush's Mideast policies.

"In a shift from last year’s failed legislative efforts to force a reduction of troops," the New York Times reports, "the Democrats’ new approach is...focusing on the financial cost of military operations and on the war’s implications for the nation’s troubled economy."

This coupling comes on the heels of a new book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict" by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz with Linda Bilmes, which estimates that Iraq has already cost almost ten times as much as the first Gulf War, almost a third more than Vietnam and twice as much as the First World War.

Stiglitz told a British think tank this week that war spending was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch after our central bank responded to the financial drain by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said, leading to a housing bubble and a consumption boom that has driven the economy into recession and saddled the next president with the biggest budget deficit in history.

If this argument is too complicated for politicians to make, Senate committees are beginning to hone in on the billions that have been wasted or stolen during the past five years of presumably protecting us from terrorists--an estimated $3.8 billion misspent by Musharraf in Pakistan along with billions more that have vanished in Iraq.

When voters get their stimulus checks of a few hundred dollars this summer, they may want to think about that.

Bloomberg's Kibitzer Candidacy

After teasing us for a year, Mike Bloomberg is putting his billion dollars back in his wallet and leaving a few platitudes on the plate instead.

In a New York Times OpEd titled "I'm Not Running for President, but...," New York's Mayor delivers a ringing concession speech for a presidential campaign that never started.

As he leaves the arena he didn't enter, Bloomberg chides the future nominees for being "afraid to level" with voters about global trade, global warming, immigration, improving schools and gun control.

"More of the same won’t do, on the economy or any other issue," he says. "We need innovative ideas, bold action and courageous leadership. That’s not just empty rhetoric, and the idea that we have the ability to solve our toughest problems isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream."

But he stands ready, Bloomberg tells us, to help McCain and Obama or Clinton, "to push them forward, by using the means at my disposal to promote a real and honest debate."

In the event the Mayor has forgotten his ethnic roots, what he is proposing to be is a kibitzer, defined as "someone who looks on and offers unwanted, usually meddlesome advice to others."

But not entirely, Bloomberg warns us: "If a candidate takes an independent, nonpartisan approach--and embraces practical solutions that challenge party orthodoxy--I’ll join others in helping that candidate win the White House."

Does he mean Ralph Nader?

William F. Buckley Jr.

Urbane, witty and maddeningly supercilious, he was the liberals' favorite conservative. William F. Buckley Jr., who died today, went to Yale, found it not to his liking, wrote a best-seller about his disdain and went on to make conservatism intellectually respectable in the second half of 20th century America.

In 1955, he founded National Review with his brother-in-law, F. Brent Bozell, but being a magazine editor was only a part-time occupation. Buckley leaves behind a torrent of words, on the pages of books and periodicals and in the medium that came of age with him, television.

My favorite memory, among many, is of his 1968 stint as a network commentator, paired with his liberal doppelganger, the elegant novelist and playwright Gore Vidal.

They ended a dispute on some minor point by calling one another "a pro crypto Nazi" and "a queer." Buckley won the argument by warning Vidal, "Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face..."

In 2006, Buckley rendered his verdict on George W. Bush: "Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology--with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress," he told a TV interviewer. "And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge."

As always, well said.

Superdelegate Scorecard

As Barack Obama sweeps through the primaries and caucuses, Hillary Clinton is still leading among the party faithful by an estimated 60 votes among the more than half of the 796 superdelegates who have made a commitment.

While the candidates are virtually tied among governors and members of Congress, the Clinton lead comes almost entirely from the Democratic National Committee, the insiders who set the organization's rules, raise the money and are likely to have long-standing ties to a family that gave them power in the 1990s.

"Change" is not the most appealing theme for this group but, if they turn out to be the deciders at the convention in August, despite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plea that they not overrule voters in choosing the nominee, Chairman Howard Dean will have a mess on his hands.

According to The Hill today, "Acrimony gathering inside the party has spurred some Democrats to begin discussing reforming the nominating process and perhaps getting rid of superdelegates altogether."

But as for now, most superdelegates are standing firm about their choices. One of them, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri vows to stick with Clinton and "would vote for her unless he died first."

If he does and she loses in November, his constituents may arrange for his political funeral later.

Barbarians at the Gray Lady's Gates

The year has not started well for the New York Times. While taking fire for the John McCain story, its family ownership is under siege from hedge funds that have now accumulated over 15 percent of the company's Class A shares.

Symbolically, the attackers are led by Scott Galloway, most often seen in a charity-ball photograph dressed as a blue-faced, sword-wielding Scottish rebel from the movie "Braveheart." But Galloway and his group are digital warriors who insist they don't want to overthrow the old order, just bring it into the 21st century.

In asking for four seats on Times Company board, they wrote that "we are not pursuing a change in the dual class shareholder structure. The New York Times is a great institution controlled by the Sulzberger family and we have no illusion about, or desire to change, that fact...

"We believe a renewed focus on the core assets and the redeployment of capital to expedite the acquisition of digital assets affords the greatest shareholder appreciation and creates the appropriate platform to compete in today’s media landscape."

For their $400 million investment so far, Galloway's invaders have received little encouragement. Their four nominees for the board have been rejected in favor of new Sulzberger choices including, significantly, a close associate of Warren Buffet's.

Nothing like a Rupert Murdoch takeover of the Wall Street Journal is on the horizon, but with 97 percent of its revenue coming from paper-based properties and stock prices falling, the Company is vulnerable to such criticism, as reported by the Washington Post, that "with a market capitalization of $2.8 billion, the single most valuable asset the Times Co. owns, some analysts say, is its new midtown Manhattan headquarters, which may be worth as much as $1 billion. Some have caustically remarked that the Times Co. is now a REIT--a real estate investment trust-- with a newspaper attached."

Amid denunciations of its McCain takeout from the Right and much of the Left, all this is a reminder that the New York Times is one of the few remaining media institutions still family-controlled and being nominally run as a public trust in a time when corporate ownership and "shareholder appreciation" are the rules of the game.

For those who have spent a lifetime in journalism, all this pressure on "the newspaper of record" is a sobering reminder that the old rules in most places are long gone.

Picturing a President

If Barack Obama is sworn in next January, last night's debate may prove to be the turning point when American voters started seeing him as more than a gifted candidate. Hillary Clinton's job was to create doubts about his fitness to be President, but she ended up giving Obama the opportunity to demonstrate he has the qualities for the job.

After a peevish start (citing a Saturday Night Live skit to air her grievances against the questioners), Sen. Clinton worked hard to present herself as Presidential and rattle Obama into appearing less so. But he never took the bait.

In 15 minutes about health care, he defended his position without demeaning hers. When she accused him of wanting to bomb Pakistan, he restated his more nuanced position and pointed out that the Bush Administration had just done what he proposed in taking out an al Qaeda leader. When she criticized him for not "rejecting" Louis Farrakhan's support, Obama pointed out that he had denounced his racist views but would be happy to reject them as well, if there was a distinction.

As the long campaign has gone on, Obama's command and self-confidence have been visibly growing, thereby undermining the arguments about inexperience the Clinton campaign has tried to use against him.

In this last debate before the nomination is decided, he demolished them. In the general election campaign, John McCain will have to work very hard to prove that his years in Washington qualify him to make better decisions about the future than Barack Obama.

Lotts of Smoke

One of last year's political loose ends--the sudden, unexplained resignation of the Senate Minority leader after only a year in his new term--is beginning to unravel today with Trent Lott's announcement that he is not a target of a judicial bribery investigation involving his brother-in-law.

Lott said FBI agents interviewed him earlier this year. "I may be called as a witness," Lott said, "but I've been assured that I'm not under investigation, and rightly so because nothing was done to justify that."

The Justice Department is investigating his brother-in-law, Mississippi attorney Richard Scruggs, for an attempt to get a lifetime appointment to the federal bench, with Lott's help, for a Circuit Court Judge in return for a favorable ruling in a lawsuit against Scruggs by another attorney over legal fees.

Lott admits talking to the judge about recommending his appointment but offers no further details because the case is still pending.

When Lott surprisingly gave up his job as the second most powerful Republican in the US Senate last November, there was speculation that his motive was to beat the new two-year limitation on lobbying that went into effect at year's end.

But the Scruggs case suggests a more plausible motive. Lott's preemptive attempt now to minimize his role will only add fuel to the speculation that it figured in his sudden decision to retire.

Pets on Prozac

After overmedicating men, women and children, the pharmaceutical companies are finding new markets in drugging cats, dogs and, symbolically, the only pets that talk, parrots.

"Parrots are very intelligent and sensitive animals," a British vet observes. "Typically if people go out to work all day their parrot will get very bored and frustrated and eventually develop depression."

If "more stimulation and toys" don't help, flavored liquid Prozac, he reports, works in two out of three cases.

Dogs and cats get depressed too, showing such symptoms as attacking furniture, loss of appetite and excessive scratching and aggression.

"A dog can't sit on the couch and discuss his worries," another vet explains, "but he can howl the house down, chase his tail or chew everything to pieces."

Eli Lilly has come to the rescue with the first anti-depressant for dogs, a once-a-day chewable tablet flavored with beef, and Pfizer has created a new diet drug and a motion-sickness remedy for pets.

No word yet on the availability of dog houses with little medicine cabinets.

Which Hillary?

In desperation now, the Campaign That Couldn't is giving us a montage of Hillary Clintons--defiant, angry, scolding, sarcastic--in Ohio and Texas, but how will she blend those stump personas into a coherent candidate for the side-by-side setting of tonight's crucial debate?

In New Hampshire, the sensitive Hillary won over voters in the final days and, at the end of last week's sitdown, emerged again to great effect, but her advisors seem convinced that only an aggressive Hillary can overcome doubts about a woman as Commander-in-Chief.

During the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy said he felt sorry for Richard Nixon. "It must be hard," JFK said, "to get up every morning and have to decide who you're going to be that day."

Compared to Nixon, Hillary Clinton is a person of substance, but the Barack Obama surge has forced her into parading multiple personalities, adding confusion to the negatives she has to overcome from the Clinton years.

Claiming superior experience didn't work. Unleashing Bill Clinton didn't work. Mockery and anger don't seem to be working. Being soft and sensitive is too risky.

What's left?

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.

Mission Creep in the Middle East

John McCain's hyperbole about keeping troops in Iraq for a hundred years is alarmingly echoed in a Washington Post OpEd by one of the saner foreign policy experts on the Washington scene.

"What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common," Anthony Cordesman writes, "is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war.

"Any American political debate that ignores or denies the fact that these are long wars is dishonest and will ensure defeat. There are good reasons that the briefing slides in U.S. military and aid presentations for both battlefields don't end in 2008 or with some aid compact that expires in 2009. They go well beyond 2012 and often to 2020."

Only seven months ago, Cordesman was pointing out that some recent advances in Iraq were the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents and quoting a U.S. official as describing our situation as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."

Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman made a case then for phasing down troop levels starting early this year. Now, another trip to Iraq and Afghanistan has persuaded him that "these are wars that can still be won" if we stay another decade or more.

Does the word quagmire ring a bell? In 1968, Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam and stayed another five years before accepting a humiliating defeat.

Now, once again, we are testing our will in places thousands of miles away against antagonists who are willing to do anything for as long it takes to get control of their own territory.

We started out to remove Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, a mission that has morphed into policing the entire Middle East, with Pakistan and Iran next on the horizon. Can Cordesman and John McCain explain how we do that without breaking our military and busting the budget?

No More Oscars for Jon Stewart

Two years ago, it might have just been the unease of doing something new before hundreds of millions of people, but last night made it clear: Jon Stewart shouldn't be hosting the Academy Awards.

With his exquisite sense of the absurd, Stewart can't break through the defenses of an audience that takes its own absurdity solemnly, and he is much too polite to provoke them outrageously. So he is reduced to making lame, outdated jokes about Dennis Hopper's drug haze and MCing a la Larry King--a little like watching a thoroughbred pulling a rusty plow.

Send back the clowns with their one-liners and let Stewart concentrate on saving our sanity on the Daily Show.

What's Wrong With Obama

Now we know the worst. Behind all the electoral enthusiasm for the Democratic front runner is a treasonous self-regard.

In today's New York Times, William Kristol explains it in his inimitable style. In declining to wear an American flag lapel pin as "a substitute...for true patriotism," which he defines as "speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security," Barack Obama is guilty of...moral vanity!

"What’s striking," Kristol instructs us, "is that Obama couldn’t resist a grandiose explanation. Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin. But moral vanity prevailed. He wanted to explain that he was too good--too patriotic!--to wear a flag pin on his chest."

A surge of unity after 9/11 inspired Americans to display the flag--on their lapels and their lawns--after the trauma of an unthinkable attack. But Kristol's heroes--Bush, Cheney and Rove--converted that heartfelt feeling into a Neo-Con tool for waging preemptive war, trampling on civil liberties and winning elections by attacking their opponents' love of country.

In rejecting that definition of patriotism, Obama is embracing "the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry."

As a member of that fraternity, Obama can't expect to be pinned by William Kristol, who has belatedly pledged John McCain into the circle of true believers who wear their American hearts on their sleeves and their chests.

3972 Reasons for Nader Not to Run

John Roberts, Samuel Alito and US fatalities in Iraq head the list of what might have been avoided if America's crusader had stayed off the ballot in 2000 and not provided George W. Bush with the margins he needed to win the White House.

Now here he is again, on Meet the Press, puffing away at the importance of third-party candidates in pushing Democrats and Republicans toward ideological purity, pooh-poohing the complaint that he gave us a President who has tilted the Supreme Court away from what Nader's admirers believe and into a war that he and they deplore.

In declaring his candidacy yet again, Nader, who will be 74 this week, is in a dead heat with Ann Coulter for becoming this year's foremost example of Reverse Attention Deficit Disorder, the compulsive need to preen for TV cameras at any cost.

What they have in common is Hillary Clinton. Coulter claims she would support her rather than John McCain, and Nader would do anything to keep another Clinton out of the White House.

Of the two, Coulter is a more benign case, providing only passing amusement in her quest for attention. Nader is a self-deluded disgrace who might pose an actual danger of electing Bush's anointed successor if it were not for the comforting fact that he drew less than half of one percent of the vote in 2004.

All the News That's Fit to Hint

You can hear the crackle of eggshells as the Public Editor of the New York Times walks through the wreckage of the paper's story about John McCain last Thursday.

In today's column, Clark Hoyt quotes the morning-after justifying by Executive Editor Bill Keller of a report on a "fighter against corruption" who has been “careless about appearances, careless about his reputation, and that’s a pretty important thing to know about somebody who wants to be president of the United States.”

Perhaps so, but Keller's characterization can be applied just as well to a newspaper that has been and still wants to be the journalistic conscience of the United States.

In defending his reporters, Keller downgraded McCain's "ties" to a younger woman lobbyist to an "association," but they offered proof of little more than an acquaintance that led staff members to worry that it might look like more. About that, the newspaper of record's own conscience concludes that "if you cannot provide readers with some independent evidence, I think it is wrong to report the suppositions or concerns of anonymous aides about whether the boss is getting into the wrong bed."

Amid all the leering, what has been lost is the point about McCain's iffy relationships with lobbyists over the years.

"The pity of it," Hoyt writes today "is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising 'poor judgment' by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients."

McCain's defense that he was only trying to expedite rather than influence that decision won't wash in a wink-and-a-nod town where any kind of intervention with a regulatory commission by a powerful Senator sends a clear message.

The Times' main error may have been not to publish its story about that, minus the gossip, as opinion rather than news in "a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations."

Michelle Obama's Pride

Those who were perplexed, annoyed and/or enraged by Mrs. Obama's statement that "for the first time in my adult life I'm proud of America" may want to take a look at HBO's contribution tonight to Black History Month, a documentary about Joe Louis.

Called, without irony, "a credit to his race," the heavyweight champion was exalted in 1938 for beating the exemplar of Nazi Germany, Max Schmeling, but never accepted as a true American. Decades later, when playing golf in San Diego, he found excrement in the first hole.

As a white child growing up in the Harlem ghetto, I saw how little of the pride that Michelle Obama now feels was within reach of its black residents. Movie placards in store windows would read "Gone With the Wind with Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen," followed in smaller type by "Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh."

In World War II, I was greeted by glares for sitting in the back of a bus in Charleston, South Carolina, and only my uniform spared me from more physical reactions by white riders.

In the 1950s, it took a Supreme Court desegregation decision to let children who looked like Michelle Obama go to school with those who didn't and, in the years afterward, they were beaten in the streets for marching with Martin Luther King for the audacity of wanting to exercise their right to vote.

In 1985, in her senior thesis, the future Mrs. Obama wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong...it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

Now millions of Americans of all races are voting to make Barack Obama their president. His wife's pride is understandable, and those who attack her manner of expressing it would do well to recall its origins and examine their own motives.

Lieberman Absolves McCain

The US Senate's Resident Moralist has prayed over the alleged sins of John McCain and given him his blessing.

"Here’s a man," the Reverend Joe Lieberman sermonized outside a Connecticut diner this week, "who has devoted his whole life to service to his country. His honor matters a lot to him. His reputation matters a lot to him. And this is a story that basically pukes up 8-year-old rumors, uncorroborated."

In addition, Lieberman offered his personal testimony: "I've been with him on a lot of occasions, traveled all around the world, been at meetings with a lot of women there. And I've never seen him do anything that even approached inappropriate behavior."

Case closed.

Such absolution is impressive from the man who publicly scolded his own President for "sexual misconduct and his deliberate efforts to deceive the American people" in the Monica Lewinsky days.

Now, as an Independent supporting a Republican candidate for president, Lieberman has obviously mellowed. It's surely only coincidence that the text he denounced came from the New York Times, which in 2006 endorsed his opponent in the Connecticut primary, saying "Mr. Lieberman has fallen in love with his image as the nation’s moral compass" but "has become one of the Bush administration’s most useful allies as the president tries to turn the war on terror into an excuse for radical changes in how this country operates."

It's heartening to see Sen. Lieberman, as Barack Obama might say, reach across the aisle to give moral support to an old friend and after all, as the Times noted back then, "if pomposity were a disqualification, the Senate would never be able to call a quorum."

Castro and Karl Rove, Commentators

Fidel just won't go away and, like Bush's Brain in Newsweek, he has to give us his expertise on '08.

“I enjoyed observing the embarrassing position of all the presidential candidates in the United States,” Castro wrote this week about reaction to his stepping down in a column for Cuba's state-run newspaper. “One by one, they found themselves forced to proclaim their immediate demands to Cuba, so as not to alienate a single voter.”

Castro also had a few words about theme of change that has dominated the campaign: "Half a century of blockade was not enough for the chosen few. 'Change, change, change!' they shouted in unison. I agree. Change!--but in the United States."

After noting the first President Bush's endorsement of John McCain, Castro remarked on the current President's visit to Africa, "I don't know what he's doing there."

Karl Rove could tell him. Now that they both have time on their hands, the Western Hemisphere's two leading political manipulators might want to get together and exchange secrets of the trade.

If Fidel wants to learn a thing or two, he might watch 60 Minutes Sunday night, for an interview with a Rove operative explaining how the Master ordered her to take sexually compromising pictures of a Democratic governor. That's Rove's definition of an "embarrassing position."

Betting on a Dead Horse, Again

Political chaos in Pakistan could bring nuclear headaches for the US, and what our government is doing to prop up a failing regime recalls efforts three decades ago on behalf of our old ally, the Shah of Iran.

The McClatchy Newspapers report: "The Bush administration is pressing the opposition leaders who defeated Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to allow the former general to retain his position, a move that Western diplomats and U.S. officials say could trigger the very turmoil the United States seeks to avoid.

"U.S. officials, from President Bush on down, said this week that they think Musharraf, a longtime U.S. ally, should continue to play a role, despite his party's rout in parliamentary elections Monday and his unpopularity in the volatile, nuclear-armed nation."

Pressuring the newly elected anti-Musharraf majority to retain our iffy friend may turn out to be the kind of mistake we made in the late 1970s on behalf of the Shah before and after he was deposed in Iran. Despite Jimmy Carter's misgivings, he was persuaded by Henry Kissinger and his oil friends to let the old US ally come here, which resulted in occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days and the ongoing hostility with Iran.

President Bush has reacted to the Pakistan elections with a wishful observation that "it's time for the newly elected folks to show up and form their government, and the question then is, will they be friends of the United States, and I certainly hope so."

Behind the scenes, however, the White House is urging the newly elected Pakistanis not to reinstate the judges Musharraf ousted last year, who would likely try to remove him from office--a strategy that veteran State Department officials feel could backfire.

But not to fear, Henry Kissinger is still around to give the Administration the benefit of his wisdom and is helping John McCain with foreign policy advice.

What could possibly go wrong?

Hillary Clinton for VP

Tonight's debate pushed front and center the question of whether the Democratic Party can do what it did in 1960, nominate an inspiring young leader paired with a Washington veteran in the workings of government.

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson persuaded voters that they could open a New Frontier with the first Catholic president in American history. This year, the Democrats can offer a ticket with two firsts.

In tone and substance, the debate in Austin suggested that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton together can restore the damage that George W. Bush has done to the American body politic and that John McCain might only prolong.

Their policy differences tonight were invisible to the naked eye, and they ended up with the kind of hearty handshake that could be repeated to seal their designation as the 2008 ticket at the Democratic convention in August.

For Obama, it would be a demonstration of his claim that he can bring people together. On her part, it would take character for Hillary Clinton to accept the vice-presidency after leading in the presidential polls for more than a year.

But voters are rendering a different judgment now, and when the Texas and Ohio primaries are over, Obama should look back at how JFK in 1960 insured that his party ended eight years of Republican rule by teaming up with his opponent for the nomination.

If the ticket won, Hillary Clinton in 2016 would still be younger than John McCain is now.

Mischanneling Marilyn

Between them, Lindsay Lohan (21) and Bert Stern (79) have inhabited planet Earth for a century, but all those years have not produced an iota of the good judgment it would have taken for them not to recreate "Marilyn Monroe's Last Sitting" for New York Magazine this week.

Grave-robbing is rife in the celebrity world, but the desperation of a troubled young woman and an aging once-talented photographer plumbs new depths of exploitation. Lohan has none of Marilyn's magic, and Stern is parodying the artist he was 46 years ago.

My revulsion is not objective. As someone who spent a week in 1955 working with Marilyn and the gifted Ed Feingersh, both of whom died in their thirties, as he created classic photographs of her, I am prejudiced in the extreme.

But for anyone who wants to get a sense of what Marilyn Monroe was really like, there is the YouTube presentation of some of Feingersh's pictures here and, for the truly patient, the story of how they were taken here.

Marilyn was no Lindsay Lohan.

The NY Times Defines Deviancy Down

The Gray Lady won't win its 96th Pulitzer Prize with today's "expose" of John McCain's history of ethical struggles and leering innuendo about his relationship with a young woman lobbyist.

In fact, the Times' takeout is bigger news than its contents. The long leadup to publication has been a source of journalistic gossip for months, and the timing is attributed to worries about being beaten on the story by another media behemoth, the New Republic.

The days of the Pentagon papers, The New York Times vs Sullivan case that changed libel law and the universal respect for columnists like James Reston and Tom Wicker are long gone. Today we have William Kristol and this--a long rehash of McCain's political lapses, coupled with a low-fact personal smear.

In defining deviancy downward, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan might say, the Times has done more than open the door for its rabid right-wing haters. The newspaper of record has put pressure on itself to do a similar job on Barack Obama and his Antoin Rezko connections or face an election-year barrage of continuing criticism.

A long mea culpa from its Public Editor next weekend won't be enough to undo the damage.