Category: 2008

It appears that one of Bill Clinton’s power bases has soured on Hillary and her bid to win back the White House. The Observer (UK) reports that the glitterati in Hollywood have turned their backs on the putative Democratic front-runner, considering her too unreliable as a liberal to support:

With its liberal politics and radical attitudes, Hollywood should be one place in America where Hillary Clinton can count on fervent and loyal support.
But as the former First Lady gears up for a run at the White House her nascent campaign has hit an unexpected roadblock. A lengthening list of top Hollywood celebrities have publicly criticised her ambitions. From George Clooney to Sharon Stone to Susan Sarandon, the Beverly Hills set has turned on Clinton.
Nor are they alone. Vast swaths of American liberals have begun to snipe at their former heroine, attacking her for supporting the war in Iraq and decrying her recent shifts to the right as she positions herself for a presidential campaign. For a woman long derided by conservative critics as a ‘feminazi’ the irony of the onslaughts from the left must be painful.
Celebrities have queued up to attack her. Kathleen Turner said she ‘had her doubts’ about Clinton’s potential bid. Stone said it was ‘too soon’ for Clinton to run. Clooney criticised the entire Democrat leadership, including Clinton, for lacking the backbone to speak against the Iraq war. Sarandon, one of the most politically active of the Hollywood elite, was forthright: ‘I find Hillary Clinton to be a great disappointment. She’s lost her progressive following because of her caution and centrist approach.’

In a way, Hillary has the same problem as John McCain, but for different reasons. McCain has played footsie with the media as a “maverick” and a moderating (supposed) influence on the GOP’s right wing. Now he wants to grab the nomination by moving back to the base. Hillary, on the other hand, won her Senate seat as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal and wants to win the nomination as a pro-war centrist.
Both politicians have now discovered that shifting positions has become much more difficult in the Internet age, where every speech and every vote can be recalled for comparison. Harry Reid discovered as much this week when his opposition to illegal immigration in 1993 came back to haunt him thirteen years later. For Hillary and McCain, the time frames are much more compressed than that, and thus less explicable.
Hillary bet that her support of the war would win her some credibility in a general election, and that the thought of returning the Clintons to the White House would be enough to sail through the primaries. If she thinks that, she will find herself very much mistaken. It has been only five years since the Clintons left under a cloud of scandal, and their manner of leaving — by granting pardons to people such as Marc Rich, who wound up spending his new-found freedom helping to put bribes into the pockets of Saddam Hussein — left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. The Democrats love Bill’s fundraising abilities, but they know that Bill’s final days will once again become an issue in any general election involving Hillary.
In order to get through the primaries, then, HIllary will need all the help she can get, including Hollywood. It looks as though her prospects are grim, however, and I suspect they are tooling up for a Russ Feingold campaign. He represents the kind of left-wing purity they most admire, especially his effort to censure or impeach George Bush. The Hollywood elite may wind up skewing the primaries to push an even more radical agenda than what John Kerry presented in 2004. They can make it very difficult for Hillary to get the liftoff she needs to win in the primaries at all, and for that matter, the same will be true for Mark Warner or any other moderate Democrat.
With Hollywood’s help, we may find the primary race to come down to Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich. As delighted as Tinseltown will be with that result, it won’t compare to the joy it will bring to the GOP.

John McCain still garners the most media attention of all prospective Republican candidates for the presidential nomination in 2008. His long-cultivated relationship with the media and his reputation as a “maverick” has provided endless fascination and a large boost to his prospects for capturing the ticket. However, now that he has to come to terms with his party, McCain now risks the very assets that propelled him to the top of the media dance card. The New York Times profiles McCain in transition in its Sunday edition:

Senator John McCain began his week by embracing the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the conservative religious leader he once denounced as polarizing. He ended it by joining Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal Massachusetts icon, in a fight for an immigration bill opposed by many conservatives.
Mr. McCain has long sought to present himself as a singular sort of American politician — straight-talking, iconoclastic and hard to quantify. But as he began a campaign-style trip here that will take him through Florida, Ohio and Iowa, he faced an extraordinarily complex political challenge as he sought to reconcile his appeals to an unusually diverse audience and cement his early standing in the emerging Republican presidential field.
Mr. McCain’s alliance with Mr. Kennedy comes as he has embarked on a campaign to repair strains with conservatives and a once-wary Bush White House. He is portraying himself as a lifelong conservative and a steadfast supporter of President Bush, once a political rival, courting his senior staff members and fund-raisers.
He has endorsed Bush tax cuts he once criticized as fiscally ruinous, and he agreed to appear at a commencement at Liberty University, headed by Mr. Falwell, whom Mr. McCain once called an agent of “intolerance.”
But a strategy designed to muscle him through the 2008 Republican primaries — should he ultimately run, which aides says is likely but not definite — risks diluting the independent image that has been central to his political appeal. Already, Mr. McCain is facing stiff questions from supporters and critics about how far he will go to win support from conservative leaders who have long been wary of him.

McCain’s problem is that he continues to try the same pattern he has since losing the primary in 2000 — zig-zag through political positions in order to please the most people. What the Senator seems to have forgotten is that one cannot ever please everybody. Reaching out to Jerry Falwell demonstrates this problem; the move looks transparently political and self-serving to those who like Falwell, especially after McCain’s earlier harsh remarks, and it alienates moderates who never liked Falwell from the beginning. It also shows a little tone-deafness, because while Falwell has some influence, it has ebbed dramatically since the 1980s.
The Times relates an incident on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where the host asked McCain if he was going into “crazy-base world” — to which McCain said, “I’m afraid so.” Hardly a ringing endorsement of the people McCain supposedly wants to embrace, and presumably expects to embrace him back.
George Will also writes about the McCain transformation in one of his better columns of late. Will chides the media for not recognizing McCain as a conservative all along, although to be fair most conservatives would have made the same mistake:

First Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, now John McCain and the media. Even torrid relationships are perishable. It was only a matter of time before the media turned on their pin-up, and that time has arrived. A rivulet, soon to be a river, of journalism is reporting — as a mystery deciphered, even a scandal unearthed — that McCain, who occupies the Senate seat once held by Barry Goldwater, is a conservative Republican.
He has been unmasked as a “pro-life, pro-family, fiscal conservative.” Those words are his, and they are a reasonably accurate description of the man who voted against the prescription drug entitlement and the most recent transportation bill because of their costs.

Will reminds us that McCain caused this confusion himself, especially in his zeal to drive money out of politics. (I wrote extensively on the strange nature of McCain’s Reform Institute, given this public position.) Not only did McCain push through the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which restricts political speech based on proximity to the election, but he explicitly voted to amend the Constitution in 2000 to restrict political speech. Fritz Hollings proposed the amendment because he saw the Constitutional conflict in McCain’s attempt to limit speech, even though the Supreme Court could not. The amendment failed, but the BCRA became law.
Now McCain wants to repair his relationship with conservatives, but he appears to want to do so through superficial efforts like the Liberty University appearance that brought him a truce with Falwell. More substantially, he has also endorsed making the Bush tax cuts permanent, which in a sane world should be a slam dunk after three years of excellent economic growth. However, McCain still pulls the rug out from under conservatives, especially in the immigration compromise that collapsed this week. He teamed up with Ted Kennedy to promote an amnesty bill that completely ignored border security as an answer to the supposedly draconian House proposal that would have established some American credibillity on the Rio Grande. He then tried, at least at first, to keep Republican Senators from amending the bill in order to correct the deficiencies.
That’s not the actions of a man who wants to represent the conservative base. That’s the actions of a man who will do anything to get himself elected. It follows on his betrayal of the GOP base on judicial nominations and the restriction of political speech to supposedly clean up politics, an effort that has only led to even more corruption and even more restrictions on speech. Bloggers had to beg for the “privilege” of expressing their political opinions thanks to the BCRA and the continued effort by BCRA authors to press the FEC to regulate the Internet. None of these are conservative values, and the last isn’t even a liberal value.
All of them remain very popular among the media, however, and they guaranteed McCain some serious coverage as the reasonable Republican. Now he risks losing that for his superficial outreach to past-prime conservative icons instead of actual support for the most important of conservative concerns. He’ll have to do much better if he expects to convince anyone.

Russ Feingold has decided to embrace the far-left fever swamp in hopes of building momentum for his run at the Presidency in 2008, and yesterday announced his support for gay marriage as another step in that strategy. The Washington Post reports that Feingold blames Republicans for using the controversy as a wedge issue, but also notes that his fellow Democrats have not lined up in support of gender-neutral marriage either:

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), a prospective 2008 presidential candidate, said yesterday that he thinks bans on same-sex marriages have no place in the nation’s laws.
Feingold said in an interview that he was motivated to state his position on one of the most divisive social issues in the country after being asked at a town hall meeting Sunday about a pending amendment to the Wisconsin state constitution to ban same-sex marriages.
Feingold called the amendment “a mean-spirited attempt” to single out gay men and lesbians for discrimination and said he would vote against it. But he went further, announcing that he favors legalizing same-sex marriages.
That puts him at odds with many prominent Democratic politicians who support gay rights but not same-sex marriage. Should Feingold decide to run for the party’s presidential nomination in 2008, his position would put him to the left of many likely rivals.

Apparently Feingold intends on positioning himself thusly, which is why he went further than the question required. He wants to signal that the far left can absolutely count on him to carry their platform into the 2008 convention. It’s not a bad idea in the primaries, and he will be able to harness the money-raising power of the MoveOn and I-ANSWER crowd early enough to be able to keep them from financing any of his more moderate rivals.
In terms of actually winning primaries, let alone a general election, Feingold has made a mistake, however. Bans on gender-neutral marriage garner large majorities wherever contested, up to 70% of the vote in some places. Feingold can blame Republicans all he wants, but those numbers show a significant number in his own party support the traditional notions of marriage as well. Nowhere is that support strongest than in the African-American community, the demographic with the strongest ties to religion in the party. The truth is that the GOP doesn’t need to exploit the issue to create a wedge; the wedge exists whether politicians like Feingold recognize it or not.
And Feingold’s position creates a problem for Democrats that Kucinich did not. The latter had always been seen as a fringe candidate, a man who stuck around long past his expiration date in the 2004 primaries mostly to provide some comic relief. Feingold, as a Senator, has a higher political profile and more impact on the party’s image. At a moment when the Democrats want to paint themselves as a serious voice in both foreign and domestic policy, one of their leading lights has done his best to embrace the radical and hysterical, starting with his censure motion and continuing with his Baghdad demand for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Now he takes one of the least-popular domestic policy positions and reminds the American electorate why they cannot trust Democrats for responsible representation of their views.
CQ readers know that I’m rather agnostic about the notion of legalizing gay civil marriages. If a state legalizes such unions through legislation, then the majority will have spoken and it will cause me no heartache. That’s relatively easy to say since even the most liberal electorates have rejected such legislation, including my home state of California. It’s such a slam dunk that Democrats do well to stay out of its way. Instead, Feingold embraces the radical, and threatens to drag his party into electoral suicide — once again.

Hillary Clinton has attended fund-raisers for her Senate re-election campaign that were hosted by a South Korean businessman tied to a slush-fund scandal in Seoul, Meghan Clyne reports in today’s New York Sun. The accusations involve the use of a cultural-exchange program aimed at improving relations with Pyongyang but actually operated as an illegal funding source for South Korean politicians:

The contributions in question come from a New York-based real estate investor, Hyung Young “Daniel” Lee. According to records on file with the Federal Election Commission, Mr. Lee, 44, donated $4,100 to Mrs. Clinton’s 2006 Senate re-election campaign through Friends of Hillary in May 2005. His wife, Eva, donated $5,100 in four separate contributions between August 2004 and May 2005. FEC documents show that the Clinton campaign refunded Mrs. Lee $1,000; FEC regulations cap donations to a candidate at $4,200 for an individual contributor during an election cycle.
According to a fund-raising invitation obtained by The New York Sun, Mr. and Mrs. Lee also hosted a “Korean Americans for Hillary” fund-raiser at their home in Great Neck on May 22, 2005. One of the organizers of Lees’ event and a Queens-based businessman, John Park, said earlier this week that “around 60 or 70 people” attended the $1,000-a-head fund-raiser, including Mrs. Clinton.

Lee is an American citizen but has a significant interest in the World Culture Open center, which is listed as a foreign not-for-profit corporation. WCO’s founder, Hung Seok Hyun, had been an ambassador to the US briefly in 2005 until he resigned over his involvement in the slush-fund scandal. A government wiretap captured his accounting of how he helped set up a slush fund through WCO in 1997 to influence South Korean politicians. He also had to pay $3.2 million in tax-evasion fines in 1999. His case on the slush-fund scandal is still pending after an appearance in court last November.
The South Korea Times first raised the question about Lee’s connections to Hong and the bribery scheme. Lee, for his part, claims that his ties to WCO are only those of a volunteer or “temporary advisor”, and that his staff filled out paperwork incorrectly that shows otherwise. About Hong he says that he doesn’t know him … “that much”. In the meantime, he is staging another Hillary fundraiser at a building he recently purchased in Flushing.
The Clintons seem to attract a strange breed of financial backing. In 1996 we had Johnny Chung; in 2000 she had Peter Paul. Now we have Daniel Lee and his connections to Korean electoral shenanigans. I don’t think anything will stop New Yorkers from re-electing her to the Senate and maintaining the Clinton “magic”, but the rest of the country should recognize that the magic consists solely of cheap and shopworn sleight of hand and showmanship.
ADDENDUM: Speaking of Peter Paul, what ever happened to the FBI investigation of the Clintons regarding Paul and his attempt to get consideration for a presidential pardon?

The urge of Democrats to tinker with their primary season continues unabated. The Rules and Bylaws Committee has decided to schedule more caucuses ahead of the New Hampshire primary, which by their rules has to hold the first primary election in the party’s presidential run. The introduction of more caucuses will dilute the impact of New Hampshire’s primary, leading to a threat of escalation by the Granite State:

The Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee yesterday dealt a blow to New Hampshire Democrats hoping to keep their coveted place in the presidential nominating schedule, agreeing by voice vote to a plan that would place one or two caucuses between the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 14, 2008, and the New Hampshire primary eight days later.
The proposal, which grew from recommendations by a commission studying how to make the nominating process more diverse both racially and geographically, would also add one or two primaries after the New Hampshire contest but before Feb. 5 — the date after which any state is free to schedule a vote. …
New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner has threatened that if a state caucus is added between the Iowa and New Hampshire events, he will simply move up the date of the Granite State vote — a power granted him by state law. Should Gardner go that route, the DNC could refuse to seat delegates from his state at the 2008 national party convention.

This kerfuffle exemplifies the silliness of the primary system. Both parties front-load their primary system with states like New Hampshire and Iowa, two of the smallest states in terms of population. The egotistical state governments insist on their roles as screeners for the rest of the nation on the validity of primary candidates. Meanwhile, the other 99% of the nation watches as the field narrows artificially.
Rather than directly challenging the ridiculous nature of this system, however, the Democrats make it worse by scheduling one or two caucuses between Iowa’s poll and the New Hampshire primary. Why not just declare the entire system broken and replace it with something that makes more sense? Under the circumstances, New Hampshire has a right to be annoyed. After all, the Democrats aren’t attempting to reform the system to get a broader participation in the primary process. They want to put another caucus in that first week in order to get better press in the South or the West, or possibly both.
The better effort would be to hold one primary election day for the entire nation. Have all the caucuses anyone wants before then, but the results should not be binding. Schedule the primary for June or July and hold the conventions immediately afterward, giving the candidates and their parties plenty of time to mount a general-election campaign. That way, no one state gets to tank anyone’s run for office. Not only will that give all candidates plenty of time and access to nationwide campaigning, but it will also create less pressure for early campaigning. If one national primary day doesn’t work, then schedule four regional days in four consecutive weeks.
Otherwise, when states get fed up with Iowa and New Hampshire dictating the slate of candidates for the rest of the nation, we will get the threatened escalation we have now. New Hampshire will move its primary to an earlier date in January, other states will follow suit, and before we know it we’ll have to kick off presidential campaigns before the prior midterm elections.
Or perhaps we’re already there.

In the first event of the 2008 presidential run for the GOP, Bill Frist won the Southern Republican Leadership Conference straw poll as expected, with 36% of the vote going to the Tennessee native in Nashville. However, instead of supposed frontrunner John McCain or southern favorites George Allen or Mike Huckabee grabbing the second spot, Governor Mitt Romney of Massachussetts rolled in right behind Frist with 14%:

Frist won 36.9 percent of the 1,427 ballots cast here by delegates to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.
The shocker of the evening was that Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney placed second, besting far better-known rivals Arizona Sen. John McCain and Virginia Sen. George Allen. Romney finished with 14 percent of the vote.
Third place was shared by Allen and President Bush, each of whom won 10.3 percent of the ballots cast. Bush, who of course is not eligible to run again for president, was the write-in candidate that McCain was pushing through the weekend.

I am somewhat surprised that Frist did as well as he did, even with the home-turf advantage. He has not provided the kind of tough leadership that many expected when he took over for Trent Lott. The long delay in moving judicial nominees in 2005 allowed momentum to build for Harry Reid’s obstructionism and McCain’s defection on the solution to it. He has appeared weak and indecisive in battling Reid, and made the lightweight replacement for Tom Daschle look like a genius at times in comparison.
Let’s not oversell this win for Frist, who alone of the contenders actively politicked for votes from the delegates. Of the 526 votes he won, all but 97 of them came from Tennessee delegates. He had no other home-state competition. He remains terribly popular in his own back yard, but even in this preliminary wind-tester, he doesn’t have much legs anywhere else.
If Frist’s finish surprises, then Romney’s stuns. No one expected Mitt Romney to show up in GOP calculations, at least not at the SRLC. George Allen, who finished four points behind and tied with the solidarity write-in vote for George Bush for third place, should have done better than Romney. After all, this is the Southern straw poll, and it was expected to raise the profile of candidates below the Mason-Dixon Line. Allen should have benefitted from that. He has served as both governor and senator, has great name recognition, and has been more stalwart in support of the Bush administration than Bill Frist.
The big loser, of course, is John McCain. After sticking his finger into the Nashville wind, McCain realized that he couldn’t win earlier this week. Having been built up by the media as the presumptive nominee for the Republicans — in much the same way Hillary has for the Democrats — McCain knew that he could not afford to get beaten badly. As I wrote on Friday, he engineered the Bush write-in vote to appear selfless and a party stalwart while hoping to make the entire event irrelevant.
McCain only succeeded in making himself irrelevant. He could only convince ten percent of the 1427 delegates to write in Bush’s name. McCain himself only got 66 votes out of 1427, a stunning rebuke for a man who has had his face on TV more than Madonna since the 2004 election. It demonstrates a gaping weakness in the South, perhaps a fatal weakness, if he expects to win the nomination. It also shows that his efforts to suck up to conservatives and Bush supporters has largely failed. And lastly, his humiliation in Nashville rebukes the media players who had built McCain into a Republican juggernaut.
What’s next? This straw poll will launch Romney into the top tier of Republican candidates and start attracting the most effective organizers to his campaign. His record in Massachussetts will get more scrutiny, but he will also get more media exposure. Romney holds a governor’s seat, a better launching pad for presidential campaigns than a Senate seat. George Allen, who has held both, will need to explain his weak showing in his own neighborhood if he wants to push for the nomination, but don’t be surprised if people start thinking about a Romney-Allen ticket. It would link two sections of the country and create a team of likeable conservatives for the 2008 campaign.
Let the games begin …

Chris Matthews reports at MS-NBC that John McCain plans to instruct delegates at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference to vote for George Bush as a write-in candidate instead of voting for him as the preferred nominee for 2008. Matthews says that McCain asks this to show support for the President, presently in a rough patch, and to keep the GOP’s focus on 2006:

It’s early on at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference down here, but already we’ve learned some big news.
Sources tell me that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., plans to shock his supporters tonight by asking them to NOT vote for him in the presidential straw poll that will be conducted by The Hotline on Saturday.
Instead, McCain will urge his followers to write in President Bush’s name. McCain will tell his supporters that this is not about 2008, but rather about 2006 and supporting the president.
According to McCain’s supporters, he’ll say: “I think we have bigger things to worry about. So if any friends here are thinking about voting for me, please don’t. Just write in President Bush’s name.”

McCain has supported Bush in elections and on the war, but has not given Bush much support for his legislative agenda. He has also gone out of his way to play the “maverick” during the last six years, often crossing the White House on key issues. His defection on the Byrd option to defeat the obstructionism that Democrats employed against over a third of Bush’s nominees to the appellate courts cost Bush a number of his judicial appointments, including Henry Saad and Brett Kavanaugh.
In short, McCain has made a pest out of himself, and seemed to enjoy playing the centrist gadfly that attracts all of the media attention. So why has he suddenly taken on a role as Bush’s chief defender?
Two reasons spring to mind. Since the beginning of the year, McCain has tried to patch up his standing with Bush supporters in the party. McCain discovered that while he polls well in the general electorate, his numbers among actual Republicans would prevent him from winning the primaries. Repairing his image as a sell-out and an enemy of free speech will take a huge effort, and this toadying at the SRLC appears to be part of that. It also is unusual enough to ensure that McCain will get his invites to the Sunday-morning talk shows to which he appears addicted.
Matthews picks up on the second reason. McCain does not enjoy a lot of popularity in the South, and he likely would have finished poorly anyway. Matthews thinks that George Allen will score well at the SRLC straw poll, but Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee will be certain to show strength as well. A third-place finish (or worse) might convince the big fundraisers that McCain will not generate the kind of momentum needed early in the effort, and the big power players will flock instead to Allen and Huckabee, and perhaps even Mitt Romney as a dark-horse candidate.
So in order to get attention at a conference that would be inclined to discount him, suck up to the Bush supporters, and appeal to the party stalwarts who feel he stabbed the GOP in the back with his Gang of 14 antics, he plays a little rah-rah for Bush and attempts to shame everyone into making the entire event irrelevant. It’s a clever ploy, one that might even work to a limited extent, and will almost certainly steal all the thunder and momentum from this effort to establish some credibility for Republican candidates early in the process.
In other words, if it’s true, it’s a typical self-centered McCain publicity stunt.

According to Dick Morris, former Vice President and lunatic-for-hire Al Gore may have enough momentum to steal the nomination away from Hillary Clinton in 2008. Morris postulates that Gore has picked up enough credibility on the Left that he can make himself the frontrunner by just entering the race:

The former vice president’s slashing attacks on the administration and his stalwart, if misguided, opposition to the Iraq war leave him without the complications and complexes that will devil Clinton as she seeks to appeal to the unforgiving left of the Democratic Party.
And Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book Earth in the Balance. He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug — Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.
The Democratic base’s anger at Gore’s defeat in 2000 was assuaged by the worse Kerry defeat of 2004. The idea that he was an incompetent candidate has been replaced in Democratic iconography by the idea that he was cheated out of the presidency. The hiatus has healed his reputation with the base in much the same way that the negative rap on Nixon for losing in 1960 was ameliorated by the Goldwater wipeout of 1964.

All Karl Rove must be thinking after reading this is: God, please make it so!
If Morris is right — and Morris usually provides accurate analysis — it only shows how radical and out of touch the Democratic Party has become. If their base prefers a bitter old man that panders to radical Islamist propaganda while we are at war against Islamofascist terrorism, then the Democrats had better consider jettisoning their base and starting fresh. No one in their right mind would nominate Al Gore for President after that speech in Saudi Arabia, and if that’s what gets the leftist base involved, the Democrats will be better off in the long run without them.
Morris, the ultimate Machiavellian, notes that some would question Gore’s loyalty for challenging the wife of the man who made him Vice President. He dryly quotes Truman’s advice to “get a dog” if one wants a friend in Washington, but he fails to mention the stab in the back he delivered to Joe Lieberman in 2004. Lieberman refused to announce his entry into the primaries in case Gore decided to run against George Bush again, but Gore waited far too long to announce his abstention. Having handicapped his former running mate with an impossibly late start — all the major donors had divided themselves between Dean, Kerry, and others — Gore then made the surprise endorsement of Howard Dean instead of Lieberman, without even warning his old partner.
Gore? Loyalty? Since when?
Republicans should be delighted with this turn of events. Gore narrowly lost when running as a centrist. Just wait to see what happens when he tries running again after five years of paranoid-conspiracy theories flying out of his mouth. There won’t be enough air time in the world to broadcast the commercials that the GOP would produce.

ABC News profiles the efforts of John McCain to attract conservative support for his expected run at the 2008 presidential nomination, an effort that looked like a dead letter several months ago. After angering the base on several issues — campaign finance and judicial nominations chief among them — McCain now wants to consolidate his support among moderates while attracting enough conservatives to remain viable:

In recent months, McCain has taken several steps to court his party’s base: he has endorsed teaching intelligent design alongside evolution; he has backed a ban on gay marriage in his home state of Arizona; he has met with the Rev. Jerry Falwell.
He has also described former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., as “the finest leader we’ve had” and questioned the commitment of media darling Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., to ethics reform . And to top it off, he recently said he wouldn’t be bothered if Roe v. Wade were overturned since he’s never supported it.
But far more important to McCain’s conservative resurgence has been his opposition to what he calls wasteful spending and his commitment to persevering in Iraq.

ABC never asks about the Gang of 14 and the BCRA, two issues with which conservatives have split — painfully — with McCain. Any analysis of his chances for a primary victory have to take those schisms into account. When asked to stand up for conservative jurists, McCain balked and legitimized the obstructionist tactics of the Democrats, kneecapping fine judges like Henry Saad and Brett Kavanaugh. He also pushed through Congress one of the worst abridgments of political speech in American history, the BCRA, which forbids private citizens and groups the right to buy advertisements for their candidates within 60 days of an election — and also seeks to regulate Internet websites for their involvement in politics, potentially including this one.
Conservatives may wind up with no choice but McCain in 2008, as the pickings look slim so far. If it comes down to McCain against Hillary Clinton, they’ll support the former … but not enthusiastically. Look for the conservatives to rally around a George Allen or Mike Huckabee before they surrender to McCainia

The London Times reviews the performance of the presumed front-runner for the Democratic ticket in 2008 and finds her performance wanting. Gerard Baker, the editor for its American desk, notes that Hillary Clinton not only cannot connect well in her appearances but cannot even escape the long shadow cast by her husband and most potent political asset:

Few deny that Mrs Clinton is razor-sharp and politically savvy. But even supporters worry about her personal skills, at least before a large audience. She is a somewhat wooden speaker with a hectoring style at times more reminiscent of Al Gore than her husband. And unlike Bill, she projects a lofty, distant air that has been likened to the Queen of Sheba in a power suit.
Last weekend Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, homed in on Mrs Clinton’s personality, saying that she was too angry. His aim was both to pinpoint her weaknesses and to needle her, and it seems to have worked. …
The hope in her camp is that people will believe that Mrs Clinton has her husband’s political strengths and none of his weaknesses. The growing fear is that she incites the same level of loathing and suspicion as her husband always did, but has none of the charm and personality to deflect it.

Hillary has always come across as a scold and a cold fish on the stump, where Bill may only truly find himself in that setting. He has always had a grace and flow to his appearances that served him well on most occasions. His charm finds its best and most productive outlet there, while Hillary usually sounds rather tight and forced. The comparisons will not make her look any better, and if she has Bill at the same events with her, he will continue to upstage her every time. That only plays into the suspicion that Hillary will run as an end-around to the 25th Amendment to garner Bill his third term in office.
Democrats need to find a national candidate with less baggage than Hillary. Almost half of the electorate doesn’t want anything to with the Clintons ever again, and about half of what’s left doesn’t think Bill is worth casting a vote for Hillary. Rasmussen’s last poll demonstrates that Hillary might win in the primaries, but she will get shellacked in a national election and probably would be the biggest get-out-the-vote incentive for the GOP in years. When the London Times plays Lloyd Bentsen to Hillary’s Dan Quayle, her negatives no longer can be portrayed as Republican wishful thinking.