PMC Commentary

Obama's Quandary Is Actually a No-Brainer, But Is Complicated By "the Brains"

Party poo-bahs, donors themselves, blogospheric kibitzers, his own career-guidance counselors and possibly even the GOP are trying, or so it seems to this out-of-the-loop kibitzer, to bully Barack Obama into making a big mistake: to forgo public financing in the general.

Obama should roundly denounce the advice, and if he feels like going spectacularly wild, even reject it.

It's bad policy, he knows better, and the simple and singular development that he hasn't yet embraced it is the surest indication that he does, in fact, know better. And even more damaging than the wounded implications for the future of public financing are the legitimate openings it would provide the GOP for character assassination: just another pol, same old politics as usual, the typical caving in to traditional pressures when push comes to shove, not to mention momentous hypocrisy.

Forget any minor escape clauses Obama may have included when, way back when, he took the pledge, as recently summarized by the New York Times: "If he won the nomination, he would limit himself to spending only the $85 million available in public financing between the convention and Election Day as long as his Republican opponent did the same."

That, loosely stated, was 99 percent of the commitment he made in answering a questionnaire from the Midwest Democracy Network, back in November when he was facing Hillary's "inevitability" and he wished to righteously shame, as he put it himself at the time, those other "presidential candidates" who had announced "they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election."

Now, more than a $100 million later in private donations and with no droughty spigot in sight, Obama is humming, hawing, parsing and amending. Again, the New York Times -- and this is just about the mildest coverage he can expect: "Mr. Obama was notably noncommittal about his previous proposal in Tuesday's Democratic debate, indicating that he would add new conditions, especially on spending by independent groups, to his previous pledges to accept the deal. If nominated, 'I will sit down with John McCain and make sure that we have a system that is fair to both sides,' Mr. Obama said, alluding to the need to close 'loopholes.'"

No, no, a thousand times this heterodox no. The electorate doesn't "get" loopholes, Mr. Obama, and cares even less.

While you're out there explaining those byzantine legalisms that call for the likes of one of your former Harvard Law School classmates to comprehend, all the electorate will be hearing and actually comprehending are these simple words from Mr. McCain: "The fact is, Senator Obama signed a piece of paper and pledged to take public financing for his campaign if I did the same. I believe that Senator Obama should keep his commitment.... The rest of it is ground noise. The rest of it is irrelevant."

Explaining is indeed losing, and explaining is all Obama would be doing for a good part of the general election campaign, as he's forced to trail off from any other message he may wish to pound.

Nor will the pertinent points related to public financing and his historical pledge, with or without verbal or written amendments, be the issue. John McCain & Co. will swiftly bury those finer points -- after all, they don't want to explain any more than he does -- under the umbrella barrage of attack that he is, simply, a hypocrite. He made a pledge, he broke it. Ergo, any pledge he makes is breakable. His chant of "change" becomes risible. He's just another pol -- whereas, behold, McCain is a man of his word.

In short, Obama would lose the most fundamental foundation of his political raison d'être. Worse, he would be the one to have thrown it away.

And for what? The goo-goos make an excellent point. Said Joan Claybrook of Public Citizen: Any presidential candidate "ought to be able to run a campaign for two months on $85 million" -- about $10 million a week. She then delicately previewed the coming, blistering attacks by McCain: Obama's hedging is "a very bad signal."

Mr. Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, has "said the campaign would not make a decision [on public financing] until the Democratic primary is settled."

Here, the exception proves the rule, for this is exceptionally bad advice from a generally outstanding adviser. And -- see opening sentence -- Obama is hearing it from more than just Mr. Plouffe.

It's killer advice -- and that adjective is not meant in its hip sense. A "settling" of the primaries could be months away, and McCain would profitably spend those months undermining Obama's message of change and painting him, as mentioned, as just another pol.

Obama should not permit himself to get fixed behind the eight ball on this. He shouldn't permit the above to cement his position -- hypocrisy -- in the public mind, the settling in of which would then require twice as long to undo, which of course he won't have time for.

He should, rather, reject, denounce, or otherwise disregard the hardball, politics-as-usual advice from the seasoned "professional" crowd -- you know, the breed that so benefited Hillary Clinton's bid -- and declare for public financing, now. He'd disappoint that noisy machinery of the right and be glad he did, as would millions of others.

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NOTE: I am delighted and honored to announce that beginning Monday, March 3, my column will appear exclusively on BuzzFlash.org. You will also be able to access it through BuzzFlash.com, front page, if that's your regular reading habit. So, see you there!
--P.M.

Punching at a Whirlwind

Of all the sins of all the pols who have derided Barack Obama as a vapid rhetorician -- as an inexperienced newcomer of "talk versus action," "speeches not solutions" and "an eloquent but empty call for change" -- none has been more lethal than their misreading of the present, based on an utter lack of comprehending inexorable historical currents.

For the election year of 2008 is likely to rank as another 1932 or 1960, when bottom-up calls for change -- something, anything but what preceded -- of transcendent, almost spiritual dimensions were uppermost in the electoral mind. Uppermost and demanded for sure, yet Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy -- two others derided in their times as speechifying phonies -- were almost singularly tuned in among the political class.

On occasion they had what some may regard as unlikely help. In 1960 Henry Kissinger, for example -- who was born, it seems, a hardened veteran of realpolitik, both foreign and domestic -- took Kennedy-adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. aside and urged this timely wisdom:

We need someone who will take a big jump -- not just improve on existing trends but produce a new frame of mind, a new national atmosphere. If Kennedy debates with Nixon on who can best manage the status quo, he is lost. The issue is not one technical program or another. The issue is a new epoch. If we get a new epoch and a new spirit, the technical programs will take care of themselves.

It is today's overshadowing yearning for a "new national atmosphere" that Hillary Clinton, above all others in the Democratic fold, missed. Armed with reams of wonkish policy proposals, she lulled audiences into a state of stupefaction, conflating the detailed introduction of "technical programs" with spirited leadership.

But the nation was one step ahead, sensing, as did Kissinger, that the technicalities of change would "take care of themselves." What is needed, rather, is a unifying voice of inspiration to get us from here to there -- to first change the uninspiring "mindset," as Obama once put it, that got us here to begin with.

By itself a call for change is fine and dandy -- that's what elections are all about -- but if the nation senses that you're dragging the uninspirational past into the present, then you're doomed.

And that, Hillary could not shake. Nor did she seem to try very hard. Instead she took the easier but ultimately suicidal route of merely deriding Obama's "rhetoric," which, it so happened, was precisely what the nation needed, and knew it needed.

Obama understood this. He is, as well, a quick study. He's capable of exploiting necessary change in himself. As a recent Washington Post article noted, friends told him after his 2000 congressional-race loss that it was largely the result of his rhetoric being "too wonkish and Ivy League." So he adjusted. Four years later, in his U.S. Senate bid, "Instead of ... dwelling on the details of welfare or health-care policy, he tied them to themes of 'hope and change and the future.'"

Yet another four years later, he was exploitative enough, which is to say smart enough, to get "informal advice from Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen." Meanwhile, Hillary was dwelling on microtrends and "technical programs." Ouch. She completely missed the national macrotrend that was swirling about her.

And, I'm happy to report, it seems that John McCain & Co. is well on its way to making the same, suicidal mistake.

For it further seems that the GOP indeed understands the vast appeal of Obama's siren song, but hasn't a clue as to how to combat it. Except, of course, by deploying the same, tired, wearisome tactics of the past.

If, say, Cincinnati talk-radio host and audience warm-up jackass Bill Cunningham is any indication of what's to come -- the mindless repetition of Barack Hussein Obama as a "hack," a "fraud from Chicago" who wishes to schmooze with "world leaders who want to kill us" -- then Obama is sitting pretty. Eight months is a self-excruciatingly long time to campaign against a man's middle name and a Kennedyesque rhetorical "fraudulence" for which the nation hungers.

It's true, as one of Obama's law-school classmates recently observed, that some "people are commenting increasingly on the disjunction between the elevated and exceptionally fine rhetoric and the rather pedestrian policy proposals that form the Obama platform." (The classmate is also a "former Bush counsel," by the way.)

But that -- a charge leveled against FDR and JFK, too -- just doesn't matter. Because a lot more people are in the mood for something else. And the GOPers, constrained by their own ideology of the rejected past, can't offer it. Even Henry Kissinger could tell them that.

***

NOTE: I am delighted and honored to announce that beginning Monday, March 3, my column will appear exclusively on BuzzFlash.org. You will also be able to access it through BuzzFlash.com, front page, if that's your regular reading habit. So, see you there!
--P.M.

#20

Last night we witnessed a 90-minute confirmation of this coming Tuesday's superfluousness; that, and the culmination of months of strategic impotence, tactical confusion and manifest frustration.

The only creative challenge successfully surmounted by the Clinton campaign these days lies in the number of ways it is finding to spell, "I-t'-s o-v-e-r." One of its strategists busies himself with public fantasies about the imminence of "locking this nomination down," its communications director has taken to screaming at rather than communicating to reporters, and other spokesmen are finally and openly sharing their pain and venting their "anger."

Then comes the big night -- the big 20th debate night -- and the candidate herself adds to the already superfluous confirmation of organizational meltdown.

"Can I just point out that in the last several debates, I seem to get the first question all the time?" And that was the coherent part of Hillary's paranoid oddity. Poor Dennis Kucinich had to elbow his way to questions, which were once universally believed to be opportunities in a debate, but oh how unremitting fire can change one's outlook about the glory of battle.

Mrs. Clinton fared reasonably well on the healthcare and Nafta controversies, but those committed 30 minutes among the 90 just weren't enough to smother the strikingly intrusive impotence, confusion and frustration. Her other responses did far more harm -- and on occasion even raised more questions -- than good.

The camera wasn't panning the audience when Tim Russert asked Hillary about releasing her tax returns, so that voters could learn if that $5 million loan to herself was or was not a backdoor breach of campaign finance laws, but every viewer could feel the audience's tension and incredulity. "The American people who support me are bankrolling my campaign. That's obvious," she said, in defiance of the profoundly obvious.

Tim continued, perhaps by Tuesday? Just to put this matter to bed? "Well, I can't get it together by then," said Mrs. Clinton, to what I thought were audible groans. And regarding the doppelganger question of releasing all her first-lady records, which are, after all, public records? Oh dear, that's such a "cumbersome process," she said. But sure, Tim, you got it -- another empty pledge to try.

As for the thrusts, pokes and distractions of her attacks, they fizzled and soured the second Obama opened his mouth in polite but formidable defense. Encountering her charge of his having disseminated "false, misleading and discredited information" on her healthcare plan, Obama calmly countered that "Senator Clinton has, in her campaign at least, has constantly sent out negative attacks on us ... and we haven't whined about it, because I understand that's the nature of this campaign." More than a smackdown, it was a shutdown, weighted with stones and the first casting thereof.

On the matter of Louis Farrakhan's unsolicited endorsement of Obama, things became downright comical. Here, Mrs. Clinton decided to play not the politician, but Peter Mark Roget. She would "reject" the scoundrel, whereas Obama would merely "denounce" him. And, for you word mavens out there, let it be known there's a vast and prodigious "difference between denouncing and rejecting," Clinton instructed.

Hopelessly inarticulate as he is, Obama amusedly protested that he failed to "see a difference between denouncing and rejecting," but hey, he was happy to couple his denunciation with a little rejection, if that, indeed, would make Mrs. Clinton happy. (It did not.)

On the broader issue raised of speeches over specific solutions -- hence executive judgment -- Hillary's impotence boomeranged almost violently.

"My objections to the war in Iraq were not simply a speech," retorted Obama in his most -- in fact only -- animated moment. "I was one of the most vocal opponents of the war, and I was very specific as to why."

"The fact was," he continued with withering, debate-ending vehemence, "this was a big strategic blunder." And another "fact is that Senator Clinton often says that she is ready on Day One, but, in [further] fact, she was ready to give in to George Bush on Day One on this critical issue -- in [yet further] fact, she facilitated and enabled this individual to make a decision that has been strategically damaging to the United States of America."

To that, there was and remains simply no rational comeback. Political historians will someday write, I am certain, that that rational absence was what vacated Hillary's nomination hopes from the beginning. The seedling virus was always there; it just needed time to grow and take malignant root throughout the base.

We will of course see you again in Texas and Ohio, Hillary, but till then and forever after, goodbye.

The Hard Work of Realignment -- It's More Than Just Hope

One of the enduring mysteries of this presidential campaign has been the uneasy doubt expressed by a few on the left about Barack Obama's overtures to many on the right. Their doubt is shrouded by suspicion as well: If Obama isn't actually in bed with Reagan Republicanism, he at least wants to be. The "proof" of this speculation -- the cynical contortion of what Obama objectively said of Reaganism into something he didn't say -- was, as we know, happily propagated by the internal opposition.

Nevertheless the doubt is indeed mysterious, if not downright puzzling. It overlooks not only Obama's far-from-conservative campaign positions and his nearly pristine liberal record in the U.S. Senate, but most of all the commonsensical political need to build, expand and even create coalitions.

Probably the most exemplary forerunner of Obama's bridge-building strategy was that of FDR's in his first presidential campaign. The left has forgotten, it would seem, that this original New Dealer, this great Keynesian, this almost singular procreator of the modern welfare state campaigned on the ineluctable wisdom of maintaining a balanced budget.

Yet whatever the leftie doubters believe today, there is no doubt that Obama's strategy of accommodation and inclusiveness is taking a painful toll on the opposition's ranks. Those he is peeling off from Republican regularity -- "Obamacans," the Illinois senator calls them -- are, as Mark Barabak of the Los Angeles Times wrote yesterday, "part of a striking phenomenon this campaign season."

"They are blurring -- for now, at least -- the red-blue lines that have colored the nation's politics for the last several years." Said one interviewee in the L.A. Times article, titled "They're Republican red, and true blue to Obama": "I don't feel like Obama is condemning me for being a Republican."

And that, my friends, as John McCain would say, is less the result of any ideological accommodation than, simply, of brilliant politics.

Being a relative newcomer on the national stage, Obama not only saw the opportunity to frame himself before the opposition could, he possessed the foresight to actually do so. Most pols throughout a prolonged and contentious primary season pander exclusively to their base. Obama indeed kept one partisan eye open, but he cast the other on those he would need in the general, and he has done it with unparalleled finesse.

The list of celebrity converts is already long and growing. "Susan Eisenhower, a GOP business consultant and granddaughter of President Eisenhower, has endorsed the Democratic hopeful" and "Colin L. Powell ... has hinted he may do so as well." Former Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee has signed on, and even McCain's media strategist, Mark McKinnon, "says he will continue to back the Arizona senator but will step aside rather than work against Obama."

Naturally these notables, having smelled the extreme likelihood of an Obama presidency, could just be blowing with the wind. Partisanship means little when you're in the market for future favors. Hence it was the less notable interviewed in Barabak's L.A. Times piece who were of more intriguing interest. Such as Johanna Schneider -- "a former GOP staffer on Capitol Hill" -- who, "convinced that fellow Republicans have lost their way," said, "I just feel this is a tremendous opportunity to open politics up to a new generation. And I believe that Barack Obama is a genuine transformational candidate."

What's overlooked by the doubters is that Ms. Schneider's attitude did not just materialize out of some vague, "empty," pointless sense of hope, as some of the doubters' instigators would self-interestedly have you believe. It was, rather, carefully and brilliantly cultivated. And, given enough cultivation, it could change the face of partisan alignments for a generation to come and ensure the dominance of progressive politics.

The realignment's essential key is that Obama has not only framed himself, but that he's engaged in systematically reframing American interests.

"Very rarely do you hear me talking about my opponents without giving them some credit for having good intentions and being decent people," as U.S. News & World Report quoted Obama, cited in Barabak's piece. "There's nothing uniquely Democratic about a respect for civil liberties. There's nothing uniquely Democratic about believing in a foreign policy of restraint.... A lot of the virtues I talk about are virtues that are deeply embedded in the Republican Party," as they are in the Democratic.

Just as -- when stripped of their partisan rigidity -- is "repealing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy" or even "expanding the government's role in healthcare"; once, that is, it's shown that these are measures founded, after all, in the traditional American ideal of community.

In effect, Obama is merely encouraging the "others" to look past how their daddies and granddaddies may have voted, and therefore why they began voting as they did. He is merely encouraging them to look deeper, to identify their and our common interests, and recognize that those interests come with no inherent partisan label.

Obama's considered strategy should be no mystery. It's just smart politics, and of vast realignment potential.

In Defense of Nader, and the Shame of Progressive Hypocrisy

Of all the scattered reactions to Ralph Nader's third entry into presidential politics, I found this, as reported yesterday afternoon by the Politico, to be the most conspicuously buffoonish:

"Democrats and bloggers are already reacting with fury, fearing a rerun of 2000, when Nader drained crucial votes from Al Gore."

It wasn't the noted fear, or even the pregnant tone of fury among Democrats and, I presume, Democratic bloggers, that made me chortle. It was, rather, the logical extension of it that prompted such amusement tinged with elemental disgust.

To explain: Of these Democrats and loosely party-affiliated bloggers, roughly half, let's say (likely more, but let's just say half), lean to the progressive camp. And of this subset, we can further reasonably assume that roughly half in turn are, or were, either in the Clinton camp or at least had no fundamental philosophical objections to it. Hillary is, or would have been, just fine with them.

Which is to say, the one "progressive" candidate who openly, stridently, swinishly violated the most fundamental precept of cherished progressive doctrine -- that this nation should never, ever even contemplate war without intolerable provocation -- would be a fine and dandy nominee.

Ralph Nader, however, who openly and stridently opposed the violation of this most fundamental precept, is to be met and countered with fear and fury.

In short, with philosophical respect to this subset of a subset, a progressive candidate who devotedly upholds progressive tenets is to be denounced and ostracized; a progressive candidate who opportunistically spits in progressive faces is to be warmly embraced.

The colossal, back-flipping hypocrisy of it all is not only stunning, it's sadly reminiscent of the very crowd -- the right-wing lunatic fringe -- that so many of these same progressives have smugly ridiculed for decades, and for the same reason.

In the 1980s, for example, when Ronald Reagan and his supply-side nincompoops conjured up the aggressively anticonservative idea that massive federal deficits are, after all, a good thing, the abovementioned progressives were cocksure and confident that the right-wing rank and file would revolt in disgust. Reagan's vast apostasy was so abhorrent to conservative philosophical values, there was just no way, it was thought by many on the left, that the right-wing multitudes would obediently fall in line.

But fall in line they did, in a vulgar rejection of so much of what they had claimed to hold so philosophically dear for so long. The left jeered -- Isn't that just like the ideologically corrupt right? Those clowns will turn on a dime, if it's their guy, or gal, doing the turning. No values. No grounding. No true, inviolable, philosophical core.

And that, of course, is what our progressive subset of a subset is demonstrating in itself these days.

So how to ease the cognitive dissonance? Pretty simple. Just revisit, once again, that right-wing grab bag of tactical distraction, which is to say: change the subject. Ignore that whole inconvenient war-vote thing -- you remember, that violation of the most fundamental precept of progressive doctrine -- and simply deride the progressively conscientious as blind Obama "worshippers" on some kind of unrealistically transcendent high.

And that, to shine the least derogatory light on it, is profoundly amusing.

I, for one, am not even in the Obama camp with both feet, but judging from my email and many pro-Hillary commenters on this site, one would think I've been puffing him from the get-go as a paid staffer, or that I'm indeed in the throes of that otherworldly transcendent trance.

Reality check: Aside from his admirably enduring adherence to the international-relations sensibilities of soft power over hard, Obama is, and has been, merely the one electable candidate who rightly opposed this war. That left him as the only candidate standing worthy of outspoken progressive support. Period. And should he gain the highest office and commence any backsliding, I'll be right there, in the front lines of the outspoken opposition.

Meanwhile, I fear not the exceedingly marginalized Ralph Nader, nor am I furious at his reentry into the political circus. Let him go forth and preach his message of Progressive Puritanism. We need all the help, encouragement, enlightenment and bits of bumping to the left we can get.

Thorazinetime for Hillary

Well, that answered that.

For a few days the speculation raged. Is Hillary Clinton subtly, uncharacteristically preparing for a gracious exit, in view of the mathematically insurmountable obstacles she faces in seizing the nomination?

Or is she merely lying momentarily low, scanning the horizon for opposing vulnerabilities, quietly forging a desperate, final offensive that will mirror the futility of the Old South's "Lost Cause" and litter the landscape with about as much needless carnage.

As of yesterday afternoon, there were competing, page-one headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post that first reflected and then answered the speculation: respectively, "Somber Clinton Soldiers On as the Horizon Darkens"; then, "Clinton Unloads on Obama's 'Destructive' Tactics."

There they stood, those newsy twin pillars of Hillary's political schizophrenia -- one, softly suggesting a resigned and somber wisdom; the other, harshly responding with theatrical and kamikaze destructiveness.

The charitable assessment of Hillary's press conference performance in Cincinnati yesterday is that she simply snapped and went 'round the bend. If you've seen the video of it, and I'm sure you have, you suspect that the psychiatrically trained among the spectators were shifting nervously in their seats, wondering if she was about to go the last full measure of clinical rage and start blasting.

She possessed an eerie, otherworldly look that screamed for the fictional and expository talents of a Norman Mailer. Here, one could nearly conclude, is a politician all used up, emotionally and dangerously unraveling right on stage.

But, of course, it was all just a stunt.

Her "outrage" was just an uncommonly theatrical confirmation of the cold, political calculation rap that she and her campaign staff once struggled to overcome, but finally and publicly conceded in spades. It was a meticulously orchestrated and pre-scripted show -- a last-ditch, last-minute explosion of feigned fury over what was, after all, the politically commonplace.

The "false and discredited mailings" from Obama's camp that Hillary pretended to have just discovered are, in fact, weeks old. The Clinton camp has been chronically aware of them, so Hillary's seemingly sudden and striking indignation was patently laughable.

At the core of her orchestration, however, weren't the mailings at all; neither their veracity or discreditability. The point, rather, was to discredit Obama's character, harking back to and intensifying the groundwork she had already strained to lay about Obama's fitness as chief executive. It was, that is, just as she accused Obama -- something right out of Karl Rove's playbook, with a little Swift Boating to boot, and it positively dripped with irrational venom.

He says one thing in his speeches and then he turns around and does this. It is not the new politics the speeches are about. It is not hopeful. It is destructive. Shame on you, Barack Obama. It is time you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public. That's not what I expect from you. Meet me in Ohio -- let's have a debate about your tactics. Enough about the speeches, and the big rallies, and then using tactics right out of Karl Rove's playbook.

This is wrong and every Democrat should be outraged.

And with those nine final words, she finally said something of meritorious truth.

If Hillary's campaign still had any realistic shot at capturing the nomination, perhaps her accelerated malice could be accepted as spirited, hardball inventiveness, however over the top it might be. But it has no such shot. Her campaign is not merely dying; it is dead. Hence her recent words were not merely over the top -- they confirmed, instead, merely that the contest is over, but she has no intention of going down alone.

No candidate at this hopeless, pointless stage in what you might call his or her right mind would launch such a party-splitting, nerve-shattering attack. It was "wrong." It was "shameful." It was "destructive." It played right into the GOP's hands, and every Democrat should indeed be outraged.

But about every Democrat, Hillary is thinking not one minute. She is thinking about only one. She has lost all human perspective, engulfed as she is in a narcissistic, entitled rage. If Democrats won't have her, then the country -- which earlier this week she still mawkishly prayed would "be fine ... no matter what happens" -- won't have any Democrat in the White House come 2009. So she'd be primed for an earlier run in 2012, not 2016.

Hillary Clinton is now less a tragic figure right out of Karl Rove's playbook than straight out of Shakespeare. She's willing to sell the fate of an entire nation down the road, so that someday, sooner, she may be queen.

And if you reject the Shakespeare metaphor, perhaps Ann Rice? Please, somebody grab a wooden stake.

To Crank Up the Proper Impact, the Times Should Have First Watered It Down

Thursday's instantly infamous New York Times piece exhausted a great bit of willpower in me. It was all the rage that morning, though I first heard of it Wednesday evening as "Breaking News" on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown." Normally there's some news in news that "breaks," yet the more I heard of it, and then the more I read and reread the story itself, the more it took on a burlesque of the old "Saturday Night Live" news flashes: "Franco is still dead."

Nevertheless the temptation to immediately pile on -- in either defense or prosecution of the Times, not to mention its target, John McCain -- was damn near irresistible. The story had swallowed up all manner of news and discussion outlets, from television networks to print to the blogosphere, and had nearly approached the intense excitability level of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But resist I did, because to me the story had the smell of 24-hour decay, 36 tops. It seemed, that is, to be going nowhere, fast.

And sure enough, by Friday evening the story was pretty much history. That's not to say it won't be debated for years to come in journalism schools as an extraordinary test case of journalistic (in)judiciousness, or that the GOP won't milk it for all it's worth in right-wing fundraising value for the next eight months. For academics and reactionary moneygrubbers, it was truly a gift of lasting utility. But the story itself swiftly became history because it was, at bottom, history itself.

Would I have run the story as written had I been its executive editor, Bill Keller? I can't say with absolute certainty that I would have, principally because if I couldn't get my reporters to get their sources on the record, with respect to the journalistically distasteful effort to tie some vague, unprovable romantic involvement to legislative favors, then the coming and consequent cries of foul would likely not have seemed worth it -- especially not for a paper with the New York Times' reputation for avoiding the sexually scandalous.

Nonetheless Keller's was a valid judgment call; he was the one deepest inside the story and it was his professional ass on the line and not mine. I give him an A+ for guts, if nothing else. And the subsequent, manufactured outrage by the right was more than worth any journalistic stink. I just love it when it gets angry. Naturally had a similar piece centered on the likes of, say, Barack Obama, the legendary right-wing noise machine would had plastered the airwaves with hosannas about the Times' occasional fairness, objectivity and journalistic integrity.

What I do not understand, however, is why the Times, Keller, Jim Rutenberg et al did not make stupendously clear in the story's text that the story itself was part of the paper's in-depth series on presidential candidates, "The Long Run." Which is to say, they did not make clear it was merely another piece on another candidate's past -- nothing of breathtaking revelation here, folks, just another delving into the historical contours of a particular candidate. We've done the same for -- to -- others, dozens of time, quite literally, and you can read them all, right here in the archives.

The Times slapped "The Long Run" in smaller and light gray type above the original headline, but it seems astonishingly clear in this case that some pointed, textual caveat was in order, given the partial subject material's sensitivity and the rather stretched anonymity of sources behind it. We are, gentle readers, simply letting you know what we've learned, or rather what we think we've learned. And we're making the call that you have the right to know what it is.

But, as we do know, this the Times did not do. Instead, it waited to explain all this after the brouhaha fact.

For a year or so, in addition to pieces on issues, candidate interviews, investigations of their business dealings, polling and reporting from the campaign trail, we have been running this series called "The Long Run." It is a kind of serial biography of the candidates. We pick key events or themes or questions [my emphasis] about a candidate's life that reflect on his or her character and qualifications.... The point of this "Long Run" installment was that, according to people who know him well, this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation.

If only someone had thought -- or fought -- to include this in the original story, the Times' landing would have been so much softer, and McCain's, perhaps, bumpier. Indeed, the historical "questions" themselves would have taken on more prominence, while the Times would have protected itself somewhat by confessing to subordinating provable fact to journalistic speculation.

But it didn't. And if there was one salient boneheaded play in its original coverage, I'd say that was it.

As for McCain's contemporary history of figuratively bedding down with come-hither lobbyists, you can read this morning's Washington Post and rightfully draw your own conclusions, as readers could have more easily done with the Times piece, had it done it right.

Who's Now Winning Every Day on the Democratic Campaign Trail? John McCain

Holy somnolence! That was the 19th debate that Hillary couldn't live without in Wisconsin? The (nearly) last, great laxative of an offensive against the unstoppable forces of Obama's Big Mo?

More stirring would have been the 3000th rehash of the New York Times' unremitting wickedness on any other cable news network. But no, I remained an observant foot soldier in Hillary's attempted Resurrection Revolution, only, of course, to witness the absence of any real fireworks.

I was indeed fired up and ready to go, as, it would seem, were the headline writers at the Times -- before the main event. Their above-the-fold, seemingly anticipatory preview of the actual coverage was, "Debate Takes on Contentious Air for Democrats," while the Washington Post waited to actually watch the boresome thing, and then more properly headlined it: "Clinton and Obama Remain Civil at Debate."

The latter caption was far more descriptive, and, although they buried the lede, the Times' reporters had to agree. They launched their coverage by writing that the debate "veered from collegial to clenched and combative" -- so keep reading -- but ultimately conceded that "for much of the debate, the two candidates agreed over and over again."

And that they did. In fact, by the top of the second hour my eyes had grown heavy and my brain numb, both having been victimized by repeated stump points and "I agree with Hillary/Barack." Eventually came a few expected digs and jabs from the New York senator, but they were tired, tedious and, simply, too expected.

Again, the repetitiveness of it all was captured in the coverage: "Mrs. Clinton ... alternated between high notes early in the debate -- smiling and nodding at Mr. Obama, pitching her economic plans for the umpteenth time -- and pointed criticisms that she has been making somewhat fruitlessly for weeks now, like portraying Mr. Obama as all talk and little action."

When words like "the umpteenth time" and "fruitlessly" begin creeping into the coverage of your talking-point zingers, you know your campaign has hit the permanent skids. Time to pee on the fire, which has all but gone out, anyway.

That's not to say there weren't moments of verbal contortion that at once pained and amused. Having seen her Latino numbers in freefall, Mrs. Clinton decided to defend that community's interests while also protecting her white, somewhat nativist working-class flank. And it was quite a trick. For instance, "she noted that she opposed making English the official national language, but also said it should remain a 'common unifying' language for all Americans." Ah-hah. I see. (Huh?)

Even better, however, was this: "Mrs. Clinton defended her support for building a physical barrier along the border with Mexico ... but at the same time she called for a review of the project, which, she said, had become 'absurd' under the Bush administration."

Linking absurdity with the Bush administration is sure to bring thunderous applause, of course, which it did; but only if the audience doesn't pause over the I-was-for-it-before-I-was-against-it contradictory essence of the linkage, which it didn't.

Nor did the pro-Clinton audience members -- who intrusively cheered, hooted and hollered with what you might call more than a trace of desperate raucousness -- seem to catch or disapprove of another Bush-litism coming from Hillary.

Speaking of potential presidential confabs with our foes in general, of Raúl Castro, specifically, Hillary said she "would not meet with him until there was evidence that change is happening." The same would go for Iran, Syria, North Korea, you name it. In short, world tensions and conflicts shall remain hopelessly stalemated and stagnant until others come around to our way of thinking. Once we all agree -- magically? -- then we'll talk.

So if you live in Ohio or Texas and dream of a four- or eight-year extension of Bushian "diplomacy," then does the Democratic Party ever have a candidate for you.

But what was the big picture emerging from the debate?

It sure wasn't Hope for Hillary, because mathematically there isn't any. That appetizing scenario for Clinton boosters is already a cooked goose. True, her vertiginous advisers have revised their spin and are now saying she "must win the Texas and Ohio primaries by at least 10 percentage points if she has any hope of catching up with Mr. Obama in the delegate count," but their shaving of the actual point spread by roughly two-thirds is as laughably cynical as pretty much everything else they've come up with lately.

No, the big picture wrap-up -- not so much from last night's rather meek debate, but in general from Hillary's attack-dog forays elsewhere on the stump -- is merely that everything negative that now comes out of Hillary Clinton's mouth will soon be coming out of John McCain's. One can hear it now: "Even my opponent's Democratic opponent said of him during the primaries...." You can fill in the blank, if you like, but you don't need to, because Hillary is doing it for you -- and for John and the GOP.

Her parting words last night were, "You know, whatever happens, we’re going to be fine." And you know, Hillary, I'm sure that's what Mr. McCain is thinking as well. Just keep throwing those grenades -- because they'll retain their explosive value down the road.

"A 65-Percent President"

The day after working-class Wisconsinites plunged yet another dagger in the heart of her campaign, Hillary launched yet another, more strident and increasingly futile broadside against her party's prospective nominee.

"Let's get real," she bellowed to a New York gathering. (By the way, has her scheduler not looked at a primary calendar and accompanying map lately?) "Let's get real about this election, let's get real about our future, let's get real about what it is we can do together."

As the Washington Post described it, her words "reflected a mounting despair."

And both -- Hillary's exhortation, that is, for us to "get real," alongside her advertisement for "despair" -- reminded me of an interview I had watched the day before, the day in which working-class Wisconsinites were otherwise busy with their dagger-plunging.

The venue was "Hardball," the guest was David Wilhelm, and the infuriating interruptions, of course, were courtesy Chris Matthews. But on this day Matthews, among all his guest-interrupting sputtering, had something of actual value to add to his guest's insights -- and it just so happens the twosome previewed the nailing of Hillary's upcoming concerns over reality, despair and the gossamer possibilities of what "we can do together."

Matthews asked Wilhelm, who was Bill Clinton's national campaign manager in '92, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee and now an Obama supporter, if the latter was a "doer," and what, if anything, he could manage to get done as president. How "can he bring his big ideals to reality?" Matthews, as is his nature, rehearsed the question at length, but this time it was worth the wait. After all, Matthews continued ...

How does he [accomplish anything] in an environment like we saw like when the Clintons came into office in '93, and, immediately, people like Bill Kristol on the right said, we're going to kill health care in its cradle; there's not going to be any health care. Senator Clinton, then first lady Clinton, said, no I'm going to get the full boat. I'm going to get everything I want. Somebody wants everything. The other wants them to get nothing. We get nothing. That's what the pattern has been.

There was, naturally, more to come from Matthews. But in it is where he nailed the despair:

I think a lot of this country ... is sick of the 60 percent requirement to get anything done in the U.S. Senate, the failure of anybody in Congress since 1965 to do anything on any issue we care about, whether it‘s Social Security reform or Medicare salvation or it's climate change more recently or it's energy independence or it's balancing the budget. Any area, this government has failed us again and again and again. And people are tired of being in this rut. And they don't want to hear that one party is blaming the other for 49 percent or 51 percent of the trouble. They want one president to get 65 percent or 60 percent of the country behind them and get something done, I think, no matter whether it's Hillary or McCain or it's Barack.

With that despairing ball, one perhaps softer than hard, Wilhelm broke into open field, pointedly addressing the reality of Chris and Hillary's concerns:

I think the reason he's a doer is that he can be a 65 percent president, not a just 51 percent president. And what I mean by that, Senator Moynihan once pulled me aside when I was chair of the DNC. And he said, you know, David, the key to really bringing about societal change, big reforms, big things, is to pass them by large margins, to pull together a big, sustainable majority. And I fundamentally believe ... Barack Obama has the potential to build that new American majority, that 65 percent majority that can make change possible.... Because, in order to get things done, we have got to have a 65 percent majority. We have got to have a 65 percent president. We have got to have somebody who can work with independents and Republicans of goodwill.

And with that, down ... goes ... Hillary, if I may mix my sporting metaphors.

If her authorization to get us into this bloody Middle East mess wasn't enough to sour your progressive heart, the prospect of another bloody but stalemated '93 should be.

At best, Mrs. Clinton would just squeak by John McCain, occupying the Oval Office with the slimmest of pluralities. She would possess no reality-changing mandate. Congressional Democrats very well might achieve that much-sought 65 percent occupancy, but that singular voice of national leadership would be muted, compromised and besieged from the start.

Immediately, to quote Matthews again, people like Bill Kristol on the right would say, we're going to kill health care in its cradle; and from there on, pick a card, any card. More of the same, for four internecine and gridlocked years. In short, Congress would have no reason to fear a mandate-less Hillary as president.

And that, Mrs. Clinton, is "get[ting] real about our future" and "get[ting] real about what it is we can do together." I hear you, Hillary. It's despairing indeed.

Obama, on the other hand, has a realistic shot at reality-changing. As we're witnessing in the primaries, he could actually be that "65-percent president" with the mandated power to level parochial interests and bickering Congressional fiefdoms.

Obviously there's no guarantee that Obama can snap the back of national paralysis. But people are seeing at least that possibility with Obama, unlike with Hillary, and that's where their retirement of despair and investment in "hope" come in: "They want," as Matthews passionately observed, "one president to get 65 percent or 60 percent of the country behind them and get something done."

We're Now Down to Just the Wretched Silliness of It All

There is nothing left but strained, over-the-top shenanigans in the service of pulling off a mathematically impossible fantasy.

That, or a polite, reasoned withdrawal in the interest of faits accomplis and party unity, leaving her, in eight years, still nearly four years younger than the current Republican nominee.

But let's do go with the shenanigans, right? Pointless, pathetic and divisive they may be, but an epic temper tantrum on the national stage is so personally cathartic.

Is that what "35 years of experience" have taught Hillary Clinton?

At long last, that would seem to be the case. For as the New York Times this morning characterized last night's tenth successive disaster rally, "Mrs. Clinton wasted no time in signaling that she would now take a tougher line against Mr. Obama."

Which answered, as well, Keith Olbermann's sadly less than whimsical questions to assorted pundits last evening: If it turns out that her recent attacks against Obama didn't work, will we see more of them? And if they really didn't work, will we see a lot more of them?

I suppose if the attacks had some meat on their bones -- if, that is, the Clinton camp had some actual evidence of a malignancy in internal opposition that the party faithful were about to foolishly embrace if not stopped in the nick of time -- then one could understand the desperate, down-to-the-wire devilishness of it all.

But Obama's borrowing of a few lines from a gubernatorial friend? This is the scurrilous proof, as Hillary's disinformation minister put it, that "there are fundamental problems with [his] campaign"? Fundamental?

Beware, good citizens of the Republic. There are pols out there actually willing to quote political pals without attribution. Oh, how this scourge of American democracy snakes among us, incomparable in its civic debauchery -- yet, bemoans the Clinton camp, we're so blind.

Asked Monday what effect her linguistic revelations might have on Wisconsin's electorate, Hillary said she did not know: "I leave that to all of you to figure out," with "you," presumably, meaning those sinister members of the punditocracy. But Wisconsin's electorate did it for them.

They figured out that it didn't mean squat.

This may seem like I'm wandering off into inconsequentials and irrelevancies -- wandering off into just plain silliness. But that, I'm sorry to say on Hillary's behalf, is essentially what her campaign now represents.

She can now stay mired in the silliness and do the party a whole lot of damage, or she can crawl out of it and do the party and herself a whole lot of good.

She can, that is, simply withdraw now. The test of Wisconsin was whether Obama would continue taking occupation of virtually every demographic territory once so confidently held by Mrs. Clinton. He did, and he did it decisively.

Since Iowa he alone has steadily mounted an inclusive campaign that can win, an observation reflected in opinions from yesterday's exit-polled: "Obama would be more likely than Mrs. Clinton, by 63 percent to 37 percent, to defeat the Republican nominee in the fall." This, despite his having quoted a friend without attribution. Imagine that.

It's over, Hillary. If you must, leave Bill and go cohabitate with Mike Huckabee and do your hoping for miracles with him. But in reality you'll immensely please God and country only by getting off the national stage and letting the general campaign commence, for every day counts when the opposing army is already rolling.

In eight years you'll be thankful you did, because millions will be thankful you did.

But for now, Hillary, it's over. And the only "inevitability" left is in making it official.

Requiem for an Overconfident Heavyweight

Life is cruel. Politics is crueler. But perhaps the cruelest: the irony of failure via the certitude of success.

If you're a regular reader of this column you probably noticed that for some time I have written under the presumption of Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. Some have seen this as jumping the gun -- that all is not yet doom for Hillary Clinton, and there are yet decisive dramas to be played out, today, in two weeks, and in two months. So be patient, these some have advised or scolded.

But, if I may: It wasn't I who jumped the gun. It was Clinton.

For too long, and way too early, she was absolutely sure of prevailing in the primary season, for who would successfully challenge the all-powerful and party-loved Clintons? She would flick away internal opposition like so many gnats -- "It will," as she commanded last year, "be all over by Feb. 5th " -- so the selection process was a mere warm-up. The only real work would be in the general.

Nowhere was this more evident than in two incurable miscalculations hatched and executed as supreme cleverness: the tragic one of her Iraq war vote and the relatedly foolish one of her schmoozing with the conservative media. Both, as we and she now know, came back to bite her in the derrière.

By now, the Iraq vote speaks for itself. Its nakedness as a cynical, general-election, tough-on-national-security ploy is seen clearly by all but hurriedly shoved aside by the Clinton camp with the briefest and most farcical of justifications. The best one can say in Hillary's defense is that she didn't plan on the war turning out this way. The worst, however, goes to her judgment as would-be commander in chief: wars never turn out the way one planned, and she should have known that.

But she couldn't be troubled at the time. Hillary was in a hurry to a general election.

And part and parcel of her Iraq strategy was, as the Politco reminds us, this: "Over the course of her six years as a New York senator and in the early days of her presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton cultivated an unlikely set of allies: the conservative media."

"From Rupert Murdoch" -- who contributed $2,300 to her presidential campaign -- "to David Brooks" -- who wrote fawningly last February that when "most liberals went into full opposition" against Bush on Iraq, Clinton "tried to stay constructive" -- "to Matt Drudge" -- who, wrote New York magazine, "seems obsessed with making Hillary Clinton our next president" -- the opinion-shaping right and far right were engaged in an intricate dance with Hillary, and it was she doing the leading.

Hillary didn't worry about blowback from the left. She already had the nomination sewn up, remember? And what blowback did erupt from her courtship of the right -- which, by the way, never equaled the Clinton-manufactured outrage over Obama's singular "Reagan" comments -- was treated as a mere and passing nuisance. Let them eat their fretting little cake. Hillary was thinking big thoughts, orchestrating grand alliances and confidently running a general campaign.

That was then, when "if the conservative base hated her, many members of the conservative elite did not." And they did not, at the time, because she was still hanging with the best of the warhawks, hawking this turkey of a war.

But then, to make a really long story quite short, the war went a bit sour; true to poll-testing form, Hillary became a dove -- and just in time for Iowa. And with that, the "conservative elite" peeled off, en masse. Murdoch "repudiated her," Drudge "rode her decline as gleefully as [he] watched her rise and the pundit class moved from its grudging respect for Clinton into an infatuation with Obama."

At the core of Hillary's seemingly sudden problem was the lack of one -- of a core, that is. It became evident to both right and left that she possessed no real philosophical grounding, that she would blow with whatever the prevailing winds. Given enough time in any primary process, this trait, this quality, this personal characteristic is what is bound to prevail in the public mind. And finally, it did.

Yet Hillary Clinton had given little thought to the primary process; it was all to have been over two weeks ago today. Instead, she played the right and took progressive support for granted. She ran a general campaign from the get-go, because she was absolutely certain of interim success -- a success that is now virtually unreachable.

No, it wasn't I who jumped the gun. It was Clinton. Nevertheless she was off by only a month. Come March 5, it really will be over.

McCain May Need Bush More Than He Thinks

"We love ya big guy, but for heaven's sake don't call us. We'll call you."

That's the official word from McCain's High Command to the occupying regime of George W. Bush, as reported this morning by the New York Times after a weekend what-to-do-about-George strategy session in Arizona.

"Senator John McCain's campaign advisers will ask the White House to deploy President Bush for major Republican fund-raising, but they do not want the president to appear too often at his side," reveals the Times, as revealed to it by the behind-the-eight-ball boys.

Things like that must be put ... uh, delicately. In effect, they need George's money -- oh, how they need his money -- but let's face it: he's drenched in voter-repellent. This may be America but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is seen by the vast multitudes as enemy territory. Thanks a lot, George, for greasing the skids of your would-be Republican successor with molasses.

Nevertheless there's that matter of dangled money, which in politics, as in life, has a certain magnetic charm -- a certain pull in the way of patching up bruised relationships. You know, like ones in which you were falsely excoriated before a third of your base for having fathered an illegitimate child, costing you your dream of a lifetime and leaving you wandering in the wilderness for years.

But the thought of those plain brown envelopes stuffed with right-wing cash has McCain's advisers feeling that Christian warmth of forgiveness. "We were dyspeptic jerks who held grudges," said one, perhaps merely in happy anticipation of getting back on a payroll that actually pays. Every month.

Yet there's a second "nevertheless." And this one, practically speaking, may be a whole lot tougher to overcome than the emotional stuff.

As the Times understated the political undertow, the McCain camp is staring down the barrel of a "difficult calculus" -- that of "using Mr. Bush enough to try to make the tough sell of Mr. McCain to conservatives but not so much that he will drive away the independents and some moderate Democrats that Mr. McCain is counting on in November."

The problem, of course, is that using Mr. Bush at all -- which they've already conceded they must do -- will approach the equivalent of Alf Landon having had Herbert Hoover dragging behind him on the 1936 campaign trail; of taking a dire calculus and making it immeasurably dismal.

Every time John and George are caught together on camera, the improbable pair will remind voters -- moderates, independents and even that handful of thoughtful conservatives -- that the latter just spent eight years, as Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal has painted the GOP's smiley face, sponsoring little more than "ruthless partisanship ... fiscal recklessness ... polarization ... presidential monarchism ... [and the] erosion of U.S. credibility on human rights." All are welcome to add to this list of U.S. fortunes-reversal, and they will.

The solution, says Rauch, is McCain. "If the Bush years were snakebit, think of McCain as an antivenin.... Wise Republicans know, to begin with, that the party is lost if it cannot rebuild its own center and appeal to the country's."

In short, McCain and some message of moderation can overcome the electorally narrowing megalomania of Karl Rove. The center shall set him -- and his party -- free.

But there's problem with that, too. A really big one. And it's already been foreshadowed by none other than one of McCain's own media advisers, Mark McKinnon, who "told National Public Radio last week that although he supported Mr. McCain, he would not be part of the senator’s campaign if Senator Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee because he ... would be uncomfortable in a campaign that would inevitably be attacking him."

McKinnon has seen the handwriting on the wall. It is, of course, axiomatic that every presidential campaign gets nasty, but this one is about to become the platinum standard for nastiness -- precisely because McCain's center will fold, and precisely because it is the independent-magnet of Obama that he'll be running against. McKinnon knows that, he can smell it. And he wants nothing to do with it.

He knows that as McCain's camp watches critical swing states turn from purple to blue, McCain may have no choice but to revert to the Rovian strategy of turning out the base. What to do about those moderates and independents flocking to Obama's camp? Subject them -- which is to say Obama -- to withering fire, not so much to energize the Republican base but to suppress the critical one of Obama's.

And when that mothering invention of necessity comes, you may indeed see Herbert Hoover dragging behind Alf Landon.

And Now, For a Little Grave Digging

Good or bad, right or wrong, presidential campaigns are commonly judged on the vaguest of contours: the warm and fuzzy vs. the cold and steely, likability vs. aloofness, the clichéd who-would-you-rather-have-a-beer-with option. The wonkish are quadrennially frustrated. They watch their chosen candidates -- those with the ability to cite H.R. bill numbers like the alphabet -- go down in flames to the guy with the smile.

The presidential year 2000 was the last full measure of this dubious phenomenon -- and likely, historically speaking, the grossest. There was Al Gore, yearning to show voters he was the smartest, wonkyish, most experienced kid in the class, flawlessly rattling off byzantine legislative provisions and his long personal history of foreign-policy travels. Opposite him was Crawford, Texas' favorite homebody, George W. Bush, struggling in his eternal battle with the English language to say that he, on the other hand, was just a humble dude who favored the Good Book as his guide.

That election will always be known as the one about "character." Issues? A monkey with a pocket calculator could have told you that George's prescription for tax cuts plus defense-spending hikes would devastate the surplus and further bury us in debt. But that just didn't matter. With a little help from the judicially robed, voters opted for projected warmth over populist anger, kitchen-table talk over rarefied statecraft, unbounded humility over unbounded experience.

This isn't to imply that every candidate who exudes warmth, a certain kitchen-table facility and humbleness is always a lethal phony -- just that those qualities tend to hold more appeal than resumes in the electoral arena.

So it was that I read this morning with no small amount of bewilderment, if not amusement, E.J. Dionne's brief entry in the Washington Post -- "E.J.'s Precinct" -- on the Wisconsin ad wars taking place between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The latest ad originating from the Clinton camp raises substantive issues, but what most viewers will hear and see instead is "Sore Loser" plastered right on its face. Mr. Dionne may "want to think about all this some more" -- the issues inside, that is -- but E.J., if I may, it's all over. It is merely the feel of the ads -- that vaguest of contours -- that counts, and is already registering with voters.

Here's the text of the ad, and the pleasure derived from reading it comes mostly from counting the number of knives plunged straight at the heart of the Clinton camp itself:

Barack Obama still won’t agree to debate in Wisconsin. And now he’s hiding behind false attack ads. Maybe he doesn’t want to explain why his health care plan leaves out 15 million people and Hillary’s covers everyone. Or why he voted to pass billions in Bush giveaways to the oil companies, but Hillary didn’t. Or why he said he might raise the retirement age and cut benefits for Social Security. But Hillary won’t. Why won’t Barack Obama debate these differences?

I counted nine; a really polished deconstructionist of the French School could, no doubt, enumerate dozens.

But why would anyone observe that the Clinton attack possesses only an inward thrust? It's not that its claims are easily refuted -- which they are -- beginning with Obama's refusal "to debate" in the face of a gazillion debates aired in Wisconsin, followed by the ad's downright laughable assertion that it's Obama's camp "hiding behind false attacks ads."

No, it's the far more general -- vague -- sense surely derived by the audience that the ad projects merely a desperate silliness, or, if you prefer, a silly desperation. It positively screams, "OK, this didn't work, that didn't work, perhaps this new tack will work -- and frankly, folks, in case you haven't noticed, we're telling you here that this is the last bullet we've got. We're all out of ammo."

It also, and ultimately, screams the old "We're willing to say anything to win" routine. And what's at the suicidal root of that? You got it: character. Voters may not always be the best of the informed, but they're not always stupid, either. They can smell underhanded desperation from a parsec away, they know "Sore Loser" when they see it, and they don't like it.

Mr. Dionne, being more balanced and judicious than I, ventured no judgments or predictions in his short piece. Only this: "The question for now is: Will this line of attack work for Clinton? Is this ad fair? Will there be a reaction against the tone of the ads? Are Wisconsin voters in the right mood for them -- or is Clinton preparing the ground for Ohio and Texas?"

Unaddressed in my answers above was that final question -- "Is Clinton preparing the ground for Ohio and Texas?"

I'd have to answer in the affirmative. She's digging her grave.

Reading the Tea Leaves of Today's Biggest Broadcast Idiot

One of the great unknowns in politics is whether Big, Fat, Conservative Broadcast Idiots hold any remarkable sway over their audiences, or, like the great apes at the zoo, they're merely there for people to gawk at and listen to for amusement, and as a way to kill an hour or so.

With any luck that question will be answered this election year, as the biggest, fattest, most conservative broadcast idiot of them all ventures into the even more mysterious jungle of openly and stridently opposing his party's candidate for the Big House.

I write, of course, of Rush Limbaugh, he of 13.5-million weekly listeners who, it would seem, wouldn't know serious political philosophy from botany. If you've ever been gripped by sufficient masochism to tune in, you know what I mean. There they are, the fawning, sycophantic dupes of dittodom, queued up on the switchboard, hankering to get at Rush so they can regurgitate his wretched unenlightenment from the Dark Ages.

His shows appear to present classic, psychosociological studies in the frightening vein of, say, philosopher Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, but perhaps it's only the appearance that's real.

Rush may in fact represent less of an actual, loosely organized mass movement than merely a massive intellectual bowel movement. On-air, three-hours long, dumped on 600 stations, five times a week. We know not how Rush relieves himself on weekends, or where vicarious relief is found by his devoted listeners.

At any rate, the latter is my guess, although I confess it may be a poorly educated one. Yet everyone seems to be poorly educated in this hazy arena, so my guess is also as good as anyone's.

When it's all over, I'm venturing, this most reactionary of broadcast idiots will be found to have held only a negligible sway over his presumed legions of lapdogs -- and he may even soon go the way of his equally offensive and finally beyond-the-pale broadcasting forebear, Father Coughlin of the National Shrine of the Little Flower. Largely muzzled and forgotten.

For Rush has been fuming and sputtering to apparent little effect. Not long after he frantically rang the alarm -- "I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get [sic] the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party, it’s going to change it forever, be the end of it" -- his principal bete noire promptly went on to essentially secure said nomination.

And according to exit polling in Maryland, John McCain "won a plurality" of "frequent listeners of conservative talk radio," while the other of the "two guys" intent on destroying the Republican Party, Mike Huckabee, marched to victory in Virginia. If Limbaugh's influence was felt at all in those primaries, it was a mighty light touch.

McCain, however, may wish that Limbaugh's voice grows even louder. Because returning again to the era of Father Coughlin, Rush represents what Franklin Roosevelt denounced as "government by organized money" -- "the old enemies of peace, business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism [and] war profiteering" who were aligned in rabid opposition to the New Deal. But rather than accommodating them, rather than seeking peace with them, rather than staging powwows of compromise, Roosevelt announced: "I welcome their hatred." He then cleaned their clocks in the '36 election.

If McCain is shrewd -- and I think he is -- he will return the same fire against the on-air reactionaries and extremists of today, and thereby gain the allegiance of moderates and independents who otherwise would quake at the thought of a presidential candidate in bed with the malignant likes of a Rush Limbaugh.

In short, as Rush himself has suggested, his alienation from McCain may be the best thing that could have happened to McCain. The extreme right is shrinking, and Rush's intimation would seem to verify that he even he knows that. It's out of whack with the times, an aging and dying ideological dinosaur whose cranky intrusion into this race could cause any candidate more injury than benefit.

Finally, one last prediction; or, rather, less a prediction than the mention of another 1930s possibility. Should McCain win, with Rush having stayed on the hostile outside looking in, Mr. Limbaugh could well go the way of H.L. Mencken.

Mencken was unsurpassed in popularity as a political commentator right up until he turned his inky venom on the prevailing ideological pragmatism of the 1930s -- the far more popular New Deal. He failed -- refused -- to go with the electoral flow, and soon found himself marginalized and ultimately, nearly forgotten.

Should the Republican Party indeed moderate its ideas and behavior, Limbaugh could find himself as insignificant a voice as Mencken's became.

Such a development would almost be worth the Ascension of John McCain. Almost.

Smothering the Outrage -- It's "Just Politics"

Yesterday the New York Time's Adam Nagourney rolled out an alarmingly objective analysis of the delegate-primary-caucus-superdelegate-state-count-popular-vote race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I say "alarmingly" objective because journalism -- even first-rate journalism, which this was -- in the guise of a legal brief can easily smother the outrage -- which this did.

His analysis essentially took every concept of fundamental fairness that we've been taught since kindergarten and sequestered them from public consideration. For this, so goes the excuse, is hardball politics, folks. And although one of its possibly winning practitioners would soon claim to represent the redawning of authentic American "values" after eight years of everything but, a sense of fair play isn't among them. Neither is an adherence to plain, authentic democracy.

Instead, we're witnessing Bush-style hardball politics, where it's the insiders who count, the secret deal that rules, the arrogance of raw power that dominates.

The closest that Mr. Nagourney's piece came to unleashing the proper outrage that yearns to escape was this line: "With every delegate precious, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers ... made it clear [to him] that they were prepared to take a number of potentially incendiary steps to build up Mrs. Clinton’s count."

What is chief among those "incendiary steps"? Screw democracy. Simple as that.

"Mr. Obama’s campaign began making a case in earnest on Wednesday that if he maintained his edge in delegates ... he would have the strongest claim to the backing of the 796 elected Democrats and party leaders known as superdelegates." Yes, that would seem to follow in any democratic process, would it not?

Well, not according to the Bush-style Clinton camp. It says, with some contemporary polling validation at hand, that it could still score victories in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania. Yet it also "acknowledged that it would be difficult for her to catch up in the race for pledged delegates even if she succeeded in winning" those states by anything less than inconceivably staggering margins.

The situation is conceptually akin to a football team that's down 14 points in the fourth with 10 seconds to go. It has the ball, and though it may indeed acquire another seven points in those remaining seconds, it would still lose if it did not, in fact, outscore the other team. Right?

Not in the Clintonian mind. It need merely appeal to the referees that it had gotten close enough. And hell, it usually wins these things, and is more likely, it further argues, to go on to win in the big game -- if only the refs will cut it some slack in this one.

"We don’t think our lead will drop below 100 delegates," revealed Obama’s campaign manager to Nagourney. "The math is the math."

Yes, and logic is logic. And one would think that the inviolable, agreed-upon logic of the Democratic Party would be that democracy rules. Fifty-two beats 48, as 51 beats 49, and no matter how you slice it, even 50.1 still beats 49.9. End of game.

Except when the special pleading to the refs comes in. "Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they were looking to bring the margin down significantly below 100 in hope of arguing that the result was too close for delegates to consider in deciding how to vote." That non sequitur speaks for itself.

Even better was that the same advisers said they would "argue to superdelegates that they should give less deference to a lead from Mr. Obama because much of that had been built up in states where there were caucuses." One assumes these advisers knew the caucus-primary breakdown when they got into the game, but along with canceling the application of basic American fairness, they're also swinishly chucking the rather prudent, all-American Boy Scout maxim: "Be prepared."

In addition to these "incendiary steps" is another -- one that would blow any hope of party unity into the disingenuous James Frey's million little pieces. The Clinton camp "is pressing for Democrats to seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, who held their primaries in January in defiance of Democratic Party rules."

Disputed? What an odd characterization, since they're not. And their participation at this late stage would merely represent our losing football team's introduction of a couple ringers. Whether or not the delegations are ultimately seated, or whether or not some sort of rules-violating do-over in these states takes place, no one knows. But the greater outrage is that the Clinton camp would even demand such an after-the-fact rules change.

At the bottom of all these outrages, however, is something even more fundamentally outrageous -- a realization that transcends mere sorrow over the devious infighting, the insider maneuvering, the undemocratic debauchery of it all. And that inexorable conclusion is this: If the Clinton camp is willing to play the nomination game in this, the most squalid of ways, then it unquestionably would be willing to govern in the selfsame manner.

And eight years of raw-power arrogance is enough. On that, I think we can all agree.