Want to remove all slime from the election this fall and limit debate strictly to the issues? Rick Hertzberg knows how:

The solution is obvious. Obama should ask McCain to be his running mate. McCain should ask Obama to be his. And both should say yes.

A campaign pitting an Obama-McCain ticket against a McCain-Obama ticket would absolutely guarantee a general-election campaign that would be about The Issues and nothing but The Issues…

Is this the end of Nixon’s Southern Strategy? (Incidentally, note the lapel pin in the photo below. Do we see a pattern emerging here? For instance, did Mussolini wear a lapel flag?)

The result in Mississippi, and what Republicans said was a surge in African-American turnout, suggested that Mr. Obama might have the effect of putting into play Southern seats that were once solidly Republican, rather than dragging down Democratic candidates.

Maureen Dowd today:

Obama breezed through West Virginia, the state he couldn’t charm even wearing a flag pin and promising to invest in “clean coal.”

Jimmy Carter was an expert at this sort of thing, too. His Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare had lately been enraging the tobacco belt by his attacks on smoking — but North Carolina’s support had been a key element in Carter’s election. So during the 1978 midterms the president visited a tobacco warehouse there and and delivered himself of this wonderful straddle: “We must find ways to make cigarettes even more safe.”

And when Carter was governor of Georgia he unveiled a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the state capitol and soothed the crowd with, “The time for racism is past.” The subtle beauty of this bank shot may be clearly seen by substituting “slavery” for “racism.”

Let’s say you’re in favor of letting the states legalize abortion and and drugs and same sex marriage if they want to. And you favor an immediate start to our withdrawal from Iraq. And you think the telecom companies should be punished for warrantless wiretapping. And you hate the Patriot Act for its gutting of civil rights. And no matter what the Creep from Crawford thinks, you think habeas corpus belongs in the Constitution after all.

Folks, have I got a candidate for you! He’s an Iowan born and bred. He went to high school in Iran. He’s a former CIA spook and federal prosecutor. Plus he’s a proud member of both the NRA and the ACLU.

Ladies and Germs, let’s hear it for the only candidate who’s really got your back — Big. Bob. BARR!

From the normally mild-mannered Bob Herbert, in his New York Times column today. Wow.

…class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.

Pollster John Zogby thinks it’s all over but the face-saving:

The Illinois senator showed himself to be resilient in the wake of three weeks or so of crisis and, much more importantly, he got back on the winning track. This is the evidence that some super-delegates have been waiting for.

Many of them — most of them — had clearly made up their minds that they would not support Mrs. Clinton, and so this had become a case of whether or not Mr. Obama could close the deal. That is what appears to have happened last night.

Where do we go from here? My understanding is that probably today, but certainly within 48 hours, about 30 super-delegates will endorse Mr. Obama. That should give him further momentum.

Mathematically, this will widen the gap between him and Mrs. Clinton. He has a bigger share of the popular vote, more pledged delegates, and will now overtake her in terms of super-delegates too.

I honestly believe that she will find a way to get out of the race before the next primaries — so as to not hurt her future and to not be blamed for hurting Mr. Obama and his chances in the general election.

Here are the reasons:

* There really is no mathematical chance for her to win

* Her campaign is virtually out of money - and it will be difficult for her to raise significant amounts of money after last night

* Not enough happened last night to give her any hope, so continuing would only give the appearance of wanting to damage Mr. Obama

Confused by all the blabber last night from Tim and Keith and Chris and Pat? Want to find out what actually happened in Indiana and North Carolina? Go here for your reality pill from Jay Cost, Doctor of Politics. Excerpt:

As you can see, North Carolina performed roughly as we might expect, falling in between Virginia and Tennessee. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the results were closer to the Virginia end (i.e. Obama +29) than the Tennessee end (i.e. Clinton +13). What might explain the difference?

Unlike Indiana, it doesn’t come from Clinton’s core voting group. She did extremely well among white voters in North Carolina. Obviously, she didn’t do as well with them as she did in Tennessee. However, she still trounced Obama among white men and white women, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Clinton’s problem was with the African American vote, which came in at about 33%. Her trouble in North Carolina, as well as the South in general, is that white voters are more likely to be Republican than in decades past. This has given Obama a demographic edge in the region — one that has actually grown in the past few months. Note that African Americans in North Carolina went for Obama more strongly than they did in either Tennessee or Virginia. In fact, we can see a general trend in the African American vote toward Obama — not just in these states, but nationwide. It has not been much commented upon — most likely because African Americans have been supporting Obama more strongly than any other group. Nevertheless, as time has gone on, the African American vote has clustered around Obama much more tightly.

As usual, the Rude Pundit comes right out and says it about Obama’s chances today in Indiana:

Ah, fond memories of living in a town northeast of Indianapolis, of car rides past homes that that flew the Confederate flag on poles on their front lawns (and this was in a medium-sized city, not a small burg), of towns with black populations so disenfranchised and isolated that they are practically invisible, of migrant workers regularly abused by employers when violence wasn’t being committed against them by townspeople. And that’s not even to get into how flat and gray and ugly most of the state is for most of the year, after harvest and before planting season.

When a large swath of a state is populated by people from the Appalachian region who migrated northward for factory jobs decades ago and then those factory jobs dry the heck up for the most part, what you are left with is a bunch of resentful crackers looking to play “where’s the scapegoat?”

By all means go and read the whole screed, but bear in mind that I had to look hard to find an obscenity-free passage as long as the one above. And even then I had to make a substitution, since the word “heck” has never made it out of the Rude Pundit’s computer. What he really wrote, I am sorry to report, was “*uc*”.

What less can you expect from a court once headed by a GOP hack who got his start by intimidating black and Hispanic voters in Arizona? Rehnquist would be proud of today’s ruling.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud…

The case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.

From the Charlotte Observer:

RALEIGH — The N.C. Republican Party says it will not back away from a planned TV ad that uses footage of Barack Obama’s controversial former minister, despite objections from the expected GOP presidential nominee, John McCain.

The ad, released Wednesday on the Internet, tries to link the minister to two Democratic candidates for governor, both of whom have endorsed Obama…

McCain called the ad “offensive” and said it “degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats.”

“From the beginning of this election, I have been committed to running a respectful campaign based upon an honest debate about the great issues confronting America today. I expect all state parties to do so as well,” McCain wrote in an e-mail to Republican chairwoman Linda Daves, asking her to pull the ad.

Actually that’s only part of the story, as Bad Attitudes has learned from a source within the McCain campaign who could not to be identified because he is not authorized to talk straight to the press. Here is the rest of McCain’s email:

Suck on this, you silly bitch. If that ad runs even one more time, the first day I’m in the White House your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower. Your taxes will be audited from now until death do us part. Your body cavities will be searched every time you get so much as get near an airplane. I will veto any spending bill containing funds for North Carolina until such day as the North Carolina Republican Party drives you from the leadership post which you presently disgrace. And then I will burn down your garage and if it is is an attached one, so much the better. Are we clear now?

Bad Attitudes, for one, is not about to pull down such a shitstorm as this on our own head. Consequently we will do exactly what the Straight Talker wants us to do, which is to give Ms. Daves’ ad a little more out-of-state exposure:

The excerpt below is by Joe Bageant, the bard of Winchester, Virginia, and the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus. His fuse has been lit by the media tizzy over Barack Obama’s mostly accurate look at white working-class resentment. Read the whole essay here. (The photo below is not of Joe, but of the younger and more photogenic Larry the Cable Guy.)

In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence, never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in the class that benefits from our classist society.

There are many positives about the British political system as compared to the one we use in the US. Perfect example: in the British system, the Democrats could cast Joe Lieberman out of the party, no matter what he calls himself. Not that they would, but it would be possible.

Since JoeMentum had the last laugh, it’s particularly fun to catch ’em on the little stuff. Like when his campaign claimed that supporters of Ned Lamont had instituted a denial-of-service attack on, or DOSd, his website on the eve of the primary election.

When the Web site went down on Aug. 7, 2006, the Lieberman campaign asserted it had been hacked in “a coordinated attack by our political opponents.”

But the F.B.I. saw it another way.

“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” the newspaper said the F.B.I. wrote. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

The Lieberman campaign workers probably caused the site to crash themselves, to judge from the report. The campaign site was configured to allow only 100 e-mail messages an hour, but when that limit was exceeded many times on the day before the primary, the site crashed, according to the report.

Yet the campaign did not realize that at the time, and said it had been the target of what is known as a denial-of-service attack, in which a server is purposely crippled by a flood of data.

It all sounds reasonable to me. If I’d been a Lieberman groupie, I might have figured that he wouldn’t be a big email recipient.

But at least I would have checked the basic stuff before accusing my opponent of dirty tricks. Perhaps it’s this that keeps Lieberman at the top of the list of Democrats Republicans Love.

Just think, if Al Gore had had the run of the White House kitchen all this time, we might have been stuck with JoeMentum invading Iran.

I offer up for what it’s worth, and you’ll notice I’m not charging for it, my candidate for the bottom half of the McCain ticket. He is shown at the United Nations, holding up a vial which does not contain anthrax so that the world would tremble at the thought of how many people could be killed by a little vial like that if it did in fact hold anthrax. Remember Anthrax and how much fun we all had with it? What ever happened to old Anthrax anyway?

The sad thing about the attacks on Senator Obama for things said by his wife and by his pastor is that attention was paid to them by anyone except Jon Stewart. It was as if the Senator were being pilloried for consorting with persons who claimed that grass is green and — the horror, the horror! — that water runs downhill.

Reverend Wright and Michelle Obama may, for all I know, harbor private beliefs as evil as those which lurk in the minds of Richard Cheney, Osama bin Laden or, back in the day, Vlad the Impaler.

If so, however, the fact has not been reported. What has been reported proves only that both the Obama pastor and the Obama wife are guilty of truth-telling in the first degree. For example, anyone who believes that American foreign policy bore no causal relation to the 9/11 attacks is simply a fool.

And as to Michelle Obama’s deplorably recent feelings of pride in her country, I will refer you, as Judy in Canada has referred me, to this efficient evisceration of the whole issue by Rick Salutin of The Globe and Mail. I’ll add only this from Edmund Burke: ‘For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

The problem of patriotism really comes down to one question: Are patriots permitted to be critical of their nation, or must they be proud and unquestioning at all times? Once that’s answered, the puzzles dissolve.

Take Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, who said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback..” That’s Position 1. Candidate John McCain’s wife, Cindy, took Position 2: “I have and always will be proud of my country.”

It’s odd that no reporters put Cindy McCain on the spot, named dubious things the U.S. has done, like its genocidal assault on aboriginals, and asked: Are you proud of that? Michelle Obama is the one they keep saying has dug her and her husband a big anti-American hole, one she still hasn’t got past.

But under Position 1 — criticism allowed — her words imply she is a true patriot, and one with a generous spirit. She didn’t wait for solutions to what presumably blocked her pride in the past: like failure to deal with the ongoing problems of race in the U.S. She was ready to be proud on the fairly flimsy basis of reactions to her husband’s campaign. She’s not just a patriot, she’s an optimistic one.

Under Position 1, the patriot test is: Does she continue to want to be proud of her nation, while demanding it live up to standards. By that test, she is a patriot with no hole to climb out of, and so probably is her pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has taken a lot more stick than she has.

What did he say that anyone could object to on patriotic grounds — that the chickens are coming home to roost in events like 9/11? That’s just foreign policy analysis, stated metaphorically. You can disagree, but it isn’t unpatriotic. Or: “The government ... wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no, God damn America ... for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” That is utterly in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

According to the Hebrew prophets, God consigned his beloved chosen people to exile for allowing social injustice, allying with evil nations — i.e., shabby foreign policy — and religious infidelity. (The black church in the U.S. has always had a preferential option for the Old Testament parts of the Bible.)

Another way to put Position 1 is: You cannot say, Blessed is the nation, unless you can also say, Cursed is the nation — they go together under love of nation. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: “There can be no patriotism without permanent opposition and criticism.”

She said that in 1963, under fire from other Jews for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She was a lifelong Zionist but critical of the direction Zionism had taken. In fact, Jews often split into the two positions over loyalty to Israel. It’s odd how that, too, has now been woven into U.S. politics. Candidates for president are required to show unquestioning allegiance to Israel as much, or more, as to the U.S. The same is becoming true in Canada.

Of course, we also have unique Canadian versions of unthinking patriotism. When the “loyal” opposition criticized the handover of detainees by our forces in Afghanistan despite possible torture, Stephen Harper and his instruments replied: Why do they criticize what our troops do? Why do they care more about the Taliban than our brave Canadian soldiers? Got that — it’s unpatriotic to ask if our country did anything to be ashamed of?

Hannah Arendt also wrote about Judah Magnes, a Zionist pioneer and founder of the Hebrew University. “Being a Jew and a Zionist, he was simply ashamed of what Jews and Zionists were doing.” The sense of shame is what can save the honour of the group and the nation. It is what Position 1 patriots provide. If there are no patriots capable of shame for what is done in the nation’s name, so there is only praise and pride everywhere, then patriotism easily slides into stupidity and worse.

BBC moved this story at 10:22 p.m. (EST) Thursday, and the 11 o’clock news only carried a sentence or two on it. But it will be all over the news by Friday morning, barring massive media misconduct. Which of course we can’t bar at all.

The US Department of State has fired two contractors and disciplined a third for accessing the passport file of presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

A spokesman for the department, Sean McCormack, said the cases were likely caused by “imprudent curiosity.” But he said it was not clear what the employees may have seen or what they were looking for.

A spokesman for Mr Obama suggested that the government could be using private information for “political purposes.”

The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, says it is an extraordinary lapse in security which allowed temporary state department employees access to personal information on a man who is guarded by the secret service day and night .

The state department tracks those who access its passport database. Breaches occurred on three separate dates — 9 January, 21 February and 14 March.

“We believe this was out of imprudent curiosity, so we are taking steps to reassure ourselves that that is, in fact, the case,” Mr McCormack said…

Grace Nearing at Scriptoids has a depressing but unfortunately accurate description of the Hobson’s Choice facing us in this election season.

It’s called “Why, you’d almost think this election actually means something,” and it’s addressed to “Obamaniacs and Clintonistas.” I’ll go one sad step further and add McCain. I’ll add this, too, from Edmund Burke:

“There never was for any long time a corrupt representation of a virtuous people, or a mean, sluggish, careless people who ever had a good government of any form.”

This piece of mine ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. One of the commenters, Blueturtle, made a point that hadn’t occurred to me, but seems aesthetically solid:

Beyond the Left's often correct belief that wearing the flag is facile posturing, there is a larger, deeper problem with the lapel pin.

Isn't it the great unspoken truth that the American flag is simply ugly? Bold, primary colors parceled out in too small stripes and indeterminant stars. It has always paled in comparison to the understated tricolor of France, the composite crosses of the Union Jack, or the beautiful exoticism of any number of developing nations' standards.

The stars and bars speaks for a nation that never could really figure out what it stood for. In response, states' rights and muddled federalism left us with a compromise guidon of cobbled together symbols.

Obama knows that will clash with any outfit that is not made for preschoolers in their bold jumpers.

Is a man fit to be commander-in-chief if he won't even fly the flag from his buttonhole?

Does that man, Barack Obama, think he's "too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest?" Because that's what William Kristol believes.

Grow up, the Chicago Sun-Times advises: "Oh for Pete's sake, Senator Obama, pin the darnn American flag to your chest. Otherwise, the poor dope will "catch a world of hurt for ... polarizing comments [that] make him sound like a hardened leftist."

Has Obama's failure to wear a flag pin really done "more damage to his White House hopes than a bomb bursting in air?" The New York Daily News thinks so.

Or is it just possible that Barack Obama knows more about getting to be president than all of these pundits laid end to end, as they probably should be? Is it possible that an empty buttonhole might actually help a candidate of either party, now that the nation's number one flag-wearer is circling the bowl with the lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded?

Let's go beyond the Beltway and take a look. Out there on the campaign trail, who's actually been wearing lapel flags in this race and who hasn't -- and how's that been working out for you guys anyway?

On April 26 of last year in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the Democrats held the first debate in the campaign that never ends. First thing that morning the candidates were all in a hurry to throw on their clothes, grabbing any old thing that came to hand. Yeah, right.

It was the most important day of their political lives to date, and they agonized over each tiny sartorial decision. Windsor knot or four-in-hand? Blue or red?

Here's where everybody came out on lapel flags. The photo coverage of the debate shows that only Joe Biden decided to wear one. The other seven -- Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd — went without.

Of course you'd expect that from a bunch of surrender monkeys, wouldn't you? So let's turn to the Republicans, tough-talking patriots to a man. Their first debate came a week later in Simi Valley, California. And sure enough, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, nonveterans all, were careful to pin on their flags.

Wait a minute, though. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Huckabee all left their little flags back home on the bureau. And so did John McCain. Hmm.

By May 15, at the Columbia, South Carolina Republican debate, Tancredo had stopped wearing his flag. By June, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had deflagged as well.

The only candidate of either party who chose to add a flag in the course of the campaign was Bill Richardson, who flagged up toward the end of the summer. With Biden's flag gone by then, Richardson had become the only Democratic candidate to wear a flag in the debates.

On the Republican side Tommy Thompson continued to wear his flag till the bitter end, which came in August when he placed sixth in the Iowa straw polls. The empty Thompson slot was filled the following month by Fred. The lobbyist/actor picked up Tommy's banner, so to speak, and was still wearing it in January when he, too, dropped out.

Rudy Giuliani, who probably wears a flag to bed, dropped out a week later after racking up a pathetic 15 percent of the vote in the Florida Republican primary.

Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel.

Don't think the press hasn't been noticing, either. To this day there has been a steady drumbeat of silence in the media over the flagless-ness of Huckabee's, Clinton's and McCain's lapels.

Nor would Obama's disrespect have made news if only he had thought to point the finger at everyone else still in the race when a TV reporter posed his trivia question back in October. But instead he gave an honest if incomplete answer.

Obama said he had worn a pin after 9/11 but stopped once he began to notice, and here I paraphrase wildly but no doubt accurately, that most of the people still wearing lapel flags were assholes.

On the evidence of the campaign so far, Obama wasn't the only one who noticed.

Clinton, Huckabee and McCain, we may say with confidence, would wear anything or even nothing at all if they thought it would help them win the nomination. Then why, when it came to miniature flags, did the three join Obama in opting for nothing?

Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don't want sticking to your fingers these days..

For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies, and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.

James Fallows passes along a participant’s perspective on the so-called crucial role of so-called organization in Obama’s recent string of stunning victories. Read the whole thing here.

My note re organization: At 11 AM I got a call asking if I could be the Obama “lead” at our [Washington state] caucus location, which had 12 precincts caucusing. Someone delivered to me a few hundred campaign pins, a few posters, and lots of stickers. When I showed up, a few minutes after noon, the place was plastered with Hillary posters. Obama early-arrivers volunteered to take all the materials off my hands. The materials were all snapped up before 20% of the ultimate attendees arrived. There were 2,000 people there. They voted at least 5 or 6 to 1 for Obama over Clinton overall, if not higher. I was the only “organizer” for Obama, and I did almost nothing nor could I. We were simply swamped with people.

Today, when I didn’t have any info on the Maine caucuses, except that she was expected to win, I read that Obama had addressed an overflow crowd yesterday, with 3,000 people not being able to get in and being forced to stand out in the snow. Note that this is just what happened in Seattle at Key Arena on Friday. The giant overflow crowd left outside in foul weather is a sign of an organization that has been overwhelmed, not an organization that has been successful. As soon as I read that, knowing what had just happened in WA, and having seen the amazing demographic diversity of the Obama supporters in our caucuses (which made me think, “This is not a regional phenomenon”), I told [xx], “He’s going to carry Maine.” It didn’t take a genius!

Rick Hertzberg clears the whole thing up:

We’re awash in numbers from yesterday’s primaries, but there’s one number that nobody ever seems to crunch: how many votes did the candidates get?

I don’t mean how many delegates, or how many states, or the margin in this or that state. I mean: across the nation, which is to say in all 23 states that held Democratic primaries or caucuses yesterday (I’m focussing on the Dems for the moment), how many human beings voted for Clinton and how many for Obama?

I just spent some time with a calculator and the latest CNN state-by-state totals, and here’s what I came up with:

* Hillary Clinton: 7,347,477 (48.8%)
* Barack Obama: 7,293,887 (48.5%)
* John Edwards: 408,622 (2.7%)

One way to look at this: Clinton crushes Obama by more than fifty thousand votes!

A second way: Despite trailing Clinton by five to seven points in national polls on the morning of the primaries, Obama finishes within half a percentage point!

A third way: A majority of Democrats voted against Clinton.

A fourth way: A majority of Democrats voted against Obama.

A fifth way: If Edwards’s votes split 57-43 for Obama, Obama wins.

Then there’s my way, which is also the high way:

It was a tie.

John Edwards, sadly, is out. With him went what seemed like the only chance to end our occupation of Iraq before 2012, when a presumably Democratic president will presumably be reelected.

If Edwards had been able to end the occupation next year — Bush’s warhogs are right about this — the results would have been the shameful abandonment of our allies there, a bloody civil war killing thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and a destabilized Middle East descending into God knows what new horrors.

If Clinton or Obama is elected, exactly the same things will happen, only four years later. By that time we will have lost another trillion dollars or so and thousands more American lives. In addition the Iraqis would have lost — Oh, well, who cares?

Obama or Clinton will happily pay such a price for reelection, just as Nixon did before them. The awful irony is that this time it might not even work. Bush has left his successor a far worse mess to clean up than Kennedy/Johnson did. We could wind up with a Republican president in 2012, or even a Scientologist. On the evidence so far this century, we’re dumb enough to elect anything.

The only bright spot in today’s announcement is my suspicion that Edwards has cut a deal with Obama and will wind up as vice president. This would halfway realize the advice I generously offered on December 16: “As between Edwards and Obama my considered opinion is that they should swap wives and then flip for the nomination.”

As usual, read Bill Greider in The Nation. Immediately. Brief taste below. Full meal here.

Bill Gross, the insightful managing director of PIMCO, the major bond-investment house, has called for virtually doubling the federal deficit in order pump hundreds of billions into new economic activity. When bond holders are more alarmed about the economy than political leaders, you know something is backwards in American politics.

Edwards, alas, probably restrained the size of his stimulus package to convince the media gatekeepers he is not wacko and thus win some coverage for his forward thinking. No such luck. Edwards has his own shortcomings, but he has been victimized by the shallow political culture that empties meaning from presidential campaigns. The press early on consigned him to the “populist” stereotype and largely ignored the serious content of his agenda.

This is the curse that leads to enervating, brain-dead presidential cycles. Substance bores political reporters. Most of them do not understand economics or even know much about how government actually works. Given their ignorance, they prefer to play the role of theater critics and imagine that readers are desperate to hear their highly subjective and utterly unreliable reviews of the sideshow.

The excerpt below is from a piece at Smirking Chimp by Paul Rogat Loeb. His argument seems pretty sound to me. In fact I said something along vaguely similar lines last month, although more briefly and with an added integrationist twist.

As media commentators proclaim Hillary Clinton's rebirth from the ashes of defeat, they miss a critical story--Obama and Edwards won the New Hampshire primary. Add together Obama's 36 percent and Edwards's 17, and they beat Clinton's 39 percent by 14 points…

Those who make up the Obedwards constituencies recognize the problems with so many of Clinton's approaches and stands. That's part of what's driving them, along with a genuine passion for Obama and Edwards, and a sense, confirmed by the polls, that either of the two has a better shot at beating the leading Republicans than does Clinton.

If we look just at delegates, both Iowa and New Hampshire advanced the Obedwards combined cause. But because the coverage has focused so exclusively on the Obama/Clinton match-up, they've missed that a solid majority of Democrats in both New Hampshire and Iowa rejected a candidate who a short while back was proclaiming her nomination as nearly inevitable…

Here’s an old classic, updated.

“Hip-hop hypocrisy” was the headline on a Washington Post column Saturday that would cause one to wonder if the vaunted political instincts of Hillary Clinton have suddenly left the premises.

First, candidate Clinton joined most other politicians in denouncing as “small-minded bigotry and coarse sexism” Don Imus’s infamous characterization of the Rutgers women’s basketball players as “nappy-headed hoes” while taking care to remind her base she didn’t intend to curtail free speech. So far, fine.

Then, she decided to take her campaign against small-minded bigotry to New Brunswick, N.J. last Monday for a photo op with team members. Bad weather and the Virginia Tech massacre intervened to render the Imus story obsolete but not sufficiently so to cause Hillary to give up the op and she visited the Rutgers campus on Friday.

But the Rutgers players had more sense than the candidate and, according to an account in Newsday, they “skipped the meeting, citing their studies and Imus fatigue.” A spokesman said the students were preparing for finals and had had enough of the Imus flap so Hillary had to be content with meeting with the coach and addressing 700 not so busy students and faculty. She named all the players, praised them and urged the audience to pledge, “Enough is enough when women or minorities or the powerless are marginalized or degraded.”

That might have been the end of it, had not Post columnist Colbert King reminded his readers on Saturday that this same foe of words that disregard basic decency and degrade all women had just taken in $800,000 at a fund raiser sponsored by one Timbaland, a hip-hop artist who makes a nice living writing lyrics that do just that.

King writes that both Hillary and her husband were present at Mr. Timbaland’s fund raiser in Pinecrest, Florida, March 31 and he wondered “why she was down in Florida making nice to — and pocketing big bucks from” a composer whose lyrics include this little ditty:

”We aint like them other fools, who don’t compare to us
All the hoes love a nigga, they be backing it up
But me I love money, I be stacking it up”

Mr. Robinson offered several other, similar examples of Mr. Timbaland’s poesy but this is enough to give you the idea. He said his reporting could not determine if Mr. Timbaland “shared his musical talents with the Clintons while they were in his home collecting money.”

Is it the year before a presidential election again? If I am a self-loathing Irish bully presidential wanna-be Democrat who never herself had the guts to go into politics, then that means it is again time to begin the quadrennial tear-down of any and every Democrat with a reasonable shot at winning.

Since the Democrats in the past few cycles by and large have put forth a steady stream of capable and impressive candidates, the key here is to focus like a laser on personal foibles of the candidates. Anything less than a total focus on the personality of the candidate in question risks inserting context into the equation. That is to say, it risks the reader thinking, for instance, something like, “Hey! Isn’t this the same spiteful asshole who savagely tore down Al Gore in 2000 without the slightest glimmer of acknowledgment that his opponent was — George W. Bush. And, ditto, re John Kerry in ’04?”

I don’t know if Obama is ready or not. But I do know that Maureen Dowd (scum-sucking paid link; sorry) thinks he has a shot at the presidential seat that by rights should be hers. Why else would she say awful, viperous, and irrelevant things like:

Using the dreaded third person that some candidates slip into, he told the press that one of their favorite narratives boiled down to “Obama has pretty good style, he can deliver a pretty good speech, but he seems to prioritize rhetoric over substance.” After an ode to his own specificity, he tut-tutted, “You’ve been reporting on how I look in a swimsuit.”

He poses for the cover of Men’s Vogue and then gets huffy when people don’t treat him as Hannah Arendt. …

and:

After talking to high school journalists, he took a sniffy shot at the loutish reporters who were merely whispering where’s the beef: “Take some notes, guys, that’s how it’s done.”

No fewer than three times last week, Mr. Obama got indignant about the beach-babe attention given to a shot of him in the Hawaiian surf. …

and:

When The Times’s Jeff Zeleny asked him on his plane whether he’d had a heater in his podium during his announcement speech in subzero Springfield, Mr. Obama hesitated. He shot Jeff a look that said, “Are you from People magazine?” before conceding that, unlike Abe Lincoln, he’d had a heater.

Take some notes, senator, that’s how it’s done.

Slow down, Mo. We know how it’s done. Where “it” means denying election to any Democratic candidate, no matter how qualified or capable.

We know because we have for years watched you tear down basically decent men, like Al Gore and John Kerry, who had the temerity put themselves in the public arena and get in line for the job you crave but never had the courage to pursue.

Good luck, Sen. Obama. You’re going to need it. Yes, there are no snakes in Ireland; but that’s only because Dowd’s forebears emigrated to America. So she was born here instead.

The Biggest Loser out of the ’06 elections? Any GOP presidential candidate who has spent the past five years in an accelerating attempt to become the mainstream GOP heir-apparent to President George W. Bush, especially in terms of embracing the Iraq war.

McCain’s clumsiness and lack of political timing now stand exposed as never before: he was an independent, critical, truth-telling outsider in 2000, at a time when the GOP needed a mainstream, establishment candidate. (We’ve since learned that Bush is a crazed millenialist, but he ran then as a moderate who could keep his pants on.) Now, when it is clear that in order to have any chance of retaining the White House in 2008, the GOP will need an independent, critical, truth-telling outsider who is distanced from a profoundly incompetent and increasingly unpopular Republican administration, John McCain is locked into a new, awkward-fitting, mainstream, establishment, heir-apparent candidacy. Not to mention that he is tar-babied to the electorally fatal Iraq war.

If the GOP is stupid enough to nominate McCain in ’08, the commercials write themselves: simple voice-overs of McCain’s thousands of quotes defending and pushing stay-the-course, playing over the grotesque visuals of the awkward hugs between Bush and a toadying, insincere McCain.

The most dangerous possible GOP candidate, and he or she simply does not exist among the front ranks of those reported to be considering a White House run, is an anti-war, anti-Bush strict fiscal and social conservative. (Possible exception on substance: Newt Gingrich, but he is so personally unlikeable and tainted as to be unelectable.)

Actually I am the one responsible for the Democratic takeover of the United States Senate.

Let’s have some fun with numbers, all right? Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003. So 365 times three less 38 less another day for leap year gives us 1,056 days from that day to this one.

Now all join in and count along with me. One, two, three, four, etc., etc., etc. and so on and so forth, keep going now, still a long, long way to Tipperary. Count, count, count, don’t give up now …

Oh, man, at last, we made it. One thousand and fifty-six. Take a couple of deep breaths and now let’s wind down with something easy. Count the days between Saddam’s death sentence and the midterm elections. All together now!

One.

Two.

Well, I’ll be damned. What are the odds of that happening?

The Rude Pundit provides us with this link to selections from Lynne Cheney’s erotic masterpiece, Sisters: The Novel of a Strong and Beautiful Woman Who Broke All the Rules of the American Frontier. So sin-sodden am I that I wasn’t at all offended by these excerpts. But then I wasn’t offended by James Webb’s novels either.

Nor was I offended when I heard Webb speak at a 1985 conference of The Asia Society on “The Vietnam Experience in American Literature.” The conference brought together such writers and editors as William Broyles, Asa Baber, C.D.B. Bryan, John Del Vecchio, Nan Talese, Osborn Elliot, Joe Klein, Ron Kovic, Myra McPherson, Kevin Buckley, Tim O’Brien, and Wallace Terry.

As well as James Webb, who at the time was an assistant secretary of defense in Reagan’s Pentagon. In that crowd, he was the Christian and we were the lions.

Webb didn’t give an inch in the hostile questioning that followed his speech. Politely, intelligently, and with quiet dignity, he defended a war that most of his audience loathed.

Like most everyone else I didn’t agree with him. But I admired him. I wasn’t surprised when he later quit his job with Reagan; nor when he eventually became a Democrat. If you live in Virginia, I urge you to help send him to the Senate. It desperately needs him, and more like him.

My wife’s friend Marie passes along a message below. Pete Seeger, appearing on YouTube, adds to the message.

Unless you’re dead or moribund, you’ve noticed that a number of Democrats have a good chance of winning, but most of them still need money. If you have a few bucks go here.

You can give to selected candidates or to all of them.

Please feel free to pass the link on or post it on your blog if you have one. It’s a lot more pleasant to part with a few bucks now than to stand naked in a cold room and have cold water poured over you later because someone thinks you’re supporting terrorists.