MAD EDITORIAL BOARD DISEASE. As part of The Washington Post editorial page's continuing march to the right, they decided to offer a New Year's Eve condemnation of Democratic presidential candidates who've criticized the administration's failure to take action sooner against mad cow disease:

Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman announced that testing of high-risk cattle would be increased; right now only 20,000 cattle are tested a year out of about 40 million slaughtered. And they are tested using a time-consuming method, so the meat has been distributed by the time the results are known. Under the new rules, meat would be held until the results come back. Second, so-called "downer" cows, those that can't walk to the slaughterhouse, will no longer be used for meat. Tissue from the nervous systems of older animals will be declared unfit for human consumption. And the system for tracking cattle, which is critical to finding out what happened to the other cows raised with the infected one, will be improved as well. All of these are prudent steps.

They do not, however, mean that the government was necessarily being lax before. And the task now should not be apportioning blame among politicians. Treating the issue as a partisan one can actually contribute to consumer panic that -- even in the absence of genuine danger -- could cause serious economic hardship.

The authors ought to consider taking a gander at the Post's news pages where they would have found this interesting story:

The Agriculture Department's announcement yesterday of a ban on the sale of meat from ailing "downer" cattle marked a policy turnabout for the Bush administration, coming only a few weeks after the department and allies in the powerful meat lobby blocked an identical measure in Congress.

. . .

For years, the politically potent and well-financed cattle and meatpacking industries have held sway in the debate over the practice of slaughtering and marketing non-ambulatory, or downer, cattle. They repeatedly blocked efforts by urban Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans to end the practice -- which provides producers with millions of dollars of profits each year but also represents the biggest potential source of contaminated meat.

So the key safety step the Post is highlighting to show that the administration's doing fine is something the administration opposed less than a month ago and that Democrats have been advocating for years -- seems relevant to me. It's fashionable to decry partisanship at any turn, but the fact is that the administration was trying to do the wrong thing here until increased media coverage forced their actions out into the open and it's mighty hard to see what's wrong with calling attention to that fact.

--Matthew Yglesias

RECUSE YOU. Today comes the news that John Ashcroft will recuse himself from the investigation into the Valerie Plame leak:

The investigation will be headed by the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald, who will report to Ashcroft's new deputy, James Comey, the officials said. It was not immediately clear why Ashcroft made the decision.

Initially, I was a bit skeptical as to how Ashcroft stepping down in favor of his deputy would really improve matters, but this October profile of Jim Comey from New York magazine indicates that he's a respected career prosecutor and the same seems to be true of Patrick Fitzgerald according to this Chicago Tribune account, which also notes that Fitzgerald and Comey worked together in the New York U.S. Attorney's office during the Clinton years before both got promotions under the Bush administration.

Taking some step like this would've been the right thing to do in the first place, so it's not clear what new developments have caused Ashcroft to see things differently but we can probably assume it's related to whatever led Dana Priest and Mike Allen's sources to give them material for a new Plame story that mostly got lost in the shuffle last weekend. The article contained these odd thoughts from the White House:

White House officials profess to be unconcerned about the outcome of the investigation. Some administration officials said they believe charges will eventually result, although it could be as long from now as 2005. A Republican legal source who has had detailed conversations about the matter with White House officials said he "doesn't get any sense at all that they're worried or concerned, or that they're covering up."

Still, the White House is eager for the findings to emerge soon, or wait until after the November election. "The only fear I've heard expressed is that the investigation will be too slow or too fast and will kick into a visible mode in a way that is poorly timed for the election," the Republican said. "If they prosecuted someone tomorrow, I don't think the White House would care. And they can do it in December 2004. They just don't want it to become an issue in the election."

Given the utter lack of interest expressed herein in uncovering the truth, I'd say it's a good idea to keep this investigation as far as possible from the Bush political operation.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE RECOVERY THAT ISN'T. It's always nice to see Paul Krugman turn in a column on politics and economics, the area in which his writing is strongest and most authoritative. Here's a great piece on who's benefitting, and who isn't, from the "recovery." Democratic strategists who have already decided the economy won't be an issue in 2004 should take a second look at the numbers.

--Nick Confessore

HOW TO WIN OVER IRAQ. There's a very timely and convincing op-ed in today's New York Times, written by a Marine lieutenant colonel who recently commanded a battalion in Iraq. Among military reform wonks -- folks worried about transformation, fourth-generation warfare, and the like -- the Marines are widely considered the service that does things right. So I'm not surprised to find out that they have also run the most successful counterinsurgency operations in Iraq:

For most of us Diwaniyah was personal. The site of skirmishes we had with fedayeen, Iraqi Army Special Forces and local militias, the city represented my battalion's "blooding" --the scene of our first important combat action and casualties. By returning, we had the chance to root out remaining resistance and help restore a community wrecked by war.

As marines only a few days out of intense combat, it was natural for us to want to undertake the "rooting out" part first -- going after the resistance with a vengeance. Fortunately, our division commander, Maj. Gen. Jim Mattis, had a different approach. He shifted our focus from conventional combat toward winning over the people. In so doing, his thinking went, we could isolate the Baathist insurgents and criminal elements and make them easier to detect and eliminate.

His guiding principle was "do no harm." So he detached our M-1 tanks and armored personnel carriers and, together with artillery, returned them to Kuwait. Armored vehicles are threatening by their very presence -- not to mention being magnets for rocket-propelled grenades. General Mattis believed that any engagement with remaining insurgents could be handled by dismounted infantry.

We also tried to be aware of Iraqi sensitivities. We "dressed down" during foot patrols, removing body armor and helmets. Arabs consider sunglasses distasteful, so we took off our wraparound Oakleys when talking to Iraqis. And with varying degrees of success, we directed young marines not to look at Iraqi women and teenage girls.

Most of our efforts were straightforward. We cleaned, painted and picked up trash at schools. Wherever we went, we used "wave tactics" -- waving at locals, especially children, and smiling at pedestrians. After capturing $5 million during a raid on suspected Baathists, we donated a large sum to a leading mullah for the needy who were not directly eligible for reconstruction money. It seemed the right thing to do and not "buying the peace." And it worked. The mullah became a grateful and helpful friend of the Marines.

In our efforts to overcome rampant crime and pursue remaining Baathists, we flooded neighborhoods with foot patrols, talked with townsfolk to gain information and laid ambushes in problem areas. We avoided rotating companies so that each company could develop a relationship with a specific village.

When out-of-work Iraqi soldiers began staging demonstrations, we invited their leaders into our compound and listened to their grievances while offering them cold sodas. By treating them as equals, we eased frustrations and countered a descent toward armed confrontation.

None of these techniques were particularly novel to the Marines. And they were practiced by our battalions across south-central Iraq. To be sure, we all benefited from the Shiite majority in the region, most of whom were joyous at the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But it is undeniably significant that in the succeeding five months of post-conflict presence, not a single marine was killed because of hostile action.

That's quite an advertisement. Granted, the battalion in question wasn't working in the Sunni triangle, which is one of the most volatile and violent regions in the country. But this does contrast markedly with the decision by Pentagon leaders to "get touch" in and around Baghdad. We'll have to wait and see whether they made the right choice.

--Nick Confessore

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS? In an interesting column, E.J. Dionne says the conventional wisdom that Bush-hatred has driven Democrats to the brink of unelectability is wrong and that, in fact, intense dislike of the president creates a golden opportunity:

Here's what's interesting for 2004: The conventional wisdom, fed by shrewd Republican operatives and commentators, is that Democrats, so out there in their antipathy for Bush, will push their party into an extremist wonderland and lose white men, security moms and anybody else who does not share their desire for revenge.

The opposite is true. Democrats will not have to spend inordinate amounts of time or money in this election year "uniting their base." Opposition to Bush has already done that.

In the 2000 election, Bush had an advantage over Al Gore because Republican rank-and-filers so hated Bill Clinton -- and so wanted to win -- that they gave Bush ample room to sound as moderate as John Breaux or Olympia Snowe. Bush's 2000 Republican National Convention hid the base behind the appealing face of inclusiveness and outreach. Gore, in the meantime, had to claw back the votes of liberals and lefties who had strayed to Ralph Nader.

That's a good analysis of the 2000 campaign, but I'm not sure how well the analogy to the present crop of Democrats holds up. The genius of Bush's candidacy is that he appealed to his Clinton-hating base through the use of fairly subtle symbols while also appearing to strike a tone of reconciliation. When he said was going to bring "honor and dignity" to the White House everyone knew what he was talking about, but it was a sufficiently low-key statement to avoid overly-associating the candidate with the unpopular cause of impeachment.

This same pattern has repeated since Bush took office -- second-tier Republicans and their allies in the press continue to launch incredibly vituperative attacks on Democrats, but the president himself largely avoids such over-the-top rhetoric in the interests of appearing above the fray. By contrast, there's nothing very subtle about Howard Dean's campaign or about Dick Gephardt's claim that the president is a "miserable failure." So far, Democratic primary voters seem to be demanding a candidate who will express their anger at the president rather than simply trusting that all the candidates agree with them deep down and letting them say what it takes to win.

A primary, of course, is not a general election, so the possibility still remains that things will change after the convention and the nominee will be able to tone things down while still keeping the base energized, but I wouldn't take anything for granted. After all, with Ralph Nader threatening to run again, Dean hinting that his supporters may not turn out to support one of his rivals in November, and other factions seeming more interested in blocking Dean than in beating Bush, there's no guarantee that any strategy will allow the party to stay unified as it starts reaching for swing voters.

-- Matthew Yglesias

THE HE GOES AGAIN. Last Monday, Sam Donaldson's Sunday television efforts came in for some well-deserved criticism from my colleague Nick Confessore recently. And yesterday on The Chris Matthew Show he repeated the remarks that ticked us off the last time:

Here -- here is Howard Dean saying, 'Well, it doesn't make America safer -- the world safer for Saddam to be caught.' In the wider context, we understand he means against the war that's going to be ongoing for terrorism, but it's the wrong sound bite.

But the thing is that Howard Dean was completely correct. Since the capture we've moved to Orange Alert, seen renewed violence in Iraq, and there's still no plausible explanation for how imprisoning Saddam is supposed to have made America safer. If it does turn out to be the case that this remark haunts the Dean campaign on the trail, the blame will lie 100 percent with a media that's more interested in mindlessly parroting the conventional wisdom than reporting the facts.

--Matthew Yglesias

DO YOU WANT TO WHINE OR TO WIN? Reading the latest Democratic Leadership Council screed against Howard Dean makes me want to assign the DLC guys a Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. essay on manliness. They sound so wounded.

Here is what Dean said:

"One of the reasons I wish the other guys running for president would tone it down a little bit is that at the end, we're all going to have to pull together in order to beat George Bush. Even the Democratic Leadership Council, which is sort of the Republican part of the Democratic Party -- the Republican wing of the Democratic Party -- we're going to need them too, we really are."

Here is what the DLC says:

"He should know how it feels to be on the receiving end of the insulting charge of crypto-Republicanism, since it was hurled at him by self-styled Democratic "progressives" in Vermont throughout much of his tenure as governor. It's a cheap shot not just at us, but at former DLC chairmen like Bill Clinton, Dick Gephardt, and Joe Lieberman, along with hundreds of hard-working Democratic elected officials around the country who are part of our movement."

So Dean called the DLC the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. The horror! It's not like the DLC has ever insulted Dean or purposefully misconstrued his politics. (See here, here, and here.)

Indeed, everything I've seen from the DLC in the past eight months suggests to me that its leaders are more interested in whining than in winning. I have never been so certain that the Democratic nominee will lose the 2004 general election than I was after attending the DLC's highly depressing annual conference in Philadephia last summer, where it became clear to me that the DLC is more interested in seeing Dean lose than in seeing Bush do so. (And even then it was clear that Dean would become the Democratic frontrunner.)

My fear for the Democratic Party is not that Dean will divide the party, but that the leaders of the DLC -- many of whose policy ideas folks around these halls are intrigued by or agree with, by the way -- and certain other nodes for unlected party leaders already have so much invested in their anti-Dean agenda that they won't be able to come around if he wins the nomination.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

LONG WEEKEND UPDATE. Santa steal your papers? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• George Will I. They don't make presidents like they used to.
• Paul Krugman. It would be good if journalists covering the 2004 election paid attention to actual policy proposals, but I'm not optimistic.
• Bob Herbet. Devious Indians have taken all our high-tech jobs.
• Charles Krauthammer. Bush's policies have succeeded brilliantly in forcing Iran to agree to inspections, but we have to bomb them anyway.
• David Ignatius. Fundamentally, the president can't decide what the point of his foreign policy is -- it's "a healthy tension."
• David Brooks. Michael Oakshott probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq, but if he had he would have done it without a proper plan so, you see, it's okay that Bush has screwed everything up.
• Richard Cohen. I probably should've written this column about metrosexuals a couple months ago when someone might have cared.
• Thomas Friedman. They may not like us in France, but the USA is big in Poland.
• George Will II. Why mention Howard Dean's explicit disavowels of a third party candidacy when doing so would ruin a perfectly good column?
• Jim Hoagland. The future's hard to predict.
• David Broder. Looking back on a year's worth of criticism of my work, it turns out that I was right.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need to Read

• Juan Cole and Shahin Cole discuss the future of Shi'ite politics in Iraq

The Shows

• Fox News Sunday. John Edwards refuses to take the bait and bash Howard Dean, so the fair and balanced panel had to do it for him.
• Meet The Press. Laura Bush and Caroline Kennedy say helping sick children is good.
• Face The Nation. A panel wonders why the conventional wisdom on Dean was so wrong a year ago before offering CW predictions for the year to come.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT'S DONE IS DONE. Fareed Zakaria's done many excellent columns on the situation in Iraq, but this week's effort to show there's something inconsistent in Howard Dean's view (shared by Wes Clark and many others) that even though the war was a bad idea we should see it through is inconsistent doesn't add up:

Dean says he thought the war was a terrible blunder -- a "catastrophic mistake," said Al Gore when endorsing him -- but now that we're there, we should stay and see it through. This makes no sense. If the war was a blunder -- draining resources and distracting Washington -- the smartest thing to do is get out fast. Dean has argued that America must stay in Iraq because it cannot allow the country to become a base for Al Qaeda. But that outcome could easily be avoided by our pulling out and turning the place over to a general or Shiite leader who will also have no interest in having his country become a Qaeda base. Why bother helping in a massive transformation of politics, economics and society in Iraq? In a sense, the most consistent Democrat in the race is not Dean, but Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who says the war was a mistake, so let's leave now.

This idea that if a project wasn't worth doing it is worth abandonning halfway through certainly isn't true as a general proposition. Say the government allocated a few million dollars to build a wasteful bridge, and now it's almost done but before it can be opened they need $50 more in order to paint the lines on the road. It would be pretty silly not to support the additional money at that point, since not opening the bridge isn't going to get you your money back.

In the particular case of Iraq, it's hard to see how Zakaria's plan to find a friendly general and then leave would in any way mitigate the damage this war has done to our diplomatic situation, and it certainly wouldn't bring any of the dead soldiers back to life. There is, moreover, no guarantee that whatever government we picked would actually be strong enough to resist the insurgent elements without significant US support. And however contained Baath Iraq may or may not have been before the war, if the party were somehow to come back into power after chasing us out of the country it would be very hard to contain in the future.

If I could, I'd like to turn back time about twelve months and see this whole situation handled in a calmer, more patient manner exhibiting a better sense of priorities, but that simply can't be done, so the best thing to do at this point is try and make the policy work.

--Matthew Yglesias

ORWELL WATCH. Once again, the Bush administration is rejiggering official government data to make things look better than they really are. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Bush administration released a pair of much-awaited reports on the quality of American health care, after extensive revisions that made the findings more upbeat than some experts thought justified.

The two studies, produced by a research arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, went through numerous drafts and were exhaustively reviewed within HHS, officials said.

In several cases, language included in drafts prepared this summer was toned down, emphasizing improvements or challenges rather than problems that afflict the quality of care in public and private health systems in the U.S.

For example, early versions of the National Healthcare Quality report warned that the U.S. health system "is not capable" of preventing or managing diabetes, while the final report said the health system "must respond in order to prevent and manage" the disease. Both versions of the report acknowledged diabetes as a growing problem in the U.S.

The second report, the National Healthcare Disparities Report, was released simultaneously, and dealt with differences in levels of health care according to race, ethnicity and income. Both were requested by Congress for the first time this year and annually thereafter, and were supposed to be delivered by Sept. 30.

Some people familiar with the evolution of the reports say that the office of planning and evaluation within HHS played an active role in making suggestions and editing changes to the report. A spokesman for HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson said Monday that, "I don't know how heavy their hand was," but he added that the planning and evaluation office "was involved, as they should be."

Some outside health-care advocates suggested that the two studies were toned down and delayed until after the Medicare overhaul and prescription-drug bill passed Congress for fear Democrats might seize on the reports to press for greater funding for quality initiatives, possibly complicating Republican efforts to pass the bill.

This is a far more serious form of corruption, I think, than most people realize. The Bush administration's systemic distortion of government-produced data undermines the entire policy process and compromises honest debate. If you don't have a handle on what problems exist, you can't have a worthwhile debate about fixing them.

I suppose that for a party which, intellectually at least, doesn't seem to believe that government should be in the business of solving problems, this state of affairs is perfectly acceptable.

--Nick Confessore

WHEN THE CENTER DOES NOT HOLD. The Democratic Leadership Council is not happy with Howard Dean's latest attacks:

Going beyond the incoherent rage expressed by some Democrats, we've offered a systematic critique of why Bush's economic and fiscal policies are a disaster for the middle class, and how Bush's foreign policies are undermining America's values and interests in a dangerous world. And we have offered a comprehensive progressive agenda that Democrats should embrace to make the case that they would govern America in a vastly superior manner. We're proud of the advice we've offered over the years, and are especially proud of the policy ideas we helped develop -- from work-based welfare reform, to community policing, to national service, to the most successful national economic strategy since the 1960s -- that in turn helped make the Clinton administration the only recent successful model of progressive politics and governance.

As they did last week when Gov. Dean appeared to dismiss the significance of Saddam Hussein's capture, and then characterized the Clinton administration as an exercise in "damage control," Dean's staffers were quick to do a little damage control of their own. The defamatory reference to the DLC, they explained, was a "joke," a "tongue-in cheek remark" -- a Ho Ho from Ho Ho, so to speak.

If so, it's a joke that's getting pretty old. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has been saying this kind of thing throughout the campaign, along with other howlers like asserting that Bill Clinton wrecked the Democratic Party, and that Democratic centrists were cravenly supporting much of George W. Bush's agenda. Dean and Trippi are very smart men, and they know perfectly well that this rap is a central part of the hard left's hallucinatory revisionist interpretation of the Clinton years as one long act of surrender to conservatism.

A lot of what they're saying here is perfectly correct -- the DLC really hasn't been offering a "Bush-lite" agenda for America. On the other hand, "Democratic centrists" really have been "cravenly supporting much of George W. Bush's agenda" and the DLC needs to learn to deal with that reality. Bush's big-government conservatism has provoked a small, but steady, stream of defections from Republican moderates, deficit hawks, and principled conservatives which, combined with the GOP's narrow margins in the congress, has meant that none of Bush's major domestic initiatives -- not the tax cuts, not the Medicare bill, not the energy bill -- had the votes to pass without cooperation from Democrats.

And cooperation is exactly what they've gotten, from folks like Zell Miller, John Breaux, and Max Baucus, who've helped move terrible legislation to the president's desk and let the GOP get away with running the most partisan congress in generations. The DLC didn't support any of these bills, but I haven't seen them criticizing those who did, many of them card-carrying New Democrats. We know the DLC doesn't shy away from condemning Democrats from the left wing of the party who cast votes that displease them, but they've been utterly silent on the craven behavior of the party's right wing.

Under those circumstances, is it any wonder people have the impression that the DLC itself endorses the "Bush lite" politics that legislators associated with the group seem to be following? Instead of facing up to the reality of today's politics -- a narrow Republican majority allying with a handful of conservative Democrats to pass frighteningly bad legislation -- they seem to want to endlessly re-fight the battles of 15 years ago, even though they know perfectly well that Dean is no kind of crazed far-lefty.

--Matthew Yglesias

A BAD IDEA. I can understand where Robert Scheer is coming from. It is indeed a problem that government officials skilled in the use and abuse of leaking and off-the-record quotes have become so good at duping reporters. The particular case that has Scheer so steamed -- The New York Times stories which smeared Wen Ho Lee, who is now suing -- was indeed a black eye on honest reporter. But is this the answer?

A spokesperson for the New York Times defended its reporters' actions, saying they "chose to take advantage of their 1st Amendment privilege on identifying sources." What about the constitutionally protected rights of Lee, whose reputation, livelihood and freedom were destroyed by the irresponsible reporting of the Times? That is often the dire consequence of leaked government smears and is a serious concern in the defamation of individuals accused after 9/11 of having links to terrorism under the USA Patriot Act. Yet the knee-jerk reaction of the media is to claim a 1st Amendment protection, even if it results in defaming individuals on the basis of secret sources.

That claim of unfettered privilege was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court the last time it visited this issue; it ruled in 1972 that reporters were required to reveal sources if the information went "to the heart" of a case and could not otherwise be obtained. That's exactly the situation faced by Lee.

In an attempt to limit his request for information to what is essential to proceed with the privacy case, Lee's attorney, Brian Sun, told the judge he would settle for knowing the names of the government agencies rather than the individuals who leaked Lee's polygraph report, classified conversations with his superiors and other information. Indeed, Lee's polygraphs, taken voluntarily and stamped with a notation that it was covered by the Privacy Act, tended to exonerate him but were distorted in the leaks to the media.

Journalists make the argument that it is sometimes necessary to protect whistle-blowers from reprisals for exposing the truth. However, that argument is undermined by the increasingly common practice of government sources using reporters to spread falsehoods or discredit foes, knowing reporters will hide their identity.

I'll admit that it would be nice to know, for instance, who was responsible for leaking Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak. But I think the solution here is not to ask the government to force journalists to reveal their sources, but for editors to have stricter rules about using leaked information.

--Nick Confessore

STEAL THIS IDEA! Friend-of-TAP Paul Glastris, editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly put together a simple package of proposals to address some of the most aggravation-inducing and unfair aspects of family life and laid it out before the readers of the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Now reprinted at TomPaine.com, it's worth a read:

[T]he stress felt by working parents today represents the single greatest unaddressed social need in America. It's a problem that has arisen from one of the most profound -- and largely beneficial -- socio-economic shifts in the last 30 years: the entry of women into the workforce.

As recently as the early 1970s, the great majority of families were still of the single-breadwinner variety. Today, notes Karen Kornbluh of the New America Foundation, 70 percent of families with children are headed by two working parents or by an unmarried working parent. Consequently, parents have 22 fewer hours per week to spend with their kids than they did in 1969.

Anyone who lives in such a household knows the drill: routines scheduled with military-like efficiency, dinners brought home from McDonald's, bills paid at one in the morning. It is a testament to the ingenuity of Americans (especially, let's face it, women) that we've been able to pull this off. Indeed, for many families it is a source of pride, evidence of the abiding American willingness to make sacrifices for a better life.

But reaching for the American Dream shouldn't be made any harder than it has to be. And that's what government has done by failing to insist on the kinds of modest societal adjustments that would allow working parents to fulfill their responsibilities at home and at work. . . .

[T]his is an issue made to order for Democrats. Indeed, other Democratic contenders have already floated -- piecemeal and ineffectively -- some good ideas to address it. It's possible to put together a package of such ideas which, taken together, would capture the imaginations of tens of millions of middle class voters; would cost the government little; would give Democrats a leg up in the culture wars; and would be hard for President Bush to embrace and therefore neutralize, as he seems to have done with Medicare prescription drugs.

Call it the Family Stress Relief Act.

The three parts of this program would be: universal after-school programs, an insurance option that would allow you to take paid family and medical leave if you needed to, and Social Security for stay-at-home parents so that full-time moms don't face retirement with nothing to fall back on. This is a pro-traditional family agenda that manages to be deeply feminist at the same time; it will appeal to conservative women and liberals alike, and -- most importantly -- it would inexpensively do a great deal to improve the lives of families.

Despite the Democrats' reputation as "the mommy party," actual married couples with kids lean toward the Republican side of the aisle. I suspect that this is partly because the Democrats have, in recent years, appeared (perhaps due to poor communications strategies) to have a largely defensive agenda of trying to block changes to decades-old programs which mainly benefit seniors and the poor -- rather than one that routinely identifies and responds to emerging issues and the every-day problems faced by families of average means. Writes Glastris:

Any one of the steps I've outlined -- universal after-school programs, paid leave insurance, Social Security for stay-at-home parents -- would be a big help to millions of stressed-out families. Taken together, they would fundamentally shift the balance of power between the workplace and the family -- giving individual parents significantly greater control over that ever-more-precious commodity, their time, without hurting the economy or draining the treasury. . .

Policies like these would not only provide relief to American families, but also reanimate the role of government in American life. Progressives have long understood that the federal government has a unique and crucial role to play in adapting the nation to economic change, from regulations that made industrial-era factories safer and work hours more humane, to college grants and loans that allowed millions of Americans to enter the knowledge economy. And yet in the face of one of the most remarkable transformations in American history, the rise of the two-earner family, Washington has been largely silent. That silence has hurt the American family -- and the Democratic party.

Though Iraq and the economy will loom large in the upcoming presidential election, the GOP will no doubt also try to pick a fight over cultural issues, like gay marriage. If they're wise, Democrats will seize the initiative -- and make the upcoming campaign about the family values that really matter.

Amen.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

CAN'T BEAT THE REAL THING. An awful lot of ink's been spilled in recent weeks on hand-wringing over liberal Bush hatred, but as Tom DeLay's appearance yesterday on Meet The Press shows, the left still has a long way to go before reaching the rhetorical depths of the GOP leadership. The interview began with DeLay referring to Democrats as "hateful," "moronic," "beyond the pale," "outrageous," "cruel," and "extremist" by way of trying to establish that liberals are excessively negative.

Then DeLay lit into "extreme extremist" Howard Dean who was said to have opposed the war in Afghanistan (he didn't) and was accused of lying for accurately noting that Bush's deficits are the largest in history. In the ensuing dialgogue with Tim Russert on the subject of balanced budgets, DeLay insisted that Bill Clinton deserves "no credit" for the budgets he signed -- in fact, not a single Republican in Congress voted for Clinton's 1993 package -- and claimed that in the nineties the GOP majority passed the first balanced budget in "well over forty years" when the correct number is somewhat less than thirty. DeLay also claimed that the Bush administration has held spending growth below 4 percent after allegedly big increases during the Clinton years, while in fact spending grew 7.6 percent in 2003, and 7.9 percent in 2002, both figures far higher than anything from the Clinton years. Next he insisted that balancing the budget will require more tax cuts and then seemed to liken the whole balanced budget concept to Communism anyway.

DeLay also feels that Medicare is a "failed program" and made the bizarre assertion that the recently passed prescription drug bill "will lower the cost of Medicare."

Compared to all this, the statement that Wes Clark was removed from command "because of character reasons" and "must live in a different world" was pretty meek, but it did provoke an amusing response from Clark strategist Reid Cherlin, also available in a toned-down version composed later in the day.

Faced with this massive lies-to-airtime ratio, we got basically nothing from Russert. His only efforts to point out the truth consisted of hypothesizing what "the Democrats would say" in response to DeLay, as though the question of what's in the federal budget was somehow subjective. Russert enjoys trying to trip his guests up by bringing up contradictory statements from the past, but when he's faced with someone who's willing to lie consistently he's helpless. In short -- he's the perfect host for today's Republican leadership.

UPDATE: Reader C.S. notes that DeLay also said "We've upset the al-Qaida networks to the point that they can't do anything right now" -- I guess someone forgot to tell Tom Ridge who just raised the terror alert level.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW THE BIG BOYS DO IT. On "Reliable Sources," Sam Donaldson shows what happens to your brain when you use too much toupée glue.

"That one phase, 'America is not safer because of Saddam's capture,' in context you know what he's saying, which is the war on terrorism is a wide-ranging war in the future and this will not really affect that. But someone on his staff should have said, 'Don't use that phrase because every headline and writer, every Donaldson, everybody on television will stick it out, and it's just the wrong message.'"

Let's get this straight. Donaldson knows that Dean's statement was -- contrary to all the hot air emitting from both the White House and Dean's Democratic rivals -- completely accurate and reasonable. (Personally, I have yet to see any of the critics convincingly explain how Saddam Hussein's capture makes Americans safer. Our soldiers in Iraq, maybe. But not those of us here at home.) Yet as a journalist, Donaldson feels it necessary to parrot the silly CW that Dean's statement was a gaffe. He is powerless to resist the spin of the other campaigns.

This goes to the problem with how many political reporters interpret their duty. Instead of being "objective," they choose to be neutral -- that is, finding the comfortable middle of whatever spectrum of opinion exists on a given issue, which leaves them at the mercy of political operatives who know how to shape the acceptable ends of the spectrum. (This is why, Tom DeLay, as my colleague Matt Yglesias points out today, refers to Democrats as extremists and compares budget-balancing to communism, and why conservative pundits call moderate Republicans such as Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) liberal. By doing so, they move the goalposts.

But you kind of wish folks like Donaldson would know better.

--Nick Confessore

WEEKEND UPDATE. Stuck in a spider-hole of denial? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. We can build a "responsibility society" by letting the rich avoid taxation.
• Nicholas Kristof. Last week, widely available coffee was a harbinger of Chinese democracy, but this week they're evil, threatening nationalists.
• Thomas Friedman. Is that a consulate we're building in Istanbul or an extended metaphor?
• Jim Hoagland. The administration doesn't know what it's doing in Iran and for some reason I've decided that's a good thing.
• David Broder. It sure was nice of Strom Thurmond's daughter not to make a big fuss about the fact that her father was a racist hypocrite.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need to Read

• Jerrold Post does a little psychoanalysis on Saddam Hussein.

The Shows

• Fox News Sunday. Dick Gephardt learns that all the Dean-bashing in the world won't make him safe from the fair and balanced crew.
• Face The Nation. Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Meyers says it's "just a matter of time" until we find Osama bin Laden.
• Meet The Press. Tom DeLay endorses Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination.
• This Week. If you want to see the Wes Clark/Hugh Shelton dispute rehashed again, and again, and again, and again this is the show for you.

--Matthew Yglesias

GOD AND MAN IN BURLINGTON. I've been skeptical of a lot of these Dean-is-unelectable theories, but I think Franklin Foer has identified a real problem: Dean's not religious enough:

Dean himself is frank on this point, perhaps too frank. "[I] don't go to church very often," the Episcopalian-turned-Congregationalist remarked in a debate last month. "My religion doesn't inform my public policy." When Dean talks about organized religion, it is often in a negative context. "I don't want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers anymore," he shouted at the California Democratic Convention in March. And, when he discusses spirituality, it is generally divorced from any mention of God or church. "We are not cogs in a corporate machine," he preached last month in Iowa. "We are human, spiritual beings who deserve better consideration as human beings than we're getting from this administration."

One day, a truly secular candidate might be able to run for president without suffering at the polls. But that day won't be soon. This is, for better or worse, an openly religious country that prefers its politicians to be openly religious, too -- a trend that has only become more pronounced in recent national elections. A 2000 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 70 percent of Americans want their president to be a person of faith. This religious vote isn't just concentrated in Southern states that a Democrat has no chance of carrying. It also saturates the Midwest, where Dean would have to win to have a chance at the presidency. (According to the American Religious Identification Survey, only about 15 percent of respondents in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois describe themselves as nonreligious.) Indeed, in the last five presidential elections, the candidate who more aggressively conveyed his religiosity (whether honestly or not so honestly) won. Seen in this light, a popular contest between Dean's secularism and George W. Bush's heartfelt faith could be, well, no contest. And the same, in turn, could be true of the election.

. . .

Dean's problem isn't just that he will bring GOP evangelicals to the polls but that he could also lose the evangelicals who have voted Democratic in recent elections. Polling done by the scholars John Green, Lyman Kellstedt, James Guth, and Corwin Smidt has broken down the white evangelical voting bloc into four groups -- highly traditional, traditional, centrist, and modernist. While Republicans dominate the two traditionalist groups, they have basically split the centrist and modernist ones with the Democrats. And, while these more moderate evangelicals don't make up an overwhelming percentage of the electorate -- only about 8 percent -- they happen to be heavily concentrated in the Midwest. According to Kellstedt, these are voters Democrats often win with an economic agenda, but Dean might lose "on the basis of religious style points and strident rhetoric on [social issues]." And, in a close election, a few thousand votes squandered in Iowa and Illinois could ruin Dean.

In defense of Dean, however, it's not clear to me that his main rivals for the nomination are any better off in this regard. Joe Lieberman, clearly, would have an advantage but would Wes Clark? Dick Gephardt? I'm not so sure. And while none of these men are likely to have a sudden conversion on the road to the convention in Boston, any of them could do the next best thing -- pretend.

After all, neither Ronald Reagan nor the first George Bush were genuinely religious men by most accounts, but both talked the talk well enough to gain stronger support from faith-based voters than any of the Democrats. Voters want candidates who can articulate themselves and their programs in broadly moral terms, and for the vast majority of Americans the language of morality is the language of religion. That's not a situation I approve of, but a presidential campaign is no time for a debate on meta-ethics, so anyone who expects to win is going to need to deal with the electorate as they find it.

Prospect contributor Amy Sullivan was on this case a while back with a Washington Monthly cover story that's still relevant today.

--Matthew Yglesias

A SHORT HISTORY OF SUNSETS. Prospect contributing writer Chris Mooney has a great article in Legal Affairs about the changing nature of "sunsets," i.e., provisions in major legislation with a built-in expiration date. Turns out it's yet another area in which George Bush has rewritten the rules of Washington politics:

Say what you will about George W. Bush, he knows how to appreciate a good sunset. Rather than the end-of-the-day, margarita-sipping kind, however, our president prefers sunsets of a more arcane and less romantic sort. Some of the most important bills Bush has signed into law during his tenure as chief executive have included so-called “sunset” provisions, which cause the laws to expire after a fixed number of years. The first Bush tax cut, passed in 2001, terminates at the close of 2010. The 2003 tax cut, which slashed taxes on capital gains and dividends, contains various features that expire before 2013. Aspects of the USA Patriot Act phase out at the end of 2005.

At first glance, such provisions might seem to represent a victory for the bills' adversaries, compromises that will force Congress to rethink the laws in a few years, when cooler heads (and perhaps a new president) might prevail. But it would be a mistake to view the sunset provisions in the tax bills and the Patriot Act this way. Though the Bush Administration may have preferred, all things being equal, to do without them, the inclusion of these provisions helped get the laws through Congress -- and there's little reason to believe the sun will ever set on these statutes.

There is some doubt, in fact, that the sunset provisions in key Bush Administration bills will survive long enough to take effect. No sooner had the laws been passed than their Republican backers launched a pre-emptive strike, criticizing the sunsets and attempting to undo them. Last June, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to make permanent the repeal of the estate tax contained in Bush's first tax cut, which had been subject to a sunset clause. Also last spring, Utah senator Orrin Hatch floated the idea of repealing the Patriot Act's limited sunset provisions because, as he put it, “terrorists will not sunset their evil intentions.” Repealing a sunset before it takes effect seems at best disingenuous when without that sunset the law might not have passed in the first place. But even if their efforts to repeal the sunset provisions fail, Republican strategists are banking that the laws will be renewed anyway. Just after Bush signed his capital gains and dividend tax break into law, the conservative columnist George Will noted that because Democrats fear being accused of raising taxes, “the sun will set on few, if any, of these cuts.” Sunsetting a tax cut can be characterized as a tax hike, and sunsetting a bill like the Patriot Act can be said to reduce the government's ability to fight terrorism. Their efforts to remove sunset provisions notwithstanding, conservatives seem confident that ending the tax cuts or the Patriot Act will never be politically viable.

This is not how sunsets were supposed to work. Sunsetting was once heralded as a cure-all to the ills of inefficient government, a legislative device capable of eliminating obsolete and antiquated statutes and of keeping stodgy regulatory bureaucracies efficient and effective. But what was once a weapon for good-government reformers has been transformed in recent years. Under the Bush Administration, sunsetting has been reduced to a spoonful of sugar that helps controversial legislation go down.

How many more times will this happen before Democrats and moderate Republicans stop taking the bait?

--Nick Confessore

THE END OF MOBILITY? Paul Krugman has a piece in The Nation titled "The Death of Horatio Alger." It's quite good, and between Krugman's piece and BusinessWeek's recent article "Waking Up From the American Dream," you have a pretty good debunking of conservative efforts to deny that class mobility is on the wane. Here's the key part:

Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and '40s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management--all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920s seemed very distant.

Now they're back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez--confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

Never mind, say the apologists, who churn out papers with titles like that of a 2001 Heritage Foundation piece, "Income Mobility and the Fallacy of Class-Warfare Arguments." America, they say, isn't a caste society--people with high incomes this year may have low incomes next year and vice versa, and the route to wealth is open to all. That's where those commies at Business Week come in: As they point out (and as economists and sociologists have been pointing out for some time), America actually is more of a caste society than we like to think. And the caste lines have lately become a lot more rigid.

The myth of income mobility has always exceeded the reality: As a general rule, once they've reached their 30s, people don't move up and down the income ladder very much. Conservatives often cite studies like a 1992 report by Glenn Hubbard, a Treasury official under the elder Bush who later became chief economic adviser to the younger Bush, that purport to show large numbers of Americans moving from low-wage to high-wage jobs during their working lives. But what these studies measure, as the economist Kevin Murphy put it, is mainly "the guy who works in the college bookstore and has a real job by his early 30s." Serious studies that exclude this sort of pseudo-mobility show that inequality in average incomes over long periods isn't much smaller than inequality in annual incomes.

Perhaps I'm just being naive, but it seems to me this should be a cause of concern for conservatives, much as keeping the estate tax intact should have been. One reason why the U.S. never developed either a large-scale labor movement or a taste for European-style social democracy has been social mobility. In contrast to many countries, Americans have always had a good shot -- or believed they did -- at moving up in the world by dint of their own efforts. I don't know how bad things would have to get for that belief to waver. But in recent decades, the U.S. has been headed in the wrong direction, towards a society more stratified in terms of economic opportunity than we've been since the Gilded Age.

For how much longer will conservative intellectuals stick their heads in the sand?

--Nick Confessore

WHITE HOUSE PRESS RELEASE OF THE YEAR. The White House press office puts out a lot of pro forma stuff over the wires. For instance, this came to my inbox at around 10:30:

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release
December 19, 2003

Kwanzaa 2003

I send greetings to those observing Kwanzaa.

Celebrated by millions across the world, Kwanzaa honors the history and heritage of Africa. This seven-day observance is an opportunity for individuals of African descent to remember the sacrifices of their ancestors and reflect on the Nguzo Saba. Kwanzaa's seven social and spiritual principles offer strength and guidance to meet the challenges of each new day.

During this joyous time of year, Americans renew our commitment to hope, understanding, and the great promise of our Nation. In honoring the traditions of Africa, Kwanzaa strengthens the ties that bind individuals in communities across our country and around the world.

Laura joins me in sending our best wishes for a joyous Kwanzaa.

GEORGE W. BUSH

# # #

Just trying to picture President Bush pronouncing "the Nguzo Saba" made me giggle.

(The Kwanzaa 2003 presidential message was followed by installments for Christmas and Hanukkah, in case anyone was wondering.)

--Nick Confessore

COULD 9-11 HAVE BEEN PREVENTED? The commission, chaired by former governor Thomas Kean, charged with looking into the question says yes:

Appointed by the Bush administration, Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, is now pointing fingers inside the administration and laying blame.

"There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed," Kean said.

. . .

Kean promises major revelations in public testimony beginning next month from top officials in the FBI, CIA, Defense Department, National Security Agency and, maybe, President Bush and former President Clinton.

Even more so than the Iraq intelligence inquiry and the Valerie Plame leak investigation, which the administration has also been trying to stonewall, I think this one has the potential to do some very serious damage. The president continues to receive very high marks for his handling of counterterrorism -- significantly more people approve of his policies in this regard than of his conduct in Iraq or economic policy -- making his record on this score the linchpin of his re-election hopes.

The main problem here, from the president's perspective, is that this approval is largely unwarranted. As has been pointed out in the Prospect and elsewhere on any number of occassions the administration has seriously shortchanged homeland security and programs like Nunn-Lugar aimed at WMD counterproliferation as well as pulling intelligence assets that could have been used to capture Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and into Iraq. It's a pretty sorry record when looked at objectively, but so far the American people don't seem receptive to the message.

Jarring revelations about the administration's ability to prevent 9-11 and, more importantly, about the president's failure to hold his subordinates accountable for their poor performance, could provide an important opportunity to lay this whole record out again. The fact that the administration seems to have downgraded the government's emphasis on fighting al Qaeda from the already inadequate levels of the Clinton years could also be very damaging if the public can be made to see it.

--Matthew Yglesias

ALL THE LIVE-LONG DAY. The U.S. economy is generating jobs again, but not enough of them are good jobs. Tens of millions of Americans receive less than a living wage -- and many of the jobs lost in the last recession are being replaced by jobs with lower pay. The Moving Ideas Network, a project of The American Prospect, has just posted a new hot topic reading list of resources to go with the magazine's Special Report on Low-Wage America.

--TAP Online

"LAWSUIT HELL?" NOT QUITE. I was pretty surprised two Mondays ago when Newsweek came out with a cover package on lawsuits. It struck me as one-sided and, worse, prone to the same sorts of exaggerations and overdependence on anecdotal evidence that plagues much journalism on the subject. Co-written by Stuart Taylor, Jr., a legal pundit of demonstrable conservative persuasion and a longtime proponent of tort reform, the article was presented as a piece of straight reporting instead of the opinion journalism that it actually was. Taylor's no hack, but I don't think he tried to present both sides. So in that light, I'd recommend the following reading. Both reports are from activist groups, but I've looked through them and they appear well-annotated (unlike the Newsweek article). One is this report from the New York State Trial Lawyers Association. The other is this long rebuttal by Public Citizen. Here's a good example of what I'm talking about, from the latter report:

"Ryan Warner is a volunteer who runs an annual softball tournament in Page, Ariz., that usually raises about $5,000 to support local school sports programs. But not this year. A man who broke his leg at a recent tournament skidding into third base filed a $100,000 lawsuit against the city, and Warner fears he may be named as a defendant." Newsweek fails to disclose that Ryan Warner is immune from liability. When telephoned at his place of employment, the Warner Insurance Agency in Page, Arizona, Ryan Warner reported to Public Citizen that the injury in question occurred two years ago in 2001 and as of this date he has not been sued. Warner insurance sells a broad range of property casualty insurance, including general liability insurance to protect against civil suits. Warner also said that he had not heard of the Volunteer Protection Act of 1997.1 Under that law, volunteers for non-profit organizations or government programs around the country, even those dealing with children, cannot be held responsible for their negligence. The authors of the Newsweek article, he said, did not mention that statute during their conversations with him. Further, Mr. Warner said that he is considering re-instituting the softball tournament next year.

Public Citizen is being polite. You have to wonder how, as they searched for anecdotes to fill out a shaky premise, Taylor and his colleague ended up quoting an insurance industry employee without disclosing what the guy did for a living. Even better, we're supposed to believe that a guy who sells liability policies for a living does not know something as basic about insurance law as the fact that volunteers for nonprofits cannot be sued.

This stinks. And so do a lot of the other purported horror stories, now that I've read a more full accounting of the facts.

--Nick Confessore

WHEN BAD JOURNALISTS DO STUPID THINGS. Aside from its excellent Pentagon coverage and a few other things, I always view the Washington Times with a lot of skepticism. It's just too Prudenized to take very seriously. One of today's lead stories caught my eye as I was waiting for the bus, and it's just absurd. The overly-portentous -- not to mention oxymoronic -- headline is "Albright's joke joins growing list of Bush theories." What? You don't know what the hell they're talking about? Here's the detail:

Conspiracy theories continued to sprout among Democrats yesterday in the wake of the capture of Saddam Hussein. Some Democrats expressed alarm that the party was drifting out of the "mainstream."

Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state in the Clinton administration, in a conversation with Morton Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call and a Fox News Channel political analyst, suggested that Osama bin Laden has been captured by U.S. forces and will soon be produced to the public.

"Do you suppose," she asked, "that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?"

Mrs. Albright said last night she was kidding. "She was not smiling when she said this," Mr. Kondracke said.

Did you hear that? She wasn't smiling! Do you know what this means? Do you?!?!?

Sigh. In case you're wondering, Albright made her comments in the makeup room at Fox, where she and Kondracke were getting pancaked for their respective chat-show appearances. Next up: Kondracke goes sleuthing at Roger Ailes' Christmas party.

--Nick Confessore

OFFICE PARK DADS, SOCCER MOMS, AND OTHER MYTHS. A friend recommended that I check out a new blog by Mark Schmitt, Director of Policy and Research at the Open Society Institute. It's quite good. I recommend this (long) post, following up on Everett Ehrlich's Washington Post article, and this one, about a fascinating new study from the Commonwealth Institute. The study aims to delineate the subdivisions in American political culture by dividing the country not into Red states and Blue ones, but into a set of regions which -- like the subdivisions -- often spill across state borders. It's absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in the dynamics of presidential elections.

--Nick Confessore

THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED. During the Q&A session after his big foreign policy address, Howard Dean apparently stated that "[h]ad the United Nations given us permission and asked us to be a part of a multilateral force, I would not have hesitated to go into Iraq," prompting a stern reply from Senator John Cornyn of Texas:

"If the ask-the-U.N.'s-permission crowd had their way, Saddam would still be in power today, rather than in the custody of the 4th Infantry Division."

"I encourage Mr. Dean to visit the troops and families at Fort Hood, home of the 4th Infantry Division and the storied 1st Cavalry Division. It's a perspective worth having, and something he is apparently lacking."

I think a reasonable argument can be made that Cornyn is wrong about this. The diplomatic history here has been somewhat forgotten amidst the trenchant political discourse, but here's what The New York Times reported about the negotiations for a second UN resolution on March 14, 2003:

The White House said today that President Bush would meet on Sunday with the leaders of Britain and Spain, his staunchest allies in demanding that Iraq disarm, to determine if there is a last-ditch way to bring the United Nations together on an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein.

But the meeting, to be held in the Azores in the eastern Atlantic, bore no promise of a diplomatic breakthrough. As much as anything, it seemed intended to show the three leaders' willingness to explore all alternatives before Mr. Bush authorizes military action.

Not invited to the gathering were the six nations whose votes the United States, Britain and Spain are seeking in their effort to win the Security Council's imprimatur on a new resolution authorizing war if Iraq fails to disarm. The White House today rejected the latest effort by the six nations -- a proposal put forward by Chile seeking three more weeks for Mr. Hussein's government to meet five tests of his willingness to disarm -- hours after it was made public.

Obviously, no one can know for sure what would have happened had the US agreed to the Chilean proposal. Perhaps giving the inspections process more time and demonstrating a good-faith commitment to the UN and to a desire for peace could have attracted more diplomatic support for an invasion and led to a second resolution in April. Or maybe there would have been majority support for such a resolution but it would have been blocked by a French veto, leading to a resolutionless war, but under circumstances that would have left France rather than the US diplomatically isolated. Or perhaps Saddam would have cooperated, inspectors would have discovered that Iraq did not, in fact, have the weapons we thought it did, and there would have been no war.

We don't really know because the administration didn't really try, instead making the argument that we needed to fight now for reasons that were never made clear to me. This final dénoument, moreover, came at the conclusion of a series of diplomatic blunders that saw Don Rumsfeld insulting the countries whose support we were trying to gain, Colin Powell declining to travel the world in support of his diplomatic efforts, Mexican President Vincente Fox feeling too slighted by Bush's betrayals of earlier promises to Mexico to support our position, and the entire administration desperately injuring its own credibility by making a series of palpably false assertions regarding connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Unfortunately for the Dean campaign, this line of defense isn't really open to them at the moment since it would reveal that the policy of voting for the congressional resolution but criticizing the administration's conduct over the next several months really isn't nearly as bizarre or inconsistent as he would like us to believe.

-- Matthew Yglesias

WHEN IN DOUBT. For more evidence that the White House is having a bit of trouble finessing the conservative base's demand for a Federal Marriage Amendment with the measure's fundamental unpopularity check out Tuesday night's interview with Dianne Sawyer where the president tried to avoid the issue with a retreat into conditionals:

"If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that," he said. "The position of this administration is that whatever legal arrangements people want to make, they're allowed to make, so long as it's embraced by the state or at the state level."

If necessary for what? And how is the president supposed to reconcile this potential necessity with his commitment to letting people make "whatever legal arrangements" they want "so long as it's embraced by the state or at the state level?" Seems pretty mysterious to me. And it looks like these remarks are pleasing no one:

"This sounds as though the administration would support civil unions, which are counterfeits of the institution of marriage," said Tony Perkins, president of the [Family Research Council]. "The president's remarks also undermine state legislators who are fighting to protect the institution of marriage in states like Massachusetts."

With the gay marriage issue galvanizing social conservatives, Bush has said repeatedly that he would do "what is legally necessary" to keep marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Republicans in Congress, however, are divided over pending bills to amend the Constitution.

Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Newton, said last night that "it sounds like Bush is moving toward supporting a constitutional amendment." At the same time, Bush's remarks about states' rights were confusing, Frank said: "It proves our point that this is more a political problem for him than it is for us."

Frank's right, and I think Republican strategists who were hoping to ride the gay marriage issue to victory in 2004 are starting to see the problem they're stuck with. Note also the tacit admission from Tony Perkins that his advocacy of this amendment goes far beyond a desire to prevent gay marriage to the hopes that it will ban civil unions as well. See also Jennifer Roback Morse's argument in NRO then the battle against gay marriage is but one small part of a broader campaign against fun sex. Gay marriage remains an unpopular cause -- for now -- but the forces mobilizing against it are trying to push something with even less support.

-- Matthew Yglesias

A CLOSER LOOK. A New York Times article discusses at length the results of their latest poll, mostly good news for the president. Strangely, however, nowhere does the text discuss the question that's probably of most interest to horse-race watchers: "If George W. Bush runs for re-election in 2004, do you think you will probably vote for Bush, or probably vote for the Democratic candidate?" Take a look at the full results and you'll see that there have been no dramatic changes on this front. The latest numbers have 44 going for Bush and 40 voting for the Democrat, hardly an insurmountable lead when you consider that the president's not going to get good news like this every week.

Also not discussed in the article is the fact that just 44 percent of people think "the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs" as opposed to 49 percent who say it wasn't. The answer to the next question is interesting, too -- a whopping 61 percent of respondents say they believe Bush will win in 2004 against just 24 percent who think the Democrat will win. I can see how the articles I've been reading in the newspapers have led people to believe this, but look behind the numbers and you'll see that it's just not very well supported by the evidence.

-- Matthew Yglesias

THE ENDURING REPUBLICAN MAJORITY. My friends Amy Sullivan and Jake Rosenfeld have a nice op-ed in Newsday which argues that, contrary to Republican gloating and Democratic doomsaying, the GOP has not engineered a political realignment nor made itself a true majority party. The nut of their argument is here:

While these aren't exactly rosy days for Democrats, the comparison of today's Republican Party to the New Deal coalition is simply absurd. In the 1937-38 Congress, Democrats enjoyed more than a three-to-one advantage in the House of Representatives; today the GOP holds exactly 24 more seats than Democrats. Given the growing power of incumbency in Congress -- experts maintain that around 400 of the 435 seats are now effectively "safe seats" -- even doubling the Republicans' current advantage would take a pretty fantastic Democratic meltdown at the polls. Republicans currently have a three-seat margin in the Senate, a chamber they didn't even control as recently as one year ago.

In the states, Democrats are steadily making up losses they suffered in gubernatorial elections during the 1990s, while the control of state legislatures is fairly evenly divided -- 17 are controlled by Democrats, 21 by Republicans, and 11 are split between the two parties.

And what of George Bush, the leader of this supposed historic realignment? We all know that the 2000 election wasn't much of a rout. In late November, his approval rating hovered around 51 percent in a CNN poll, almost matching Bill Clinton's 50-percent rating in a CNN poll at the same point in his first term. Despite the hopeful predictions of Republican pundits following Hussein's detention, the country remains solidly split.

I think this is true as far as it goes. The GOP has not built a old-fashioned majority; their core beliefs -- radical deregulation and privatization, dismantling the New Deal -- do not and probably won't ever command a consensus among American voters. But I don't think that matters very much. The modern Republican machine is very different from the old Democratic majorities that ran the country, off and on, for the 30 or so years beginning with FDR and which controlled Congress for two decades more. It is not based on robust local and state political organizations turning out voters like clockwork, which is what won elections in the days before television ads and media took over campaigning. It is based, on the one hand, on a robust infrastructure of communications, small-donor fundraising and idea factories, and, on the other hand, on dominating the resources needed to gain public office. The first part was built during the 1970s and 1980s and came to full flower in the 1990s. The second took shape with the takeover of Congress in 1994 and solidified with Bush's presidential victory in 2000. The longevity of the GOP machine will depend on winning most of the close contests cycle after cycle and by slowly shrinking the number of contests that must be won. Success will come not from luck, but by being smarter, better-organized, better-funded and more strategic than the competition. The whole thing works in a virtuous circle (or a vicious one, if you're a Democrat). So far, they've been incredibly successful.

Here's how Republican strategists see things -- or at least, how I think they see things:

First, the House. Most Democrats now recognize that they are unlikely to win back the House before 2010. The GOP used its control of most statehouses at the end of the 1990s to gerrymander the current House majority into place. If the overtime redistricting attempts in Colorado and Texas are struck down, the Democrats have a marginal shot at winning the House, but only that. If those attempts survive, forget about it.

How about the Senate? The Senate is naturally gerrymandered for GOP control, at least under the current geographical distribution of the parties. The Democratic senators control a minority of the chamber even while representing a strong majority of the U.S. population. They may get it back once in awhile, but probably not in 2004, and maybe not in 2006, either. This week, John Breaux became the fifth Democratic senator from the South to announce he will be relinquishing his seat. Odds are these Democrats will be replaced by Republicans, making recapturing the majority an uphill slog.

How about the White House? The presidency is a wild card. But the smart Republicans don't expect to keep it year in and year out. They do expect, however, that with the GOP in control of Congress, no Democratic president will be able to do much in the way of big reforms. While GOP presidents and the Republican Congress will continue to spend like drunken sailors to both buy off new constituencies and reward their business base, the occasional Democratic president will try and clean up the resulting messes, balancing the budget and trimming spending, which makes Wall Street and a lot of voters happy -- a by no means unimportant accomplishment -- but doesn't really buy you an enduring political coalition, as Bill Clinton discovered after he left office.

Personally, if I were a Democratic strategist, I'd be bummed. But the floor is open to our readers and fellow bloggers. This is a discussion worth having.

--Nick Confessore

EXACTLY. Finally, a sensible article about media "bias." Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Karen Heller nicely filets various critiques of the SCLM, as Eric Alterman likes to call it. She writes:

Let's get this clear: The media are about as organized as the Balkans. The only thing we agree on is free drinks.

We don't even agree on who's deemed "the media," which include ad execs on fat expense accounts, Diane Sawyer, Don Imus, Chris Matthews, and me.

No matter how much I complain, management has yet to provide me with a stylist. Travel budgets have been so skimpy at times that I may be the only journalist who has ever begged to be sent to Albany for a story.

Objectivity is an illusory concept. We try to be objective -- OK, most of us try -- but come with baggage collected since birth. One of the many marvelous things about children is that, for a while, you can program them so that they agree with almost everything you think, your own little Greek chorus of approbation.

Ask most people who shaped their politics, and they'll say their parents. Children are wise enough to agree with our insight and common sense, or they run screaming in the opposite direction. Once a person's political agenda is set, it's often carved in stone. People who listen to Rush Limbaugh already agree with him, or have serious masochistic tendencies.

Progress Media wants to give liberals equal airtime to rant and rave, to combat Rush, O'Reilly and Ann Coulter. It hopes to acquire stations in five of the nation's largest media markets, including Philadelphia.

Conservatives don't like this. Rush thinks there are too many liberals as it is, though none are in political power. Success and the inability to criticize Bill Clinton have made Rush and his fans very, very paranoid.

"Please! On TV you own C-Span, PBS, C-Span 2, CNN, ABC, CNNfn, CBS, MSNBC, CNN Headline News, NBC, CNBC, CNN Headline News, NBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, Lifetime, Oxygen, etc.," Limbaugh wrote on his Web site, forgetting to include E! and the Golf Channel.

That's exactly what I said the other night to Wolf Blitzer, Michael Bloomberg, and those cutups from Antiques Roadshow over a nice vegetable frittata while discussing our plan for global domination.

If journalists are too liberal, it's had no effect on organized politics. The presidency and both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia might as well have two seats on the Supreme Court, so seldom does Clarence Thomas, his acolyte for life, disagree with his decisions.

Despite candidates' pleasure when they snare one, newspaper endorsements have little role in determining the outcome of most elections. They're not the kiss of death, just lukewarm handshakes met with apathy.

Pithy and right. From her mouth to Rush Limbaugh's ears.

--Nick Confessore

TRAIL MIX: CRIBBING FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES. I'm sure Joe Lieberman's speechwriters thought they were being original when they scripted a passage in Lieberman's latest Dean-bashing speech, given yesterday in New Hampshire, where he said: "Dr. Dean has become Dr. No." Now, I like a good Ian Fleming reference as much as the next girl, but it was the New York Times' Matt Bai who first tossed that particular moniker into the soup in his June 1 Times magazine piece "Dr. No and the Yes Men." And when it came to the "Yes Men," Lieberman, of course, was Exhibit A.

Actually, the article holds up surprisingly well almost six months later. Though I do wonder if people are still as angry as they were earlier in the year -- there was a freshness about such sentiments last spring and summer, as if people were themselves surprised to be feeling as they did, and thus grateful to find anyone who agreed with them. Emotions seem a little more settled -- or perhaps hardened -- now. In any event, here's Bai's closing:

In this first campaign of the post-Clinton era, the coalition of interests the former president so deftly managed to patch together is on the verge of spinning apart. Democratic voters are venting more than a decade's worth of pent-up hostility, and at least one poll shows they don't think they're going to win anyway. In Dean, they see someone who will at least go down fighting and give voice to their dissent. Against that backdrop, touting your electability -- because you're a war hero or a Southerner or a social conservative -- might turn out to be the worst argument a candidate can make. When Jimmy Carter went South to campaign in 1976, fending off a challenge from Jerry Brown, he used a brilliant slogan to remind Democrats of what was at stake: "Don't send them a message. Send them a president." If Dean's campaign feels as if it's only about sending an angry message, he has a problem. If the other Democrats can't hear the anger, so do they.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

THE ESTABLISHMENT STRIKES BACK, SORTA. According to this story in The Guardian, the money for those anti-Howard Dean ads came from a group of unions that have endorsed Richard Gephardt for president. They include the International Association of Machinists, Laborers International Union of North America and the Ironworkers Union. (The guys in charge of the 527 which ran the ad also have ties to Gephardt, who himself insists he has no connection to the group.) According to the article, one of the unions in question, the machinists, were ticked off at how cutting the ad was and asked the 527 to pull it.

What's interesting is that this is the first -- and so far only -- attempt establishment Democrats have made to really halt Dean's march to the nomination. The entirety of the stop-Dean movement to this date has been a couple of critical memos from the Democratic Leadership Council and an unending progression of anonymous quotes in the press from a) other campaigns, and b) consultants working for those campaigns or not working for Dean. In other words, not much.

I think the ads will probably backfire to a large extent -- indeed, judging from the machinists' reaction, they already have. These guys are smart. They may have endorsed Gephardt, but they don't want to slime someone who is the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. And this can only exacerbate the continuing tensions between the industrial and trades unions and the service unions.

--Nick Confessore

TRAIL MIX: The Edwards Mystery. Presidential historian David Greenberg has an interesting review of Sen. John Edwards' book Four Trails coming out in the January-February issue of Legal Affairs magazine that proposes a novel answer to the ever-intriguing question of why the Edwards campaign failed to catch fire. It's not online yet, but here's the relevant excerpt, which seems particularly insightful in light of Edwards' "In Defense of Optimism" speech last week:

[Edwards'] ascent may have been hard, but he has made it look too easy. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, in different ways, inspired people in part because they conveyed a sense of carrying with them -- of having been fueled by -- a sense of victimization or struggle. For all the obstacles he's overcome, Edwards admits to never having questioned the essential happiness of his life until his son's death. Even now, he shows no outward signs of having developed a tragic outlook. The power to inspire comes not from simple optimism and amiability but from an appreciation of how to live with tragedy. . . .

The importance Edwards places on "credibility" goes to the heart of his troubles on the campaign trail. He deserves praise for wanting voters to see him as straightforward. But credibility is not the same thing as honesty; it's the appearance of honesty. In his 1961 book The Image, historian Daniel Boorstin lamented a culture in which reality already seemed to be giving way to illusion. Among the cultural shifts Boorstin noted were that celebrities were replacing heroes, that personality was being vaunted over character -- and that "credibility" had come to supercede truth . . . In our post-modern times, credibility, and not actual commitment, has become the rallying cry of those who happily skate on the surface of things, of those who are concerned above all with public impressions.

When Edwards said that his working class background gave him credibility, he was pre-emptively raising the question of how electable he is. He was arguing that he could challenge Bush on issues of fairness and corporate power in ways that his rivals couldn't. But raising the issue of electability that early in a campaign was not just a bit gauche, it was also self-defeating. Advertising your own credibility has the effect of dissipating it. The quality derives its power from being quietly noted by others, not yourself.

This is spot-on and helps explain why the candidate who first declared himself as representative of the "electable wing of the Democratic Party" -- Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) -- saw his campaign flop so badly that he became the first candidate to drop out of the race. And it also helps reconcile the fact that Sen. Joe Lieberman's (D-Conn.) claims that he is a forward-looking visionary running on a broadly-appealing message, while at the same time he has made the most unfavorable impression on voters in New Hampshire of any candidate besides the Rev. Al Sharpton.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

TRYING SADDAM. The Washington Post runs down some interesting developments in the movement to put Saddam Hussein on trial:

Currently, the only thing the tribunal has is a building in a highly fortified part of Baghdad near the occupation authority headquarters. Even so, political leaders and others involved with the tribunal have started to map out prosecution strategies. "For someone like Saddam Hussein, we clearly need to think through how we approach the case," Salem Chalabi said. "We don't want to try him for every offense, because that could take years."

In building a case for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, Chalabi said, prosecutors likely would focus on only about a dozen of the most significant atrocities committed while Hussein was president. To satisfy various political constituencies, the cases would involve victims from the country's major ethnic and religious groups.

Now I'd sort of like to know how Salem Chalabi (that's Ahmed's nephew) went so quickly from being a lobbyist for would-be contractors in Iraq to leading a war crimes tribunal, but let's leave that aside for a moment. While Chalabi's indicating that the need to limit the scope of the charges is driven by considerations of time, I think there may be rather more going on here. The sad fact of the matter is that several western powers, including both the United States and France, were involved at various points in time in building up Saddam's military power. Not only that, but such current bigshots as French president Jacques Chirac and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were personally involved in these goings-on in their former jobs as prime minister and special envoy, respectively.

Rumsfeld would probably rather not organize a trial in such a way as to lead to a lengthy public airing of his role in all of this. Some France-bashers out there have suggested that an airing of Chirac's dirty laundry is exactly what the United States needs right now, but with James Baker busy at the moment begging France to forgive Iraq's debts, I think helping him out could look like an attractive option, too.

Taking either of these steps, however, would be a serious mistake. The fact that the Reagan-era United States was supporting Saddam does not, in fact, remove Saddam's culpability or eliminate the moral rationale for trying to build a new, better regime in Baghdad. At the same time, a full airing of Saddam's record will be important in establishing confidence in the integrity of the new administration and in helping the Iraqi people move beyond the horrors they've endured. Hiding embarrassing facts -- either by unduly restricting the charges or restricting Saddam's ability to mount a defense -- probably looks like a tempting option, but it's a temptation officials should be under pressure to resist.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHY NOT BOTH? David Brooks' column panning Howard Dean's foreign policy address contains at least a grain of truth. I do wish, both as a matter of policy and of politics, that Dean had done a bit more moralizing about the evils of terrorism and the necessity of defeating America's enemies. That said, I think Brooks has erected a false dichotomy here. The fact that terrorism is evil and the United States is good doesn't change the fact that we're more in need of good policy than of bombast. Dean's various points about the administration's neglect of homeland security and of programs like Nunn-Lugar -- designed to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists -- are all perfectly correct.

I'm quite aware that the stuff Dean spent most of his time talking about is rather boring, but the fact that policy details are dry and dull is no reason not to get them right. Personally, I'm quite confident that Dean thinks Osama bin Laden is a bad guy, but I was concerned as to whether or not he really had a handle on the details of national-security policy, and this speech did a lot to alleviate that concern on my part.

As a political matter, however, I think more people see things the way Brooks does than the way I do. One of the reasons I've been thinking Dean stands a better chance in the general election than many observers seem to think is that I thought his "angry man" persona would serve him well in countering the perception that Democrats are "too weak" to defend the country. No one else in the primary field serves up bombast (albeit anti-Bush bombast) quite like Dean, and since it seems to be bombast about terrorism the American people want, I've been hoping Dean would give it to them.

Yesterday, though, the impassioned Howard Dean seems to have vanished in favor of an earnest policy wonk. There's no reason, however, why the country couldn't have both -- a president who understands the challenges facing the country both in dramatic moral terms and in rather dry technical ones. Dean did a pretty good job on the latter front, but in order to win an election, he needs to master the former as well.

--Matthew Yglesias

VALUE MEAL? It turns out that that Halliburton is not only charging U.S. taxpayers too much for gasoline -- they're also running filthy kitchens and serving American troops dirty food:

The Pentagon repeatedly warned contractor Halliburton-KBR that the food it served to US troops in Iraq was "dirty," as were as the kitchens it was served in, NBC News reported on Friday.

Halliburton-Kellogg Brown and Root's promises to improve "have not been followed through," according to a Pentagon report that warned "serious repercussions may result" if the contractor did not clean up.

The Pentagon reported finding "blood all over the floor," "dirty pans," "dirty grills," "dirty salad bars" and "rotting meats ... and vegetables" in four of the military messes the company operates in Iraq, NBC said, citing Pentagon documents.

Lovely. It's not enough to give Dick Cheney's old firm no-bid contracts on Iraq work. They have to screw us on the service, too. Don't our troops deserve better than this?

--Nick Confessore

FUSION FOLLIES. To add a little to Nick Confessore's skepticism regarding Everett Ehrlich's prediction that the religious right will form a third party that "[l]ike the Conservative Party in New York state . . . will usually endorse Republican candidates," it seems relevant to note that this practice (known as "fusion") is only legal in 10 states. Since it's clearly not in the interests of the two major parties to permit fusion tickets, which make it much easier to build third parties, it's very hard to get these laws changed.

In New York, moreover, while the minor fusion parties once played a fairly significant role -- the Conservative Party has thrown a few elections to the Democrats, and moderate incumbent Jacob Javits ran on the centrist Liberal Party ticket following his defeat by Al D'Amato in the 1980 GOP primary, spoiling the Democrat's chances -- in recent years they have become little more than patronage operations, with the conservatives endorsing George Pataki in 2002 despite the governor's pre-campaign leftward lurch.

--Matthew Yglesias

GOD'S GIFT TO BUSH? While The New York Times' Adam Nagourney slyly insinuates with copious use of conditional verbs that Saddam Hussein's capture has assured George W. Bush's second inauguration, David Frum comes right out and says that "it's becoming increasingy difficult to doubt that God wants President Bush re-elected."

For its part, The Washington Post eschewed uninformed speculation and conducted a poll in which 95 percent of respondents had heard the news. Bush has gained 10 points on the "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?" question, and his overall approval rating has gone up four points. On the question of whether the war on terrorism is going well, Bush is up three, and on the issue of whether the war was worth fighting, he's up an underwhelming one point. As far as bumps go, this is not a very big deal, though obviously if the capture leads to a drastic improvement in the situation in Iraq, Bush will be in very good shape.

To make a long story short, very little has actually changed politically, despite the Post's assertion that Saddam's "dramatic arrest provides a major political boost for President Bush and considerably complicates the task for the Democrats who have argued that Bush's foreign policy needs a significant overhaul." That's as it should be -- after all, it's not as if anyone opposed the war because they thought the United States was incapable of capturing Saddam. Similarly, all the key pro-war arguments were about the benefits of removing him from power, not actually capturing him. It's obviously better not to have him at large, but the fact that we've nabbed him doesn't change the merits of the arguments either way.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE NEXT DEMOCRATIC PARTY? If you didn't catch this op-ed by Everett Ehrlich in Sunday's Washington Post, it's definitely a must-read. It's a fasincating argument for why Howard Dean's candidacy may augur the final death of the political parties:

To an economist, the "trick" of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to [economist Ronald] Coase's theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that's why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones.

For all Dean's talk about wanting to represent the truly "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the paradox is that he is essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party. Other candidates -- John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value, as part of his marketing strategy. Perhaps that's why former vice president Al Gore's endorsement of Dean last week felt so strange -- less like the traditional benediction of a fellow member of the party "club" than a senior executive welcoming the successful leveraged buyout specialist. And if Dean can do it this time around, so can others in future campaigns.

Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network and a booster of Dean's Internet-based campaign organizing, if not Dean himself, has more thoughts here. Rosenberg's enthusiasm is shared by a lot of other Democratic insiders I've spoken with during the last week or so for an article in progress. Even many people who aren't convinced Dean can beat President Bush in 2004 believe Dean's primary campaign will change the way the Democratic Party itself is organized and structured, and I think they're right. Combine the Dean campaign with the rise of 527s and McCain-Feingold's ban on party-raised soft money, and you're looking at the future of politics.

The only thing I don't agree with in Ehrlich's piece is his belief that Internet technologies, by bringing down the cost of organizing a political party, will lead to a boost in third-party candidacies. He writes:

Here are some predictions. First, if Dean loses the nomination, he will preserve his organizational advantage and reemerge as a third-party force four years from now. He has done with technology what Ross Perot could not do with money alone. Second, the evangelical right will become a separate political party in the near future, and will hold its own conventions and primaries. Like the Conservative Party in New York state, it will usually endorse Republican candidates. But evangelicals will use their inherent party-ness to make the Republican candidate stand in front of them and give a separate acceptance speech. And finally, in the next six or eight presidential elections, a third-party candidate will win the presidency. Issues -- most likely the coming fiscal debacle and the inescapable abrogation of promises made on Social Security and Medicare -- will give the third-party candidate an opening. But technology will give him, or her, the means.

I am doubtful that Dean will split away to form a third party. He's not a spoiler, and while he can come off as arrogant, he appears to lack the moral vanity of a Ralph Nader. I am even more certain that the religious right will remain well-integrated with the Republican Party. Religious conservatives are among Bush's staunchest backers. He has delivered for them on key issues and, more importantly, he has won their trust. They have little incentive to split off or disrupt their position in the GOP.

--Nick Confessore

A POST-SADDAM IRAQ. Watching the television footage yesterday of a bearded, bedraggled Saddam Hussein being hauled out of his hiding hole, I had a lot of hope that this symbolic victory would have pronounced and practical effects. One of the things I took away from George Packer's widely read New Yorker article on Iraq was the extent to which the psychology of ordinary Iraqis is still dominated by the societal habits and memories of the Saddam years. Not being an Iraqi, I don't really know what his capture truly means to those who lived under his tyranny. But I hope it means something to them -- that it demolishes the mythology of his omnipotence and capacity to hurt them.

How much will this change the situation in Iraq? Hopefully, it will improve it. As Fred Kaplan puts it, elegantly, in his Slate piece:

If any Iraqis still regarded him as an unconquerable god, they must have been severely shaken by the televised images of their erstwhile leader-for-life -- the king of kings who was obsessed with cleanliness, refusing even to be touched -- looking like a street bum, having his throat probed and his hair poked for lice.

Whoever the insurgents are, whatever their goals or allegiances, they have been abetted by the fear of ordinary Iraqis that the Americans might be driven out, that Saddam might return to power, and that he would punish those who helped the occupiers in his absence.

They have been completely reasonable in this fear. Saddam has been the dominating force in their lives for 30 years, surviving every assault.

Now he is definitively gone. The foundation of fear is shattered. The fear itself will soon evaporate. The insurgents are still there, raising frightening mayhem, but they stand for nothing larger than themselves. The ordinary people, who have been sitting on the sidelines, watching which way the wind blows, may now no longer tolerate -- may no longer feel a need to tolerate -- the armed rebels in their midst. They may be more willing -- less afraid -- to cooperate with the Americans in rooting out the bad guys.

But as Kaplan notes, capturing Saddam won't create jobs, restore electricity or repair oil refineries. So much hard work remains to be done. Let's hope our leaders have sense and determination enough to finish the job.

--Nick Confessore

HOW IMPORTANT WAS SADDAM? Now that Saddam Hussein's been captured, the obvious question to ask is how helpful this will be to the nation's efforts in Iraq. This, in turn, raises the question of what kind of role he was playing in the ongoing resistance. No one knows for sure at this point, but Seymour Hersh's latest reporting in The New Yorker (written before the capture) leads me to doubt that Saddam's role was particularly central:

During an interview in Washington, a senior Arab diplomat noted, "We do not believe that the resistance is loyal to Saddam. Yes, the Baathists have reorganized, not for political reasons but because of the terrible decisions made by Jerry Bremer" -- the director of the CPA. "The Iraqis really want to make you pay the price," the diplomat said. "Killing Saddam will not end it."

Similarly, a Middle Eastern businessman who has advised senior Bush Administration officials told me that the reorganized Baath Party is "extremely active, working underground with permanent internal communiocations. And without Saddam." Baath Party leaders, he added, expect Saddam to issue a public statement of self-criticism, "telling of his mistakes and his excesses," including his reliance on his sons.

There is disagreement, inevitably, on the extent of Baathist control. The former Israeli military-intelligence office said, "Most of the firepower comes from the Baathists, and they know where the weapons are kept. But many of the shooters are ethnic and tribal. Iraq is very factionalized right now, and within the Sunni community factionalism goes deep." He added, "unless you settle this, any effort at reconstruction in the center is hopeless."

A more realistic sign that these events could turn the corner comes less from the fact of Saddam's capture than from the reason it happened: intelligence from within his own clan. If that signals a continuing trend toward better intelligence-sharing between U.S. forces and local Iraqis, then things really are looking up. Saddam's absence, in addition, may make Iraqis more inclined to cooperate with the United States, as they no longer have reason to fear his return to power. On the other hand, as Juan Cole points out, the same dynamic may lead other Iraqis to become less cooperative:

My wife, Shahin Cole, suggested to me an ironic possibility with regard to the Shiites. She said that many Shiites in East Baghdad, Basra, and elsewhere may have been timid about opposing the US presence, because they feared the return of Saddam. Saddam was in their nightmares, and the reprisals of the Fedayee Saddam are still a factor in Iraqi politics. Now that it is perfectly clear that he is finished, she suggested, the Shiites may be emboldened. Those who dislike US policies or who are opposed to the idea of occupation no longer need be apprehensive that the US will suddenly leave and allow Saddam to come back to power. They may therefore now gradually throw off their political timidity, and come out more forcefully into the streets when they disagree with the US. As with many of her insights, this one seems to me likely correct.

This last point reminds us that while capturing Saddam and defeating the insurgency are both good and necessary, they are not really the goals of American policy in Iraq. Building a new, democratic state in an ethnically and religiously fragmented country remains a huge challenge, even with Saddam's capture.

--Matthew Yglesias

WEEKEND UPDATE. Holiday office parties distract you from the news? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• David Brooks. The real problem with the president is that he doesn't lie enough -- plus, bonus dig at Al Gore.
• Nicholas Kristof. Since the Chinese now drink all kinds of coffee, demands for political freedom can't be far behind.
• Thomas Friedman. Bush has no plan for Iraq, "and that really bothers me," which I probably should have thought of before the war.
• Jim Hoagland. Bush's betrayal of Taiwan last week was part of a brilliant secret plan to help the Taiwanese out, and I've also got a bridge you might be interested in buying.
• George Will. Things are all messed up in Russia and Northern Ireland, so they'll probably be messed up in Iraq, too.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• Atiq Sarwari and Robert Crews in the Los Angeles Times warn of the dangers in Afghanistan's new, centralizing constitution.

The Shows

• Fox News Sunday. John Kerry trims his sails and takes a more hawkish tack in the wake of Saddam Hussein's capture.
• Meet The Press. Watch Joe Lieberman gloat as he hopes the news from Iraq will save him from Howard Dean.

--Matthew Yglesias

SYSTEM DOWN. The Supreme Court's decision to uphold McCain-Feingold may have provided an appparent victory for advocates of campaign-finance reform, but, as Yale Law School professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres point out today at TAP Online, it's not much to get excited about. By raising the limits on hard money contributions, McCain-Feingold has helped to wreck our current model of publicly financing campaigns, providing candidates such as Howard Dean, John Kerry and George W. Bush with an even greater incentive to opt out of the system.

What will it take to fix this mess? Ackerman and Ayres offer a dramatic, and intriguing, proposal.

--TAP Online

THE SURE LOSER? New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes the following:

One of the reasons Dr. Dean is doing so much better at this point than his primary opponents has been his combativeness, his willingness to attack and bluntly confront President Bush and his policies.

"Our leaders have developed a vocabulary which has become meaningless to the American people," he said in his announcement speech in June. "There is no greater example of this than a self-described conservative Republican president who creates the greatest deficits in the history of America. Or a president who boasts of a Clear Skies Initiative which allows far more pollution into our air. Or a president who co-opts from an advocacy organization the phrase 'No Child Left Behind,' while paying for irresponsible tax cuts by cutting children's health care."

I don't know if Howard Dean would be able to beat George Bush. But those who are dismissing him as a sure loser should give us the name of the candidate who is so obviously more competitive. Is it Senator Lieberman? I'd like to see the odds out of Vegas if he were to go against President Bush head to head.

What about John Kerry? He might make a good president but, frankly, he looks lost in the maze of primaries. General Clark? John Edwards?

Any Democrat will be a long shot next year. Without an infusion of new voters (young people, white working families, Hispanics and women) and another huge turnout by African-Americans, the Democrats are doomed.

The strongest ticket might be Dean-Clark. But the Democrats need more than a candidate or two. The party needs a plan. It needs a coherent, compelling, convincing narrative that shows how voters and the nation would be better off under Dr. Dean or General Clark or Dick Gephardt -- take your pick -- than they are now.

I think Herbert's got it right that the Democrats need a plan. It's obvious when observing the two parties at work that the Republicans have a governing narrative and the Democrats don't. But it got me thinking about a conversation I had yesterday with a top Democratic lobbyist and former White House staffer. The person in question was not contemptuous of Dean, although skeptical, and expressed some excitement about the positive energy unleashed by Dean's campaign. But for this Democrat, the nomination race boiled down to one very simple question: What state that George W. Bush won last year does Dean have a better chance than the other candidates of winning next year?

Believe it or not, this issue is what it comes down to for most of Washington's Dean skeptics. And for good reason. You hear a lot of talk about Dean getting Democrats excited and motivating new people. But finding new ways to energize affluent white liberals is not exactly the party's most pressing conundrum at the moment. In the short term, what the Democrats need to win is 270 electoral votes. Winning by higher margins in New York and California and other Democratic strongholds won't do the trick.

Joe Trippi has a plan to win the Democratic primary, and it is working splendidly. So what is his plan to win Arizona, Missouri or Ohio? And why is Dean better-positioned to win those states than Dick Gephardt, Wes Clark or John Kerry?

--Nick Confessore

DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING. So you're telling me that a company that was awarded no-bid contracts on reconstruction may now be overcharging American taxpayers? I guess you just can't trust anyone anymore.

Good thing we can count on the Pentagon's inspectors-general to catch these things down the road. Oh, wait -- my bad.

--Nick Confessore

THE FORGOTTEN DEMOCRACY AGENDA. In a November speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, the president appeared to have finally settled on a case for war in Iraq -- it's all about ending tyranny in the Islamic world:

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo. (Applause.)

Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace. (Applause.)

As I said at the time, however, speeches are one thing; actual policies are another. Take a look at yesterday's post by Hesiod on the atrocious human rights situation in Uzbekistan and the administration's continued support for dictator Islam Karimov. Also note Husain Haqqani's column from the same day regarding American support for the autocratic government of Pakistan:

The Bush administration's willingness to look the other way over a range of issues, from non-proliferation to support for regional Islamic militants to lack of progress toward democracy, in return for limited support from Pakistan's military regime will aggravate its problems in Afghanistan. The rise of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban was blowback from U.S. support of the anti-Soviet Jihad in the 1980s, waged in Afghanistan with Pakistan as its staging ground. Just wait for the blowback from the current U.S. engagement in that region.

Bush's speech was widely praised on the right, but I've heard almost no comment on the lack of actual policy followup. Nor, for that matter, do any of the converts to human-rights activism on the right have much to say about the appointment of uber-realist and good friend of Saudi Arabia James Baker to a potentially important role in the future of Iraq. Talking a good game is easy, but those who quite rightly found the president's sentiments compelling ought to take note of how little impact those sentiments are having in the real world.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEYOND RED AND BLUE. Robert David Sullivan of CommonWealth magazine has come up with an interesting map and accompanying discussion that try to improve on the Red America versus Blue America dichotomy by introducing a 10-region scheme. This companion article also suggests that the geographical background of the presidential candidates is becoming less important in determining which way the various regions will vote on Election Day.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE RIGHT TO KNOW. Over at TNR Primary, Clay Risen slams John Kerry for his embrace of a "Call Center Consumer's Right to Know" bill that would require call center workers to identify themselves and their locations at the beginning of each call:

The stated intention of Kerry's plan may be simply to help consumers make "informed choices" about their call-center usage (whatever that means), but the practical implications are obvious and odious. As the National Foundation for American Policy notes in a recent study of anti-offshoring legislation, "[The bill] assumes that if Americans discovered they were speaking to foreigners they would either hang up the telephone or protest in another manner." The bill, in fact, does nothing to protect, let alone produce, jobs; all it does is foment an already strong wave of anti-foreign labor sentiment. But hey, there's nothing like a little reactionary nativism to kick off the holiday season.

It certainly is true that insofar as this bill (and similar proposals in New Jersey and elsewhere) is supposed to protect American jobs, it would do so on the assumption that consumers don't want to deal with foreigners on the telephone. But that's an assumption that Kerry seems to share with the very companies doing the outsourcing. Take, for example, this article summarizing a fascinating Australian documentary called Diverted to Delhi:

An element of deceit comes with the job. Operators masquerade as American, Australian or British to mask their true location. They pretend to be much closer to their callers than they really are, geographically and culturally. Operators adopt an anglicised name and download the local weather and news details so they can make polite chit-chat.

Courses are provided to prepare graduates for call centre jobs. The documentary shows students at one training school being familiarised with all things Australian, including the accent, cultural highlights (The Castle!) and geography. In one scene, the class is taught how to say Bondi with an Australian accent (rhyming with "eye" rather than "ee"), although a picture of the Gold Coast is shown.

Stitt says the workers "virtually become actors [who] play a role". The impact of masking their Indian-ness is hard to assess, although Stitt believes some workers "are quite naive about what's happening to them and what they have to do to get a job".

I think there's a real liberal dilemma here -- I'm not comfortable with letting corporations lie to their customers, but I'm not thrilled about the idea of empowering consumers to indulge their racial prejudices either. It's also relevant to note that racism is one factor driving companies toward the offshoring of call center work. Those who run many call centers feel it would be bad for business to hire agents who speak with typical African-American or Latino accents, but U.S. law prohibits them from engaging in racially discriminatory hiring practices.

Were they to instruct their African-American and Latino employees that they need to learn to talk like white people, however, they would attract all kinds of bad publicity. As a result, companies locate these operations either in areas of the country (like the plains states) where the population is overwhelmingly white, or else move them abroad, where instructing Indians to adopt American (or British or Australian) accents raises less notice. I could go on and on, as I've got an article on the call center industry coming out in the forthcoming January issue of the Prospect, but you can read more about this there.

--Matthew Yglesias

PROGRESSIVE TAX REFORM. In the wake of my praise yesterday for Joe Lieberman's tax plan, several correspondents from the Economic Policy Institute wrote in to draw my attention to the Progressive Tax Act of 2003 recently introduced by Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee and Bernie Sanders. In essence, it's a more ambitiously progressive variant of Lieberman's idea -- raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans while providing relief for those at the bottom, especially the rather large number of people whose tax burden consists primarily of payroll taxes.

To repeat yesterday's pitch, the other candidates for president ought to seriously consider getting behind something along these lines. Arguing for the simple repeal of the Bush tax cuts is walking into something of a trap where you'll be easily caricatured as a would-be tax raiser. Putting forward a serious progressive reform as an alternative to the administration's gift to the rich would be better politics and better policy.

-- Matthew Yglesias

PROGNOSIS? NEGATIVE. Looks like Josh Marshall (here) and I (here) aren't the only people who find it odd that columnist Charles Krauthammer goes around diagnosing liberals with various mental disorders. Here's a fellow psychiatrist slamming Krauthammer in The Washington Post.

--Nick Confessore

RIGHT HAND, MEET LEFT HAND. The lead of this New York Times article is really priceless.

President Bush found himself in the awkward position on Wednesday of calling the leaders of France, Germany and Russia to ask them to forgive Iraq's debts, just a day after the Pentagon said it was excluding those countries and others from $18 billion in American-financed Iraqi reconstruction projects.

White House officials were fuming about the timing and the tone of the Pentagon's directive, even while conceding that they had approved the Pentagon policy of limiting contracts to 63 countries that have given the United States political or military aid in Iraq.

What was that about Republican competence?

--Nick Confessore

DRUG DEAL. Today's edition of the Progress Report has a pretty juicy scoop. It concerns the connections between President Bush, pharmaceutical benefit management (PBM) companies, various lawsuits and the like. Definitely check it out.

--Nick Confessore

CRY, CRY, CRY. Does Al Gore owe Joe Lieberman an apology for his decision to endorse Howard Dean? Today at TAP Online, Michael Tomasky says: No way.

--TAP Online

WHEN WORDS LOSE MEANING. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund isn't happy with Sandra Day O'Connor:

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor more or less completed her ideological journey toward judicial activism yesterday when she cast the deciding vote upholding the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign speech. Proponents of judicial restraint who were leery of her when Ronald Reagn appointed her in 1981 acknowledge that even they didn't expect her to come under the sway of elite opinion as much as she has.

I'm unenthusiastic about the substance of McCain-Feingold and pretty ignorant about the legal issues, but this is a pretty absurd argument. I mean, don't you hate it when those damn activist judges fail to exercise "judicial restraint" and trample on the will of the people by, um, not striking down laws passed by Congress? It seems to me that Fund's gotten things a bit backwards. It would be nice to have a serious debate in this country about the future of the judiciary instead of this sort of nonsensical name-calling.

--Matthew Yglesias

IS THE GRASS(ROOTS) GREENER? Articles about grassroots organizing in the liberal press are often too self-indulgent or wishful. But TAP Online contributor Chris Hayes' piece in In These Times is actually quite good. If you've been trying and failing to follow the development of the post McCain-Feingold activist groups on the left, this will help considerably. Here's the really interesting part:

Issue advocacy and voter contact in an election year is nothing new, but never before have progressive groups come together to coordinate their efforts, pool their resources and collectively execute the program. Although the organizational structure binding the half-dozen largest 527s is to a certain extent ad hoc, most of the groups are staffed by the same pool of veteran political organizers and headquartered in the same office building at 888 16th St. -- across the street from the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.

Each 527 has a specific geographic or demographic niche. America Coming Together, which with a projected budget of $98 million is the largest, is looking to register and educate Democratic-leaning voters in 17 battleground states. Partnership for America’s Families is focusing on registering minority voters in swing state urban centers like Cleveland and St. Louis. And Voices for Working Families is working on registering and contacting black, Latino and women voters in other hotly contested areas such as Dade and Broward counties in Florida.

Alongside groups that will manage and execute the field operations are a few 527s, like America Votes, dedicated solely to coordinating these efforts.

"We want to make sure everyone isn’t knocking over each other in the same neighborhoods," Richards says. "It’s a big country and there are a lot of voters."

Nearly all 20 organizations within the America Votes coalition routinely meet to share ideas and strategies. Richards says that groups with more experience, such as organized labor, have been mentoring units newer to the field: "It's an opportunity for those who are established to work with groups that are newer, that have more flexibility."

This is significant on many levels. In the first place, it indicates that the institutional Democratic Party is practically dead; money and energy have flowed to the profusion of interlocking 527s, for good or for ill. (If Harold Meyerson is right, the party apparatus might be revived down the road. But for now it's not very important.) A second issue is that this fracturing splinters the message even more, although it's worth noting that the 527s seem well-coordinated and at any rate are focusing mostly on reconstituting the grassroots base of the party -- a long-term project that will pay the Democrats dividends down the road, even if it costs them coherence in the short-term.

I think what's most important here, though, isn't the power balance within the party, but the broader shift in how the Democrats are organizing themselves. Ever since the 1980s, most of the activist groups now participating in the 527s have been what Theda Skocpol calls "associations without members" -- centralized, Washington-based groups run by professionals, with little or now active involvement by the putative membership. This has had profound consequences both for the health of civic America and the vitality of the Democratic Party:

Half a century later, the 1990s health security episode played out in a transformed civic universe dominated by advocacy groups, pollsters, and big-money media campaigns. Top-heavy advocacy groups did not mobilize mass support for a sensible reform plan. Hundreds of business and professional groups influenced the Clinton administration's complex policy schemes, and then used a combination of congressional lobbying and media campaigns to block new legislation. Both the artificial polarization and the elitism of today's organized civic universe may help to explain why increasing numbers of Americans are turned off by and pulling back from public life. Large majorities say that wealthy "special interests" dominate the federal government, and many Americans express cynicism about the chances for regular people to make a difference. People may be entertained by advocacy clashes on television, but they are also ignoring many public debates and withdrawing into privatism. Voting less and less, American citizens increasingly act—and claim to feel -- like mere spectators in a polity where all the significant action seems to go on above their heads, with their views ignored by pundits and clashing partisans.

From the nineteenth through the mid–twentieth century, American democracy flourished within a unique matrix of state and society. Not only was America the world's first manhood democracy and the first nation in the world to establish mass public education. It also had a uniquely balanced civic life, in which markets expanded but could not subsume civil society, in which governments at multiple levels deliberately and indirectly encouraged federated voluntary associations. National elites had to pay attention to the values and interests of millions of ordinary Americans.

Over the past third of a century, the old civic Amer ica has been bypassed and shoved to the side by a gaggle of professionally dominated advocacy groups and nonprofit institutions rarely attached to memberships worthy of the name. Ideals of shared citizenship and possibilities for democratic leverage have been compromised in the process. Since the 1960s, many good things have happened in America. New voices are now heard, and there have been invaluable gains in equality and liberty. But vital links in the nation's associational life have frayed, and we may need to find creative ways to repair those links if America is to avoid becoming a country of detached spectators. There is no going back to the civic world we have lost. But we Americans can and should look for ways to recreate the best of our civic past in new forms suited to a renewed democratic future.

In a sense, the 527 structure may be turning those "associations without members" into associations with members. Some people, of course, are very wary of activist groups getting even more power within the party. But I think they'll be surprised. As Skocpol points out, one of the reasons liberal activist groups are often so shrill and parochial is the very fact that they are disconnected from their memberships, which are usually less ideological or partisan than the professional leadership back in Washington. Change one aspect, and you may change the other.

--Nick Confessore

THE TAX PLAN TIME FORGOT. Last night's presidential debate provided Joe Lieberman with an opportunity to remind viewers about his tax plan, which, when you look at it, is very good:

First, he will keep in place the middle class tax cuts included in the Bush tax cuts some of which were included only because Democrats fought for them--such as the increase in the child tax credit and the elimination of the marriage penalty.

Second, to make the system better balanced, he will:

• Restructure the income tax brackets in a systematic way
• Reset the top two income tax rates that George W. Bush decreased
• Lower the middle two rates for middle class families
• Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income families
• Repeal the dividend tax cut that Bush pushed for
• Reform the estate tax that Bush repealed
• Eliminate wasteful corporate loopholes and subsidies that Bush has protected
• Add a special "recapture" bracket for the highest income taxpayers that will recoup the benefits of the lower rates.

This should provide a tax cut for the vast majority of Americans, while raising rates on the very rich sufficiently to generate additional revenue to begin closing the massive hole Bush has put in our budget. Liberals have a tendency to get all queasy when they hear the name "Lieberman," but this is arguably a more progressive proposal than anything the other candidates are putting forward. And it's better politics, too, than plans that can easily be caricatured as simple tax hikes because it avoids creating the impression that the sole goal of the Democratic Party is to try and turn back time, undoing every single initiative of the Bush administration.

Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt, in particular, have proposed simply repealing every aspect of the various Bush tax cuts, a policy that will allow the president to tar them with a desire to raise taxes on the middle class. The Lieberman campaign doesn't seem to be going anywhere, but if either Dean or Gephardt finds himself needing to revise his thinking on this score in order to better fight the general election, he should seriously consider stealing this idea.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW NOT TO RESTORE CONFIDENCE. Just as a heads-up to the gang at NRO, let me suggest that next time you want to run an article debunking claims of election irregularities in Florida, you should probably give the assignment to someone who doesn't apparently have a record of fraud. The person, of course, is John Lott whose sorry tale has been chronicled here before. Lott chronicler in chief Tim Lambert, meanwhile, is alleging that Lott created not one, but two fake online identities to defend his work and recommend his books.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT DEMOCRACY? The president's bold democracy promotion agenda doesn't seem to extend to East Asia, where we appear to be taking China's side in its dispute over whether or not Taiwan's democratically elected president should hold a democratic referendum on whether the country should declare independence from its fictional union with the mainland. As a strongly worded Washington Post editorial states:

Taiwan's democratically elected president, Chen Shui-bian, has been hinting that maybe his people should make a democratic choice about whether to unite with China or become independent. Beijing's Communist dictators have replied with bellicose threats to settle the matter by force, no matter the price. Yesterday President Bush essentially placed the United States on the side of the dictators who promise war, rather than the democrats whose threat is a ballot box. His gift to visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was to condemn "the comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan" while ignoring the sanguinary rhetoric of the man standing next to him. Mr. Bush had his reasons for doing so -- above all to avoid one more foreign policy crisis during an election year. But in avoiding a headache for himself, he demonstrated again how malleable is his commitment to the defense of freedom as a guiding principle of U.S. policy.

That seems about right. I was hoping to find some amusing conservative hypocrisy on this issue, but The Weekly Standard's come out with a pretty strong statement on the subject. When President Bush came out with his big National Endowment for Democracy speech several weeks ago, a lot of folks on the right complained that he wasn't getting enough credit for his stance. The reason he didn't get any credit, however, is that nothing in his policies -- before or after the speech, before or after the invasion of Iraq -- indicates that there's any real commitment to democracy promotion, except as an expedient ex post facto rationale for an Iraq policy that was originally sold to the public on other grounds.

--Matthew Yglesias

A LITTLE HELP FOR OUR FRIENDS. A memo sent out yesterday by Paul Wolfowitz indicating that only companies from the United States and 61 other designated "coalition partners" will be allowed to compete for contracts pertaining to the reconstruction of Iraq has provoked some predictable outrage -- including John Kerry's statement during last night's debate that he "can't think of anything dumber" and my colleage Nick Confessore's post below, in which he says the decision is "more like petulance than well-considered policy."

These seem like overstatements to me. A lot of the coverage of this issue, including The New York Times' headline ("Pentagon Bars Three Nations From Iraq Bids") spins this as simple retaliation against France, Germany and Russia. Insofar as that's accurate, it really is a bit petty and shortsighted. Another way of looking at it, however, is as a method of rewarding our various allies -- notably Japan and the United Kingdom -- who are cooperating with us in Iraq today. Those countries are led by governments that have taken considerable domestic political risks to come to the assistance of the United States, and doing a little something for them in return is probably a smart move.

It would be nice, of course, if we had a more broad-based coalition in Iraq so these kinds of trade-offs weren't an issue, but the fact is that we don't have a particularly broad-based coalition and so we need to work with the coalition that we've got, and do what we can to hold it together. If this contracting move can help us do that, I'm all for it.

--Matthew Yglesias

CONTRACT HIT. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has issued a directive forbidding French, German and Russian companies from competing for American-issued contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq.

So what's going on here? Talking Points Memo nicely lays out the contrast between the Wolfowitz efforts and those of new uber-envoy Jim Baker. It's the neocon-realist smackdown! Personally, I think the bidding should be as open and competitive as possible, so the American taxpayer (me!) gets the best value. It would be one thing if Wolfowitz wanted to restrict the bidding to American firms, which would at least mean that the money spent gets circulated back over here in some measure. But we're not doing that -- 60-odd other countries that did support the war in some way will be able to bid, although I don't see, say, Uzbekistan getting into the action. And the order does seem kind of pointless, given that firms from those allegedly banned countries will still be permitted to subcontract on rebuilding projects. So this seems more like petulance than well-considered policy.

--Nick Confessore

NOT TOO SHARP. Al Sharpton kicked off tonight's debate with a zinger, but the sleuths here at Tapped are disappointed to report that he was a little off-base: In his opening remarks, Sharpton criticized Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean, declaring that on his computer, "www.bossism.com" didn't work. Well, actually . . . www.bossism.com works fine on my computer. Take a look. Fantastic.

But on a more substantive note: Al also let us down when local New Hampshire reporter Scott Spradling tried to guilt him into admitting he had faltered by not spending enough time in the Granite State. Feebly, Sharpton responded that he had adequately reached out to the people of New Hampshire, and then he promptly changed the subject. A disappointing reply to an annoying question. Guess what, Scott? Last time I checked, the United States is a pretty big place. Sharpton has spent his time elsewhere, and he doesn't need to apologize for it.

And New Hampshire residents shouldn't whine so much; they're already too big for their snowpants.

--Ayelish McGarvey

NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME. It's not over yet, but it seems clear to me that the main loser in tonight's Democratic debate is Scott Spradling (of WMUR, an ABC affiliate in New Hampshire) -- he really should have written out his questions on note cards rather than embarrassing himself like this in front of a national audience.

-- Matthew Yglesias

527 411. TAP Online contributor Chris Hayes has the cover story in the newest issue of In These Times. The piece provides a nice overview of how 527s -- the political groups that have come into existence as a result of McCain-Feingold -- are changing progressive politics and how they could influence the 2004 election. Here's an excerpt, which quotes Cecile Richards, former chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi and current director of America Votes, a coalition of 24 progressive organizations:

The energy surrounding field efforts is palpable, and many veteran party activists and organizers who were critical of the ways in which the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act would end up handcuffing the Democrats now say that birth of the 527s has reinvigorated the party by moving money and manpower outside the Democratic National Committee and closer to activists. “There are some functions that historically the parties did that are going to fall to other organizations,” Richards says. “If you look at what labor has done—increasing their share of the vote and focusing their efforts on direct contact with union members in the workplace, in their homes, on the phones—they’ve really demonstrated the impact of direct contact. You don’t inherit a lot of the institutional baggage that anyone who runs the DNC or the state party has to deal with.”

Read the whole thing here.

--TAP Online

FEDERALISM FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE. Via Tacitus, I came across this very interesting article (from USA Today) on liberal activism by politicians at the state level:

A new era of activism by state governments has arrived. Unhappy with what's happening in Washington, governors, legislatures and state attorneys general are leading a charge to set the national agenda on issues from health care to pollution control to securities regulation.

The New York attorney general has been a leader in the investigation of Wall Street corruption. Northeastern states have sued the federal government over acid rain caused by air pollution generated in the South and Midwest. And many states are attacking high prescription-drug prices.

The new initiatives are largely liberal challenges to conservative policies adopted in Washington by the Republican-controlled Congress and White House. The activist states, mostly in the North and West, have the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and other institutions on the defensive in a way that threatens to undermine interest groups' political success in the nation's capital.

What's happened here is that conservative and business groups have achieved such a lock on the federal government apparatus -- courts, regulatory bodies, Congress and the White House -- that policies with popular support can't be easily enacted. So Democrats are taking action where they have power, at the state level. So of course, conservatives are unhappy. Here's the money bit:

"States are trying to pre-empt Congress on national issues, and it's quite dangerous," says Michael Greve, director of the federalism project at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes limited government.

Tacitus is right that this is pretty amazing. Especially since the state officials involved are not agitating for restrictions on the federal government's right to do things, as conservative federalists do here in Washington. They're simply taking action to improve life for residents of their states. So, naturally, the federalists are now complaining that states are usurping the rightful duties of the federal government.

--Nick Confessore

REPUBLICANS: STILL THE PARTY OF THE RICH. Michael Novak's entry into the continuing -- and continually tiresome -- effort to explain why the left "hates" George W. Bush partakes heartily of the faux populism that grows ever more popular on the right:

Did you know that the Democratic party in the U.S. relies more heavily upon large donations from millionaires for its finances than the Republicans? The Republican party takes in a much larger proportion of its funds from small and modest donations, because its backbone is formed by the small businessmen and "sole proprietors" (barbers, shopkeepers, plumbers, etc.) of the American heartland. The Democratic party gets its strength from the millionaires in the communications industry, Hollywood, and other new technological elites.

These underreported facts do not serve the mythology of the American Left. The Left imagines that it is the populist party. But most journalists, professors, and other commentators on public affairs are considerably to the left of the American people. And wealthier, and highly educated -- in short, privileged. The "voice" of the Democratic party seems much more like the glitzy people "uptown" and in Hollywood than like the workers and middle class of Midland, Texas.

This is doubtless a song and dance you've heard before. The Democrats are the party of "elites," while regular people vote Republican. It's true, of course, that people with advanced degrees support the Democrats, but the claim that the GOP is the party of ordinary folks only comes out true if you somehow exclude all the working class blacks, Latinos and women who support the Democrats.

Take a look at the latest Ipsos-Reid poll, and you'll see that support for the president's reelection correlates pretty highly with income. Fifty percent of people making over $75,000 say they will "definitely" vote for Bush in 2004, as compared to 43 percent of people in the $50,000-$75,000 range, 42 percent in the $25,000-$50,000 range and just 32 percent of those making under $25,000 (that adds up, by the way, to a total of 41 percent saying they'll definitely vote for Bush and 36 percent who'll definitely vote for someone else).

Indeed, the Republican leanings of the run-of-the-mill wealthy are the reason the Democrats are so financially dependent on a handful of super-rich people. Unable to offer rich people a decent return in the form of tax cuts in exchange for their $1,000 contributions, the Democrats need to appeal to the idealism of a few people who can afford to give a vast sum of money without putting a real crimp in their lifestyle. The promise of the Howard Dean campaign, however, is that it appears to have developed a fundraising model that's low-cost enough to make it worthwhile to collect large numbers of small contributions from people of more modest means. Could that be why the right hates him so much?

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON THE OMNIBUS BILL. An outrageous sop to the NRA wasn't the only bad thing that ended up in the omnibus appropriations bill, which passed the House yesterday. The bill was also loaded down with pork and egregious non-appropriations relating to overtime pay and media concentration, most of which were smuggled in by the leadership during the conference committee designed to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill -- despite the fact that there was no actual disagreement between the two chambers on those issues.

Democrats on the Hill may be given to crying foul about the impotence of being a minority party, especially in the House. But the trouble with this theory is that the Dems actually had the votes necessary to stop this bill. The absurdity of Bush's "big government conservatism" has provoked consistent, non-trivial, numbers of defections from serious House Republicans on the energy bill, on the Medicare bill and now on the omnibus bill, which saw 38 Republicans crossing the aisle to vote "no." The reason the bill passed, then, wasn't the iron discipline of Tom DeLay but the lack of discipline of the Democrats, who saw a whopping 58 defections.

The pattern goes way back to the first Bush tax cut, where two Senate Republicans -- Lincoln Chaffee and John McCain -- voted "no," only to be offset by 12 defecting Democrats. Then, a compromise resolution supported by Republican Richard Lugar that would have limited the president's discretionary authority to invade Iraq also could have passed the Senate, but it, too, was undermined by defecting Democrats. This has got to stop, but the fact that the one major legislative victory of this session -- stopping the energy bill in the Senate -- came on a vote where the party's leader defected shouldn't inspire a great deal of confidence that it will.

--Matthew Yglesias

GUN NUTS. The devil really is in the details of the $375-billion omnibus spending bill approved by the House yesterday. As NPR's Morning Edition reported yesterday, among the bill's less-noticed elements is a provision that would require the FBI to destroy gun-buyer background checks within 24 hours of a gun purchase. Currently, the FBI is allowed to keep the records for up to 90 days.

The NRA backs the bill, of course; so does Attorney General John Ashcroft, who first floated the proposal before 9-11. The measure was sponsored by Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), who said this to NPR: "This country is about personal freedom; it's not about intrusion by the federal government into our daily lives, and this is one area where we can keep our personal freedoms -- and that's what I'm trying to do."

Why is it that folks like Ashcroft are so quick to argue that national security demands all sorts of sacrifices of our civil liberties -- but when it comes to guns, "personal freedoms" suddenly become paramount, and public safety becomes an afterthought?

--Jessica Farmer

GORE GOES FOR DEAN. Al Gore will apparently announce tomorrow that he is endorsing Howard Dean to be the 2004 Democratic nominee. This isn't so surprising to me, given Gore's vocal position against the war, estrangement from the New Democrats and ongoing collaborations with groups like MoveOn.org. (Although it wouldn't have occurred to me to predict it.) The media will take this move as evidence that Dean is earning new credibility among the Democratic establishment, but I'm not sure the endorsement really gives Dean a lot of added oomph; Gore is popular among grassroots Democrats, but it's hard to see how this endorsement will help Dean garner too many voters that he doesn't already have. (The not-unimportant exception is black voters; Dean is in the process of shoring up support there, and Gore's endorsement will help significantly in gaining credibility with them.)

So what's going on here? In some sense, Dean is Gore's ideological heir apparent. Both are fiscally conservative Democrats who opposed the Iraq War, and both marry a frisson of populist energy to unradical center-left policy positions. So on that level it makes sense. But Gore's endorsement is a major middle finger to plenty of his old colleagues and allies, many of whom have been having lunches at the Palm, nervously discussing what will happen if Dean wins the nomination. It's also a blow-off of Joe Lieberman, as Josh Marshall points out.

But what's the long-term meaning? A source of mine in labor with good instincts speculates as follows:

[Gore] knows he looks like a kingmaker now, and that's got to be satisfying -- not as good, of course, as being the king, but better than nothing. He's been slamming the war, and Dean had the balls to oppose the war, unlike the Hill candidates. So, he'll campaign like hell for the guy, and, if by chance, he wins, he can do anything he want for the new administration -- sec of state, world troubleshooter, even supreme court seat (you don't need a law degree -- Earl Warren didn't have one).

But if Dean loses -- obviously, still more likely -- the Dean folks won't forget that Al supported their guy when it was still a contest. He'll inherit the whole machine -- probably get Trippi, too -- the whole fundraising apparatus, the web stuff (and Gore's the original Blackberry guy, remember?) -- if there's anything [to the] Dean machine vs. Clinton machine thesis, well, Gore will have the Dean machine -- and Hillary will have the Clinton machine -- should be entertaining.

That would be entertaining -- and not a simple left-center fight, either.

UPDATE: Actually, Warren did have a law degree and practiced law briefly, too. Still, by the time of his appointment to the Supreme Court, he was basically a pol, not a lawyer or legal academic.

--Nick Confessore

ISOLATION PLAY. On Nov. 26, the Interntional Atomic Engergy Agency (IAEA) adopted a resolution on Iran that represented a defeat for the United States. Rather than punishing Iran for its alleged nuclear weapons program (as the United States had wanted) the resolution authorized the start of a long-term weapons monitoring program inside Iran. Today at TAP Online, Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle reports from Tehran on why the U.S. failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has strengthened Iran's diplomatic position, and whether détente between Washington and Tehran is a realistic possibility.

--TAP Online

A SERIOUS BELIEF. David Frum responds with astonishment to the Jonathan Chait article we mentioned on Friday:

Can anyone seriously believe that the reason that George W. Bush signed the prescription drug bill was to please American business?

In a word, "yes."

But even if the price-controls provision were a giveaway, it's a giveaway intended to mitigate the inherently anti-competitive effects of a much bigger giveaway: the giveaway of subsidized medicines to America's senior citizens regardless of need. That's what Bush signed, and anyone trying to get an ideological fix on him needs to reckon with that rather large fact.

There seems to be a bit of confusion on Frum's part. In order for the anti-price-controls element of the bill to be "mitigating" some kind of anti-corporate agenda, you have to believe that pharmaceutical companies are for some reason upset at the prospect of the government subsidizing purchases of their products. But why would that bother them? Well, it would only bother them if the subsidies came with some sort of strings attached in the form of efforts to lower prices, but they don't, so the bill is pure candy for the drug industry, as it is for the insurance industry.

Small government conservatives are used to finding themselves allied with business in a quest to deregulate the economy, but there's no reason, in principle, why government spending programs can't be aimed so as to benefit large corporations, and that's exactly what we've got here -- a bill that's great for the health care industry, not so hot for senior citizens and downright terrible for those of us who'll be footing the bill.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE RISE OF "CONSERVATIVE LYSENKOISM." That's CalPundit's perfect term for the growing Republican tendency to attack science that doesn't conform to conservative political ideology, just as the Soviets refused to accept proof of the failure of central planning. And Chris Mooney has yet another example of the practice, this one related to the venerable academic tradition of peer review.

It's worth noting that from the 1970s forward, neoconservatives like Charles Murray posed a similar critique of liberalism, arguing that empirical social science belied liberal belief in the efficacy of government programs. But increasingly, it is conservative doctrine -- from supply-side economics to the denial of global warming -- that is belied by reality. So what do conservatives do? They attack the science, as GOP pollster Frank Luntz advocated in one famous memo, while promoting tendentious pseudoscience.

When will one or another of the Democratic candidates pick up this theme? It's a rich vein for President Bush's challengers, after all. Who in this day and age wants to be the "anti-science" president?

--Nick Confessore

RULES OF THE WEB. Here's an interesting op-ed in USA Today from Alan Webber, the founding editor of Fast Company magazine, explaining that Howard Dean has succeeded in using the Internet as an organizing tool because he (or his aides, at any rate) understands three crucial facts about Web culture. It's definitely worth reading. So is Samantha Shapiro's touching and informative article about the younger Dean supporters, published in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

--Nick Confessore

WHAT CRITICISM IS FOR. In the midst of arguing for his striking thesis that whether or not the current Republican majority lasts will depend on the GOP's ability to win future elections, The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto takes the opportunity to misrepresent the nature of opposition to the Bush foreign policy:

The loss of the Senate stoked the frustrations of the Democratic left and lent plausibility to the argument that foreign-policy bipartisanship is a losing strategy for Democrats. Howard Dean became the presidential front-runner by tapping this anger, and the other candidates, to varying degrees, have followed along, becoming harsh critics of U.S. foreign policy.

The political calculation seems to be that military victory will help the president, so the Democrats' only chance is to hope for quagmire or even defeat. Yet even if things go badly in Iraq between now and November, it's not clear that this will redound to the opposition party's benefit. George McGovern, after all, ran against an unpopular war and carried one state. If the Democrats had actively opposed President Bush on foreign policy, they might have done even worse in 2002 than they did. By doing so now, they may be setting themselves up for a big loss in 2004.

Perhaps Taranto should consider the possibility that opposition to Bush is motivated not by hope that his policies will fail, but rather by fear that they are failing. We'd like to see something better than a strategy in Iraq that none other than Newt Gingrich describes as having gone "off a cliff," and we think that by making criticisms, we can produce a change.

Take a look, for example, at policy toward North Korea, where the White House seems to have recently realized that its previous strategy of calling Kim Jong Il nasty names while refusing to negotiate isn't working. Obviously, the administration is never going to admit that it was wrong and that it is now adopting the approach its critics had been suggesting -- but that's exactly what's going on. One hopes that Bush officials will similarly see the light in Iraq, or else be replaced by folks capable of doing better.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW MANY TROOPS DOES THE POPE HAVE? Here's a noteworthy bit from The Washington Post's latest article about Howard Dean. The article focuses on Dean's effort to foment a "southern strategy" of his own, but also notes:

A large number of influential Democrats, many of them former high-level advisers to President Bill Clinton and state leaders, are growing increasingly concerned that Dean's antiwar, anti-tax-cut campaign could doom the party's chances of winning back the White House and Congress. If Dean can't quickly exhibit an ability and willingness to broaden his appeal, especially in the South, these Democrats may join together in a campaign to stop him, several said.

Exactly how much longer do they plan to wait? And what, precisely, do they plan to do to stop him?

--Nick Confessore

IT HELPS TO READ THE RELEVANT POLL. Maggie Gallagher writes in NRO that her beloved Federal Marriage Amendment could be an electoral boon to the Republican Party. The trouble is that most of her article is dedicated to demonstrating that gay marriage polls poorly, while almost none of it discusses the popularity of the FMA. Eventually, she concludes:

Almost all Democratic presidential candidates say they oppose gay marriage. But most say they are against any effort to stop courts from imposing gay marriage as well. A strong, intelligent, bipartisan, multiracial effort to pass a Federal Marriage Amendment that focuses on the marriage issue itself?

For the Dem elites, it's a nightmare. But for America, it could be an opportunity.

Gallagher might want to take a look at the Pew Research Center's November poll on attitudes toward sexual orientation in America:

The survey also finds that most who are opposed to gay marriage believe that it would be enough to prohibit it by law, and that a constitutional amendment is not necessary. While 59% oppose gay marriage, just 10% say the Constitution should "be amended to ban gay marriage" in a follow-up question. Instead, 42% say it is "enough to prohibit gay marriage by law without changing the Constitution."

That's more dream than nightmare for the Democratic Party. Of course it's possible that a high-profile public debate would turn opinion around on this front, but it could just as easily shift things the other way, especially since elite opinion on the right is considerably more pro-gay than the conservative base (see Gallagher's article on anti-FMA conservatives in the media in The Weekly Standard). That split would only become more obvious if the issue takes center stage.

--Matthew Yglesias

"TEFLON" DEAN? The transcript of this week's Reliable Sources is pretty interesting, not least for what it reveals about the habits and mores of the Washington press corps. For one thing, there seems to be a fair amount of hostility towards Howard Dean -- at least among panelists Mike Isikoff, Karen Tumulty and, to a lesser extent, Walter Shapiro (of Newsweek, Time and USA Today, respectively). But here's an interesting exchange on the controversy surrounding Dean's sealing of his Vermont records:

HOWARD KURTZ: We can look forward to that. Karen Tumulty, the press, as you know, creates a narrative for each candidate. So is this more of a story for Dean than it would be for a Kerry or a Gephardt, who had long paper trail records in Congress?

KAREN TUMULTY, "TIME" MAGAZINE: It would be, except that the one thing we're learning about Howard Dean is that none of the rules seem to apply to him. The story lines don't stick with Howard Dean.

KURTZ: You're saying you write stories and it looks like a story that casts the former governor, perhaps, in a less favorable light, and nothing happens?

TUMULTY: His campaign will tell you that the more he's criticized, the more money he raises.

In part, this is because Dean -- wisely -- has completely ignored the Washington press, much as George W. Bush did in 2000. (Al Gore, by contrast, paid way too much attention to the Beltway press, constantly reacting to its provocations. It really hurt him.)

--Nick Confessore

FRIDAY'S BAD NEWS. Last Friday, right around happy hour, the Pentagon released some unfortunate but not-unexpected news: Four Army divisions -- or about 40 percent of our active-duty force -- will not be combat-ready for at least six months. These are the divisions that are rotating out of Iraq in the near future, and will likely be given the lowest readiness rating.

You'll recall that, during the Republican convention in 2000, candidate George W. Bush claimed, "If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, 'Not ready for duty, sir.'" It was a dishonest attack at the time, since Bush was referring to two divisions that had substantial personnel deployed to the Balkans, and under Army regulations any division with units away from home must be listed as not "combat-ready" -- that is, not able to be deployed to fight a regional war as per U.S. military doctrine. Any kind of deployment will lower the combat-readiness of some forces.

Which is why I'm reluctant to criticize the Bush administration on this matter. But there are some differences between the current situation and that faced by the Clinton administration. First, at the time we had troops deployed to the Balkans, we faced no immediate threat of an actual regional war, let alone two. Given our foreign-policy objectives in Bosnia and Kosovo, it was prudent to put troops in both places even at the expense of readiness for the divisions in question. And we had enough capacity left over to ensure readiness for possible future flashpoints, like North Korea.

President Bush faced a different situation. Even before we went into Iraq, knowledgeable observers were worried about military overstretch. (I talked to some of them for this article. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew, too -- why do you think he fought so hard to whittle down the troop numbers for Iraq?) Post-9-11 deployments, including homeland-security missions for the reserves and the war in Afghanistan for both active and reserve personnel, already had most of our armed forces on what was in effect war footing; reservist duty-days were skyrocketing. Botched diplomacy in North Korea had significantly elevated the potential for a flare-up there. Under the circumstances, it would have been prudent of the White House to muster more troop commitments from allied nations, to take the burden off our own forces and allow us to commit fewer of them to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Instead, President Bush and his advisers decided to go it more or less alone, at least in part because they foolishly believed our work there would be done in relatively short notice. (George Packer's magisterial New Yorker article on the Iraq occupation provides sound evidence of just how deep this self-delusion ran.) Unlike Clinton officials, the Bush folks have taken a series of unwise risks with our security, the folly of which was readily foreseeable at the time those choices were made. For that, they deserve criticism.

--Nick Confessore

WEEKEND UPDATE. Snowed in for the weekend? Here's what you missed:

The Columnists

• Nicholas Kristof. Here's something insightful and original -- Howard Dean is like . . . George McGovern!
• David Brooks. Republicans and New York City just don't mix.
• Thomas Friedman. Bush is like Abraham Lincoln, I hope.
• David Broder. With American troops in harm's way, the time has come to raise procedural objections to a year-old resolution authorizing war.
• Jim Hoagland. It would be easier to take this seriously if I didn't keep implying that Afghanistan was in the Middle East.
• George Will. College professors shouldn't support Dean because he's stupid, whereas the Republican alternative is . . . never mind.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need to Read

• Robert Levine says Europe's turn against Israel has been grossly exaggerated.

The Shows

• Fox News Sunday. New host Chris Wallace watches as Andy Card explains that everything is going great in Bush's America.
• Meet The Press. Hillary Clinton tries to discuss policy, but Tim Russert really wants to know if she's secretly running for president.
• Face The Nation. Card says things are going "very well" in Iraq, while Hillary disagrees.

--Matthew Yglesias

FREE-LUNCH CONSERVATISM. This piece in next week's New Republic, by Jonathan Chait, is important reading. It eludicates some common misunderstandings of President Bush's ideology and that of the current Republican Party. If you want to understand the pattern behind the current GOP establishment's manueverings during the past three years, this will help.

The key concept is not that Bush is a traditional small-government conservative -- which would involve difficult and politically costly policy trade-offs -- but that he and his party have consistently and unabashedly used the mechanisms of government to reward and enrich key allies, mainly business interests, wealthy individuals, and -- to a lesser extent -- religious conservatives.

Sometimes this has involved traditionally conservative mechanisms, such as cutting taxes or reducing regulation. Sometimes it's involved traditionally liberal methods, such as new government spending. There has been no consistent principle involved, except the determination to stay in power. Nor has there been much attention to the long-term effects of the inherent contradictions in such a policy. So the administration passed a Medicare "reform" that buys off seniors with a drug benefit and hands billions of dollars in subsidies and government spending to HMOs, drug companies, and doctors -- all while specifically prohibiting cost-saving measures like using federal bargaining power to reduce the price of pharmaceuticals. The result is -- all at once -- generous corporate pork; a massive entitlement program; and deregulation. It's a combination that boosts the GOP's ability to stay in power in Washington. But the resulting cost -- ballooning health care costs that in turn will further balloon the deficit -- gets kicked down the road. If a Democrat president is elected to clean up the mess, that's about all he'll be able to accomplish before the next Republican is elected.

--Nick Confessore

WHO PAID FOR THAT OP-ED? The Washington Post reports that Richard Perle, our modern exemplar of how to enrich oneself via work in the public service, co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which advocated this boondoggle tanker leasing deal. The arrangement then under consideration would have put millions of dollars into Boeing's pockets; Boeing is a large investor in Perle's Trireme Partners firm, about which The New Yorker's Sy Hersh has written all that need be written.

Perle's co-author was Tom Donnelly -- who, like Perle, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Insistitute. I don't know much about Donnelly, other than that he used to work for the neocons' Project for a New American Century and is a respected military wonk. But if I were an enterprising reporter, I'd want to know if Donnelly has done any corporate consulting work lately.

None of this surprises me in the least. To understand more about how things work over at AEI, home to an alarming amount of shoddy scholarship -- which gives the honest folks over there an undeserved black eye -- read this article and, if I may say so myself, this one, too. Perle is in some ways the least of it.

--Nick Confessore

NOT EXACTLY. Conservative claims of fiscal rectitude take yet another hit as The Weekly Standard's Bill Whalen praises Arnold Schwarzenegger's new California budget:

By midnight West Coast time tonight, Arnold Schwarzenegger will have solved California's fiscal mess. Well, not solved it, exactly, but he is poised to deliver on the last of his big three recall promises. The Governator wants the legislature to sign off on a $15 billion deficit bond, which voters will have to approve next March. Schwarzenegger could get a version of that as soon as tonight, as well as a spending cap (he calls it a "never again spending limit") that gives him more control over the budget process in fiscal fights to come.

For those of you keeping score, here's where Schwarzenegger stands after three weeks on the job. On Day One, he signed an executive order overturning the tripling of the state's car tax. On Day 17, he signed a bill repealing the measure granting drivers' licenses to illegal aliens. By the close of business, on Day 19, he may have his budget fix and spending cap. Schwarzenegger promised to deliver those three items in his first 100 days as governor. He's about to pull it off in one-fifth the time.

The only sentence from this article you really need to read is, "Well, not solved it, exactly" -- because when you "solve" a fiscal mess by taking on additional debt, you've solved exactly nothing. Obviously, one way to resolve a mismatch between revenues and expenditures is to borrow the money to make up the gap, but next year the gap just comes back with an additional bill for the interest. Repeat this process long enough, however, and people aren't going to lend you any more money, and then you're still faced with the choice between raising taxes and cutting spending. Arnold, needless to say, has actually cut taxes, thus improving his political prospects, but worsening the budget outlook. No word yet on whether all this was done "reluctantly".

--Matthew Yglesias

HOWARD DEAN, "PRESCIENT MODERATE"? Over at National Journal, Jonathan Rauch uncorks a typically good column looking over Howard Dean's policy positions and public statements:

I spent several days recently poring over Dean's speeches and other public comments. The conclusion was not as expected. The Dean campaign may be set to the music of firebrand liberalism, but its words belie the notion that Dean has painted himself into a far-left corner. Even on Iraq -- his signature issue -- Dean has planted himself subtly but distinctly to the right of his supporters.

I don't agree with Rauch that Dean's position on the war was "incoherent," but his analysis of Dean's general posture and positioning is spot on.

--Nick Confessore

THERE HE GOES AGAIN. A couple of years ago in his syndicated Washington Post column, Charles Krauthammer had this to say about pundits who engage in cheap psychoanalysis of public figures.

It is part of the trivialization of politics that we give endless attention to the inner life of the politician--his private thoughts, his inner demons--at the expense of his outer life. I cannot, for example, imagine Pat Buchanan ever saying even in private anything as nasty about Jews as did Nixon. But the public Pat Buchanan goes around fanning hatred for Jews with his sly and not so sly allusions to Jewish power, Jewish influence, Jewish disloyalty. So who is the antisemite?

Obsession with self is the motif of our time. It carries over into our thinking about public figures, to our preoccupation--long predating our fascination with Gary Hart's nocturnal trysts--with their inner life.

The reductio ad absurdum of this tendency is Edmund Morris's disastrous book on Reagan. The subject of the book is really not Reagan but Morris, and when Morris does get around to Reagan, it is the inner "Dutch" that interests him, not the politician, the leader, the president.

The results are comical. Seven pages spent on imagining Reagan's thoughts while making his first movie, four pages on the momentous years 1976-1980, when Reagan remade American politics. Between Reagan's losing the nomination in '76 and winning the presidency in '80, the book is a near total blank. We hear about Morris's encounter with Jimmy Carter, Morris's publication of his Theodore Roosevelt biography, then get one page -- out of 674 -- on the 1980 campaign.

One modern conceit is that the inner man is more important than the outer man. The second conceit is that somehow, thanks to Freud and modern psychobabble, we have real access to the inner man.

As a former psychiatrist, I know how difficult it is to try to understand the soul of even someone you have spent hundreds of hours alone with in therapy. To think that one can decipher the inner life of some distant public figure is folly.

Apparently Krauthammer has since changed his mind -- that, or he finds it irresistible to blame mental illness for other people's refusal to agree with his view of the world. In today's column, a melange of wink-wink pop-psychology and shallow punditry, Krauthammer decides to diagnose Howard Dean and a good portion of the American electorate with something called "Bush Derangement Syndrome." He writes:

It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: "Secondary Mania," Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven't been looking for new ones. But it's time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.

Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush. Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean's sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that "the most interesting" theory as to why the president is "suppressing" the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it's time to check on thorazine supplies.

It goes on from there. And this isn't the first time. In fact, Krauthammer has been "trivializing politics" -- to use his phrase -- with cheap psychoanalysis a lot lately. In September, for instance, he wrote that Ted Kennedy was deranged. Around the same time, he wrote in Time that the Democratic Party itself had become "unhinged."

I get it. When pundits are psychologizing people on the right -- Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan -- it's reprehensible. When Krauthammer does it to politicians and partisans on the left, it's dandy.

UPDATE: The Daily Howler has more. Krauthammer's partial quotation of Dean's "Hardball" appearance was incredibly misleading.

--Nick Confessore

ABOUT THOSE GROWNUPS. My hopes that we might see a return to fiscal sanity at some point in the relatively near future were more or less dashed by this Washington Post report on the White House's quest for a fresh domestic agenda. Nothing's been decided yet, but the basic idea is to combine further tax cuts with further spending increases.

President Bush's aides are considering a new lunar exploration program and other unifying national goals, including a campaign to promote longevity or fight childhood illness or hunger, as they sift ideas for a fresh agenda for the final year of his term, administration officials said yesterday.

. . .

The development of big ideas for Bush's 2004 agenda is being led by the president's senior adviser, Karl Rove, the officials said. Administration officials said options have not been presented to the president, let alone decided, but the search is active for ambitious initiatives to flesh out a reelection agenda that also includes limiting lawsuits, making the tax cuts permanent and adding private investment accounts to the Social Security system.

As usual, policymaking is being led by Karl Rove rather than by experts in policymaking. In a healthy administration, policy-oriented people armed with relevant knowledge would design proposals -- and the task of the political and communications staffs would be designing methods to sell the proposals to the public and to the Congress. In this White House, however, politics is in the driver's seat, leading to decent political outcomes for the president and terrible policies for the rest of us.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE YEAR IN REVIEW. The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy has published a "Year in Review" that's well worth checking out. (The publication was co-sponsored by Moving Ideas, the Prospect's public-policy Web site.) The series of articles rounds up the best and worst of the policy world from 2003. It also contains some statistics most people probably aren't aware of. (Among others: The number of viewers who voted on the final night of American Idol was greater than the number of 18-25 year olds who voted in the last presidential election.) Check it out here.

--Shireen Zaman

JOURNAL ON GERRYMANDERS. Notwithstanding the president's decision to award a Medal of Freedom to The Wall Street Journal's odious former opinion editor Robert Bartley, the Journal has penned a good editorial on gerrymandering:

All of this has been coming into sharper public focus because of a series of court challenges to several recent GOP gerrymanders. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed this term to hear a Democratic challenge to a GOP plan in Pennsylvania. And this week, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that a recent GOP-friendly gerrymander violates that state's constitution.

We're actually sympathetic to Colorado Democrats here, because the GOP tactics were all about incumbent protection. In 2001, state legislators deadlocked on a new map of Colorado's seven House seats, and a federal court decided district boundaries for the 2002 elections. The GOP gained control of both houses of the state legislature that year and proceeded to design a gerrymander that locked in partisan majorities for all seven House Members from the state--five Republicans and two Democrats.

Republican Bob Beauprez won his House seat by only 121 votes in 2002, but under the new plan he could mail his victory in next year. This may be good for Republicans, but it certainly isn't good for competitive democracy. The Colorado Supreme Court threw the gerrymander out on other grounds, namely that the legislature can't redistrict more than once a decade, but the result is still healthy.

. . .

All of this reminds us of the similar process of liberal self-discovery concerning the independent counsel statute. Only when the law began to skewer Clinton officials did Democrats start to agree with us that the law was a terrible idea. But, hey, let's not be partisan about this. If liberals now want to campaign for turning electoral map-drawing over to nonpartisan or bipartisan bodies the way Iowa and Washington state have, welcome aboard.

We could probably argue until the cows come home about who started it, and who did what to whom when, but while the practice of gerrymandering goes way back in American history, it's getting more pernicious as technological improvements make the line-drawing ever more precise. As the Journal says, there are states that handle this much better by using specially appointed commissions of various sorts; all that's lacking is the political will to implement such systems nationwide. There's a good editorial about steel in today's edition, too, but it's not available online.

--Matthew Yglesias

NEWSFLASH: ISRAEL NOW FULL OF SELF-HATING JEWS. With regard to the Geneva Accords -- a grassroots-inspired, Middle East peace plan rapidly gaining support, including at the White House -- Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes:

The international applause greeting the so-called Geneva Accord -- the unofficial Israeli-Palestinian "peace" agreement formally presented in Switzerland this week -- is a vivid illustration of the world's contempt for the Jewish state.

That's interesting, since polling by the International Crisis Group shows solid majorities of both Palestinians and Israelis supporting the proposal. Any student of politics knows that government policymaking is often dominated by aggressive, mobilized minorities, to the detriment of sensible, middle-ground solutions. The Geneva Accord -- made necessary by the intransigence of the official Israeli and Palestinian leadership -- is a good example of that.

--Nick Confessore

OH MY GOD! IT WAS A FAKE TURKEY! The real turkey served to soldiers was from steam trays, not the delicious-looking bird President Bush carried around for the photo op.

Well, kudos to The Washington Post for nailing this one down. Not to be snide, but every time I think of Post reporter Mike Allen expending his prodigious reportorial abilities to get to the bottom of this one, I let off a little giggle.

The press also appears to have backed Scott McClellan into a corner regarding whether or not a British Airways pilot actually communicated with Air Force One as it was flying to Iraq.

Somehow, I feel like the journalistic resources of the White House press corps could be put to better use. I dunno -- call me crazy.

--Nick Confessore

THE MAN OF STEEL. There's always been something of a disconnect between reality and the president's public statements, but today's proclamation regarding the lifting of steel tariffs takes things to a whole new level:

Today, I signed a proclamation ending the temporary steel safeguard measures I put in place in March 2002. Prior to that time, steel prices were at 20-year lows, and the U.S. International Trade Commission found that a surge in imports to the U.S. market was causing serious injury to our domestic steel industry. I took action to give the industry a chance to adjust to the surge in foreign imports and to give relief to the workers and communities that depend on steel for their jobs and livelihoods. These safeguard measures have now achieved their purpose, and as a result of changed economic circumstances it is time to lift them.

The idea that lifting the tarriffs won't harm the domestic steel industry will surely come as news to these protesting steel workers, who don't seem to have gotten the memo. So much for "changed economic circumstances."

Back in the real world, Bush put these tarriffs in place more than a year and a half ago over the objections of his economic policy team in order to try to win votes in steel-producing swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. The European Union, Japan and other steel exporters didn't take the news well:

The World Trade Organization ruled last month that the American tariffs were illegal. It authorized the European Union, as well as by Asian and South American steel-producing countries, to impose $2.2 billion in retaliatory tariffs if the United States failed to back down.

The European Union had made its threat more pointed by saying it would retaliate with tariffs tailored to punish states of great political importance to Mr. Bush's re-election campaign next year, like Florida and the Carolinas.

And so, faced with the prospect of a trade war that would have been even more damaging to his political standing than removing the tarriffs will be, Bush decided to do what he should have done in the first place and get rid of them. Meanwhile, the conventions of journalism dictate that reporters for the major papers and networks must give equal credibility to the president's obviously false statement on this matter, all in the name of "objectivity."

--Matthew Yglesias

TV TIME. The New York Times reports that campaign advertising in Iowa has gone through the roof:

The four major Democratic candidates competing in Iowa -- Dr. Dean, Mr. Kerry, Senator John Edwards and Mr. Gephardt -- have run at least 4,450 spots in Des Moines alone since January, according to new figures to be released on Thursday by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitors political television advertising.

At this point in 1999, the Republican and Democratic candidates had run at least 850 advertisements, combined, in Des Moines, according to the University of Wisconsin research group, which also noted a priority shift, pointing out that where advertising in New Hampshire was twice that of Iowa in 1999, the situation is now reversed.

That's a lot of ads. The Times doesn't mention this, but one obvious explanation is that several different candidates are still competitive in Iowa. (By contrast, Howard Dean now leads in New Hampshire by a huge margin -- more than 20 points. Wes Clark is leading in South Carolina, where John Edwards is somewhat competitive.) But there's another reason, too: money. Campaign finance reform was supposed to reduce advertising (or at least modulate it). Instead, it's making it more common -- at least in the primaries. Why? Because, as Walter Shapiro points out in his new book, One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In, McCain-Feingold tripled hard-money limits.

Let's say, hypothetically, that each of the five major primary candidates had roughly 1,000 high-rollers who were reliable friends and contributors. Before McCain-Feingold, if you visited every one of those friends and each gave the maximum contribution, you'd have a million bucks on hand for the primaries. Most would give more if they could, but $1,000 bucks was the old max. Nowadays, if you visit each of them the same number of times and each maxes out, you raise $3 million. Basically, thanks to McCain-Feingold, more candidates can stay in the primaries for longer than before, each with enough money to survive. Are they spending it on ground operations? No. They're spending it -- mostly -- on advertising.

File this one under "unintended consequences."

--Nick Confessore

DEAN VS. THE ESTABLISHMENT? The Washington Post has an interesting article today about Howard Dean's efforts to court the Democrats in Washington. It will certainly surprise people who have taken too seriously his campaign-trail attacks on the Washington Dems. Remember how, during the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush deliberately criticized Washington Republicans, including the GOP leaders in Congress, so as to buttress his media profile as an outsider? It was a crock. Bush was (and is) the GOP establishment, which is why he didn't find it difficult to work with the local potentates once he got here. But that sort of thing plays well on the campaign trail, and reporters are often lazy enough to adopt the theme.

Reading the piece, though, it's interesting to see what a cross-section the Dean backers represent -- you have Clintonites, leaders of the Democrats' congressional wing, lobbyists (!) and more. (Heck, just before Thanksgiving, Harvard professor Elaine Kamarck -- one of the original New Democrats -- wrote a column for Newsday essentially marveling at Dean's ability to confound expectations.) Clearly he commands support from many different parts of the party.

But that shouldn't really surprise anyone. Dean's politics put him just to the right of the Democratic Party's middle. The attacks on the establishment are part of his song and dance.

--Nick Confessore

LOVE THAT SMALL GOVERNMENT. Terry Eastland has a column singing the praises of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who has taken a leading role in the battle over judicial nominations. The piece contains one of the more absurd paragraphs I've ever read:

Cornyn is a conservative Republican working in a Washington dominated by Republicans who no longer swear fidelity to limited government. It isn't an easy assignment. Cornyn reluctantly joined his Senate colleagues in supporting the Medicare prescription-drug bill, which the president and the congressional leadership regard as a major accomplishment. The cost of the legislation--$395 billion over the next 10 years--may create pressure to raise taxes.

I see. Unlike many of his colleagues, Cornyn still "swear[s] fidelity to limited government" because when he voted for a $395 billion (a figure everyone regards as a drastic understatement of the Medicare bill's true cost) boondoggle, he did so "reluctantly"? Setting the bar a bit low nowadays, I think. Note, moreover, that the bill's opponents were one vote short of what they needed to scuttle the thing on a procedural maneuver, so this is hardly a small detail. Cornyn was also a supporter of the recent energy bill, whose vast expense and dubious merits were outlined for Standard readers by Irwin Stelzer. But I'm sure the senator's support for that was reluctant, too, so it's OK.

--Matthew Yglesias

STRIKE ZONE. Israel has been teetering on the verge of a general strike for two months. Because one labor union (called the Histadrut) represents all public sector employees -- and because Zionism's socialist pioneers left behind a rather large public sector -- a strike could effectively shut down much of the country. TAP Online contributor Jeff Mandell files the following dispatch from Jerusalem:

The reasons for the labor dispute have a lot to do with the unusual realities of Israeli economics, but the standoff's immediate cause may well be the political ambitions of one man -- Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The former prime minister took control of the finance ministry after being soundly defeated earlier this year in his bid for control of the conservative Likud Party by the current prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu has made little secret of his desire to reclaim Likud's leadership from Sharon, and he may see the labor standoff as an opportunity to keep himself in the political spotlight.

Netanyahu was educated in the United States and once worked for an American business consulting firm. Unlike Sharon, who represents a strain of Israeli conservatism that focuses solely on issues of national security, Netanyahu has long been a champion of supply-side economics. Earlier this year, following his loss to Sharon in the Likud primary, Netanyahu served as the government's foreign minister, a central role in Israeli politics. In February, however, Sharon removed Netanyahu from the job and gave him the post of finance minister, a demotion (of sorts) to a position often viewed here as a political backwater. But Netanyahu has refused to fade from public view, using his new post to advocate sweeping economic reforms modeled on the initiatives of Ronald Reagan. His plans include proposals to privatize government-owned services (such as the Israeli electric, water and telephone companies), reduce the number of public-sector personnel, slash social-welfare programs, reform government pensions and cut tax rates for the wealthiest Israelis.

Read the whole thing here.

--TAP Online

HAVING IT BOTH WAYS. After a pleasant fall lull, the summer's "Democrats hate Catholics" meme seems to have resurfaced in a Hugh Hewitt column:

[William] Pryor is one of the president's judicial nominees who has been filibustered by the Democratic minority because of his "deeply held views," which is code for his Catholic beliefs. The Catholic lay group, the Knights of Columbus, has denounced the bigotry beneath the opposition to Pryor, and Republican senators used much of their recent lengthy debate to highlight Pryor's extraordinary credentials that qualify him for service on the Eleventh Circuit.

But the American Catholic bishops as a group have been silent on the Pryor nomination, thus emboldening Pryor's opponents and underscoring their own trepidation.

First off, this is a serious mischaracterization of the debate. Problems with William Pryor run the gamut from his views on church-state relations, to his views on civil rights, to his views on federalism, and all down the line. Even accepting Hewitt's account of things, however, he's stuck in a paradox because just earlier in the column he was saying that Catholic politicians who say they believe that abortion is morally wrong but that it ought to remain legal are being bad Catholics. I'm not qualified to judge whether or not that's good theology, but if Pryor thinks the way Hewitt does, then his religious beliefs are a perfectly good reason to worry about putting him on the bench.

Like it or not, the Supreme Court's decisions in the Roe and Casey cases are the law of the land, and a Circuit Court judge is supposed to apply them faithfully. A person who believes that his religious commitments prevent him from doing that has no place in the federal judiciary. That's not bigotry any more than the observation that it would be inappropriate to appoint a devout Quaker to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If, on the other hand, you believe (as many Catholics do) that a good Catholic can have any sort of opinion on the legal and political questions surrounding abortion, then objections to Pryor's beliefs about abortion law aren't objections to his religious beliefs at all -- they're objections to his legal views, and it's hard to see what could be more appropriate for senators to consider than a potential judge's approach to the law.

I understand that Republicans are just trying to get more socially conservative judges appointed to the bench, but in their quest to do so they've ginned up a fairly absurd doctrine by which no political figure's views about anything can be held against him as long as they derive from his religious beliefs. That's a road that, as I've said, will lead us to pacifists in the Pentagon, judges refusing to hand down death sentences, a total pass for everything the Rev. Al Sharpton wants to say, and all manner of other things that conservatives won't be happy with. It's time to knock it off.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHOM DO YOU TRUST? Here's the startling and dismaying kernel of Fareed Zakaria's excellent Washington Post op-ed:

Traveling through East Asia last week, I noted how poorly most observers rated Bush's recent trip there. Even more striking, however, was the comparison repeatedly made between Bush's visit and that of Chinese President Hu Jintao -- with a thumping majority believing Hu had done better.

In Thailand at the meeting for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, "there was no question that Hu was the better appreciated one," a Thai official said to me. "He outshone Bush in most of the attendees' eyes." The trips ended with the two making back-to-back visits to Australia. Bush was greeted with demonstrations, his address to Parliament interrupted by hecklers. Hu, on the other hand, got a 20-minute standing ovation from Parliament. "It is Hu's visit rather than George W. Bush's that will provide a lingering sense of satisfaction and security about Australia's place in the region," wrote the Australian, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch and not given to knee-jerk anti-Americanism.

What is going on here? How does the chief representative of the world's oldest constitutional democracy lose a popularity contest to the leader of a Leninist party?

How, indeed? I suspect it is not, as certain people might say, because Australia is too left-wing. Zakaria offers a mix of thoughts on the style and substance of President Bush's trips, and concludes:

What is most dismaying about this state of affairs is that for the past 50 years the United States has skillfully merged its own agenda with the agendas of others, creating a sense of shared interests and values. When Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy waged the Cold War, they also presented the world with a constructive agenda dealing with trade, poverty and health. They fought communism with one hand and offered hope with the other. We have fallen far from that model if the head of the Chinese Communist Party is seen as presenting the world with a more progressive agenda than the president of the world's leading democracy.

This is really a clear point, and one worth repeating. The United States did not build the old international system out of altruism, but out of enlightened self-interest, to use a hoary old phrase. Finding creative and cooperative ways of getting the world to align its interests with ours was the source of much of America's prestige and strength for decades. The Bush administration's policies have begun to unravel that accomplishment. And it's a disaster in the making -- for us.

Zakaria's op-ed brings reminds me of the brilliant speech Zbigniew Brzezinski delivered at the Prospect's national security conference, co-hosted with the Center for American Progress, last month. Here's the opening bit:

Ladies and gentlemen, 40 years ago almost to the day an important Presidential emissary was sent abroad by a beleaguered President of the United States. The United States was facing the prospect of nuclear war. These were the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Several emissaries went to our principal allies. One of them was a tough-minded former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson whose mission was to brief President De Gaulle and to solicit French support in what could be a nuclear war involving not just the United States and the Soviet Union but the entire NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact.

The former Secretary of State briefed the French President and then said to him at the end of the briefing, I would now like to show you the evidence, the photographs that we have of Soviet missiles armed with nuclear weapons. The French President responded by saying, I do not wish to see the photographs. The word of the President of the United States is good enough for me. Please tell him that France stands with America.

Would any foreign leader today react the same way to an American emissary who would go abroad and say that country X is armed with weapons of mass destruction which threaten the United States? There's food for thought in that question.

Indeed there is.

Incidentally, the only Democratic candidate who I think really, really understands this -- who has systematically thought it through for himself and knows how to articulate the issues at hand -- is Wesley Clark. Much of his thinking was on display in this excerpt, published in The Washington Monthly, from his new book, Winning Modern Wars. I highly recommend reading it for an understanding of the very real fruits of multilateralism.

--Nick Confessore

STILL TRYING. Lame defenses of the Bush administration's conduct in the Valerie Plame affair have resurfaced, as Glenn Reynolds pronounces the scandal "bogus" in response to The Washington Post's report that Joe Wilson and Plame (in disguise) will be photographed for a Vanity Fair article:

Serious people don't do self-promoting spreads in Vanity Fair where important questions of national security are involved. Self-promoters (Wilson is trying to pitch a book, the article reports) do. Not knowing the underlying facts, I have to make my judgment by the behavior of the parties. And judging from that, the scandal is bogus, and Wilson is a self-promoter who can't be trusted. That's my judgment on this matter. Yours, of course, may vary. But if you see Wilson as anything other than a cheesy opportunist, well, then yours really varies.

I'm totally baffled as to what the relevance of this is supposed to be. Plame worked for the CIA and that fact was a secret. Somebody told that secret to Robert Novak. According to Novak, the people who told him work for the Bush administration. At the request of the CIA, therefore, the Justice Department launched an investigation designed to uncover who did this. The administration has been uncooperative with this investigation. Whether or not Wilson or Plame are "serious people" is, frankly, irrelevant.

Either way, though, before other journalists decide to pick up this argument from the blogosphere's hit king, they might want to remind themselves that the entire Bush national security team posed for a Vanity Fair photo spread in the magazine's February 2002 issue. But I'm sure self-promotion had nothing to do with that.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE DOOR REVOLVES. Just in case the real story behind the Medicare bill wasn't obvious enough, today it turns out that Thomas Scully -- the man in charge of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and the person who, as the program's chief administrator, played an important role in drafting the recent reforms -- is now going to take a job as a "consultant" for the health care industry. It doesn't get much more shameless than that.

--Matthew Yglesias

UVA GOES BONKERS. I get really tired of reading stories like this one, where a university employee uses the word "nigger" to make a point about why the team name "Redskins" is offensive to Native Americans, and wham! The staff union is holding protests against racism, administrators are interrogating people, and Julian Bond, who should know better, is demanding an apology and "sensitivity training" for the employee in question. Are they insane?

Via CalPundit, who sums up my thoughts on the matter perfectly.

--Nick Confessore

SHOOTING OURSELVES IN THE FOOT. I know this is an old story, but it's still pretty ridiculous that we're pushing desparately-needed linguists out of the armed forces because they're gay. Here's the latest update, courtesy of The Washington Post. It's about an Arabic linguist trained at the prestigious Defense Language Institute. Instead of helping civil affairs battalions rebuild Iraq, she is -- literally -- cleaning pools in Washington, D.C.

--Nick Confessore

THE MIRACULOUS HOUSTON SCAM. Both The New York Times and Tapped have written about this before, but it certainly bears repeating: The miraculous success of the Houston public school system -- centerpiece of George W. Bush's education agenda as Texas governor and the achievement that supposedly qualified Rod Paige for his current job as secretary of education -- is more myth than reality:

In recent years, Texas has trumpeted the academic gains of Ms. Arevelo and millions more students largely on the basis of a state test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, or TAAS. As a presidential candidate, Texas's former governor, George W. Bush, contended that Texas's methods of holding schools responsible for student performance had brought huge improvements in passing rates and remarkable strides in eliminating the gap between white and minority children.

. . .

Compared with the rest of the country, Houston's gains on the national exam, the Stanford Achievement Test, were modest. The improvements in middle and elementary school were a fraction of those depicted by the Texas test and were similar to those posted on the Stanford test by students in Los Angeles.

Over all, a comparison of the performance of Houston students who took the Stanford exam in 2002 and in 1999 showed most did not advance in relation to their counterparts across the nation. More than half of them either remained in the same place or lost ground in reading and math.

. . .

But questions about Houston's accomplishments are increasing. In June, the Texas Education Agency found rampant undercounting of school dropouts. Houston school officials have also been accused of overstating how many high school graduates were college bound and of failing to report violent crimes in schools to state authorities.

Standards and accountability are all good things, but the imposition of standards is only as good as the standards themselves. Principled people committed to real improvements can use tests to measure performance and find methods that work, but a group of people primarily concerned with cosmetic improvements and securing political advantage can just as easily game the system to produce "improvements" relative to benchmarks that are unrelated to real goals.

Given the generally unprincipled nature of the Bush administration and its contempt for natural science, it's not particularly surprising to learn that it plays the same games with social science as well. During the 2000 campaign, Bush used the education issue to cement his credentials as a "compassionate conservative." With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, Democrats seem to have lost interest in talking about the education issue, despite their traditional strength on this front. It's time to start talking again, especially as strong GDP growth is starting to make generic complaints about "the economy" look less compelling.

--Matthew Yglesias

SCARY CANADIAN DRUGS. The government's official line on why you're not allowed to buy cheap prescription drugs in Canada is that, for some reason, it would be unsafe to do so. Now, the FDA is admitting what should have been obvious to anyone: There's no evidence to support this assertion:

After nearly a year of sharp warnings about the dangers of prescription drugs from Canada, U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials cannot produce a single U.S. consumer who was killed or injured by inferior medications from Canada.

"We don't have that," said Tom McGinnis, the FDA's director of pharmacy affairs. "I can't think of one thing off the top of my head where somebody died or somebody got put in the hospital because of these medications. I just don't know if there's anything like that."

. . .

Despite the admonitions, only two instances have become public in which U.S. residents suffered injury after taking Canadian drugs. In both cases, a Canadian pharmacy sent patients the wrong medication, presumably out of human error. One case, according to Senate testimony by Catizone, involved an Illinois woman who ordered an asthma inhaler for her child and got the wrong drug. The child suffered an asthma attack. Another involved an Oregon woman who got hypertension drugs instead of breast-cancer medication.

The incidents are not minor - both resulted in adverse reactions. They are also not unique to purchases from Canada.

Studies indicate that errors occur in about 3 percent of the three-billion-plus retail prescriptions written annually in the United States, said Mike Cohen, a pharmacist and president of the Institute of Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit group in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., working to reduce medical errors.

I doubt that large-scale drug reimportation would prove to be the panacea its advocates tend to make it out to be, since drug companies aren't going to put enough medicine into the Canadian market to cover the much larger U.S. consumer demand -- and if reimportation started causing shortages up north, the Canadian government would probably respond with export controls. A more realistic possibility, however, is that reimportation might create the groundwork for the American government to negotiate a situation where the rest of the world relaxes price controls somewhat and the United States gets to impose some mild ones, thus ending the current situation where American consumers subsidize research and development that the whole world benefits from.

Going through that process would be inconvenient for the pharmaceutical industry, especially as it might shed light on how much research and development the American taxpayer is directly financing through the National Institutes of Health -- and then getting charged for again at the pharmacy. Nevertheless, American consumers would stand to gain a lot if our government would start standing up for our interests instead of those of the drug companies. Then we could have a real debate on how to rectify a situation that does Americans enormous harm.

--Matthew Yglesias

SCIENCE FRICTION. My former colleague Chris Mooney, who I think is one of the best writers on science policy out there, has an interesting post up on his blog. It's essentially an annotation of this article by pollster Daniel Yankolovich, who writes about the growing divide between science and policymaking:

Science has reached greater heights of sophistication and productivity, while the gap between science and public life has grown ever larger and more dangerous, to an extent that now poses a serious threat to our future. We need to understand the causes of the divide between science and society and to explore ways of narrowing the gap so that the voice of science can exert a more direct and constructive influence on the policy decisions that shape our future.

Yankolovich's article is a fascinating tour not only of the disconnect in question, but of the use and misuses of science and scientists by journalists. (The two big examples are global warming and evolution, where journalists -- who tend to confuse objectivity with neutrality -- give hacks, quacks and paid shills equal time with those representing the scientific consensus on each subject.)

I'd also read this excellent piece by Nick Thompson about where the disconnect is worst -- between GOP ideology (on missile defense, stem cells, and more) and scientific fact.

--Nick Confessore

THE SHORT END OF THE WEDGE. Two weeks ago I wrote that contrary to liberal fears and conservative hopes, the gay marriage issue would wind up causing more trouble for the president than for his Democratic rivals, as Bush would be forced to choose between endorsing the unpopular Federal Marriage Amendment or seeing his strategy for mobilizing social conservatives fall apart. Gene Lyons said I was "dreaming," but it looks to me like things are developing in the way I suggested. For evidence, check out this Robert Novak column from yesterday, and today's Wall Street Journal op-ed from Brendan Miniter:

So what's really giving the Christian right jitters is that Gov. Mitt Romney--a Republican with access to the president--waffled a little. He initially spoke out against the court's ruling, calling for a state constitutional amendment defining marriage in traditional terms. He later softened his position, saying a civil-union law might satisfy the court. Many fear that Mr. Romney softened his position after getting a call from the White House. That's why Karl Rove is now hearing that if President Bush waffles on marriage, many Christian voters will stay home next November.

This is a real political problem for the White House, which, faced with demographic trends toward a less white America, actually needs to boost evangelical turnout higher than the 2000 level in order to stay even with the Democrats. Meanwhile, Bush's challengers are under little pressure from their left flank to advocate federal action on the marriage issue since gay rights advocates are confident that their side will win in the medium-term as long as no constitutional amendments are passed. This leaves the Democrats free to endorse neither gay marriage nor the FMA, putting themselves right in the political center.

--Matthew Yglesias

IT'S GOOD TO HAVE PRIORITIES. Mickey Kaus says Howard Dean may have run into his Willie Horton: Osama bin Laden. When asked if he'd rather have bin Laden tried here at home or by an international tribunal, Dean told Chris Matthews, "You know, the truth is it doesn't make a lot of difference to me as long as he is brought to justice. I think that's the critical part of that."

Egads! And Hugh Hewitt is off, convicting Dean as unfit to be president because he hasn't taken a firm stand on a purely hypothetical issue on which Hewitt speculates Americans have already made up their minds.

I guess Dean's statement won't win any votes among the black-helicopter crowd, but then again, I'm also pretty sure that he wasn't planning to pick up a lot of support there, anyway. The real potential gaffe here, I think, would be if Dean flatly came out against the death penalty for bin Laden. And that's unlikely, since in the past he's been for the death penalty in cases "involving extreme and heinous crimes." Surely 9-11 would qualify. If and when this actually becomes an issue to think about, I doubt we'll see any serious Democratic presidential candidate take bin Laden's side on procedural grounds.

It's amazing to me that Hewitt is far more exercised about the unlikely possibility that Dean might not favor execution for bin Laden than he is about the established fact that the Bush administration diverted key intelligence and Special Forces assets away from the search for bin Laden so as to mount an invasion of Iraq (on false pretenses, whatever else its merits). And it suggests Hewitt is not the slightest bit serious about the fight against terrorism. What's more important -- the fact that President Bush and his advisors flubbed the bin Laden manhunt, or the question of what we might do to the guy on the ever-diminishing chance we find him?

--Nick Confessore

WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT A CONSPIRACY? A typical rhetorical gambit you see in lame-brained commentary, especially on the right, is to accuse a person of fomenting a "conspiracy theory" even though said person never alleged any such thing. And it so it goes with this Weekly Standard piece on Wes Clark. It's written by Matthew Continetti, who appears to have been assigned to the "make Clark look like a congenital liar/eccentric nutcase" beat, but is not acquitting himself particularly well. The article, headlined "Wesley Clark's Conspiracy Theory," takes issue with Clark's recent statement on CNN's Late Edition.

Yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition," for example, Clark said--not for the first time--that the Bush administration's war plans extend far beyond Iraq.

"I do know this," Clark told Wolf Blitzer. "In the gossip circles in Washington, among the neoconservative press, and in some of the statements that Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Wolfowitz have made, there is an inclination to extend this into Syria and maybe Lebanon." What's more, Clark added, "the administration's never disavowed this intent."

Well, no. Here's what a senior administration official told the Los Angeles Times's Robin Wright last April: "The lesson of Iraq is not 'Watch out, the U.S. is going to invade.' We're not. . . . Do you think President Bush would do anything to prepare for an election like fight another war? He's not looking for more foreign adventures. We won't get ahead by invading Syria or Iran."

Secretary of State Colin Powell made the same argument when he visited Syria last May. The secretary traveled to Damascus shortly after major combat operations in Iraq had ended, Powell said, in order "to pursue diplomacy and mutual political efforts that both sides can be taking." The reason for the visit? "So the issue of war hostilities is not on the table."

Needless to say, there's a difference between recounting what you hear in Washington dining rooms and positing a conspiracy theory to invade Syria. And as heartening as it is to see the Standard tacitly conceding that Colin Powell actually represents a legitimate role in formulating foreign policy, it's too cute by half. Maybe Continetti can go knock on Bill Kristol's door and ask him to explain how within the Bush administration there are, like, two very different schools of thought about Middle East policy, and members of those two schools have been at each other's throats for two years or so, and, you know, Powell doesn't really speak for the neocons. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how Continetti has spent any time at the Standard without noticing how often the admistration's hawks spoon-feed stories to his magazine designed to discredit and undermine the secretary of state.

In any case, it wasn't very long ago -- September, actually -- when Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a leading hawk, went off telling Congress that "in Syria we see expanding WMD capabilities and state sponsorship of terrorism" and "as the president has said, we cannot allow the world's most dangerous weapons to fall into the hands of the world's most dangerous regimes." Now, Bolton may have been off the reservation back then. But at the time, most people in Washington and around the world quite understandably interpreteted his statement as an indication that Syria might be the hawks' next target, and thus perhaps the administration's.

Here's an editorial from the Sept. 18, 2003 edition of the Financial Times, hardly a bastion of goo-goo leftism:

The Bush administration this week said it remained sure weapons of mass destruction (WMD) would be uncovered in Iraq. This attitude may be understandable as a sort of geo-Micawberism in lieu of any actual weapons turning up. But the approach underlying it is now being extended to Syria.

John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, told a congressional subcommittee on Tuesday: "In Syria we see expanding WMD capabilities and state sponsorship of terrorism. As the president has said, we cannot allow the world's most dangerous weapons to fall into the hands of the world's most dangerous regimes." Sound familiar?

Heck, Bolton's testimony was leaked to The New York Times' Judith Miller by, in her words, "individuals who feel that the accusations against Syria have received insufficient attention" -- i.e., hawks who wanted a tougher line against the country.

--Nick Confessore

CROSSING BOUNDARIES. Jeffrey Toobin has an important and fascinating article in this week's New Yorker about the redistricting fights of the past few years. If you find this stuff at all interesting -- I do -- the whole piece is fascinating. Here is one place worth highlighting:

Following the 2000 census, all states were obligated to redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts in line with the new population figures. In 2001, that process produced a standoff in Texas, with the Republican state senate and the Democratic state house of representatives unable to reach an agreement. As a result, a panel of federal judges formulated a compromise plan, which more or less replicated the current partisan balance in the state's congressional delegation: seventeen Democrats and thirteen Republicans. Then, in the 2002 elections, Republicans took control of the state house, and Tom DeLay, the Houston-area congressman who serves as House Majority Leader in Washington, decided to reopen the redistricting question. DeLay said that the current makeup of the congressional delegation did not reflect the state’s true political orientation, so he set out to insure that it did.

When it came to Texas, Tom DeLay was apparently a believer in proportional representation. Strangely, as the next passage shows, he didn't speak out in favor of applying the same rule in states where Democrats would have been entitled -- under his own logic -- to a majority of the congressional delegation:

The off-cycle timing of the Texas redistricting fight, as well as the farcical drama of the fleeing Democratic legislators, made the saga look like a colorful aberration. But the results of that altercation merely replicated what happened, after the 2000 census, in several other states where Republicans controlled the governorship and the legislature. Even in states where voters were evenly divided, the Republicans used their advantage in the state capitals to transform their congressional delegations. In Florida, the paradigmatically deadlocked state, the new district lines sent eighteen Republicans and seven Democrats to the House. In the Gore state of Michigan, which lost a seat in redistricting, the delegation went from 9-7 in favor of the Democrats to 9-6 in favor of the Republicans -- even though Democratic congressional candidates received thirty-five thousand more votes than their Republican opponents in 2002. (The Michigan plan was approved on September 11, 2001, so it received little publicity.) Pennsylvania, which also went to Gore, had one of the most ruthless Republican gerrymanders, and it is the one being challenged before the Supreme Court.

After 2000, Pennsylvania lost two seats in Congress, and its legislature had to establish new district lines. Republican legislative leaders there engaged in no subterfuge; they candidly admitted that they intended to draw the lines to favor their party as much as possible. In the midst of the battle over the Pennsylvania plan, DeLay and Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House, sent a letter to the Pennsylvania legislators, saying, "We wish to encourage you in these efforts, as they play a crucial role in maintaining a Republican majority in the United States House of Representatives."

So Republicans are pretty much full of it on wanting delegations to accurately reflect the partisan tilt of a given state.

Personally, I'd like to see the whole system tossed out, with the courts coming up with some way to get rid of gerrymandering entirely. It's ridiculous that only 10 percent or so of House seats are competitive in any election. Both parties have abused redistricting, with negative results for the country. (Among other things, it's made the House less democratic, since it is essentially state legislators -- the folks in charge of drawing district boundaries -- who pick which party will win a given congressional election.) But Toobin's opinion seems to be that the Supreme Court, which is hearing various gerrymandering cases in December, won't intervene. Too bad.

--Nick Confessore

PUTTING POLITICS FIRST. There was an important story over the weekend in The New York Times about how Bush's re-election campaign is undermining his foreign policy:

Ms. Rice was the primary author of the National Security Strategy last year, which enshrined as policy the concept of pre-emptive action against growing military threats. But she has asserted since that too little attention was paid to the rest of the strategy, and she has repeatedly said that for Mr. Bush, a pre-emptive military action, like the one he chose in Iraq, "is only the very last option this president reaches for, not the first."

It was a rude awakening, then, when the foreign policy team returned to Washington last weekend and saw the political advertisement from the Republican National Committee, with its suggestion that voters call their Congressional representatives and "tell them to support the president's policy of pre-emptive self-defense."

"What was that all about?" one of Mr. Bush's senior aides asked after returning from Britain, where the president took his appeal for collaborative action against common enemies to new heights. Saying the advertisement ignored Mr. Bush's recent series of speeches, the official complained, "Don't these guys read the papers?"

There's a grand tradition in politics all around the world of saying one thing with an eye toward the domestic audience and saying another thing abroad, but in the modern world these stories travel rapidly across borders and you can't really get away with it. We saw something similar last spring when efforts to secure international support for the war were undercut by nonsense about the "axis of weasels" and "freedom fries," but back then the illusion that America didn't need any assistance from our allies at least had a veneer of plausibility. Now, though, it's become clear to the president's policy staff that international help really is needed. In a serious administration, the political staff would be working to achieve the president's policy goals, but in the Bush White House everything -- even national security -- takes a back seat to politics.

--Matthew Yglesias

KERRY ON. Back in March, when John Kerry was the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Mary Lynn F. Jones wrote for TAP Online that Kerry was peaking too early. Today, Jones says that coming too fast out of the gate was only one of the problems that has left Kerry struggling to stay alive in the presidential race. But she also says that it's not too late for the Massachusetts Democrat to revive his campaign, and suggests how he might do it.

--TAP Online

CAN LIBERAL RADIO SUCCEED? The New York Times reports that Progress Media, the much-vaunted left-leaning investment group looking to start up a network of liberal radio shows, is close to acquiring several radio stations in major cities. The Times' Jim Rutenberg writes:

The acquisitions would represent a major move toward making the network real. After its conception was announced in February, many radio analysts and even some Democratic activists predicted that the network would face too many challenges to get off the ground, including finding stations to run its programming and bucking a historical record replete with failed liberal radio attempts.

I'm still not convinced, and this next paragraph is the reason why:

Jon Sinton, Progress Media's president, said the company had hired Lizz Winstead, one of the creators of "The Daily Show," to oversee entertainment programming. Shelley Lewis, a longtime network news producer who was most recently in charge of "American Morning" on CNN, will oversee news programming, Mr. Sinton said.

He said Progress Media was pursuing a deal to give the comedian Al Franken a daily talk show. The company, whose programming division is to be called Central Air, is also talking with representatives of the comedian Janeane Garofalo.

The network has hired Martin Kaplan to be the host of an early evening talk show about the news media. Mr. Kaplan is associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and was once a speechwriter for Walter F. Mondale as well as a Disney studio executive.

Like a lot of people, I think The Daily Show rocks. And Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo are talented comics and satirists. But neither of them, as far as I know, has any experience with radio programming. (It's not clear from the article if The Daily Show folks have any such experience, but I suspect not.) What made Limbaugh successful was, in large part, his mastery of the medium -- he spent years as a radio DJ before becoming host of a political show. He knows radio. From what I've seen, the various liberals who've gone up against Limbaugh (Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, etc.) were almost always people selected for their political and intellectual credentials rather than any proven mastery of the radio medium. And not surprisingly, they failed to build a Rush-size audience.

Progress Media is at least hiring entertainers with a political bent, rather than politicians and pundits with a yen to be the left's Rush. But I wonder if that will be enough.

--Nick Confessore

THOSE WERE THE DAYS. Whenever Democrats on the Hill complain about their mistreatment by the GOP leadership, the rejoinder is usually the same: When you guys were in the majority, Republicans lecture, you were just as bad. Turnabout is fair play. (Conservatives like to claim that FOX is merely balancing out CNN, that Heritage is simply an antidote to Brookings, and so forth.) But an important op-ed by Norman Ornstein in last week's Washington Post (it got buried in the holiday rush) shows that this is not always true, if it's ever true. Commenting on last week's outrageous three-hour roll call vote -- which was kept open well past the traditional 15-minute period so that GOP leaders could bludgeon a couple of Republicans into supporting a Medicare bill that would otherwise have failed -- Ornstein writes:

In the 22 years that Democrats ran the House after the electronic voting system was put in place, there was only one time when the vote period substantially exceeded the 15 minutes. At the end of the session in 1987, under Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, the vote on the omnibus budget reconciliation bill -- a key piece of legislation -- was one vote short of passage when one of the bill's supporters, Marty Russo of Illinois, took offense at something, changed his vote to no, and left to catch a plane to his home district in Chicago. He was unaware that his switch altered the ultimate outcome. Caught by surprise, Wright kept the vote tally open for an extra 15 to 20 minutes until one of his aides could find another member, fellow Texan Jim Chapman, and draw him out of the cloakroom to change his nay vote to aye and pass the bill. Republicans went ballistic, using the example for years as evidence of Democrats' autocratic style and insensitivity to rules and basic fairness.

In 1995, soon after the Republicans gained the majority, Speaker Newt Gingrich declared his intention to make sure that votes would consistently be held in the 15-minute time frame. The "regular practice of the House," he said would be "a policy of closing electronic votes as soon as possible after the guaranteed period of 15 minutes." The policy was reiterated by Speaker Dennis J. Hastert when he assumed the post.

But faced with a series of tough votes and close margins, Republicans have ignored their own standards and adopted a practice that has in fact become frequent during the Bush presidency, of stretching out the vote when they were losing until they could twist enough arms to prevail. On at least a dozen occasions, they have gone well over the 15 minutes, sometimes up to an hour.

The Medicare prescription drug vote -- three hours instead of 15 minutes, hours after a clear majority of the House had signaled its will -- was the ugliest and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of the House. It was made dramatically worse when the speaker violated the longstanding tradition of the House floor's being off limits to lobbying by outsiders (other than former members) by allowing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on the floor during the vote to twist arms -- another shameful first.

Amazing. GOP leaders on the Hill are not only measurably far worse than the old Democratic chieftains, but they're perpetrating an abuse they literally campaigned against in the early 1990s. Note that this comes not from a liberal, but from Ornstein, a respected analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Bonus question: Can our readers name any circa-1995 promises made by the new Republican majority that haven't been broken? They probably exist, but I can't think of them.

--Nick Confessore

LONG WEEKEND UPDATE. Too stuffed with turkey to have time for punditry? Here's what you missed.

• Thomas Friedman I. Somewhere, Saddam Hussein is smiling.
• Maureen Dowd I. Organ donation is such an important issue, both to the world and to me personally, that I waited until a famous person needed one to write a column about it.
• Paul Krugman. Bush is bad, but trade is good, good, good.
• George Will. We're on a slippery slope to polygamy.
• Jim Hoagland. We must all be nicer to the poor, misunderstood bureaucrats.
• Charles Krauthammer. Peace process . . . we don't need no stinkin' peace process.
• David Ignatius. I have the utmost respect for Stephen Hayes but his big scoop is bogus.
• David Broder. Those mean Republicans are going to get themselves reelected.
• Nicholas Kristof. Think of the soldiers: "Humor cannot erase their fear and loneliness in the face of Washington's policy failures" -- but I'll try anyway.
• David Brooks. Republican corruption ensures their political dominance, and it's a good thing, too.
• Thomas Friedman II. The left needs to get behind rebuilding Iraq even though it has no influence over the administration's conduct and the administration's plans won't work.
• Maureen Dowd II. Highbrow for the holidays with a Milan Kundera reference and nothing about pop culture.

The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read

• David Boaz of the Cato Institute says small-government types are ready to walk away from Bush.

The Shows

• Fox News Sunday. Joe Lieberman explains that his vote against the Kyoto accords doesn't mean he didn't support the treaty.
• Face The Nation. A politician-free show, as a panel of historians say George Bush is no John Kennedy, except insofar as they both got involved in dubious guerilla wars.
• Meet The Press. Tim Russert and a six-person panel don't seem to know whether to be impressed or frightened by the Bush administration's combination of tax cuts, defense spending hikes and entitlement spending increases.
• This Week. George Stephanopoulos mixes things up as a Democratic supporter of the president's Medicare bill debates a Republican opponent.

--Matthew Yglesias

UPDATE: Reader R.S.B. writes in to inform me that Dowd has, in fact, written several columns on organ donation in the past and that my snark was therefore unwarranted. Apologies for the error.