Glenn Beck has a plan.  Actually, the Plan.  Which he reveals on his website.

Today, I have stopped looking for a leader to show us the way out because I have come to realize that the only one who can truly save our country…is us. To change America’s course we need to change ourselves, our expectations and our willingness to accept the unacceptable. When we refuse to allow our children to receive a trophy for participation, we are on the road to restoring the meaning of merit in our Republic. When we insist that no one is too big to fail, we will be able to learn from our mistakes, and when we demand that we are self-reliant, we will ensure that others can rely on us, not the government.

[...]

- Education is key, and not just for our children. To that end, we will be conducting a series of conventions. These will be full-day experiences where you will be immersed in learning about topics ranging from self-reliance, community organizing, the economy and how to be a political force in your own neighborhood and country. The first one will be in Orlando at UCF Arena on March 27th. You will also be able to vote to have a convention in your region by clicking here.

- I have begun meeting with some of the best minds in the country that believe in limited government, maximum freedom and the values of our Founders. I am developing a 100 year plan. I know that the bipartisan corruption in Washington that has brought us to this brink and it will not be defeated easily. It will require unconventional thinking and a radical plan to restore our nation to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting, using only the battlefield of ideas.

- All of the above will culminate in The Plan, a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this Refounding.

- On August 28, 2010, I ask you, your family and neighbors to join me at the feet of Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall for the unveiling of The Plan and the birthday of a new national movement to restore our great country.

The Soviets and Chinese Communists were famous for Five Year Plans that Americans used to make fun of.  Beck, apparently, figures that their flaw wasn’t the hubris of planning the next five years but stopping 95 years short.

Apparently, the plan has yet to be hatched.  It’s intriguing to announce a 100 year plan but tell people they’ll need to wait nine months and a week to get the details.

If nothing else, Beck has intrigued NYT correspondent Brian Seltzer and a few bloggers. Seltzer reports that Beck “emphasized that while candidates may align themselves with the values and principles that he espouses, he would not take the next step to endorse them.”

Mr. Beck is not the only media firebrand trying to mobilize Americans disaffected with a Democratic-controlled government. The radio host Laura Ingraham is inviting candidates to sign a 10-point pledge on her Web site. Sean Hannity, on his afternoon radio show and prime-time Fox News program, is promoting “Conservative Victory 2010,” his name for the map on his site that will spell out questions for candidates. And the former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who has a show on Fox News, has steered viewers to his Web site, where they can contribute money to his political action committee in support of conservative candidates.

Pundits have used their media stages to encourage political action before, but people like Mr. Beck and Mr. Hannity are taking on outsize roles now, political experts and conservative commentators say. One reason, they say, is the weakened state of the Republican Party.

Beck’s strangeness aside, the idea of reshaping the American political system from the bottom up is interesting.  But while I rather like the idea of pressuring the Republican Party to get back to its small government roots — even by challenging it with a libertarian oriented third party — there’s precious little evidence that there’s anything close to majority support for that as a style of governance.   Like it or not, the Republicans became a Big Government party in recent years because that’s what the people have demanded.

I still see enthusiastic small government types calling for dismantling the Department of Education and other bits of leftover rhetoric from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign.  But I doubt that even twenty percent of Americans are in favor of such a move.

The two parties and their constituent interest groups have done a superb job of poisoning the well.  Republicans have virtually ensured that we’ll never have anything short of a massive defense budget and we’ll never have the sort of confiscatory tax brackets for high earners that they have in Europe and we had here as recently as John Kennedy’s administration.  And Democrats have made it a virtual certainty that we’ll not only not cut back on the social safety net but that it will incrementally increase and periodically boom.   The “compromise” solution is massive deficit spending.

While we occasionally get Ross Perot types calling attention to the unsustainability of that approach, the excitement quickly fades.  While all of us can find big chunks of the budget we’d pare, there’s not enough overlap to get anywhere close to majority support — let alone the sixty votes necessary to get much of anything through the Senate.  And those who would face cuts to their subsidies care more and are better organized than those who want the cuts.

Dave Schuler likes to point out that things which are unsustainable will not be sustained.  But the nature of the American political system guarantees we won’t do anything until an absolute crisis forces us to.

Taegan Goddard links a Public Policy Polling survey [PDF] showing that President Obama would have beaten the most commonly mentioned Republican hopefuls had the election been held from October 16th to 19th and opened to registered voters.  (I hasten to add, it wasn’t.)

In fact, according to the survey, “Obama leads Mike Huckabee 47-43, Mitt Romney 48-40, Sarah Palin 52-40, and Tim Pawlenty 50-30.”

Considering that Huckabee, Romney, and Pawlenty remain virtual unknowns to most Americans and Obama is the sitting president, I’m not sure this is as depressing news for the GOP as PPP’s Tom Jensen seems to think.  Indeed, Huckabee is actually within the poll’s margin of error!

Look, the 2012 election’s a ridiculously long time from now and it’s pretty silly even talk about it.  Still, as Dave Schuler notes, it’s a Thursday.  Obama’s quite popular and, while his approval is plummeting by historical standards, it’s still pretty good all things considered.  Given our propensity for re-electing sitting presidents, the fact that the economy is bound to be better by mid-2012, and that the Republican Party seems to be in disarray, I’d say Obama is an early favorite to win a second term.  But we’ll have a much better idea in, say, two years.

My strong hunch is that neither Huckabee nor Palin will be the Republican nominee.  The party traditionally nominates the person whose “turn” it is, which would seemingly point to Romney.  But given how sick everyone is with the Washington wing of the GOP, I wouldn’t be shocked if some governor who’s never run before emerges out of nowhere.

Daniel Larison is a bit too charitable here in assessing Mike Huckabee’s finish in last year’s presidential primaries:

While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it is not certain that Huckabee could have managed his second place finish.

In fact, the 2008 Republican race wasn’t even a contest.  Mitt Romney quit the race during CPAC on February 7 and pledged his delegates to McCain.   Rudy Giuliani had failed to make his push in Florida — coming in way behind Romney, who finished second.  The race was over.

Except that, technically, it wasn’t.  Huckabee stayed in the race, along with Ron Paul, despite no chance of beating John McCain for the nomination.  As a result, they padded their totals as everyone not happy with McCain as the nominee had to vote for one of them.  And, really, since Paul was a fringe candidate, that meant Huckabee.

The results, per CNN, are at right.

The fact of the matter was that Huckabee, a virtual unknown at the beginning of the contest, was mostly a stalking horse.  Huckabee finally withdrew on March 5, once McCain mathematically sewed up the race on his own — that is, not counting Romney’s delegates.   As I wrote at the time:

But let’s not get carried away, either. He’s a personable fellow who went a long way with very little money, a weak organization, and zero Establishment support. But there was no time in this race when it was plausible that he’d be the nominee. He won Iowa as the “anybody but Mitt Romney” candidate in a contest McCain, Giuliani, and others skipped. He didn’t win again until garbage time, when he was running as “the conservative alternative” to a man who had all but sewn up the nomination.

Huckabee will not win the nomination in 2012. Or 2016. Or 2020. He’d easily win a Senate seat from Arkansas if he changes his mind. But he’s not going to be elected president.

I  stand by that assessment.

Mitt Romney is busy selling off a few of many his mansions and plans to move to his family vacation home in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Hotline reports.  He has also registered his PAC there.  This has some people guessing that Romney is contemplating another run for the presidency.

“No doubt in my mind that they are doing the necessary maintenance to keep their network in New Hampshire together,” noted veteran Granite State GOP operative Mike Dennehy, who was a senior adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign.

Establishing residency in NH could raise expectations for Romney’s performance in the state’s 2012 primary, but the state is also flush with important contests in the upcoming 2010 midterm elections, where Romney could lend a hand. First and foremost for Republicans, NH will host a critical Senate race to replace retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R). At this point in the cycle, Democratic Rep. Paul Hodes is the only announced candidate, and with recent trends in the state, the seat is a top target for Democratic pick up. What’s more, Romney’s Wolfeboro home is in the 1st Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, who is likely to face a strong Republican challenge by Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta. In both races Romney’s help–and even his vote–could matter.

At the same time, a case could be made for Romney to establish residency in CA [he already has a mansion in San Diego] instead. Romney’s loss to McCain in the Golden State on Super Tuesday last year was the death knell for his candidacy, given the state’s large share of delegates. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is a strong GOP contender for the open gubernatorial contest to replace outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), while Democrats barrel toward a competitive primary. Whitman originally endorsed Romney and assisted him in his primary campaign before he ended his bid, and former Romney campaign staffers are flocking to Whitman’s effort. And former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a top McCain surrogate, is looking seriously at a challenge to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

To the extent that the Republican nomination goes to the candidate whose “turn” it is, Romney is well positioned. Technically, Mike Huckabee finished slightly ahead of him in the 2008 delegate count, but only as a function of shamelessly campaigning for months after he was mathematically eliminated, whereas Romney had the good grace to bow out at CPAC once the writing was on the wall.

Romney’s relatively moderate but the political advantage of setting up shop in California would be negligible; no Republican is going to beat Obama there in 2012.  The power of New Hampshire in the nominating process, on the other hand, is as obvious as it is ridiculous.

A long profile in today’s WaPo extolling Bobby Jindal as the Republican Party’s best hope to regain the White House may constitute the unofficial start of Campaign 2012.  It’s about time.

Last weekend, 18 days after Barack Obama decisively defeated their candidate for president, a mostly Republican crowd of self-described conservatives received their first introduction to someone many prominent members of the GOP think could be the party’s own version of Obama.

Like the president-elect, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is young (37), accomplished (a Rhodes scholar) and, as the son of Indian immigrants, someone familiar with breaking racial and cultural barriers. He came to Iowa to deliver a pair of speeches, and his mere presence ignited talk that the 2012 presidential campaign has begun here, if coyly. Already, a fierce fight is looming between him and other Republicans — former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who arrived in Iowa a couple of days before him, and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who is said to be coming at some point — for the hearts of social conservatives.

When one reaches the point of being seriously considered for the presidency of the United States, it’s long past time for academic credentials to have moved to the bottom of the resume. Jindal is a sitting governor who ran his state’s health and university systems and served in Congress; his successful undergraduate career is now a footnote.

Jindal insists he is ignoring all the speculation. In Cedar Rapids, at a breakfast event devoted to addressing this beleaguered city’s efforts to rebound from its disastrous flood last summer, he avoided any reference to 2012, staying focused on explaining Louisiana’s methods for coping with hurricane floods in emergencies on his watch.

It has been said that no politician travels to Iowa unless they’re running for president. Certainly, not from Louisiana.

No less an aspiring kingmaker than Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist of McCain’s failed presidential bid, sees Jindal as the Republican Party’s destiny. “The question is not whether he’ll be president, but when he’ll be president, because he will be elected someday.” The anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist believes, too, that Jindal is a certainty to occupy the White House, and conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh has described him as “the next Ronald Reagan.”

Jindal’s rise has indeed been meteoric and I do believe the next Republican president will be a youngish governor rather than a geriatric senator. But timing is everything. The best nominee might not be able to beat Obama in 2012 if things are looking up — and anyone might be able to knock him off if the economy is still in a slump.

Kathleen Parker is getting quite a response to her WaPo piece “Giving Up on God.”

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I’m bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

Andrew Sullivan agrees wholeheartedly and contends the party’s control by the “Christianists” is the reason they so blindly followed Bush.

You have to see the link between the fundamentalist psyche and the suspension of critical judgment in the Republican party for the past eight years. A non-born-again president would never have been allowed to get away with it.

Jonah Goldberg says “This act is getting really old.”

I don’t know what’s more grating, the quasi-bigotry that has you calling religious Christians low brows, gorillas and oogedy-boogedy types or the bravery-on-the-cheap as you salute — in that winsome way — your own courage for saying what (according to you) needs to be said.

In this one, I’m much closer to Goldberg than to Parker.   As with nonsense about how liberals are modern-day Fascists, this business about “oogedy-boogedy” is decidedly unhelpful in shaping the debate.

Goldberg is quite right here:

For the record, I have no problem with arguments about how the GOP has become too religious. I ended my book with pretty much that argument. I opposed Mike Huckabee vociferously because he seemed the quintessential rightwing progressive imbued with a rightwing social gospel. These are all good arguments to make and they have good responses to them. But please drop the nonsense about how the G-O-D people  or the Palin people are low brows and beasts. There are low brows and beasts everywhere, on every side of the ideological spectrum.

Indeed.  Sadly, Parker gets is right too late in her column:

It isn’t that culture doesn’t matter. It does. But preaching to the choir produces no converts.

I fully concur that trying to build a majority coalition around Christian Conservatives is a losing proposition.  As I noted a couple weeks ago on OTB Radio, targeting one’s public policy so as to appeal to “every last Pentacostal” is a mistake.  At the same time, however, there’s no conceivable center-right majority that excludes people of faith.  (Indeed, one can argue that conservatism without religion isn’t conservatism at all; but that’s another debate.)  The key is to appeal to social values voters without repelling Chamber of Commerce and libertarian Republicans and sympathetic moderates.

Daniel Larison, meanwhile, thinks religious conservatives get too much blame but for a different reason:

Despite their numbers, and in large part because of their reliability as Republican voters, evangelicals and social conservatives draw very little water in the GOP. Each cycle GOP leaders see how little it will take to get these voters to turn out for their candidates, and what that amount of lip service is each cycle they try to reduce it. The voters continue to turn out, despite having less and less reason to do so, and for their trouble they are accused of the errors that the party leaders made and into which the establishment dragged them.

I disagree.  All of the Republican Party’s major leaders are from the social conservative wing of the party and that wing dominates grassroots recruitment, get-out-the-vote drives, fundraising, and so forth.   It’s true that they don’t have much to show for their power in terms of public policy outcomes.  But that’s a function of institutional checks and balances (the filibuster in the Senate, the fealty to stare decisis in the courts, and so forth) than the voting behavior of Republican officeholders.

Really, though, that’s part of the point.  We’re simply never going to outlaw abortion again.  The culture and the medicine (RU486, morning after pills, etc.) have moved beyond that. We’re not going to have prayer in the public schools.  We’re not going to outlaw divorce or return to a mythical time where there’s no sex outside of marriage.

That said, Parker’s notion that religion must be “returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs” is as offensive as it is absurd.  Religious folk have every bit as much right as anyone else to speak their minds and to try to shift public policy towards their preferences.  For that matter, Christian belief is as valid a motivation as partisanship or ideology or habit or self-interest for forming positions on the candidates and the issues.

The GOP’s goal shouldn’t be to drive out the social conservatives but rather to bring in others.

Quite a few reports came out yesterday buttressing rumors that there were tensions between John McCain and Sarah Palin which caused a feud within the campaign team.   It’s only fitting, I suppose, since the selection of Palin has highlighted and exacerbated a growing fissure within the Republican Party itself.

Fox New’s Carl Cameron dished last night about rumors that Palin was even more unprepared than we thought, like not knowing that Africa was a continent rather than a country or being clueless about which countries were in NAFTA:

Cameron continued the assault on Bill O’Reilly’s show, continuing to use the word “knowledgability” to describe what she lacked:

In “Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps,” NYT corespondent Elisabeth Bumiller details some of the petty squabbles and disputes over such things as the prank Sarkozy call and the wardrobe brouhaha but this section puts it all into perspective:

Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a prescient interview in July.

“Every book I’ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, etcetera,” Mr. McCain said then. “And always the one that lost, ‘Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etcetera.’ So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ‘Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.’ If I lose,” people will say, “ ‘That campaign, always in disarray.’ ”

Quite right.  Had McCain somehow managed to win, we’d be hearing about all the Obama staffers who couldn’t believe Joe Biden was so boneheaded as to promise a grave national security crisis if his guy won and Biden staffers complaining about Obama’s ill-considered remarks to Joe the Plumber or Obama’s diva qualities being demonstrated by his penchant for giant outdoor rallies with Greek columns.  Since they won, however, the mistakes are minimized.

Regardless, these revelations about Palin are embarrassing, if true, and seem petty at this juncture.   Michelle Malkin and Ace are absolutely right that it’s cowardly for these rumormongers to be dishing anonymously.

Palin, for her part, is being extraordinarily gracious, at least in public, saying all the right things about McCain and about letting president-elect Obama have his moment.

RedState honcho Erick Erickson says his team is “tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others.” Fair enough. He then goes on:

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

[...]

Don’t make us add you to our list. Do you really want to be next to Kathleen Parker in the leper colony?

I was about halfway through a draft of this post which decried a New McCarthyism and a witch hunt against those Republicans who dared speak out against Palin when it occurred to me that I’ve had more than one adult beverage with Erick and that he couldn’t possibly mean that.  Either this was a late night rant that he’d walk back in the morning or I was reading too much into the whole thing.

So I emailed him asking, “Is it your intention to sabotage candidates you’d otherwise support for hiring staffers who say mean things about Sarah Palin?  And perhaps anyone else who says anything mean about Palin?   Not sure how else to take Don’t make us add you to our list.”  He assured me that, “We’re just trying to rattle cages.  It’s pretty clear there are four staffers and one former staffer in the McCain camp who are out to save their own reputations by throwing Palin under the bus.  Just trying to get them to back off.  I’m positive, because i have my own campaign sources, that the vast majority of what they are saying is B.S.”

Fair enough.

The whole Palin thing, though, worries me.  I take people like George Will and Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell at their word when they say the selection of Palin was very troubling to them.   And, to the extent Palin did lack “knowledgability,” it’s not her fault that she was jumped directly from Rookie League ball to the World Series.   Michelle Malkin is absolutely right here:

Let’s assume the rumor-mongers are telling the truth for a moment. Who does it damn more: Sarah Palin or McCain and his vetters who green-lighted her for the vice presidential nomination? Don’t need an Ivy League degree to figure that one out.

Indeed not.

But here’s the thing: As Stacy McCain has argued eloquently for some time, the grassroots of the party love Sarah Palin.  His sentiment that, “We need more grass-roots activists and fewer intellectual elites” is surely widespread.   It’s also a path to permanent minority party status.

My political awakening occured in late 1979, with the Iran Hostage Crisis, and grew steadily over the next year as Ronald Reagan battled Jimmy Carter for the presidency.  At that point in time, the Republican Party was said to have an “Electoral College lock” on the White House — California was a solid GOP state at the time — and it took extraordinary things like the combination of Watergate, an energy crisis, and runaway stagflation to get a Democrat elected.  At the same time, though, the Democrats were overwhelmingly the dominant party.  They had majorities in most state legislatures, held most of the governorships, had been in control of the House of Representatives for decades, and were ensconsed as the majority party in the Senate.

Reagan changed all that.  He managed to build a coalition of anti-communists, fiscal conservatives, and social conservativesthat swept Carter off to build houses for the poor, brought in a wave of Republicans on his coattails, and started a national realignment that culminated in the 1994 Republican revolution.

The social conservatives, mostly Southern evangelicals, took over the party, starting with the school boards and county commissions and eventually the state legislatures, the breeding ground for future Congressmen and governors.   The result, for a time, was a majority party or, at least, one on par with the Democrats in party ID and more easily mobilized on election day.

The coalition has long been an uneasy one, with the social conservatives disdained by the Rockefeller Republicans and vice versa.  The demise of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War made it harder to keep the coalition together but it has more-or-less held together.   All the while, though, moderate and liberal Republicans have gradually been driven from power.  Olympia Snowe is all that’s left of them in the New England states, now a one-party region.

The frontrunners for the 2012 nomination are Palin and Mike Huckabee.  I don’t see how either gets beyond 40 percent of the national popular vote, let alone takes back any state that Obama won this go-round.   Not only will they not appeal to independent voters, they’d both alienate the Crunchy Cons, South Park Republicans, Goldwater Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, and essentially everyone else outside the hard core evangelical base.

There’s got to be a better way.

UPDATE: Along these same lines, Steve Benen reminds us of Jim Nuzzo’s recent remarks that,

There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?

Matt Yglesias‘ response at the time is apt:

I’m actually one who thinks that the occasional ideological purge can strengthen a movement, but this would be a seriously odd basis for conducting such a cleansing exercise. Nuzzo is talking about a blind test of loyalty, not any kind of substantive demarcation of conservatism.

A GOP where the likes of Brooks and Noonan aren’t welcome would be a fringe party, indeed.

UPDATE II:   George Will makes similar arguments in his column today, although his view of what’s happening is a bit more, well, conservative.

As this is being written, Republicans seem to have lost a total of 55 House and 11 Senate seats in the past two elections. These are the worst Republican results in consecutive elections since the Depression-era elections of 1930 and 1932 (153 and 22), which presaged exile from the presidency until 1953. If, as seems likely at this writing, in January congressional Republicans have 177 representatives and 44 senators, they will be weaker than at any time since after the 1976 elections, when they were outnumbered in the House 292 to 143 and the Senate 61 to 38.

After the 1936 election, when the Republican nominee against FDR, Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, carried only two states, both in New England (hence the jest, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”), there were 29 congressional seats in New England and Republicans still held 15. With Tuesday’s defeat of Connecticut Republican Chris Shays, Democrats hold all 22 New England seats. As recently as 1996, when New York had 31 House seats, Republicans held 14; after Tuesday, they have just three of 29. With the loss of the seat on Staten Island, Republicans will hold at most one urban seat.

Since John Kennedy was elected from Massachusetts in 1960, all of the elected presidents (leaving aside Gerald Ford), before Tuesday, came from Georgia, Arkansas, Texas and Southern California. In 1960, there were no Republican senators from the South. (In 1961, John Tower of Texas became the first since Reconstruction.) But when the next Congress convenes, 19 of the probable 44 Republican senators — 43 percent of them — will be from the South, understood as including Oklahoma and Kentucky. The South is beginning to look less like the firm foundation of a national party than the embattled redoubt of a regional one.

Still, the Republican Party retains a remarkably strong pulse, considering that McCain’s often chaotic campaign earned 46 percent of the popular vote while tacking into terrible winds. Conservatives can take some solace from the fact that four years after Goldwater won just 38.5 percent of the popular vote, a Republican president was elected.

True that.  But it took some extraordinarily bad governing and an unpopular war to do it.  And it would be another three decades before the GOP won a majority in the House of Representatives.

We’ve reached the seemingly inevitable part of the campaign where the trailing candidates start hurling charges out of desperation and the leader responds in kind. In the closing days of 1992, President George H.W. Bush, ordinarily among the most decent, genteel fellows you’d ever meet, was running around calling Bill Clinton and Al Gore “bozos.” He simply couldn’t believe that he, a war hero, seasoned public servant, and recent winner of the Gulf War, was losing to a draft dodging, dope smoking hick from Arkansas.

It appears that John McCain has reached that point. During the primaries, he merely shook his head and noted that “Life’s not fair” when guys like Mitt Romney and even Mike Huckabee were outpolling him. But he kept plugging away and ultimately won the nomination easily. It looked like he was going to do the same thing in the general election, even taking a small lead after connecting on the Sarah Palin Hail Mary. But, alas, life’s not fair and the financial crisis seems to have stopped his campaign in its tracks. (It’s been noted before that this campaign has eerie similarities to the Santos-Vinick race during the last season of “West Wing.” The financial crisis is apparently the real world’s answer to the nuclear plant disaster on the show.)

Howard Wolfson is almost surely right that “Bill Ayers Won’t Save John McCain.”  Unless there’s far, far more to the association than we’ve seen, it’s a non-story that’s already been absorbed into the current polls.  And this is right, too:

This dynamic is very unlikely to change. John McCain’s goal in the first debate was to discredit Senator Obama as a credible Commander in Chief and elevate the issue of foreign policy and national security. He didn’t come close. Absent a domestic terror attack the economy will remain the number one issue in the race, and there is little Senator McCain can do to make up his gap with Senator Obama on it. Oh, Senator McCain will try to make issues of Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko and Rev. Wright, and that might hurt Senator Obama around the margins — but it will not prevent him from winning.  The economy is simply bigger than the rogues gallery that John McCain is conjuring up.

Palin kicked it up a notch yesterday with this nonsense: “Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who target their own country.”  To put it in a vernacular Palin might understand, that dog won’t hunt.  (One presumes dogs are involved in moose hunting, although my expertise is limited.)   It just comes across as a pathetic, desperate charge.

The foreign campaign contributions charge that’s been floated over the weekend is much more reasonable.  Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to work.   I seem to recall proof positive that Clinton was taking money from Red Chinese nationals in 1996 not having much, if any, impact on the race.

Ironically, Obama’s planned countercharges involving the twenty-year-old Keating Five scandal are more likely to have an impact because they go against McCain’s cultivated anti-corruption “maverick” image and most people have forgotten about that scandal.

Barring a catastrophic event like a terrorist attack, I’m not sure what happens over the next four weeks to turn this thing around for McCain.  It strikes me that his best course is to run an honorable, dignified campaign and simply sell himself.   Who knows, if he doesn’t win maybe Obama will offer to make him Secretary of State.

BREAKING: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been tabbed as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, CNBC reports.

________________________

Earlier this morning, all signs were pointing to Tim Pawlenty as John McCain’s running mate.  He even had issued the requisite “I’m not the guy” statement.

His name has been on the short list all along and, while he’s not an exciting choice, he doesn’t bring the liability of the other names that we’ve been hearing.

Mitt Romney is the obvious choice.  Despite Mike Huckabee ultimately getting a few more votes by hanging in long after it was over, Romney was easily the second choice of Republican primary voters.   He’s attractive, relatively young, and has a strong resume.   But he and McCain seem to genuinely dislike each other and there are plenty of negative sound bytes from the primaries for the Democrats to use in their ads.  And then there’s the “he owns more than one house” problem.  And the Mormon problem.

Huckabee would be the best choice if the election were going to be decided by Evangelicals.  It won’t be, however.

Joe Lieberman would be the guy if it McCain had his druthers.  The two are good friends and would work well together.  It would also be the boldest serious choice available and a strong play in the contest to attract moderates and even conservative Democrats.   But it’s too risky.  McCain has enough trouble with the base that he’s not going to be able to pull the trigger on a pro-choice fellow who, despite being hated by the Democrats, votes with his former party 80 percent of the time.

Condi Rice, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal and other longshot choices would liven up the race.  They’d also undercut key parts of McCain’s message.  Neither Palin nor Jindal are more experienced than Obama and it’s hard to run as a maverick who’s not a third Bush term running with  Bush’s chief foreign policy advisor.

UPDATE:  ABC reports that Palin in still in Alaska, seeming to rule her out logistically.  They also report that Pawlenty has received a call saying he’s not the guy.  Which means, as it did with Biden, he’s either 1) actually not the guy or 2) telling a little white lie to keep the suspense going a little longer.

UPDATE II:   Now AP says, “Two GOP strategists close to the McCain campaign said all indications pointed to Palin.”  Drudge has had a McCain-Palin logo atop his site most of the morning, despite no links to stories (until this one) indicating Palin was a likely choice.

Aside from being young and hot-for-a-politician, though, Palin undercuts McCain’s entire campaign theme. She’s got less political experience and less foreign policy experience than Obama.

UPDATE:  More from CNBC, which seems to be the first to go on the record with Palin as the choice.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a self-styled “hockey mom” who has only been governor for a little over a year, is GOP Presidential candidate John McCain’s choice for Vice President, CNBC has learned. According to a Republican strategist, Palin is the nominee, though McCain’s campaign has not comfirmed this. [But have they confirmed it? -ed.]

[...]

At 44, Palin is younger than Obama and, like McCain, she calls herself a maverick.

I’d never heard of Palin before the VP buzz started on the blogs a while back. She’s supposedly an excellent campaigner. And, obviously, her youth and gender make her a bold pick. Ultimately, though, I think she doesn’t make sense. If you’re running on “the country’s security is too important to be run by neophytes,” you can’t have one as next in line.

While Joe Biden was, twice, an awful presidential candidate, he’s a plausible president. Sarah Palin is not.

I hope CNBC is wrong.

UPDATE:  AP is running with the story, too.

UPDATE:  They’ve gone from qualifiers to a bold statement that Palin’s the one:

UPDATE: CNN’s on board, too:

Palin, 44, who’s in her first term as governor, is a pioneering figure in Alaska, the first woman and the youngest person to hold the state’s top political job.

She catapulted to the post with a strong reputation as a political outsider, forged during her stint in local politics. She was mayor and a council member of the small town of Wasilla and was chairman of the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which regulates Alaska’s oil and gas resources, in 2003 and 2004.

The conservative Palin defeated two so-called political insiders to win the governor’s job — incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in the GOP primary and former two-term Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles in the 2006 general election.

Palin made her name in part by backing tough ethical standards for politicians. During the first legislative session after her election, her administration passed a state ethics law overhaul.

Palin’s term has not been without controversy. A legislative investigation is looking into allegations that Palin fired Alaska’s public safety commissioner because he refused to fire the governor’s former brother-in-law, a state trooper.  Palin acknowledged that a member of her staff made a call to a trooper in which the staffer suggested he was speaking for the governor. Palin has admitted that the call could be interpreted as pressure to fire state trooper Mike Wooten, who was locked in a child-custody battle with Palin’s sister. “I am truly disappointed and disturbed to learn that a member of this administration contacted the Department of Public Safety regarding Trooper Wooten,” Palin said. “At no time did I authorize any member of my staff to do so.”

She’s going to make us pine for the days of Dan Quayle, methinks.

TIME, at least, is happy with the boldness of the pick, going with the headline: “McCain’s Surprise Pick: Sarah Palin.”  The text, thus far, is just AP wire copy.

WSJ is hailing the pick.

The move is the most dramatic in a series of efforts to appeal to Hillary Clinton supporters still disappointed that she didn’t capture the Democratic nomination. Gov. Palin also reinforces Sen. McCain’s reformer image. She took on her state’s political establishment that had been rocked by an FBI corruption investigation.

[...]

At the same time, her thin resume runs the risk of undercutting a central attack by Sen. McCain against Sen. Obama: That he isn’t ready to serve as president. The ability of Sen. McCain’s vice president to step into the top job is seen as particularly important given his age: He turns 72 today and would be the oldest person ever to enter the White House.

Even as Alaska governor, Gov. Palin has been criticized for her sparse experience. “Sarah is a small town mayor running Alaska as if it’s a small town,” says Frank Smith, a former union and Democratic Party activist in Alaska. “McCain is out of his mind. He has no foreign policy experience and she’ll help because she’s been fishing in Canada.”

[...]

The Republican Party’s conservative base — long wary of Sen. McCain and angry in recent weeks about hints he may pick a pro-choice running mate — hailed the move.

“Conservatives will be thrilled with this pick. Gov. Palin is a down the line mainstream conservative who will energize the base and reach across party lines attracting women voters, independents and blue collar Democrats,” Greg Mueller, a Republican strategist, and former aide to Republican presidential candidates Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan, said in a blast email. “Governor Palin is a terrific contrast to the all Washington ticket of Obama-Biden. She is a wonderful contrast to Biden, and a truly outside the beltway pick.”

We’ll see what the reaction turns out to be.  I’m certainly not the target audience.  But McCain’s first big decision is, in my mind, a truly awful one.   Obama went traditional but steady in Biden.  It wasn’t a bold pick but it was one that butressed his claim that he has judgment even though he lacks experience.   McCain has done the opposite here.

Update:  I’ll have more on Palin in subsequent threads as I get to know her a bit better and have time to digest it.  Since my take has been so negative, though, I thought I’d add some praise from an unlikely source, Charles Homans, a new editor at Washington Monthly who “lived in and reported on Alaska for the entirety of Sarah Palin’s tenure as governor.”

Palin can legitimately claim the maverick reformist credentials that McCain himself has long since lost. Her pro-life record helps McCain with the Republican base, her gender might lure away a few Hillary bitter-enders, and her youth goes a little way towards compensating one of McCain’s major weaknesses. Palin also manages the Obama-esque feat of commanding a great deal of popularity among people who don’t really know what she stands for–Dave Dittman, an Anchorage-based pollster, who has done a lot of polling and thinking about this, pointed out to me several months ago that Palin was maintaining a 85 percent approval rating among Alaskan voters even when her policies (particularly a natural gas line deal that has been a signature ambition of her administration) polled far short of that, and even when voters had trouble accurately describing her political leanings. She also pretty much guarantees a McCain victory in her home state, where Obama has been polling astoundingly well (Alaska hasn’t gone for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson).

It’s not much, to be sure, but useful in an admission against interests sort of way.  That Mark Levin and the like are stoked is, by contrast, decidedly less comforting.

Hillary Clinton’s speech is the big draw tonight at the Democratic Convention.  She’s going to have to convince a lot of people  — perhaps starting with herself — to put aside their grudges and voter for Barack Obama to be the next president.

Matt Yglesias echoes my longstanding view that this will happen organically and notes a recent parallel:

As you may recall, several months ago it looked as if one of America’s two major political parties was going to have a serious “party unity” problem. Their nominating contest produced a winner who’d prevailed against divided opposition without ever proving himself to be a clear majority choice anywhere. What’s more, the party’s base was divided between a substantial element that strongly approved of the party’s unpopular incumbent president, and another substantial element that joined the majority of the public in disapproving of his job performance. What’s more, the winner had a long history of personal and professional tensions with key stakeholders in his party’s political movement and with leading party politicians.

He’s referring, of course, to John McCain.  While a not insignificant number of Republicans still remain less than enthusiastic about him as their standard bearer, almost all have come around to its inevitability.  Few people who voted in the Republican primaries, perhaps excepting the Ron Paul crowd, will seriously consider Obama.

Matt argues that the transformation happened “by shifting attention off the internally controversial of their nominee and his relationship to other party figures and on to the internally uncontroversial subject of how awful the other political party is.”  I would argue that this happened without much help from Team McCain but is the natural state of affairs for partisans.

Slate’s John Dickerson, likewise, has thought the talk about a lasting riff between Obama and Clinton supporters was nonsense.  But, he confesses, “I’m getting wobbly. ”

In the two and a half months since Barack Obama won the nomination, he’s been trying to convince Hillary’s supporters—but his standing with them has gotten only worse. Roughly 30 percent of Clinton voters say they won’t vote for him, and this is not a one-poll anomaly. The number is the same in the Pew, ABC, and CNN polls. That’s as bad as it was during the heat of the Democratic primary.

[...]

Whatever role these PUMAs (”Party Unity My Ass”) ultimately play, we are learning that Barack Obama’s ability to persuade is limited. This has obvious implications for the coalition he needs to build to win, but it also raises questions about the way he intends to govern. He’s promised he can rally the nation to change, but it may be that he can rally only a certain constituency (and boy can he rally them) rather than being able to sway opinions and emotions across several constituencies.

I must confess, that I thought the healing would have taken place by now.  At times, it does seem like Team Obama has gone out of its way to poke Hillary supporters in the eye, as with the hiring of Patty Solis Doyle or by not even pretending that Hillary Clinton had any shot whatsoever to get the VP nod.

But, seriously, it’s simply bizarre to contemplate that all that many Clinton supporters are going to vote for McCain in a huff.  The amount of public policy light between the two Democratic contenders was miniscule, whereas McCain is a rock solid Republican on all but a handful of issues.  One can’t imagine, for example, partisans of Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee flocking to Obama in a huff.

The GOP has come up with a clever yet bizarre line of attack on Barack Obama: How dare he pass over Hillary Clinton for Joe Biden as his running mate?

As WSJ’s Amy Chozick reported last night, Team McCain debuted a new spot, “Passed Over,” at 3 a.m.:

The timing is a reference to Hillary Clinton’s national security ad during the Democratic primary and the same time the Obama campaign sent out its text message announcing Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden as the vice-presidential nominee.

“She won millions of votes. But isn’t on his ticket. Why?” an announcer says in the 30-second spot.

The answer? “For speaking the truth.”

The ad, which has not yet been released [as of 6:29 yesterday evening], then ticks off a litany of criticism Clinton used against Obama in the prolonged primary, according to a transcript sent to reporters.

“You never hear the specifics,” Clinton says.

“On the Rezko scandal,” the voice says.

“We still don’t have a lot of answers about Senator Obama,” Clinton says in footage from the primaries.

“Senator Obama’s campaign has become increasingly negative,” Clinton says in another scene.

The announcer closes by saying “The truth hurt. And Obama didn’t like it.”

The ad is the latest sign that the presidential contest has grown increasingly personal. It’s also proof that the some times bitter battle between the two Democratic senators has provided useful fodder to the Republican opposition.

The campaign also quickly emailed around a CNN Political Ticker story headlined “Some in Clinton circle ’outraged’.”

Evan as Hillary Clinton praised the newly-minted Democratic presidential ticket Saturday, some in her circle are furious Barack Obama did not appear to give the New York Democrat serious consideration for the No. 2 spot, or even ask for her consultation on the matter.

“Set aside that Obama said she’d be on anybody’s short list, set aside anybody’s feelings on whether she was deliberately snubbed and the pros and cons of whether it should be her,” a former Clinton strategist told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “Focus on the politics of it and you have about a quarter of Clinton loyalists still not joining the caravan…for God’s sake, not to even make a show of taking her seriously is flatly stupid.”

A top Clinton advisor also told CNN they were “outraged,” over how the process was conducted.  “You can’t put [Obama VP vetters] Eric Holder and Caroline Kennedy on an hour plane ride to Chappaqua just to check the box? They should have done it just for the optics,” this person said. “Barack never even said to her, ‘Here’s how I envision the job’– not one discussion with her about [the position].”

“They thought her supporters were mad before? They are really mad now,” this person also said. We knew it was never going to happen but you would have thought they might at least make a show of it.”

Not to be outdone, Bill Kristol weighs in with a blog post entitled “The Democrats’ Glass Ceiling.”

So Hillary Clinton gets about 18 million votes in 2008, and isn’t even considered for–she apparently isn’t even given the courtesy of being consulted–the vice presidential pick. Joe Biden manages to persuade a few thousand (if that) Iowans to support him. And Barack Obama selects Biden? Normally, if the VP pick came from that year’s presidential field, it’s the runner-up (Kerry-Edwards in 2004, Reagan-Bush in 1980, Stevenson-Kefauver in 1956). (Lyndon Johnson in 1960 hadn’t entered the primaries.) And Biden wasn’t even the third most successful candidate this year (hi, John Edwards!), or fourth (Bill Richardson, I suppose), or fifth (Dennis Kucinich!).

What’s more, Biden and Hillary have basically comparable foreign policy “experience” (such as it is in either case). Nor is Biden clearly more knowledgeable in foreign affairs than Hillary. And they have pretty similar foreign policy views. So no advantage to Biden there. And, unlike Jack Reed, for example, Biden didn’t serve in the military. So no advantage over Hillary there. Nor does he outshine her in executive experience (unlike Evan Bayh or Tim Kaine or Kathleen Sebelius)–neither Biden nor Hillary has any.

Stoking the lingering resentments of the Hillary camp is probably smart politics, although doing it so brazenly could backfire and cause more of them to realize that they’re playing into the Republicans’ hands.  But the idea that Clinton was somehow owed a VP offer is silly.

By Kristol’s logic, Mike Huckabee should be McCain’s running mate.  At the very least, he should be be seriously interviewed and Mitt Romney should get the nod, under the theory that Huckabee only surpassed him because he stayed in the race long after it was over.  Does anyone think McCain is seriously thinking about Huckabee?

Did Obama take “seriously” the idea of putting Hillary on the ticket?  I can’t imagine he didn’t given the delegate math.  But he and his team surely came to the conclusion that giving her the nod would be a disaster, given the hundreds  of sound bytes she gave the GOP and the complications that Bill Clinton brings to the mix.  Having decided that, pretending to interview her for the gig would have arguably been more insulting than moving on to other candidates.

And, please, let’s not pretend that Hillary Clinton has anything like Joe Biden’s foreign policy gravitas.  It’s been his bread and butter since Hillary was in law school.  She’s a junior Senate backbencher whose “experience” until eight years ago consisted of being married to a powerful man.  Did she learn a lot as a result of that partnership?  Sure.  Is it comparable to chairing the Foreign Relations Committee?  Not hardly.

Republican delegrate graphic via CNN.

In the long months between now and the conventions, one recurring theme we’ll see in the press and the punditocracy is speculation of who Barack Obama and John McCain will chose as running mates. None of us have any idea, of course, other than that Dick Cheney is not on anybody’s list. But it’s still fun to speculate.

For Obama, the most prominent names I’ve seen, aside from Hillary Clinton of course, are former North Carolina Senator John Edwards (Motto: He did so well in 2004), Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius (a white woman who’s much less annoying than Hillary), former NATO commander and Marine Commandant Jim Jones (my boss’ boss at the Atlantic Council), former NATO commander and 2004 also-ran Wesley Clark and, now, former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn. Former Reagan SECNAV and current Virginia Senator Jim Webb, widely touted by myself and others, seems to have fallen out of favor. Also, since Jim Johnson has been ousted, we’re pretty sure that Obama won’t pull a Dick Cheney and pick his selection committee chairman.

Clinton, Edwards, and Sebelius would be traditional choices made for standard political reasons. Jones, Clark, or Nunn would be an admission that national security is a huge issue and that Obama needs help there. Frankly, unless he puts Jeremiah Wright on the ticket, I’m not sure it much matters.

The conventional wisdom is probably right that McCain’s VP choice matters more than Obama’s simply because of McCain’s age. At 72, it’s hard to see him running for a second term and, let’s face it, he’s more likely than his 45-year-old opponent to die in office.

Speculation centers on former 2008 challengers Mitt Romney (less conservative than McCain but more favored among conservatives), Mike Huckabee (reducing the Republican Party to its essential element), Louisiana governor and boy wonder Bobby Jindal (half McCain’s age and “of color”), Florida Governor Charlie Crist (who’s from Florida), Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (who’s a woman), and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (who’s not only a woman but good looking by VP candidate standards). Nobody’s much talking about Condi Rice anymore, given that distancing himself from President Bush is a key McCain priority. Former Democrat Joe Lieberman is a Hail Mary dark horse, creating a possible RINO-DINO* ticket.

Frankly, I’m not particularly enthusiastic with any of the above options. Palin and Jindal are interesting choices but make no sense for a candidate betting the ranch on national security expertise. Huckabee is simply a non-starter, since he alienates pretty much everyone who isn’t a die hard Evangelical. Hutchinson and Crist are safe but boring. Lieberman is the boldest choice, simultaneously doubling down on the Iraq bet and appealing to moderates, but he also energizes a large part of the Democratic base and irritates McCain’s conservative critics on domestic issues.

Is there someone out there that can simultaneously 1) help McCain carry a swing state, 2) bolster his conservative credentials, 3) complement the “Ready on Day One” message?

Image via HuffPo

___________

*Technically, Lieberman’s no longer a Democrat in name but there’s no cute acronym for “Caucusing With the Democrats But Poking them in the Eye with a Sharp Stick Whenever Possible” — much less one which rhymes with RINO.

George Will decries the romanticization of the presidency.

Barack Obama recently said, “I believe in our ability to perfect this nation.” Clearly there is something the candidate of “change” will not change—the pattern of extravagant presidential rhetoric. Obama is trying to replace a president who vowed to “rid the world of evil”—and of tyranny, too.

[...]

If you can name it, presidents are responsible for it. The name for this is infantilization. “The average American,” said President Richard Nixon, “is just like the child in the family—you give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something.” Vice President Al Gore said the government should act like “grandparents in the sense that grandparents perform a nurturing role.”

Such demented talk encourages presidential candidates to make delusional promises—energy independence in eight years (Mike Huckabee), “an excellent teacher in every classroom” and “every school an outstanding school” (John Edwards, who presumably knows how every school can stand out when all are outstanding), a “perfect” nation (see above) and so on.

The last presidential candidate to talk sense about the office was fictional. In an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing,” the Republican candidate, who was not the hero, was asked, “How many jobs will you create?” “None,” he replied, adding: “Entrepreneurs create jobs. Business creates jobs. The president’s job is to get out of the way.”

John McCain said something similar while campaigning in Michigan. He lost. We reward candidates who promise pie in the sky, not those who tell us that we’re responsible for our own lives.

Many more examples of the phenomenon at the link and, presumably, Gene Healy’s new book The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, which inspired Will’s column.

via Radley Balko

Everyone’s abuzz over Hillary Clinton saying she is staying in the race just in case Barack Obama gets assassinated. Or, something like that:

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

Here’s the video:

A very angry John Aravosis has the blow-by-blow of the story breaking and the various reactions and counter-reactions as they played out on television.

Marc Ambinder notes that the part about Bill Clinton isn’t even true — that he essentially had it wrapped up in March — and that Gary Hart and numerous other frontrunners who fell apart late without getting murdered would have been better examples.

TIME’s objective journalist Karen Tumulty calls the comments “very strange and tasteless” and points out Clinton said something very similar in March. Big Tent Democrat/Armando, the Hugh Hewitt of pro-Clinton bloggers, uses the fact that nobody made a big deal about it then as evidence that it’s not a big deal now.

AllahPundit, who thinks this kills (no pun intended) the idea of Hillary as VP, notes that Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a Clinton supporter and has issued a statement that it would be “a mistake for people to take offense.”

I’m with RFK, Jr. and Armando on this one. Yes, it was an impolitic thing to say. And, goodness, you think she’d have learned from Mike Huckabee’s example. But, rather clearly, the context was “Hey, sometimes things happen” rather than “Hey, I’ve got a chance — he could get hisself shot!”

There are plenty of reasons to want Hillary Clinton to go away. This, though, isn’t one of them.

Think Progress‘ Matt Corley notes that for the NYT has been forced to append a correction on a Bill Kristol column for an egregious factual error. Citing Obama’s 41 point loss in West Virginia, Kristol exclaimed, “I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.” In fact, Mike Huckabee won his native Arkansas by 41 points and Mitt Romney took Utah by nearly 90 points in a single day this cycle.

John Cole quips, “I am noticing a trend here. Kristol claims government is inefficient, ineffective, and bad, gets a bunch of his buddies elected, and proves it. He also rails against the MSM, claims they can’t get their facts straight, gets a job at the NY Times, and proves it.”

It’s noteworthy, too, that Kristol’s colleague, David Brooks, made a similar error earlier in the week, claiming that Obama had voted for a farm bill which he merely endorsed without casting a vote. These are dumb errors and one would think NYT fact checkers could find these things before going live. Columns aren’t published at blog speed, after all, and they have a staff of greater than one.

In fairness to Kristol and Brooks, though, their essential points worked with the real facts. Obama did in fact support and fail to vote against a farm bill that he surely would agree was a bad law. And Obama’s loss in a head-to-head race with a single candidate was staggering. There were 21 states voting and multiple candidates still running on Super Tuesday; McCain strategically avoided gimme states for his opponents and concentrated on consolidating victory. (Kristol’s larger argument, that this says much of anything about the general election, however, still strikes me as unpersuasive.)