Entries for December 2007

Marc Ambinder of theatlantic.com has obtained and printed a copy of the Giuliani campaign memo which argues that he can win the nomination by winning in Florida and in the February 5 contests. Key point from the memo:

Only 78 delegates will be picked prior to Florida whereas 1,039 delegates will be picked on January 29 and February 5. Additionally, it is important to note that voting HAS ALREADY STARTED in Florida, Missouri, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey and New York - tens of thousands of people will have already cast their ballot by the time you are reading this note. And more February 5th states, including California will begin early and absentee voting soon. All of this points to the folly of over-estimating the impact of the results of Iowa and New Hampshire and the wisdom of our strategy.

The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi today is a terrible tragedy.

Last October I noted, Bhutto's brave words as she returned to Pakistan after a long exile and immediately faced an assassination attempt. Here is an article by Bhutto that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 23, and here is an August interview of Bhutto by the Journal’s Bret Stephens.

I gather from those who know more than I do that Bhutto was a flawed public official, but she did have a genuine popular following and did seem to be committed—and willing to risk her life—to democratic governance. She seemed to be the only leader who could put together a democratic government and make a transition from the personal rule of Pervez Musharraf. Whether the elections will proceed as scheduled January 8 seems unclear.

Her death is a reminder that we really do live in a dangerous world. Pakistan is a nuclear power with a military and a secret service that seem laced with supporters of Islamist terrorism. Many Americans would like to go back on holiday from history. But as Leon Trotsky is supposed to have said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” I suspect that this tragic event will have an effect on the campaign going on so hot and heavy right now in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Many political observers see Mitt Romney as contrived, artificial, faux. This impression comes partly from his quite recent switches on political issues like abortion and also from his manner. He seems too platform perfect, too given to clichés, too saccharine to be true.

But maybe this is the real Mitt Romney. Or at least, so my theory goes. Mitt Romney, to a greater extent than most candidates and most public figures, is a guy out of the '50s. If you remember the '50s, as I do, you probably sometimes hear yourself using phrases and expressions that no one else seems to use anymore. Or you hear others your age doing the same thing. Most Americans, after all, are younger than you are. The popular culture of the 1950s is as strange to them as the silent movies of the 1920s are to you. And you sound somehow phony (does anyone use that word anymore? J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield used it a lot in the 1950s) to them.

Time magazine has chosen Vladimir Putin as the person of the year. This strikes me as an odd choice. Yes, Putin has been an important player on the international stage; yes, he has frustrated American efforts to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons; yes, he has been more intransigent on asserting Russian power on the "near abroad," the former Soviet republics, which, like Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltics, seek to take a different course. But he has been doing these things for years, and he has made no important advances, at best incremental progress, in calendar year 2007.

In contrast, Time's fourth runner-up for person of the year, Gen. David Petraeus, has made an enormous difference this past year. With the help of many others (which is true of any leader), he has turned around the military situation and the political situation (if not at the top-down national level, then at the bottom-up local level) in Iraq. What seemed to be an imminent American defeat has been transformed into an imminent American success. And Petraeus has done more than any other person to turn that around.

Two special elections for the House of Representatives were held yesterday to replace the late Paul Gillmor of Ohio and Jo Ann Davis of Virginia, both Republicans. Republicans held both seats by solid margins.

In Ohio's Fifth District, Bob Latta beat Robin Weirauch 57 to 43 percent. This is a little below George W. Bush's 61-to-39 margin in the district. Democrats put some money in this race, presumably because of the recent strong anti-Republican trend in Ohio. That trend enabled Democrats last year to win the governorship by a wide margin and to win the other statewide offices, listed lower on the ballot, after 16 years of Republican control of state government (the longest such period of party control in Ohio since the 1840s). Latta carried every county in the district.

Here is my Creators Syndicate column for this week, looking at progress in Iraq, the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and the defeat of Hugo Chávez's referendum in Venezuela. For more on Venezuela, check out this interesting column by former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda. He reports that Chávez attempted to steal the election but was prevented by the military. This strikes me as very plausible, given the doubts about the integrity of Chávez's electoral process I've expressed in the past.

Do we want to dredge up the Clinton scandals of the past? A large part of me says no. They're history now; let's give Hillary (as she is referred to often on her website) a clean slate and see how she does this cycle. But in National Journal, Stuart Taylor takes a trip down memory lane—from the tawdriness of the 1992 presidential campaign through the mendacity of the ensuing years—to revisit a sampling of why so many of us came to think that Hillary's first instinct when in an embarrassing spot is to lie.

It's a powerful column, the more so because Taylor is an evenhanded, thoughtful journalist who, if memory serves, has written that he's never voted for a Republican for president.