Good morning to those of you who tune in Sunday for the morning marathon of political talk and to those of you who just come here to avoid it. Let's begin.

Fox News Sunday

Rudy Giuliani will be on today, thus ensuring that someone will talk about him after two weeks of being of complete non-entity. Chris opens things up by demonstrating to Rudy just how stupid his campaign strategy was. Rudy responds with that giggle of his, and then says, "We have a major campaign, we've run a great campaign." He says, "Everyone has to has a strategy that fits them, and he feels that an obscure property tax vote that's coming up makes him the best candidate for Florida." So, there you have it--he'll mount a national campaign based on regional minutia.

Giuliani says that all those people are working for free, "wasn't necessary." Just a generous gesture! Betcha he's taken them up on the offer, though!

Wallace keeps hammering away on strategy. "But you spent money in New Hampshire! In South Carolina!" It's getting asinine. WE GET IT! Rudy ran a dumb campaign and is broke! We've known this for a month! Wallace is trying to play "gotcha" on this issue, but of all the potential "gotcha" moments you can have with Giuliani, why belabor this one? Best you can hope for is Rudy breaking down, saying, "All right! You got me! I have no money! I ran a bad campaign!" What about policy? What about that Cabinet of Dr. Caliguri he calls "foreign policy advisors?" What about Kerik? (YES, I KNOW: Chris Wallace is doing the asking.)

Wallace shows Giuliani's crazy terrorporn advertisement and then basically asks why shouldn't John McCain be the national security President. Rudy says that the commercial proves he is ready. WHAT? The commercial proves he is ready to demonstrate his hard-on for terrifying images. He says that he's better than John McCain because he made decisions on his own, where John has been "one voice out of one-hundred." That should cue an anaylsis of those decisions. FDNY radios, anyone!

First mention of 9/11! Drink!

Ha. See: Mr. Decision Maker says, "I am going to fight for all of [my tax reductions], I won't get them all passed." He goes on the voice support for the Bush tax cuts, and this crazy belief that the economy can grow as long as everyone keeping clicking their heels together and imagining that things will get better.

Then he talks about deporting millions of people, perfecting foolproof IDs, and processing millions more immigrants. This will all be done for FREE, I guess, because all his tax policies have been built to pander to the nutlog ideas of the fringe crazies at the Club For Growth. Oh, and they would all have to learn English, too! For free! By magic! Read and write Engllsh! OUR OWN PRESIDENT CAN'T DO THOSE THINGS.

Panel Time: We're going to talk about the whole "race card" stuff that's coming out of the Democratic race, where the Clintons said a whole bunch of things about the civil rights movement.

Bill Kristol insists that the only people who got upset are people who just like to get upset, right after Mara Liasson said that this issue has been "burning up black talk radio." So, to Kristol, black people are just ornery cusses who get upset all the time. "Where's my M-Fing iced tea?" Right, Bill? It doesn't matter: Kristol is weirdly all up in arms about this! Liasson says the Clintons use too many brass knuckles! Surreal!

We turn to the Michigan primary. McCain bounce? Kristol says that there is an assumed "wave" behind McCain that's carrying him in Michigan, but that might not be there. This is a good point! But with no real Democratic race in the state, McCain has the advantage of getting the independent votes. And, Juan Williams just made that point.

Does Romney have to win in Michigan? Can you imagine ANOTHER, "Hey, I won a silver medal!" speech? There's a general consensus that Romney's done if he can't win Michigan, and Thompson's done if he can't win in South Carolina.

Love Liasson's point on heading to a Huckabee-McCain finish: "The brokest, funniest candidates standing...it will put the Republican establishment in therapy."

This Week with George Stephanopoulos

We have John Kerry! Obama brings leadership, inspiration, and a definitive "break from the past," he says. And that Newt Gingrich is going to agree with him!

Kerry has a lot of nice things to say about Obama, but none of this is going to advance him past the Clinton's main criticism: that Obama is more inspirational than executive. That said: Bill Clinton got to the White House on nothing more than inspiration (and Ross Perot!).

Kerry acknowledges that he made a mistake in dealing with the Swift Boaters, and that no Democrat would ever make that mistake again. We'll see. It may not be up to a candidate. It's up to a press that's willing to call people like that out instead of standing around stupefied, talking endlessly about the impact that people like the Swift Boaters have on the horse race.

Kerry talks about Obama being the first black student to head the Harvard Law Review, "Which you know how difficult that is." How would Stephanopoulos know? He didn't go to law school at Harvard and he's not black.



Hey! Newt Gingrich! Defibrillating his relevance! Who thinks we need a law to make English the official language of government. What American legislature is conducting business in some other language? And then he says that bureaucracy is destructive, after suggesting we bureaucratize the speaking of English. Dear, oh dear.

But, too much talk about issue! Must talk about horse races! Gingrich says Romney has more delegates than anyone--I think that's wrong, actually! Yes. I am right. Here's the delegate count. Note Romney's use of Enron accounting. Also note that this story comes from ABC News! You'd think maybe someone there would tell Stephanopoulos that his own news division has a different answer.

Gingrich thinks the "open" Hillary is better than the "austere" Hillary, and that it was strange to identify herself with LBJ.

Ahh. Montage of crying. Is that where we're going with this today? Yes. Great.

George Will opines that he doesn't feel that the crying was calculated, but he brings up a point that's been troubling me: if we say that those tears turned the tide for Clinton, doesn't that infantilize women voters? Personally, I think Clinton won by targeting Democratic undecided voters while Obama was wooing independents, and got a surge of support out of it. I don't believe those tears won her the race. But as long as everyone gives that idea credence (Clinton included), it's going to really go a long way to undermining the credibility of women voters. Pay attention to this in the coming weeks. Make note of where the conversation turns in this direction.

Was there a secret "anti-black" vote in NH? Bradley effect? Nobody really gives that credence.

Romney appears to be up in all polls in Michigan. Will says that this is the Giuliani strategy coming together, but notes that the problem is that Rudy's campaign is running on fumes. Also: Rudy's got getting more than one percent separation between he and Ron Paul! Also: it's a bit of stretch to count on Thompson winning South Carolina.

Ahh, the side deals. McCain and Huckabee attack Romney while McCain and Thompson attack Huckabee, while Paul and Giuliani compete with each other for the vote of the warped and distended. Romney needs an alliance. But only Alan Keyes is left!

The Chris Matthews Show

Ahh, the mangled, misogynistic mind of Chris Matthews. This is starting to feel less like an indulgence and more like torture. And that's saying something considering I witnessed an live waterboarding last night - via Chicago's brilliant Neo-Futurist troupe, who included the short segment as a part of their "Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind: 30 Plays in 60 Minutes" show last night at DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre. (The segment was about as unpretentious and as honest as theatre can get, by the way. The actor simply explained what was going to happen, it happened, and after he signalled for it to stop, one of the other actors asked, "Why did you stop?" The waterboardee simply said, "Because I couldn't breathe. I would have done anything for it to stop." Then, withour dwelling on it, they moved on to the next play. Powerful, without being smacked over the head with "message." These guys perform regularly in Chicago and New York City, and despite the tenor of the piece I've described, their performances are typically high-octane, breakneck enjoyment. Highly recommended. And now, non-political plugs and recommendations for your enjoyment over, I'm moving on.)

So today we have Michelle Norris, Bob Woodward, Gloria Borger, and David Brooks. Yay.

Obama vs. Clinton. And we're going to talk about women voters. Ready yourself, Matthews-watchers.

Woodward thinks she's "become her own story" and is no longer in Bill's shadow. Then suggests that she needs to "dial her personality down." Borger suggests that she has a difficult problem balancing the "tough" with the "likeable." "Are you suggesting contrivance," Matthews asks. But Borger says the tears were real. Sorry, Chris. Brooks suggests that she's a "celebrity" that has "built walls." Then Woodward says, "Now the focus is on her." Now? Now it's on her? It's been on her since day one!

Borger is basically suggesting that the voters responded to the Obama/Edwards pile on and voted for her out of pity. See: can we not simply assume that the voters had a substantive reason to vote? Who's ever won an election on "pity" votes? I'm not saying that voters cannot sympathize with candidates from time to time, but people vote their values.

David Brooks reasons: "People are idiots." If the media professionals get it wrong, imagine how wrong the people get things! Ugh.

Borger says that Obama needs to "outline an agenda that appeals to working class citizens." Okay. That's fair. Then she says that Obama is the candidate of the "wealthy" who are "the idealists." What? Middle class Americans, working class Americans, can't be "idealists? Michelle Norris is feeling me, shooting "What the heck?" beams across the room at Borger.

Now it's wine! Beer! Starbucks! Dunkin Donuts! And what about Latinos, Brooks wonders? The churro voters!

Borger says Obama has to talk about substance because Clinton is going to start talking about it. Hillary's on Meet The Press later...so we'll see. I think this has been a solidly platitude-based campaign.

Then, Matthews compares John Edwards to Ben Stein's character from Honeymoon in Vegas? There are days when I wake up and just don't know what anyone's even talking about anymore!

Will McCain grab the support of the GOP establishment? Woodward notes that McCain's stature might trump their opinions of his politics. McCain has a sense of Presidential gravitas, according to Woodward. "Moral authority."

Borger suggests that voters are rejecting the polarizing types, rather than just backing experience. Brooks relates that GOP consultants are recommending that you don't sleep on Huckabee, however.

Michelle says that the "Oprah effect" is going to be on display in South Carolina. The question is, will it show up anywhere else.

Woodward, says, "You may not know this, but the real fault line in America is still the Iraq War." That Woodward would say this to Chris Matthews on a segment called "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" speaks volumes about Matthews, Woodward, and the media in general. "It's going to be the most important thing in American politics." And he's writing a book about it, HE HELPFULLY REMINDS. "The next President is going to have to make...hard, important choices," Woodward says. GREAT, Bob. THANKS. That never occurred to anyone, ever before! Tell me why we take this guy so damn seriously again? "That needs to be discussed more in the campaign," he says, seemingly unaware that when these candidates get in front of cameras, the press wants to talk about crying.

Borger says that Democratic strategists have told her that March 4th will be the date the Democratic nominee is decided.

"I think Florida, but that's just me," Brooks says. Uhm...yeah. It would be JUST YOU, because the Democrats aren't even campaigning in Florida. Borger leans over to the grinning face of political density and reminds him that she was talking about the Democrats. Then he says that there is a "fatigue factor" in play. I think he's just projecting!

Hey! Would you like to see a webcast of the Chris Matthews show? Yeah. I didn't think you did.

Meet The Press

Russert has Hillary Clinton on for the whole hour. Russert gets right into the race issue, brandishing a headline that attests to black voters finding the Obama/MLK remarks to be "painful." he hits her with a Bob Herbert column as well. Clinton insists that there is not one shred of truth to any of the charges, that she admires MLK and was only contesting Obama's self-comparison to Kennedy and King. And if Obama would march, protest, organize and get himself gassed, beaten and jailed, he'd be allowed to say the things he's saying. She says the Obama campaign is distorting things, and then immediately hits the high road, "Neither of us wants to inject these things into the race." And Bill was talking about Obama's positions on the Iraq War when he talked about "fairy tales."

So, okay...that's a fairy tale. Clinton's Iraq War votes lined up the same way, didn't they?

"Anytime anyone from my campaign has said anything that is out of bounds, they're gone."

On Martin Luther King and LBJ, Clinton says that beyond the great speeches, King recognized that he needed to support people within the power structure to get things done. So he campaigned for Johnson. And all of that is true. But taking it to this race, she seems to be saying that the best thing Obama can do, is, well...to campaign for her, I guess! I mean, ultimately, she doesn't really want voters to make a side-by-side comparison. She doesn't define any sort of space for her opponent to join this debate. She just wants Obama to admit that he's crazy for ever running in the same election against her!

Essentially, the Clinton message is this: Obama is good at speechifying. "But when the cameras are gone...what's next?" It seems to me that Edwards is the one of the three that's talked about "what's next." What we know of Clinton's policies is that she won't just give speeches about it. But sooner or later, won't she have to gove a speech on some topic other than not merely giving speeches? This race, on both sides, is so cautious. Most of that probably has to do with not knowing who the frontrunner on the GOP side is going to turn out to be - no one wants to stake out the wrong territory. Think about how complicated a single issue, like immigration, gets depending on what Republican wins the nomination.

Clinton's pan-accusation is that Obama has never but his words into deeds. I'm not sure this is true. He seems to have anecdotally, wrought a great deal of good while heading up the Harvard Law Review, and his supporters point to a lot of legislation he helped to pass in Illinois. But Obama stays very muted on his record, it's true (his Nevada ad, for example, is one long paean to the aspirational/inspirational). Why he doesn't spend time specifically detailing substantive accomplishments is beyond me...maybe the fear is that state/local efforts will seem too small in the context of a national election. Still, why not just shoot down the "all talk no action" frame?

By comparison, I think a lot of perfectly reasonable people would contend that Clinton is vastly overselling her "experience" as FLOTUS and FLOTSOA (First Lady Of The State Of Arkansas).

"I don't like talking about myself," Clinton says She won't say whether or not Obama is "ready" to be President. She says that's up to the voters. Then she implies that he isn't. Then she says again that it's up to voters. Then she implies that he isn't. Then she says that in New Hampshire, the voters said that he wasn't ready. But she'd never say so herself. Just imply it.

If anyone can explain to me specifically what Hillary Clinton did 1973 that constituted an act of "proven, tested leadership," please let me know. Seriously! It would be very helpful. She seems to forget to be specific about it! Often just saying she has "thirty-five years of proven, tested leadership." So, please. What did she do in 1973? I just want voters to be able to compare her records to the other candidates!

Now we get to Down and Marcus insisting that she won the Senate by "playing the victim." To be fair, she won the Senate because the opponent she was facing--the formidable one, Giuliani--dropped out of the race to tend to his cancer. The opponent she faced, Rick Lazio, was not a very good candidate. People make a big deal about Lazio walking over to her at that debate--far from a moment in which Clinton got to play "damsel in distress," it was a moment in which Lazio demonstrated that he was a boob. Lazio was not a serious man, or a serious candidate. I think Clinton beat Lazio on the merits, or Lazio's palpable lack thereof.

Clinton offers some substance. She will begin plans to withdraw troops on Day One. "One to two brigades a month." She will put pressure on the Iraqi government. She says that the only reason the Iraqi government is doing anything is because time is running out. Uhm...I don't see the Iraqi government doing much of anything, actually. And this plan to withdraw troops...the question is: how many? She told the New York Times that she "would leave residual forces to fight terrorism and to stabilize the Kurdish region in the north." That's a BIG troop commitment, and that Kurdish region is growing more and more unstable. If she still believes that it's necessary to do these things militarily, then this talk of withdrawal is way overblown. (In fairness, neither Obama, nor Edwards have offered withdrawal plans that differ substantatively from Clinton's--all would require a significant troop presence to remain in Iraq for a considerable amount of time.)

I think Democratic voters really need to realize that they no longer have a "withdrawal" candidate within shouting distance of front-runner status.

Clinton wants the Iraqis to get their act together before she becomes President. Let's hope that happens! Meanwhile, if it doesn't I'd still kind of like to know what she'd do differently to get them moving in that direction - other than to just pulling troops! She says that her plan to withdraw troops - not the surge - is driving the Iraqi government. Though I don't really see the Iraqi government doing that much, so are they really listening? This is a weird way of making her case: The surge isn't working. But the effects we wanted are being achieved because of my presidential run. Personally, I think the stronger case is: The surge isn't working, here's what I plan on doing that is different. But in Clinton's world, the Iraqi government is going to work REALLY DILIGENTLY to solve their problems by the time she's sworn in, out of the goodness of their hearts or something. O-kay.

Russert next attempts to draw her out on a comparison of her vote to authorize the Iraq War and Obama's statement that he does not support "dumb wars." Hardly the first time anyone's done that. And her answer is much the same: she insists that her vote had a specific intent behind it - to have inspectors sent back into Iraq - that absolves her of the practical fact that President Bush was always going to take that vote and accept it as carte blanche permission to do whatever he wanted. You can hardly expect her to say anything else, though! The truth is that she voted in that way because taking a principled stand against the war might negatively impact her career prospects. (And there came a point where this affected Obama's subsequent votes as well.)

Discussing the Levin amendment, Clinton says that her intention was always to restrict the President's ability to wage war. Military force, she insists, was intended to be wielded if "we weren't successful with the diplomacy and if we weren't successful in persuading Hussein to do something." But as any observer of that period of time would note, the White House was engaged full-scale in undercutting diplomatic efforts, and Rumsfeld's famous speech about "known knowns and unknown knowns" more or less demonstrated that Hussein was never going to be given the option of "doing something." The assumption always was that no matter what Hussein did, it was never going to be enough. That's probably correct to assume about Hussein, by the way, but to present this historical narrative in a way that suggests that there was chance the march to war would have been arrested through the satisfaction of some set of diplomatic criteria is fundamentally wrong.

This is what I'm talking about: Clinton says that if the inspectors had been allowed to work, that Saddam's threat would have been revealed to be a "charade." But the White House was fully prepared to shrug off any proof the inspectors brought out! And this was evident to just about anyone who was paying attention to their rhetoric at the time! The inspectors would have never satisfied the administration sufficiently. That vote to authorize war was Congressional cover of a fait accompli.

Obama, Clinton contends, spoke out rightly in 2002, but then changed his mind. Clinton says that there were others who voted against the war and never wavered. Mind you, she's not one of them. But none of "never-wavers" are currently running for President, are they?



"As we end the war in Iraq, we're going to be bringing" the money home that she'll use to pay for her programs. But if our troops are going to stay to fight terrorists and secure the Kurds, that doesn't sound like a cost-saving "end" to the Iraq War.

Nobody talked to her about the Rich pardon? But I thought her involvement in the White House was central to her experience?

With regard to whether she still believes in a "vast right-wing conspiracy," Hillary laughs and says she's been too busy over the past ten years to worry about it. But when she was worried about it, was she not busy with the activity that provided her the experience she's now claiming to have?

She united New York?

Now she's talking about the scars she gained from "entrenched interests" that aligned against her. Is "entrenched interests" the new term for "vast right-wing conspiracy?"

Presented with polls numbers, she parries that surely New Hampshire proves that the value of polls is pretty worthless. She should have stopped there, because she goes on to add that polls are not something to which she pays any attention. So I wonder: if that's true, what was driving all the talk of people getting fired, and cancelling plans to campaign in South Carolina? My understanding was that it looked like the polls had her losing New Hampshire. Someone was paying attention to them! And closely.

You know, it's funny. Russert asks her about her biggest moment of adversity. She says, "I think you know it. We lived through it, didn't we." I can only gather we're talking about Lewinsky-slash-impeachment. Did we "all" live through that? Because I can think of a few different adverse times lately that we all lived through. But hey, an honest answer.

All right, people. Go enjoy the NFL playoffs!

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