Most recent thoughts....

Let the games begin

[Burning Bush on Pennsy Turnpike
-- a sign for the superdelegates?]

By Terry Michael
Article published Apr 22, 2008

Aging stalwarts of America's more secular political party are seeking a sign to deliver us from the presidential primary wilderness, divine intervention to get us out of campaign hell.

The graying wing of the Democratic Party is tired of this marathon. We will encounter our burning bush somewhere along the Pennsylvania Turnpike Tuesday night, even if we have to hallucinate it. Enough is enough. We've heard Sen. Hillary Clinton's claims about taking her fight to the last rodeo in Montana June 3. Yes, Sen. Barack Obama pays obligatory lip service to the right of every Democratic voice to be heard in all eight remaining states, plus Puerto Rico, Guam and galaxies far, far away. Stipulated, some "super delegates" are telling journalists everybody should get to weigh in, even if it takes until July.

Hey, we're Democrats, the inclusive party. That's how we talk.

But most of us want this damn thing over. Use whatever metaphor you like: a nuclear chain reaction reaching critical mass, or a tipping point at which buyers flock to the next new thing. But the Pennsylvania results will be embraced, by super delegates, party elders, average Democrats and an increasingly bored media, as the beginning of the end.

A rush toward Mr. Obama will get underway in the early morning hours of April 23, before we elitist Democrats grab our caramel macchiattos at Starbucks. By the time we reach Whole Foods in the late afternoon of the day after, and before we can put those French lentils with baby carrots into the microwave, the march of super delegates toward ObamaLand will be viewable on our 47-inch flat panel displays, presented by the best political teams in the cable babbling cosmos.

The mathematical impossibility for Mrs. Clinton to be victorious in popular votes, pledged delegates or states has been repeated ad nauseum, and needs no belaboring here. But it will take a miracle to reach the strong double digit victory predicted just weeks ago in Pennsylvania, which couldn't be more perfectly tailored for her focus-group-written biography and the poll-crafted neo-Clinton positions with which she has waged her quest for restoration of power.

Witness the evidence from Pennsylvania.

A blue collar, depressed, older electorate, "Ohio on steroids," and Mrs. Clinton's fourth home state. Has any American politician ever claimed more ancestral geography? To that mix, add incendiary language from Mr. Obama's silly old-guy pastor, cabled and YouTubed throughout cheese steak and Steelers land, along with the senator's poorly chosen, elitist-sounding words in San Francisco (though one should be skeptical of media elites interpreting elitism).

Yet, Mrs. Clinton's numbers have plummeted in the Keystone State, where her assets have been laser-focused and Mr. Obama's liabilities have been revealed since primary voters were last heard from March 11 in Mississippi. Just a week before Pennsylvanians were to vote, instead of a deficit of two dozen points, at least one poll showed Mr. Obama several digits ahead and two others calculated he was no more than 4 points behind (not that anyone should believe any polls this year). Obviously, if he ekes out even a one percent victory, the race is over. But if the former First Lady claims anything less than a 10-point lead, she should be regarded as toast.

The clear and present danger for Democrats allowing the battle to proceed past Pennsylvania was reflected in an amazing strategy memo — so off the wall it may have been written tongue-in-cheek — published in The Washington Post recently by Douglas Schoen, the estranged polling partner of former Clinton chief strategist Mark Penn.

Mr. Schoen asserted that Mrs. Clinton " needs to completely abandon her positive campaign and continue to hammer away at Obama," contending that "[though] Clinton is acutely conscious... too many personal attacks will hurt her party in November, a positive message is simply not enough to alter the race at this point." That cynical prescription appeared the same day the same newspaper released polling numbers revealing, "Today, more Americans have an unfavorable view of her than at any time since The Post and ABC began asking the question, in 1992."

It is over. The sign is upon us, flashing brightly. To put it bluntly, the Democratic Party is not going to thumb its nose at history and deny the nomination to a black candidate in favor of a woman with Mrs. Clinton's baggage. Get ready for Obamamania, Mr. McCain.

Terry Michael, a former press secretary at the Democratic National Committee, is director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism. (www.terrymichael.net)

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Note: A few paragraphs were cut from this piece, for space, by Reason editors. They have been included here, and are in red.

by Terry Michael | March 14, 2008

Who Says
the Surge Is Working?
Weak-kneed Democrats,
that's who.

The surge is smirking.

When it comes Iraq, neoconservative true believers have been allowed to set the bar of "success" below ground level. In this, they're aided by media siding with power instead of challenging it, all while congressional Democrats cower in their cloak rooms.

Approaching the fifth anniversary of "mission accomplished," we are a few improvised explosive devices away from the moment a 4,000th young American will die on some desert roadside.

As that new level of tragedy looms, far too many Democrats remain frightened by their "weak-on-defense" Cold War shadows, apparitions raised not just by the no-time-to-surrender bluster of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, but by the neocon-lite faction of the Democratic Party itself.

"Third way" Democrats lost their national security minds somewhere around 1985, when the World War II generation played the role of swing voters. Promoting "progressive internationalism"—interventionism by another name—Beltway-based operatives like those at the Democratic Leadership Council hallucinate a political center of "Reagan Democrats," who in reality disappeared with the Berlin wall. The middle of the electorate is now made up of generally anti-war Baby Boomers, who came of political age in the 1960s and Vietnam.

Proponents of the war and the surge even get to pick their own faux war “critics,” as they did last July when they heralded a New York Times op-ed by “liberal” Brookings Institution fellow Michael O’Hanlon, co-authored with another supporter of the Iraq War from the beginning, Kenneth Pollack. This pair described themselves as “two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq,” after they returned from parachuting into Baghdad. Audaciously, they feigned they were “...surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.” The entire neo-con establishment then trumpeted how even these “liberal critics” recognized success.

It's difficult to report on a debate not taking place, especially when an influential rump group of the "opposition" colludes instead of opposes. Except for a few pieces in left-liberal journals and blogs, Democrats have simply allowed neoconservative propagandists to define the terms of what has become a one-sided monologue about "victory," voiced by elective warriors who employed deception about phantom weapons of mass destruction to market a multi-trillion dollar travesty; claimed a paper tiger thug was our enemy, when the real culprits of the 9/11 attacks still hide in caves, not spider holes; imagined Iraqi embrace of pluralistic democracy, in a tribal culture with no indigenous movement for it; and fielded an imperial American occupying force, drawing jihadists to Baghdad while fomenting civil war that raged outside a surreal "Green Zone," as our puppet government dithered.

Those who took us to the wrong war in the wrong place at the right time seek redemption by claiming their surge is working. That’s as rational as placing a few dozen more cops on urban street corners and declaring victory in the self-defeating war on drugs.

Instead of making a case against the war, congressional Democrats shift their poll-driven attention to "the economy, stupid." Democrats like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who provided initial anti-war leadership, muzzle themselves with half-hearted statements like one she made on television February 10. "The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time...to bring reconciliation to Iraq. They have not done that." But then, she hastened to add: "The troops have succeeded, God bless them." So which is it, failure or success? Democratic "leaders" try to have it both ways, reminiscent of John Kerry in 2004.

The "liberal" newspapers which could have challenged the surge have used it either to justify their own support for the war, or have averted their eyes. The Washington Post's befuddled neocon editorial page engages in tortuous revisionism, pointing a finger at everyone except itself for failures of the war it helped cheerlead.

The New York Times, theoretically anti-war, fails even to attempt rational argument against the surge's "success," and yields precious column space to an architect of the war and editor of its propaganda organ, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Taking cues from the neocon play book, cable-babbling correspondents and print reporters ask simple-minded questions of squishy Democrats, phrased something like this one from CNN's Joe Johns at January's Democratic debate in South Carolina: "Now that the surge is succeeding, how are you going to counter John McCain's case for the war?"

So the war rages on. Weak-kneed Democrats fail to stand against it, and Republicans act like the jilted lover in British singer Dido's "White Flag," taking comfort in denial: "I will go down with this ship. I won't throw my hands up in surrender. There'll be no white flag above my door. I'm in love, and always will be."

The neocons will never give up their love affair with a fatal fantasy. And they'll take the rest of us down with their ship, as long as timid Democrats and a compliant press let them.
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A former DNC press secretary, Terry Michael directs the non-partisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism and writes opinion at his "libertarian Democrat" blog, terrymichael.net.

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by Terry Michael
February 26, 2008

Ms. Saturday Night’s Desperation
Flailing Away with Bloodless Process Liberalism

A final flailing maneuver of losing Democratic candidates seems to be embracing bloodless Process Liberalism--non-substantive gruel ladled by operatives so addled by failure they start confusing the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and aging Baby Boom political reporters with actual participants in primaries and caucuses.

Like the sagging Billy Crystal character reduced to working nursing homes, Hillary Inc. has become “Ms. Saturday Night.” Failing to connect with voters on her “experience” and her “solutions,” Ms. Clinton has now been reduced to pushing the hot buttons of wrinkled left liberals in the Washington ethics industry, and fifty- and sixty-something journalists whose first big presidential campaign was circa 1988, or somewhere in that century.

So, the First Lady-in-Chief is now:

--Demanding more debates, which we’ve endured ad nauseam, and which have devolved into info-mercials for cable TV networks.

--Assaulting the Senator from Hope (expressed in verklempt, New York-ish mock disbelief) for not promising in February, to the Republican half of the McCain-Feingold attack on political speech, that he’ll agree to stick taxpayers with the bill for the November campaign.

--And claiming her opponent is copping speech phrases from another politician, as Joe Biden was charged with way back in 1987.

Some of us have seen this movie before.

Return to yesteryear, fellow old people, and you’ll recall how Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, being liberal-ly defined by the Bush 41 campaign, approved a 30-second spot he thought would be a bigger killer than Willie Horton. Selected from scores produced by dozens of frustrated media consultants, “They want to sell you a package. Wouldn't you rather choose a President?” was tapped by the Massachusetts process liberal as his idea of what would turn on the electorate. “Those unfair, nasty Republicans,” seemed to be Dukakis’ “message” to voters, who were more interested in urban crime and the last days of the cold war than the naughtiness of Bush’s message makers.

So, let’s de-construct Ms. Clinton’s attempts to pander to the goo-goo (=“good government”) process concerns of lefties and blurry memories of a geriatric press corps.

Obama wouldn’t debate for the entertainment of eat-cheese-or-die types. Correct. He was too busy talking directly to them, camping out in Wisconsin after the Potomac primaries, while Ms. Clinton’s only presence in the state was her 30-second spot claiming he wouldn’t debate in Velveeta-land. Refusing to debate for the 675th time? Workers of Madison unite!

He should be held to his “promise” to get the Senator from McCain-Feingold to act like...well, the Senator from McCain-Feingold, and practice virtuous campaigning at taxpayer expense. Hello! Is Hillary declaring the primaries over, advantage Barack, time to start general election negotiations? Absolute nonsense, it needs no further verbal bludgeoning here. (Disclosure: this libertarian Democrat writer despises McInsane-Feinbull, though he personally prefers Sen. Obama, who needs re-education on that subject.)

And, finally....

He is plagiarizing Deval Patrick. This is a silly attempt by the Clinton camp to jerk the chains of scribbling codgers who covered the first attempt of the Mouth of Wilmington to ascend to Leader of the Free World in 1987. If you’re under 35, Google it and you’ll learn that Irish-American Sen. Joseph Biden attempted to re-cycle lines from the “Welsh Windbag,” British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

But, as Sen. Biden learned and Sen. Clinton is learning, it ain’t the meat, it’s the emotion that counts when orating and selling 10-point proposals. Leadership is not about making plans. It’s about creating followers.

And, if you think you just had an original thought or came up with a beautiful piece of language, Google that, too, and see how many other great minds think alike. As someone who spent 17 years as a press secretary, never once--shockingly!--was I credited publicly for a line I wrote. It’s called ghost-writing and doesn’t have a thing to do with plagiarism. It’s exactly what Sen. Clinton did in her tear-jerking close in the Texas debate, when she lifted a riff from both her husband and John Edwards.

“Mr. Saturday Night” certainly is not a perfect analogy for Bill and Hill’s big come-back attempt, but viewing the DVD may be more useful than spending too much of your time watching any of The Best Political Reporting Teams in the Cable Babble Universe, if you wish to understand why it is over for Ms. Saturday Night.
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A former DNC press secretary, “libertarian Democrat” Terry Michael teaches journalism students about politics, and writes personal opinion at www.terrymichael.net

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Pink Elephant at Party of Color

by Terry Michael
February 13, 2008

A pink elephant may crash the Party of Color in the next several weeks, but the intruder will not be some unwelcome Republican.

Like all such party animals, this one could be ignored by Democratic hosts who hope he’ll just go away. But if he’s not stopped now, he could be back to spoil the big celebration planned later in the year.

The pachyderm I am describing is a big problem that Democrats could face if, unlike Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, a significant number of Latino participants in key Democratic primaries “see race” when they cast their votes.

Hard as that will be for the elders and matrons of the Inclusive Party to admit, it suggests a more convincing scenario for why, to date, Hillary Rodham Clinton has outpolled Barack Obama in many of the barrio precincts. The polite explanation has been that Hispanic voters love the Clintons on their “issues” — whatever those are now or were in the 1990s.

Such possible electoral manifestation of prejudice is a two-way street, of course. You would have to be blind not to have observed the black and brown gang warfare that has gone on in some of our inner cities in recent decades, the jagged tip of an ugly social-cultural iceberg.

If one of the two finalists in this history-making election had not been black but had been named Juan, a different kind of cross-racial discrimination would be the subject of this essay.

So why do I risk being hated on by my friends in the Democratic Party for bringing this up?

Well, we are about to witness bloody hand-to-hand combat for every single delegate to the convention that will be held in Denver next August. And street fighting can bring out the worst among even the most enlightened multiculti paragons of virtuous political diversity (i.e., left-liberal Democrats).

Stipulated, I am a partisan of my fellow Illinoisan Obama, who I believe is transcending race in this campaign.

But, putting on my media critic hat, I would urge those whose business it is to interpret our politics, the press corps, to carefully observe how Clinton Inc. plays the “brown-black” race card as the campaign moves toward Texas. That extra scrutiny was earned by trash talk from the Supreme and Un-Fireable Manager of Clinton Inc. (our “first black president”) between Iowa and South Carolina.

All of this could have been predicted for a political party (I lament it is mine) that has been playing identity politics with a vengeance for the past several decades.

With an unfortunate focus on granting entitlements based on tribal affinity rather than celebrating the rights, liberties and personal responsibilities of individuals in a pluralistic democracy, strengthened by civic cultural assimilation, we Democrats have been courting racialist warfare for a long time.

As I tell my students, if you want to end race consciousness in America, stop being race conscious.

My advice to fellow Democrats: Kick that pink elephant out of the party. Don’t allow even the slightest hint of conflict to break out between Hispanic and black Democrats. Because one of the few good things John McCain has going for him is that he’s not in the anti-Hispanic-immigrant, wing-nut, Lou Dobbs wing of the Grand Old (very old this year) Party.

And my counsel to Obama would be to keep on talking about what Mexican-Americans and other Latin Americans can teach all of us when it comes to the importance of family and a strong work ethic in the pursuit of the American dream.

A long-ago Democratic National Committee press secretary (1985-1987), “libertarian Democrat” Terry Michael teaches journalism students about politics as director of the nonpartisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism and writes personal opinion at www.terrymichael.net.

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Article published Feb 8, 2008, Oped Page
McCain: The John Kerry of '08

PhotoGraphic by Terry Michael
(not published in Washington Times)

by Terry Michael

The deal wasn't completely sealed on Super Tuesday, but the Republican Party seems suicidally set on nominating its own John Kerry in 2008, further depressing a despondent base, while offering little to the center on the defining issues of this election, ending the war and reviving the economy.

In early January 2004, I ran into a reporter friend and lamented, as a partisan Democrat, that we were about to nominate the worst possible candidate for president, a have-it-every-way legislator who supported the war in Iraq.

"Oh no," my journalist friend protested. "He's got Vietnam War hero credentials, and foreign policy experience." It was a perfect reflection of received wisdom shared by the Democratic political establishment, which looked in the mirror and saw Mr. Kerry, and a capital-based press corps, living near and quoting the usual suspects.

It was not the ideological base of the party coming to the aid of John Kerry. The party's anti-war core had boosted Howard Dean to front-runner status. It was the Democrats' K Street wing, which, like Mr. Kerry, had supported the neo-cons' elective venture into Mesopotamia, and which was deluding itself into believing the center of American politics could be reached with a candidate simultaneously for and against the war.

A similar scenario is now playing itself out among the pragmatic, interest-group dominated, Beltway-based Republican Party establishment (not to be confused with the party's ideological base), desperately trying to hold onto power which has corrupted them. Gasping for four more years, their desperation came through clearly in this recent assault from the GOP establishment. "He doesn't play by the same rules the rest of us do," said Charlie Black, a senior McCain strategist, to The New York Times Jan. 24.

Indeed, Mitt Romney doesn't play by the rules of the GOP power brokers, which Mr. Black, a quintessential Washington lobbyist, so perfectly embodies. Mr. Romney is a governor, the breed of politician, along with generals and some vice presidents and cabinet members, who Americans have almost always elected president.

Only three times in history have we selected someone directly out of Congress: James Garfield in 1880; Warren Harding in 1920; and, the only time in the candidate-centered, media-driven political era, Kennedy in 1960.

That last time is instructive to the 2008 race, because Democrats now have a better than even chance of nominating JFK-like Barack Obama, who can transcend the baggage that comes with being a split-every-difference legislator without executive experience.

Republicans understood clearly in 1996 how much burden comes with sitting-senator credentials when they talked the ultimate creature of Congress, Bob Dole, into resigning his seat before the party convention.

The collective groan of the Republican status quo, a noise inflated by a McCain-loving media, is now rushing to the aid of one of their own, his press-driven "independent" image not withstanding.

Of course, Mr. Romney has to live with the media narrative (left over from 2004) into which his "flip flops" played. He hired some of the same Rove-ing band of GOP operatives whose minds were stuck in the 1980s, when the religious right was more appealing to a Depression Era center and was entering its love-hate relationship with the libertarian and Main Street-Wall Street wings of the GOP.

Had Mr. Romney used his status as the monogamist in the race, with five vibrant sons, to reflect "family values," he could have focused from the beginning on his strengths, executive leadership and free-market prowess.

But he committed the ultimate press sin of apparent hypocrisy, changing his mind on gay rights, abortion and the 2nd Amendment, issues that matter most to cable-babbling talking heads. Never mind that the press favorite, the senator from The Daily Show, had blasted Jerry Falwell and then went to Liberty University to grovel before him.

No, the media's favorite "maverick" was the co-author of their beloved McCain-Feingold, an assault on free political speech that should be an embarrassment to anyone in the press corps who takes the First Amendment seriously.

The psycho-graphic landscape of the 2008 campaign is increasingly being defined by the Barack Obama Movement, not Clinton, Inc., energizing the Democratic base and appealing to the center with demands to end the war and revive the economy, move into a hopeful future and change politics as usual. In that environment, the other party seems to be preparing to nominate a standard bearer who: (1) appears to be satisfied with 100 more years of war, (2) lacks any significant free-market economic plans, and (3) at 71 is all about the past.

And he is someone whose libertarian and socially and culturally conservative party base literally can't stand him.

Go figure.

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Terry Michael, who served as press secretary to the Democratic National Committee, is director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism.

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by Terry Michael
January 28, 2008 (revised, 6:55 pm EST)

Play the dynasty card now, Barack.
The presidency is not a family business (as Teddy learned in 1980)

Any smart sixty-year-old woman with “35 years of experience” living with a man as self-obsessed as Bill Clinton is certainly entitled to some kind of compensation for bearing that burden.

But inheriting leadership of the free world?

That seems a bit much to many of us with old fashioned ideas about power belonging to the people, rather than being mere chattel handed down by divine right of old world kings.....

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Terry Michael picto-graphic

Tenacity of Hope, Failure of Fear
(post-Iowa, it's still Obama vs. Romney
in November 2008)

by Terry Michael
January 5, 2008

All victories are not created equal.

Barack Obama’s thundering triumph in Iowa, capped with one of the most inspirational speeches in the modern history of presidential primary politics, is being undervalued by a media that collectively wants a continuing death match with the vaunted Clinton, Inc.

And a press corps that has never understood the ultimate appeal of Mitt Romney as a general election candidate is way over-stating the modest success of Mike Huckabee’s one-hit-wonder in Iowa......

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2008 prediction....
Tiger Obama vs. Mitt Cleaver

by Terry Michael
January 1, 2008

Hope and heritage.

Those two words suggest why the 2008 finalists in the race for Leader of the Free World, after the early caucus and primary dust settles, are likely to be Tiger Woods and Ward Cleaver--though you may know them as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Too much has been made this year of “change” as the quality sought in candidates for president. It is to state the obvious that voters want out of the boxes, both foreign and domestic, into which an under-qualified president has put the country.......

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The Party of God, The Party
of "Reform" and Hypocrisy

by Terry Michael
September 9, 2007

The Party of God, we are shocked to learn, seems to have a libido. And, equally amazing, the Party of Reform apparently covets a little mammon on occasion.

When will self-righteous Republicans and holier-than-thou Democrats learn that hypocrisy, not sex and greed, is the original sin for which voters, and certainly cynical journalists, hold them accountable?......

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by Terry Michael
July 31, 2007

Clinton won battle. Obama will win war.

The dust-up over junior Sen. Barack Obama's big slip on the foreign policy banana peel in the CNN/YouTube marketing venture "debate" and former first lady in chief Hillary Rodham Clinton's faux shock at Obama's comparing her to George W. Bush for her vote in favor of the Iraq war may have scored Clinton first-round points on who is best equipped to face off against the world's bad guys. But it might be Obama who is going to rope-a-dope in round three or four.......
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July 25, 2007

John Edwards:
Trial Lawyer to the Underclass

Just when I thought I was about to lose my lunch over recent gushing reviews of John Edwards' anti-poverty agenda, first by The Economist and then by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, the ONION came to the rescue.

"John Edwards Vows to End All Bad Things by 2011," America's self-described "finest news source" reported in its lead story. In an imaginary dispatch from Ames, Iowa, the ONION revealed the North Carolina presidential candidate is trying to jump-start....
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[Hope springs electoral in 2008. Fear fails.]

July 19, 2007, Page A21

Presidential Hopefuls
by Terry Michael

In the summer silly season of presidential politics, it doesn't seem unreasonable to consult dead English poets for campaign message strategy.

I can only imagine the fees, but former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. Barack Obama have wisely engaged Alexander Pope. And the bard is soundly advising them that hope springs eternal in the breasts of voters.....

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Pious Democrats, meet your maker
(Mr. Thomas Jefferson, who would advise you to keep that church-state wall intact)

by Terry Michael
June 6, 2007 - Politico.com

If you publicly pious candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination could look up from your talking points for a moment, I'd like to introduce you to the founder of our party -- our earthly father, if you will, Thomas Jefferson. Consider some of President Jefferson's views on religion and politics, which he expressed in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence ... a wall of separation between church and state."

Apparently, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) all decided they did, indeed, owe an accounting of their personal religious beliefs......
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Aging Boomers

Face-to-face with mortality and 2008

by Terry Michael
April 5, 2007, Page A17

    Many of us who came of age in the baby-booming, youth culture-obsessed, politically charged 1960s have been hectored by recent headlines to face another inconvenient truth: our own mortality.

    Possible first lady Elizabeth Edwards, born in 1949, and presidential press secretary Tony Snow, delivered for his first briefing in 1955, remind us that no one gets off this planet alive......
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Washington Post to Readers:
Stop Us Before We Kill Again
Post (war) Partum Depression?

by Terry Michael, March 20, 2007

People! Listen up. If there’s a journalism shrink in the crowd, please proceed immediately to the media tent. The editorial page editors of The Washington Post seem to have dropped some really bad shit on this otherwise fun and fabulous fourth anniversary of their first Iraq war trip. They’re having these, like, uh...reality-based flashbacks about no actual WMD’s, and non-threatening paper tiger thugs, and tribal, theocratic cultures that don’t seem to be into flower power. If you’ve got any anti-anxiety stuff to help ‘em out, man--pills, or whatever--they could really use it. Please help, man. Peace and love. Rock on.

I live in Washington, DC. I know surreal when I see it. And I saw it in vivid blotter acid color this past Sunday on the editorial page of a paper that once helped bring down a president who also undercut America’s moral authority several decades ago......
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Where's the outrage over Pace's prejudice?
by Terry Michael, March 19, 2007

In a mainstream media that regularly imagines the possibilities of racism in everything from medical mis-treatment of hypertension to inequitable application of agricultural price supports (actual stories, if you will check), there was surprisingly little attention paid to an actual example of bigotry voiced by the nation's highest ranking military official.

Is my hearing or vision bad, or didn't the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell the Chicago Tribune that the daughter of the Vice Commander-in-Chief and tens of millions of other Americans are immoral because of who they love?......
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Six Degrees of Liberal Racism

In the past week, if you made the mistake of reading New York tabloids or tuning into the reality-challenged world of cable babble, you were assaulted with the shocking (!) revelation of Rev. Al Sharpton's ties to slave-holding distant ancestral cousins of the late orange-haired senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond.

And now, quoting unauthenticated "research" by an amateur genealogist writing at his blog, the Baltimore Sun gets into the act with the equally amazing! disclosure that those of us with at least one Caucasian American parent, including Sen. Barack Obama, might have had slave holders in our family trees. Imagine that.  If all this reminds you of the six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, then welcome to the real world......
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by Terry Michael, February 24, 2007

Dog Ate Gov. Vilsack's Homework

"It was money, and only money," Gov. Tom Vilsack assured me in the sound-bite delivered to my Jeep by NPR as I was driving home from the office Friday.

That's all I heard from his exit press conference, as I steered my way through traffic on the Southeast Expressway past the U.S. Capitol, leaving me to wonder whether he also explained how Spot ate the killer speech he planned for the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.....
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Unplug Your Mitt-Wit Advisers, Governor!

by Terry Michael, February 22, 2007

How can Gov. William Jefferson Clinton Romney get out of the flip-flop box his Mitt-wit advisers have consulted him into?

Asking myself that simple question, I was fortunate to run into a pollster friend, Tom Riehle, who had part of the answer. “He needs to collapse.”

“Yes!” I said, abandoning......
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Published February 15, 2007 in
Washington's newest crack for political junkies....

Smitten with Mitt TV

by Terry Michael

To experience why former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney may be a better than even bet for next Leader of the Free World, point your web browser toward “Mitt TV,” the streaming video site of Mitt Romney's presidential exploratory committee.

“Experience” is key here, because you won’t get an understanding of his appeal....
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The Neo-Con warriors' religion,
impervious to fact and argument.
No 'White Flag' for these unrequited lovers.
by Terry Michael, February 2, 2007
Listening to an NPR sound bite recently from a neo-conservative foreign policy wonk, I wondered to myself: “Is arguing the war with a Neo-Con like trying to talk sense to an unrequited lover, or debating evolution with a fundamentalist Christian?

How can you have a rational discussion with someone whose "views".....
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A version of the following piece is also in the
March 2007 edition of.......

Take the Lead
Where are the Gordon Smiths?
by Terry Michael, Thursday, January 11, 2007 - Page A21
[Democrats vamp, without principled opposition]

It's hard to get out of a deal with the devil.

That's the congressional Democrats' dilemma, as they continue to treat the Iraq war as a speed bump on their pathway to the perks of restored power, rather than as a moral question to which voters loudly demanded a moral answer two months ago......
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GOP faces an ideological meltdown
The religious right is out of step with most voters
and on its way out the door of American politics.

By TERRY MICHAEL, Friday, November 17, 2006

Should the mother-in-law moment be mocked or embraced?

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice used the term while swearing in the new international AIDS coordinator, referring to the mother of Dr. Mark Dybul’s partner, the easy response was, “more Republican hypocrisy.”

It was a curious utterance......
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by Terry Michael
Monday, November 6, 2006

When the results are in Tuesday....
GOP Evangelicals to Render Unto Caesar.
Democrats' Cold War Ghost Exorcized.

The results of the 2006 mid-term election, if they’re anything close to predictions, will suggest two near-seismic changes in the national political landscape.

Evangelical Christians, after three decades of dabbling in politics, are ready--perhaps even eager--to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things which are not the Republican Party’s.......
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