Most recent thoughts....

June 30, 2008
libertarian Democrat's predictions...

Obama-McCaskill
vs.
McCain-Romney

Just wanted to get my predictions of the past several weeks on record. My April 2007 prognostication of Obama vs. Romney didn't quite make it, but that doesn't stop me from trying again. For the record, I made both the McCaskill and Romney veep predictions to a group of Univ. of Oklahoma summer Washington interns on June 13, had a piece touting McCaskill in Politico June 18, and last week told a senior Romney aide I ran into at the gym (you know who you are!) that he would be re-employed again soon. Just noticed that Mike Allen at Politico was claiming today that Mitt was at the top of the McCain list.

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Will libertarian Barr
be next Nader?

By: Terry Michael
June 26, 2008

The Republican Party and John McCain should be afraid, very afraid, of Bob Barr.

For only the second time since it began running presidential candidates in 1972, the Libertarian Party has a leader who has actually been elected to something (the first being Ron Paul, in 1988, then also a former Republican congressman).

A Republican congressman from Georgia for eight years, Barr has a real constituency in his home state. Combined with a heavy black turnout, the participation of Barr partisans could easily deprive McCain of Georgia’s usually Republican electoral votes.

But Barr goes beyond the one-key-state problem that megalomaniac Ralph Nader caused Democrats in 2000, when the self-righteous, self-styled consumer advocate deprived Al Gore of more than enough chads to lose Florida.

And Barr is a considerably more skilled, articulate campaigner than Paul. Like many children of the ’60s now in our 60s, he has traveled a circuitous route to his libertarian philosophy. He was a military brat, born in Iowa City; grew up in Malaysia, Pakistan, Panama and Iran; and became an anti-Vietnam War Young Democrat in the 1960s, when he studied at the University of Southern California. He then discovered the philosophy of Ayn Rand and joined the Young Trojan Republican Club at USC; he went on to embrace movement conservatism in the 1980s. He rekindled the libertarian side of his conservative inclinations after being involuntarily retired from the congressional Republican Party after his census-redistricted campaign for reelection in 2002.

Like a number of small-government Republicans who came to Washington in the Republican Revolution of 1994, Barr’s separation from the corrupting influences of K Street power led him to rediscover just how much liberty was being sucked out of our personal as well as economic lives in these — to use the well-earned cliché — 10 square miles, surrounded by reality, known as Washington, D.C.

He may be proof that political wisdom can grow when not polluted by the mindless partisanship and seductive careerism that contaminates Capitol Hill.

An anti-drug warrior in the Reagan Department of Justice as well as in Congress, Barr now supports medical marijuana rights and questions neo-Prohibition. The author of the Defense of Marriage Act while in the House, he now opposes the federal constitutional amendment against gay marriage and advocates states’ rights on the issue. A supporter of the post-Sept. 11 Patriot Act, Barr now publicly regrets that vote.

Perhaps most remarkable for a man made famous as one of the House managers in the Clinton impeachment, the anti-Iraq-war-Republican-turned-Libertarian recently gave this answer to MobLogic.tv interviewer Lindsay Campbell when she asked him to choose between George W. Bush and Bill Clinton: “Why you doin’ that to me?” he sighed. But he quickly answered, “I’d have to go with Bill Clinton. Bush has done such damage to freedom, liberty and privacy.” Wow.

As a libertarian Democrat (there are about six of us, I think), but also an Obamamaniac, I certainly appreciate all the support Barr can provide in helping to thwart a third Bush term.

But as a small “l” libertarian, I welcome Barr’s contribution to explaining what the philosophy of free markets and free minds means to voters, who got little sense of it from the personality- and rhetorically challenged Paul.

To be sure, the bespectacled and mustachioed Barr may be too dour for prime time — though not necessarily boring, for those who recall his licking whipped cream off the chest of a woman at a fundraising event several years ago. But he speaks in complete thoughts and succinct sound bites, with occasional flashes of humor. There may be enough gravitas in him to rescue the Libertarian label from the potpourri of wackery that keeps its candidates from breaking the 1.1 percent of the presidential electorate that was its zenith of national vote-getting. That happened in 1980, when Republicans had a self-described libertarian candidate running for president, Ronald Reagan.

With a statist conservative as the GOP standard-bearer this year, Republicans who can’t hold their noses and vote Democratic may find Barr an appealing place to plant their protests against a party that has sold out to a Rove-ing band of “compassionate” big-government “conservatives,” more interested in the perks of power than in principle.

And that has to be welcome news for Barack Obama in several other Southern states and the Rockies and Intermountain West. But good also for those of us who would like to see a contest of ideas in the next five months that goes beyond a silly left/right food fight.

Go, Bob, go!

_____

Terry Michael, director of the nonpartisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, is a former Democratic National Committee press secretary and writes on his blog, www.terrymichael.net.

© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

Original Politico HTML Link  or  Politico PDF

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McCaskill: Obama's
'Wonder Woman'?

By: Terry Michael
June 18, 2008

Why is no one in the punditocracy talking about Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill as a possible running mate for Barack Obama?

A self-made, 54-year-old Catholic female professional (hmm — sounds like Hillary Rodham Clinton voters), she has won statewide office three times in the fiercely independent Show Me State, without the benefit of a spouse’s coattails.

A former state legislator and state auditor, she is one of only a handful of United States senators who refuse to pander to their constituents by padding the federal budget with those tax-wasting, bridge-to-nowhere earmarks. A tough but reasonable former county prosecutor, she had the guts to take on a sitting Democratic governor for her party’s nomination for that office — and she defeated him, only very narrowly losing the general election in 2004. She then bounced back from that one loss in her career to win her Senate seat in 2006 against Republican incumbent Jim Talent.

A former cheerleader and homecoming queen, a divorced and remarried mother of three, and a stepmother of three more children, McCaskill comes off almost as an Everywoman. And as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, perhaps a Wonder Woman.

Sure, the idea of her as Obama’s running mate is counterintuitive. She’s another senator with little federal experience, and she’s from the Illinois senator’s neighboring Midwestern state.

Oh, but wait. Wasn’t Al Gore a fellow baby-boom-generation Southerner from a neighboring state when Bill Clinton tapped him for the No. 2 spot in 1992? Clinton got synergy, not balance, and it worked.

But I have saved the best argument for last. As someone who for several decades has both practiced and taught the skills needed for effective political communication, I am struck by McCaskill’s huge talent as a thoroughly authentic communicator. She has been showcasing that ability for several months now — ever since, prodded by her 18-year-old daughter, she exhibited the political courage to step out front for Obama when other Democratic women in the Senate took the safe route and endorsed Hillary Clinton.

View some YouTube clips of this woman speaking on Obama’s behalf. Start with her Bill Maher interview, perhaps. Though I realize it’s not good for my emotional or intellectual health, I have watched countless hours of cable babble this past winter and spring, and McCaskill has been one of the rare voices of sanity and reason among the talking-points-scripted verbal food fighters.

She is unflappable, genuine, likable, feminine, strong, warm, articulate, tough. The list of pleasing human attributes could go on and on.

If I were Obama, I’d think seriously about having this former cheerleader boost me in the big campaign pep rally that’s about to begin. She sounds like real change to me.

And she has the depth and breadth of experience to provide the most important quality we should always seek in someone a heartbeat away from the presidency: good judgment. (Would you prefer as a Supreme Court justice a brilliant law professor or an intelligent lawyer who served a term as county sheriff or state’s attorney? The first Cold War president, McCaskill’s fellow Missourian Harry Truman, was served well by a high school diploma and autodidactic knowledge of world and American history.)

Two candidates on the same ticket with good judgment. If I can take a little license with Nirvana’s lyrics, smells like team spirit to me.

Go, Claire, go!
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Terry Michael, director of the nonpartisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, is a former Democratic National Committee press secretary and writes for his blog, www.terrymichael.net

Original Politico HTML Link  or  Politico PDF

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Obama as the
End of Identity Politics
as We've Known It
(And I Feel Fine)

Terry Michael | June 10, 2008

We are nearing the end of American identity politics as we know it.

Bearing that gift to those who prize the individual over the tribal is a messenger who shared a Hyde Park neighborhood with Milton Friedman, though with a public record that suggests he is more statist than classical liberal.

But Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), can’t be categorized that simply. He is, rather, an intellectual and ideological work in progress. Not stuck in cable-babble caricatured time, he may be traveling the circuitous path many “liberal-tarians”--or libertarian Democrats like me--treaded as we grew and found our way back to the self-reliant values that informed our pluralistic democracy.

We lost those values in the Industrial and Progressive eras, when advocates of centralized planning prized society’s perfection over individual liberty. While Obama’s positions don’t exactly channel the Cato Institute, his departure from usual Democratic Party left-liberalism is reflected in the left’s suspicion of him for not having all the 162-point plans of Sen. Hillary Clinton, or spewing the syrupy populism of trial lawyer to the underclass, Sen. John Edwards.

To me, this suggests the beginnings of a journey away from the Great Society mind-set of the Democratic Party. I was a 1960s teenage political junkie who wanted to complete the New Deal, with wealth redistribution and “social justice” managed from Washington. I morphed into a 1980s DLC centrist, embracing mushy “progressive” politics as a halfway house from statist liberalism. Now in my own sixties, I have rediscovered the founder of my party, Thomas Jefferson, in an information era in which we are desktop-empowered to seek our own way and make our own choices, much like the agrarian age inventors of our political system.

I can’t claim to know exactly where Obama is on this ideological continuum. He may not even know. But in his personal evolution, he has moved from the white world of boy Barry in Hawaii and Indonesia, to left-liberal enclaves at Ivy League colleges engaging with young conservatives, to a kind of noblesse oblige organizer bearing the white man's burden (half, in his case) on the streets of Chicago.

He went from a young state legislator too aloof, in too much of a hurry for his colleagues in Springfield, to a failed U.S. House candidacy against former Black Panther Bobby Rush, hobbled by an inability to translate the language of the Harvard Law Review to the vernacular of the street. From that latter experience, he drew lessons allowing him to grow as a politician, hearing and incorporating some of the style of the black preacher—including the one who was to later cause him so much grief. He returned to Springfield after that failed congressional bid a different man.

He seems to be a grounded but still searching, an intellectually curious 46-year-old, with a breadth and depth of life experience that will help him make informed choices in a pluralistic democracy that demands its leaders split a lot of differences.

Compromise is a word doctrinaire libertarians find more appalling than appealing. But there's a lot that is appealing in Barack Obama.

Look at his health care plan. While it certainly won’t satisfy free-market purists, it relies on private insurance coverage, encourages portability and choice, promotes competition, and allows purchase of prescription drugs from other countries. It wasn’t by accident he proposed fewer government mandates for purchasing coverage—and was pummeled for it in every debate by the politician who, back in 1993, seemed to seek personal control of a big chunk of our economy. Though drugs and crime can be political minefields for an urban black candidate who has acknowledged marijuana and cocaine use, Obama has no hard line positions in favor of neo-prohibition and has made promising comments about pulling back from America’s status as one of the world’s most prolific jailers. Immediately, his election will restore America's reputation around the world as an opponent of interventionist elective wars.

But perhaps most important to libertarians, his election will put the Jesse Jacksons, the Al Sharptons, and the white identity politics liberals out of business. No longer will they be able to peddle victimology or mau-mau their way through the political landscape, demanding diversity training, minority contracts, or other tribal reparations from bigots they find behind every bush. The myth of unassimilable “minorities” dies when a majority white nation selects a leader “of color,” just as religious social distance was diminished when a majority Protestant country chose a Catholic a half-century before.

There is no perfect leader in the wings. I'll settle for one whose election will signal the end of the world of racial politics as we know it. And, with a nod to R.E.M., I'll feel fine about it.

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Terry Michael is director of the non-partisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism. He came to Washington in 1975 as press secretary to newly elected progressive Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), was a press spokesman (1983-87) for the Democratic National Committee, and now offers “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat” at his blog.

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

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Self-defeating myths
Democrats must dispel
(it wasn't Willie or the Swift Boat Vets
that defeated us, Barack)

by Terry Michael
June 2, 2008

As Democrats prepare to do battle with John McCain this fall, we need to dispel two comforting but self-defeating myths about recent failed White House campaigns.

These canards are also shared by many editorial page pontificators, who ascribe 1988 and 2004 losses to crafty Republicans working their negative-advertising black magic, Willie Hortonizing Michael Dukakis and swift-boating John F. Kerry, who were either excessively noble or maybe too slow or too wimpy to fight back.

Evil may have lurked in the souls of those GOP operatives, and Democratic consultants may have been constrained by nominees unwilling to dirty their hands. But it wasn’t why we lost.

What the Republicans really did was to rope a couple of dopes. That’s the lesson Barack Obama should learn from the fate of Dukakis and Kerry. Engage with McCain on things voters care about and talk honestly about what they don’t like about Republicans. But don’t make excuses about dirty GOP tactics to explain why the electorate rejects Democratic candidates, when what voters really eschew then and now is failure of judgment, lack of common sense and intellectual dishonesty.

The 1980s saw a bigger than usual glut of aggressive young males. Motivated by profits from the black market created by a brainless drug war, urban gangbangers were scaring aging children of the Depression known as Reagan Democrats.

So Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, aided by minions in the basement of the Republican National Committee, dredged up a resonant metaphor for everything Reagan Democrats loved to hate about crime-coddling liberals: Willie Horton, the murderer sentenced to life in prison, who pillaged his way through Maryland on a weekend prison pass.

Yet that’s not what really happened.

The Massachusetts program, a rehabilitation effort signed into law in 1972, was applied to convicted murderers by the commonwealth’s Supreme Court, and Dukakis, in his first term as Massachusetts governor, vetoed an attempt to overturn the court. After scores of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories by the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune, the law that allowed Horton his pass was overturned in a bill signed by Dukakis himself on April 28, 1988, after the issue was raised in presidential politics at a Democratic debate April 12 in New York by ... Al Gore! Yes, the same Nobel laureate Hollywood liberals adore, not some fire-breathing, right-wing nut.

But to this day, in the left-liberal imagination, it was Republican racists who did poor Dukakis in.
No. It was Michael Dukakis who did himself in, because he seemed more interested in the privileges of criminals than the rights of victims. If Horton had been a blond, blue-eyed Minnesotan, letting him out on a pass still would have struck voters as taking rehab theory to its illogical conclusion.

That first comforting myth attempts to mask Dukakis’ lack of judgment and common sense (not uncommon in über-rational, otherwise decent men) by demonizing motives of the opposition. The Swift Boat canard goes directly to Kerry’s intellectual dishonesty in trying to have it both ways on the fundamentals of war and peace.

The Beltway Democratic geniuses who gave us Kerry were convinced they needed a military hero to carry an anti-war banner against a war-making weekend warrior.

The best and the brightest among the party elders did their best to push Howard Dean off the stage and nominate Lt. Kerry, who reported for duty in Boston with a speech performance that told the nation everything it needed to know: He was for the war in Vietnam. He was against the war in Vietnam. Just as he voted for the war in Iraq but now he was against the war in Iraq.

Or was he? Because, just weeks later, Kerry said he would have voted for authorizing the war, even if he’d known there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Enter Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, with its smarmy TV spot asking whether Kerry deserved those medals. Hapless voters must have wondered: “If he’s trying to be on both sides of two war debates at the same time, is he really a hero? Is he any better than the dolt who got us into this mess?”

So, Obama, don’t you delude yourself into thinking you win just by being quick to defend yourself against nasty demagogues. Take it right to them. Show no fear. You were right in 2002; McCain is still wrong in 2008. You’ve got judgment. He’s a stubborn old man.

Nobody wins an election, or leads a nation, by talking down to the collective common sense of citizens or by trying to split every difference. Take no comfort in those myths.

Terry Michael, the director of the nonpartisan Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, is a former Democratic National Committee press secretary and writes for his blog, www.terrymichael.net.

Original Politico HTML Link  or  Politico PDF

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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.........

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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.
__________________
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.

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

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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......

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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.........

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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......

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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......

[Click here for Permalink to this piece on this site]

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.......

[Click here for Permalink to this piece on this site]

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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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