The Battleground

In the Post, EJ Dionne elaborates on how New Hampshire could be one of the most contentious battlegrounds this Fall. An excerpt:

The race for electoral votes could be so close in November that small states may well pick the next president. Among those diminutive states, New Hampshire is by far the most interesting. Consider that in 2000, George W. Bush beat Al Gore here by 7,211 votes (Ralph Nader got just over 22,000). If New Hampshire's four electoral votes had gone the other way, Gore would have won, and Florida would not have mattered.

New Hampshire is also one of only three states that changed sides between 2000 and 2004, and the only one that switched to the Democrats. John Kerry carried it by 9,274 votes out of almost 680,000 cast. Because the state holds the nation's first primary, voters here have been studying the candidates for well over a year. New Hampshire probably has the highest percentage of citizens who have actually met John McCain and Barack Obama. Maddeningly, the polls suggest that the vote here this year could be as close as it was in the past two elections. "You're going to see house-to-house combat for these votes," said Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, a Democrat.

Pawlenty: The Good and Bad

As John McCain looks to potential Vice Presidential picks, the Fix makes the case for and against Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.

No potential vice presidential pick - with the exception of Hillary Rodham Clinton - has received as much attention over the last few months as Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty is widely assumed to be favorite pick of presumptive GOP nominee John McCain and has held down the top spot in The Fix's Veepstakes Line since we began ranking the potential choices. It is only likely to get worse (or, if you're Pawlenty, better) over the next 24 hours as McCain's trip to Minnesota is sure to stoke the rumor mill. While conventional wisdom seems to have hardened around the "Pawlenty as frontrunner" meme, the truth of the matter is that few in the chattering class have any real sense of the man - where he comes from, what he stands for and why he has vaulted into such an exalted position in the Veepstakes.

The Case for Tim Pawlenty:

Up From His Bootstraps: In a party long seen as controlled by affluent elites, Pawlenty's decidedly blue collar background puts an entirely different face on what it means to be a Republican. Pawlenty grew up in the working class environs of South St. Paul. He was a teenager when he lost his mother. His father was a truck driver. He was the first member of his family to graduate from college. He still plays ice hockey whenever he can. He caught a 17" walleye on opening day of fishing season this spring. His most oft-quoted line by the national press is his vow to make the GOP the party of "Sam's Club not just the country club."

The Good Soldier: Pawlenty is nothing if not loyal to his party. In 1998, Pawlenty was running for governor but stepped aside in favor of then-St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman (R) who was regarded as the party's best chance of taking back the post. Three years later, Pawlenty was actively weighing a race against Sen. Paul Wellstone (D) when Vice President Dick Cheney and White House political Svengali Karl Rove called to urge him to step aside in favor of - you guessed it - Coleman. He did, and decided instead to run for governor - a three-way race he won by eight points. (Pawlenty was reelected by a far more narrow margin in 2006, besting Attorney General Mike Hatch 47 percent to 46 percent.) For some, Pawlenty's willingness to repeatedly step aside at the behest of the party powers-that-be could be taken as a sign of weakness -- a willingness to play second fiddle that runs counter to the sort of profile a national politician needs.

Bridging the Evangelical Gap: Pawlenty could well provide a solution to the gap between McCain and evangelical voters without alienating moderates and independents. (Huckabee would almost surely help McCain bridge the evangelical gap too but lacks the appeal to the ideological middle.) Vin Weber, a former Republican member of Congress from Minnesota and now a major player in Washington GOP politics, explains that while Pawlenty has close ties to the evangelical community in his state and nationally but is "not a guy who wears [religion] on his sleeve."

Free of the Taint: Voters feel passionately that Washington is broken and new faces are needed to fix it… Pawlenty certainly fits this description, having spent his entire political career in his home state.Pawlenty also has demonstrated during his time as governor a penchant for the sort of hands-on, nitty gritty approach to solving problems that tends to resonate with average voters. An example: Pawlenty not only declared a state of emergency in a handful of southeastern Minnesota counties ravaged by recent floods but quickly toured the areas to see the damage first hand. Voters like doers, not talkers. And judging from his reaction to the recent flooding as well as the 2007 collapse of the I-35 bridge, Pawlenty intuitively understands that the best way to handle crises is to put yourself in the middle of them.

The Case Against Tim Pawlenty:

Tim Who?: Pawlenty is virtually unknown on the national stage despite being in his second term as governor of a swing state. He has done little to raise his profile nationally since coming into office - although he has been seeking to remedy that of late by traveling the country in support of Republican downballot candidates.

Political Operation Incognito: For a guy who has spent six years in the governor's office and was a leader in the state House before winning that post in 2002, Pawlenty has an almost non-existent political operation either in the state or nationally. Even allies describe Pawlenty as generally apolitical and not someone who has spent much time building a national network of donors or hiring on national operatives to position him for a run at the ticket.

A Man Without an (Ideological) Home: In our case for Pawlenty yesterday, we noted that he has stronger ties to the evangelical community than many people assume. But, he is not generally regarded by social conservatives as "one of them." ...Even so, Pawlenty may well be a man without a country when it comes to the veepstakes. He is unlikely to be pushed to McCain's advisers by either social or fiscal conservatives - the two broadest and most powerful elements within the party. That also means that if Pawlenty is picked by McCain, he will make neither of those constituent groups happy.

"Big John"

And just when you thought the world of John Cornyn (the prototypical Bush-lackey) couldn’t get any more absurd…

Rating Confusion

CQ explores the “rating confusion” in this election.

It’s a line you’ll hear many times from Sen. John McCain over the next five months: “In just a few years in office, Sen. Obama has accumulated the most liberal voting record in the Senate.”

But McCain’s campaign also pointed out recently that Barack Obama votes with President Bush about half the time. So the biggest liberal in the Senate is a solid supporter of President Bush? What gives?

Team of Rivals

In TIME, Joe Klein points out the many Lincoln comparisons invoked by Barack Obama, the chief of which is his insistence on governing like the ‘Great Emancipator.’ To do so, he would undoubtedly have to recruit many of his rivals and ideological adversaries into his cabinet. In particular, the inclusion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates would an interesting first step. Klein elaborates:

Obama said he'd be particularly interested in having high-ranking Republicans advising him on defense and national security. "I really admire the way the elder Bush negotiated the end of the Cold War — with discipline, tough diplomacy and restraint ... and I'd be very interested in having those sorts of Republicans in my Administration, especially people who can expedite a responsible and orderly conclusion to the Iraq war — and who know how to keep the hammer down on al-Qaeda."

When I asked him specifically if he would want to retain Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, Obama said, "I'm not going to let you pin me down ... but I'd certainly be interested in the sort of people who served in the first Bush Administration." Gates was George H.W. Bush's CIA director — and he has been a superb Secretary of Defense, as good in that post as his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, was awful.

No doubt, partisan Democrats who equate bipartisan government with namby-pamby policymaking are horrified by the thought that Republicans might keep control of the Pentagon. But Gates has been neither ideological nor namby-pamby. He has demanded accountability. He fired the Secretary of the Army after the Walter Reed hospital scandal and the Secretary of the Air Force for lax stewardship of the nuclear arsenal. Early on, Gates encouraged the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq; he has been one of the few Bush officials open to negotiations with Iran.

He has called for a larger budget for diplomacy — "which makes him far more popular than SecDefs usually are around here," a State Department official told me. He has clearly sided with the Army reformers against the Old Guard, and even called David Petraeus back to Washington to preside over a promotion board when it became clear that Petraeus-style officers — the bold and creative proponents of counterinsurgency strategy — were being blocked. (Petraeus apparently succeeded in getting several of his protégés promoted to general.)

Gates has been cagey about his future. He told CNN he would "never say never," but said staying on in the job was "inconceivable." However, with two wars in progress and the difficulty in getting new Cabinet (and staff) members confirmed quickly, there is a strong desire in the military community for continuity in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon. Associates say Gates might stay if he believed the security of the troops was at stake. The political rationale for a "team of rivals" government is compelling for Obama — it would be the freshest way to turn the page after the ideological myopia of the Bush debacle, a decisive step away from the partisan ugliness Americans claim to hate, the best way to build a decisive governing coalition. There are other worthy Republicans and military officers that Obama might turn to, people like Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel or retired General James Jones, who would make an excellent National Security Adviser. But it is no small irony that if Obama really wants to make a clean break from his predecessor, he should start by retaining George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.

Country I Love

Veepstakes Continued...

Interesting gossip from Bob Novak yesterday:

Sources close to Sen. John McCain say the Republican presidential candidate likes the idea of Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman, re-elected from Connecticut as an independent in 2006, or former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge -- if he could get away with it. The political consensus is that McCain couldn't get away with either, and he knows it.

Lieberman, one of McCain's closest Senate friends, vigorously supports him for president and sometimes joins him on the campaign trail. However, Lieberman opposes Republican policy on nearly everything except Iraq, where he has backed the war effort.

Ridge, who served as President Bush's secretary of homeland security, is a generally conservative Republican except for being pro-choice on abortion. He was considered for vice president in 1996 and 2000, but was ruled out both times because of the abortion issue.

Angry Clinton Women Love McCain?

In the Times, Frank Rich explores the question of “how Mr. McCain and his press enablers could seriously assert that he will pick up disaffected female voters in the aftermath of the brutal Obama-Clinton nomination battle.” If the McCain team choses to spend serious time and resources on this fruitless cause, it’ll be yet another example of how inept they truly are. Have at it!

Ten years ago John McCain had to apologize for regaling a Republican audience with a crude sexual joke about Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno. Last year he had to explain why he didn’t so much as flinch when a supporter asked him on camera, “How do we beat the bitch?” But these days Mr. McCain just loves the women.

In his televised address on Barack Obama’s victory night of June 3, he dismissed Mr. Obama in a single patronizing line but devoted four fulsome sentences to praising Mrs. Clinton for “inspiring millions of women.” The McCain Web site is showcasing a new blogger who crooned of the “genuine affection” for Mrs. Clinton “here at McCain HQ” after she lost. One of the few visible women in the McCain campaign hierarchy, Carly Fiorina, has declared herself “enormously proud” of Mrs. Clinton and is barnstorming to win over Democratic women to her guy’s cause.

How heartwarming. You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.

A Flawed Process

The Iraqi Insider provides an interesting post on the Pentagon’s fundamentally flawed weapons acquisition process. An excerpt:

The past decade has seen incredible growth in the amount of money spent by the United States on its national defense. The U.S. defense budget is now at its highest level, in inflation-adjusted terms, since World War II. When including war costs, defense expenditures have increased 86% since September 2001.

A key reason for skyrocketing costs is the inefficiency of the Department of Defense's weapons acquisitions process. In mid-2008, the Government Accountability Office released three reports examining the problem. All three reports are based on a GAO assessment of 72 weapons programs, none of which satisfied GAO's standards for a successful, efficient program. GAO's analyses serve as a resounding critique of DOD's ineffective and extremely costly acquisitions process.

GAO found that while acquisition costs have gone up 120% in the past fifteen years, the number of new systems has not mirrored that growth. When the military fails to acquire new technologies, it is forced to spend money renovating existing "legacy" systems, which only compounds the problem because then the government must pay to develop and operate both "old" and "new" components that don't work well together.

The Republican Attack Dog

CNN’s Political Ticker describes how “Joe Lieberman is fast becoming the Democrats' public enemy No. 1.” In championing John McCain for President, Lieberman apparently has no qualms campaigning for a candidate who is fundamentally at odds with nearly every domestic priority he has worked toward his entire public service. While he claims the merits (or lack thereof) of McCain’s foreign policy trump all else, you can’t help but see the underlying resentment toward the Democratic Party he still carries from his last election. An excerpt:

Lieberman has wasted no time in questioning Obama's positions on Iran and Israel, two topics on which Lieberman and McCain agree. Just one day after Obama clinched his party's nomination, Lieberman joined Republicans on a McCain campaign teleconference call assailing Obama following his foreign policy address to a leading Jewish group.

Lieberman accused Obama of blaming U.S. policies for "essentially sort of strengthening" Iran. "If Israel is in danger today, it's not because of American foreign policy, which has been strongly supportive of Israel in every way," he said. "It is not because of what we have done in Iraq. It is because Iran is a fanatical terrorist, expansionist state."

Later that day, during a budget vote in the Senate, Obama led Lieberman to a corner of the Senate floor for a pointed private conversation. Without elaborating, Obama told reporters the chat was about politics. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had a similar private conversation with Lieberman.

For his part, Lieberman said he assured Obama he would avoid personal attacks. "I said, and we agreed, that any time I get out there mostly I'm going to be talking positively about John McCain — and anytime I would take issue with Barack Obama, it would never be personal because I have the highest regard for him personally," he said.

Still, Democrats were irked. Lieberman seemed to be breaking new ground — shifting gears from simply promoting McCain to taking shots at Obama.

A Welcome Verdict Cont...

More reaction from last week's Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush.

The Post:

The [ruling] that those held at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to challenge their detentions in federal court is a welcome victory for due process and the rule of law. It completes a signal and totally avoidable failure by President Bush, who will leave office with the nation's regime for holding al-Qaeda combatants in shambles. A 5 to 4 majority of the court correctly concluded that habeas corpus, the ancient right to contest one's detention, extends to those held at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay. Although it only leases the property from Cuba, the United States exerts complete legal and military control over the base; those held there have nowhere to challenge their detentions other than U.S. courts. To have forbidden the detainees access to those courts would have left the executive branch almost unfettered power to hold people indefinitely -- a proposition that is untenable.

The LA Times:

The 5-4 decision also broke important new ground. In 2004, the court held that detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo, a de facto U.S. territory, could challenge their confinement in a U.S. court under a federal habeas corpus statute. Rather than accept that ruling, Congress obliged the administration by passing legislation making it clear that the habeas statute didn't protect the detainees and purporting to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to hear such appeals. It was a craven capitulation to an administration that has made cutting legal corners the trademark of its anti-terrorism policy.

Bush can rail against the Supreme Court or he can honor the spirit as well as the letter of this ruling and work with Congress to reform a system that has delayed justice for detainees and dishonored America in the eyes of the world. And he should do what both of the men aspiring to succeed him have promised to do - close Guantanamo.

Justice Kennedy: "To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say 'what the law is.' While some delay in fashioning new procedures is unavoidable, the costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody."

Justice Scalia: “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. The nation will live to regret what the court has done today.” He said the decision was based not on principle, “but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”

Chief Justice Roberts: The decision represented “overreaching” that was “particularly egregious” and left the court open to “charges of judicial activism.” The decision “is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.” The public will “lose a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.”

Barack Obama: "Today's Supreme Court decision ensures that we can protect our nation and bring terrorists to justice, while also protecting our core values. The Court's decision is a rejection of the Bush Administration's attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo - yet another failed policy supported by John McCain. This is an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus. Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy."

Senator John McCain: "The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."

Remembering Russert

Conan remembers Tim Russert:

Little Russ, 1950-2008

"The most extraordinary thing about him was that he just had such unparalleled empathy for whoever he was talking with. You never had the feeling he was trying to get somebody, he just wanted to get them to talk and wanted to get the record straight and his emotional self was as strong as his intellect. As a journalist there was such a strength of his person who everyone who knew him knew. He was just beloved. I can't imagine what the news bureau is going through down there I heard it is just wailing. He was just a giant of a person he was such a good friend." - Doris Kearns Goodwin

Sex and the Senator

In the Post, Hanna Rosin takes readers through the unimaginable – a sex education briefing for congressional staff by Senator/Doctor Tom Coburn. Yes, that Tom Coburn. Also that Tom Coburn. An excerpt:

For the first few minutes, it worked, as Coburn flipped through slides showing dry facts and figures about STDs, that 2 of every 3 new cases occur in people younger than 25, that most occur in people with multiple sexual partners. Then Coburn got serious. He flipped to his next slide. It showed a part of the male anatomy but not as a science textbook drawing; this was the real thing, and a particularly sorry example; it looked like it had been left outside by mistake and then rusted in some unnatural way, with scaly dry spots, and warts on an angry red background.

This image was now projected up on a wall of the U.S. Capitol, and the mood shifted instantly. None of the 160 or so audience members shrieked, or giggled, or ran out of the room. They're not 15 anymore, and this is a professional environment. The chatter stopped; everyone looked straight ahead, or down at their BlackBerries. A large number of women crossed their arms over their chests. Most everyone seemed encapsulated in the bit of air around them, afraid to move or touch the person sitting next to them. The half-eaten slices of pizza, now cooling on laps, seemed deeply
unappetizing.

This is the seventh year that Coburn, who is a family doctor in Muskogee, has presented his slide show; he showed it for six years when he was in the House, and totes it around Oklahoma, and always he begins it the way he did yesterday: "I'm going to try not to give you my opinion," he says. "I'm just going to give you scientific facts." But the combination of Coburn, sex and the U.S. Capitol does not get away without controversy.

"His unwitting patients should get a second opinion," says Bill Smith, vice president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. "What Dr. Coburn did was resort to typical scare tactics, showing pictures of genital warts that have gone untreated for decades, even though genital warts are highly treatable."

Toxic Support

In the Politico, Jonathan Martin asks the question “What should McCain do about Cheney?” An excerpt:

He’s a highly effective fundraiser in an election cycle in which Republicans are starved for cash, a hero to the wing of the party that views John McCain with the most suspicion. He has four decades of campaign experience, ranging from a short stint running Gerald Ford’s election bid in 1976 to two successful races on the presidential ticket.

Yet despite that pedigree, Vice President Cheney is unlikely to share a stage with McCain anytime soon — and may not be called on to play any role at all in the 2008 presidential campaign. In part, it’s a reflection of political expediency. Though Cheney is one of the nation’s most influential and talked about vice presidents ever, his favorability ratings are near toxic lows. But Cheney and McCain also have had a rocky relationship.

Rahm Emmanuel offers his two cents:

“The last time they put him on the road was for the Mississippi special, and look at how he worked there. I look forward to and I will pay the travel fees to put Vice President Cheney out on the road to talk about energy policy. Because it will remind this country of where this administration has been and who their friends are. And their friends are doing very well.”