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Politics : THE VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (5850)	1/28/2004 7:23:19 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6358

JAN. 28, 2004: PICKING PRESIDENTS I asked yesterday if I had missed anyone from the list of GOP possibilities in 2008 and got a load of interesting replies. Two names stand out from the list: Sen. George Allen of Virginia and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts. Romney almost certainly belongs on the “likely” list. What about Allen? His intentions are very heard to read. Certainly he has all the objective qualifications to make a good candidate. But has he been acting like a candidate? He’s certainly been keeping a low profile in the Senate. Let’s call him a “possible” for now. The New Hampshire Democratic results suggest another possible way of grouping the presidential possibilities. Each of the three men who now must be called the Democratic front-runners has his own distinctive qualification for the nomination. Kerry has organization and stature in the party. Edwards has political talent and raw desire. And Howard Dean has that special conjunction of man and moment. That last – the meeting of man and moment – is more important than is sometimes supposed. In this week in which all the press has fallen in love with John Edwards, one thing that makes me wonder whether he really is the super-candidate he is made out to be – and that is the weird timelessness of his message. “Two Americas”: couldn’t that have been a theme of any Democrat in any election since 1968? Or 1948? Editors call timeless articles “evergreens.” They can run at any time – and as a result they tend never to run at all. They are always superseded by something more urgent and specific. So as the Republican would-be candidates think ahead, they may wish to consider: What will they have to say in 2008 that will be urgent and specific, in the way that George Bush’s message of restoring moral integrity was urgent and specific after the Clinton years. They don’t have to decide now – but they will have to decide sooner than some might think. As for the Dems: Edwards may be the best potential candidate, but they seem now to be repeating one of their favorite mistakes: confusing a military biography with national-security credibility. It’s a mistake that dates all the way back to 1972, when they counted on McGovern’s record as a World War II bomber pilot to compensate for his foreign-policy fecklessness – or maybe back to 1880 when they thought that nominating a Civil War hero, Winfield Scott Hancock, would distract attention from the party’s eagerness for a negotiated peace in 1864. John Kerry was a valiant soldier in Vietnam. He remains clueless on terrorism. And the American people will be able to tell the difference.