9 January 2008 a Wednesday

Let the political year truly begin, as Hillary's secret muscle starts to show and Obama couldn't bus students in from other states. Will her air of inevitability magically return now? Edwards says he will stay as long as OPM rolls in, and I wish Huckabee had been fourth, not third. Otherwise I'd say things were about as expected, weren't they? The big money...and I mean the really BIG money...is behind Hillary. It's the kind of money that doesn't get added up, but counts.

Back to the voting situation, as John Fund talks about the Supreme Courts coming decision about requiring photo ID in order to vote:

Some key facts will determine the outcome, as the court weighs the potential the law has to combat fraud versus the barriers it erects to voting. The liberal Brennan Center at NYU Law School reports that a nationwide telephone survey it conducted found that 11% of the voting-age public lacks government-issued photo ID, including an implausible 25% of African-Americans.

But U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker, who first upheld Indiana's photo ID law in 2006, cited a state study that found 99% of the voting-age population had the necessary photo ID. Judge Barker also noted that Indiana provided a photo ID for free to anyone who could prove their identity...

I got that far and then I wondered how someone would do that if they already lacked earlier photo ID? I mean, most ID requirements begin with a birth certificate...but how do you really prove that you are the infant named on the birth certificate? If it has your footprint on it, presumably that could be verified...but how many do? Are footprints as unique as fingerprints? Almost all of us have current photo ID which comes as a result of having presented earlier photo ID, and by now we're so far down the line that it's taken for granted...but where does it all start if you don't already have photo ID now? Even if I presented a birth certificate with a footprint, who would make me take off my shoes today, print my feet, and then be expert enough to make the identification?

Or rent a car or even a video, and nowadays even to pay with a credit card in many places. I think the study that shows 99% of the voting-age public has some form of photo ID now is the one more likely to be correct.

Here's an observation by the OpinionJournal editors which supports what I've been predicting:

Mr. McCain's victory catapults him back into contention in a GOP race that he once led, only to implode last year. The Arizona Senator can thank New Hampshire voters who knew him well from his primary win there in 2000. But the candidate himself also deserves credit--for sheer doggedness, and because his determination on Iraq when everyone else was running for cover has now paid off politically.

Three out of four New Hampshire Republicans yesterday said they support the Iraq War, and Mr. McCain got the bulk of them. On the question of who would be the better Commander in Chief, the exit polls showed that Mr. McCain beat Mitt Romney decisively. The Senator's performance suggests that, at least among Republicans and independents, the war was unpopular mainly because the U.S. seemed to be losing it. General David Petraeus's "surge" has not only saved Iraq from defeat, it has also helped to rescue the McCain candidacy.

Some pundits have decided that since the MSM no longer wishes to play up the Iraqi war, this means it won't be an issue in the elections later this year. I disagree. The Democrats and the MSM may not to emphasize it, but the Republicans will!

And, as I've repeatedly promised you, Hillary will stand up to remind you that this was her idea long before Bush came along, back in 1998 she passed a Public Law declaring it to be in the national interest to overthrow Saddam and replace him with a democratic regime. George Bush, she'll remind you, came along, appropriated HER IDEA, and then didn't know how to do it properly.

Even her "suspension of disbelief" crack at Petraeus can be explained away by the fact that she was only skeptical about Bush finally finding the right man for the job, not of Petraeus personally.

Mr. Romney signaled that he'll also fight in a state where his father was once Governor, offering his latest retooled theme that he's the Republican Obama, the best man to "change" Washington.

While making that case this week, however, he also made the same mistake he did in Iowa, assuming that immigration was the kill shot against his opponents. Yet the smooth businessman never seemed natural impersonating Tom Tancredo. Mr. Romney is now portraying Mr. McCain, a four-term Senator, as an "insider." But this may also be a tough sell considering Mr. McCain's status as an outside insider, someone who has never been part of the Senate club.

I'll bet you when it comes right down to it that the average voter isn't nearly as much into "change" as the conventional wisdom currently has it. What they're looking for is a reduction in bitter partisan politics, and neither Romney nor Hillary can promise that. McCain's support from Joe Lieberman will be trotted out again, you can bet on that. This will make McCain-v-Hillary look even better for McCain, because he'll pick up enough moderate Democrats to make up for any right-wing Republicans he loses.

He's also picked more than one policy fight with fellow Republicans over the years--on taxes, campaign-finance and health care. Mr. McCain is a conviction politician, but his main beliefs concern qualities of personal character such as duty and honor. They are admirable traits, and they clearly help in a year when national security is a main concern.

But our guess is that Mr. McCain is going to need more than character to win the nomination, and especially to prevail in November. He is going to need a domestic reform agenda. One suggestion: He could help himself now among economic conservatives if he said that while he may have opposed the Bush tax cuts out of concern for overspending, he now believes they have been a resounding success, and that he wants to extend them with a major tax reform.

I'd swear that I've already heard McCain acknowledge that the tax cuts were a good thing and that what he was against was not having any associated spending cuts. He has already said he thinks they were a resounding success, although I don't recall him mentioning extending them.

Yet. When he does he will certainly including spending cuts in HIS bill, making it even more popular. Hillary doesn't have a good dog in this hunt.

There’s only a small group of writers who honestly spend enough time in Iraq to make serious claims based on firsthand accounts. But I’ve seen the Iraqi Army with my own eyes. I’ve done many missions in 2005 and 2007, in many places in Iraq, along with the Iraqi Army: please believe me when I say that, on the whole, the Iraqi Army is remarkably better in 2007 and far more effective than it was in 2005. By 2007, the Iraqis were doing most of the fighting. And . . . this is very important . . . they see our Army and Marines as serious allies, and in many cases as friends. Please let the potential implications of that sink in.

We now have a large number of American and British officers who can pick up a phone from Washington or London and call an Iraqi officer that he knows well—an Iraqi he has fought along side of—and talk. Same with untold numbers of Sheiks and government officials, most of whom do not deserve the caricatural disdain they get most often from pundits who have never set foot in Iraq. British and American forces have a personal relationship with Iraqi leaders of many stripes. The long-term intangible implications of the betrayal of that trust through the precipitous withdrawal of our troops could be enormous, because they would be the certain first casualties of renewed violence, and selling out the Iraqis who are making an honest-go would make the Bay of Pigs sell-out seem inconsequential. The United States and Great Britain would hang their heads in shame for a century.

Alternately, in an equation in which the outcome is a stable Iraq for which they (Iraqi Police and Army officials) are stewards, the potential benefits are equally enormous. Because if Iraq were to settle down, and then a decade passes and we look back and even our most severe critics cannot deny that Iraq is a better place, a generation of Iraq’s most important leaders would have deep personal bonds with their counterparts in America and Great Britain.

Some excellent points I confess I had not thought enough about...the personal relationships which have developed over time. It's one of the better aspects of a longer war, the opportunity it gives to bond. One of the truths I learned early in life, although I could well have used it earlier still, was how much easier it was to work with people you had at least met before. When I was at Standard Oil I made a point of meeting people who worked in different departments than I did, people I ordinarily did not encounter in my work...like guys in the land department, the legal department, our research arm, even the drilling people back when Standard still drilled its own wells. I was always surprised at how few of them knew anyone personally in the exploration department...in fact, I'd sometimes know other people within their own department who they hadn't met, themselves.

In real estate, I soon found out how much easier it was to present an offer when you knew the other agent. The way the business works, in practice, one agent (by which I mean in the sense the public understands the term...the individual real estate salesperson) considers himself or herself the seller's representative and the other agent is the buyer's. The very best agents take their work very seriously and can develop very close personal bonds, especially with their sellers since they tend to know them longer, on the whole.

The way the business works, in practice, is that the buyer's agent writes up the buyer's wishes, and offer, on an approved form in such way that it will be a defendable legal contract. (Without practicing law in the process, of course!) Then the buyer's agent, alone, typically presents it to the sellers, in their home, with the seller's agent there to listen. After any questions have been answered, the buyer's agent is excused while the sellers and their agent decide on an appropriate course of action.

The mother-hen defending her brood of sellers (and I'm talking about residential real estate here, in particular) against the buyer who wants to "steal" their home (the one they are offering for sale), can turn into a raging mother bear protecting the life of her cubs if she perceives the buyer's agent as a bad guy she has no reason to trust. And it's axiomatic that if they don't know you at all, they don't trust you at all. When I retired and left Amador County, I think that I probably knew every single member of the Association.

One of the easiest deals I ever had was one of my last ones. I was representing a gay couple moving to our area from somewhere else "down below." The sellers were from "up country" and weren't all that tolerant, but they were represented by one of the local brokers in whom I had the utmost trust and confidence. We were good friends, as well, and between the two of us we handled all of the inevitable problems of even the easiest real estate transaction, which this wasn't. I'm not sure if that transaction would have closed if we had been strangers.

Oddly enough, one of my very first transactions in the business was with a lesbian couple, my buyers. To be sure that was in the SF Bay Area, much more liberal than Amador County, but it was also quite a long time ago, too, and they definitely were not open about it.

It's interesting...I've never known, I realize, a gay/lesbian person I did not like. I cannot come even CLOSE to saying that about any number of "macho men" I've known in my life.

I recently had lunch with the Iraqi doctor who treated Uday Hussein after he was shot years ago. The doctor told me Uday’s bodyguards all had his same blood type just in case, and Uday did need a lot of blood on that occasion. The doctor told me that Uday’s mom was there in the hospital and she was screaming at Saddam—(screaming at Saddam!)—something like, “You killed my son, you bastard! You killed my son!” Uday survived to be killed by our guys later in Mosul and the doctor is now very helpful to US forces and seems to be doing quite well (he has a home in Costa Rica).

I had to laugh at that definition of "doing quite well", but on the other hand I have to admit to being quite satisfied here, too. And I prefer it over the United States, so I'm quite sure it would be an improvement over Iraq!

Another comment that his home was this reference about the book he is writing about the different people he encountered in Iraq:

Yon probably has a positive feeling toward Tonto for the same reason that we had when we were growing up...he was the Long Ranger's faithful companion, a good guy himself without whom the Lone Ranger probably would not have survived. Sort of like Robin, in Batman's case.

But the English compliment comes a cropper here, where tonto is Spanish for 'fool'. Surely Fran Strker must not have known that, he was born in Buffalo, NY, in 1903, making him only 6 years older than my own father, but I wonder where he got the name from? Similarly Tonto's name for the Long Ranger, kemo sabe, which I figure has to be some confused reference to something like quien no sabe, the man whose name nobody knew, since the Lone Ranger's identity was secret.

I had some Lone Ranger books when I was a kid, but I no longer have them now, alas.

You honestly expect campaigns to be selected solely upon the results of two states? You're surprised that you don't know how it's going to end, already? Now if it had been forty election nights that might have been a meaningful headline...but two? I think I'll skip her piece.

The Big No-Mo [Mark Steyn]

Looking at the winners and losers on the Republican side, I don't see a lot of the former coming out of New Hampshire:

Romney lost, because he came second, which is starting to look like a pattern;

McCain lost, because his margin over Romney is, as noted below, underwhelming enough to get his comeback written off as little more than a local phenomenon;

Huckabee lost, because a distant third with no evidence of an Iowa bounce makes his caucus victory seem ancient history;

Giuliani lost, because he barely beat Ron Paul;

Paul lost, because he couldn't even beat Giuliani;

Thompson lost, because he's a big-time Hollywood guy with a hot primetime TV show and, even if he were totally incompetent, that ought to be worth more than one per cent.

Two second-place finishes is a pattern? But two points are the minimum number for describing a straight line, since one point cannot possibly indicate any trend or pattern, but there are also a nearly-infinite number of patterns, lines or shapes which contain two points. Reaching for your theme, Mark, I thought.

McCain's underwhelming margin might better be examined with a small dose of time perspective. If McCain and Romney had been running in this one-two position for some time, perhaps 8 points or so might be called underwhelming. On the other hand, if McCain was down in double-digits not long before the election and came from that point to win by 8, that's more like a 20-plus-point change and pretty whelming, at a minimum.

Huckabee simply finishing ahead of all of the other candidates WAS a significant bounce! Before Iowa, where would Huckabee have been expected to place in New Hampshire? That's right...last. Third is a real bounce up from last!

Giuliani hardly lost for the simple fact that he didn't even put on his running shoes. Finishing fourth in a race you didn't even show up for sounds pretty good...I mean, what if he had tried at all?

Paul won simply by getting ANY points after his last debate appearance; I was embarrassed for my friend who supports him. He looked like a puzzled and querulous old man. Joe Biden has to look at Paul's success and wonder if it isn't really true that life isn't fair. There's no way that Biden, however dumb he might sometimes appear, isn't smarter than Paul.

Many will point to Hillary’s watery-eyed performance at a Portsmouth rally on Monday as a watershed moment. Down in the polls and facing imminent defeat, the erstwhile anti-Tammy Wynette turned on the spigot and played damsel in distress: “It’s not easy, and I couldn’t do it if I didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do. You know, I have so many opportunities from this country. I just don’t want to see us fall backward, you know?”

The steely voice — infamous for uttering profanities at staffers, state troopers, and her Secret Service detail, bellowing at the Bush administration and Rush Limbaugh, and imitating a fiery southern drawl — turned drippy: “You know, this is very personal for me. It’s not just political; it’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it.” Insert heartfelt pauses and choke-ups as directed.

So long, feminist hero. Hello, weeping willow. Anyone who believes Hillary spontaneously teared up and got emotional on the campaign trail has been in a coma the last three decades.

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.” ,,,

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”

In following links from various places I came across this Stephen F. Hayes item in the Weekly Standard:

And here's Power Line with an interesting set of numbers! Each have one state win to their credit, Romney, McCain and Huckabee, yet Romney has almost as many delegates as a result as McCain and Huckabee combined! And Obama is one ahead of Hillary by a point with Edwards not that far behind both of them. A different viewpoint, certainly. Remember: the nomination is based upon the number of delegates, so Romney isn't as bad off as you might think he should be after two losses and a win.

2008 shapes up as a very unusual year, with five candidates on the Republican side who can be expected to win delegates: McCain, Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee and Thompson. McCain obviously is back, and Giuliani, while he has slipped recently in national polls, has not yet (in the words of John Paul Jones) begun to fight. It seems likely that he will carry some big states, as will Thompson and/or Huckabee once the campaign moves to the South. Some big states, like California, will be fragmented with delegates going to multiple candidates.

In most years the winner of a handful of early primaries develops unstoppable momentum. But I don't see that happening in 2008. Rommey hasn't shown the political muscle to pull it off; Huckabee is the fourth or fifth choice of a great many mainstream Republicans; and McCain's stances on immigration, campaign finance and tax cuts should prevent him from running away with anything.

In short, I think it is entirely possible that we may arrive at the convention in Minnesota next summer in a position where no candidate commands a majority of the delegates.

I'm not your ideal conservative, of course, but I think McCain's only really bad stance is the one on campaign finance reform. He explained his tax cuts stance satisfactorily, admitting that they worked but still feeling that spending cuts should have gone along with them, and it's hard to argue against that. And his stance on immigration is unpopular with the people who want to send all 12-20 million illegals back but haven't let realism seep into their argument yet. Once you acknowledge the physical impossibility...

Let's see...the Amtrack superliner seats 74 and is 85 feet long. A Greyhound bus seats 47 and is 45 feet long, so let's just figure one foot of length per passenger. Naturally they will be allowed to keep only normal bus-type luggage culled from their life's accumulation of personal possessions, so there will be a lot of garage sales first. A glut of homes coming on the market, too, assuming we give them the time and opportunity to do that and don't simply appropriate them for...for...for the homeless, there's an idea! Obviously the government should simply buy all of the homes, in the spirit of fairness, using the Halliburton Real Estate Division.

Making our math easier, let's figure we're only going to manage to round up 15,840,000 of the illegals and there are 15,840 feet in 3 miles, so our line of buses stretches 3000 miles, bumper to bumper, at 117.33 buses per mile. Obviously the buses will have perhaps a bus-length of separation, so now the line is 6000 miles long. Our 352,000 buses won't all be available at the same time, of course...according to the American Bus Association there are only 40,000 or so "motor coaches" in all of the United States bus fleets. Could we commandeer ten percent of those, do you think? Maybe set up our own travel division, the Hallibur...oh, why kid around, the Cheney Bus Company. At least we can be assured that they'll have to have tickets.

Now we might guess that most of the illegal aliens will live closer to the border than most people, but large numbers will be in the larger northern cities, too, so what's the average trip length...would 500 miles be fair? Ten hours...one travel day per bus, considering turn-around time, etc. This would give us 4000 buses/day x 50 people/bus (cram them in a bit), or 200,000 people/day deposited on the Mexican border.

Hey, wait a second...this is starting to sound workable after all! A million people a week even allowing time off for church! Four months! Nothing to it, right?

McCain's probably secretly quite irritated that people simply cannot grasp the magnitude of trying to find and to force that many people to leave the United States, whether we or they like it or not. If you want only legal immigrants in the United States, this means you have to invent some new law which will cause them to be no longer illegal.

Is that amnesty? Depends on the meaning of 'is'. McCain's argument is that if you only twinkle your nose and clap your heels together three times, it is, but if you create your new laws so that they will be tough, yet still enforceable, it isn't. How do you get around the fact that this can be looked upon as rewarding some illegal behavior? Create a statute of limitations, just like any other criminal offense...a time after which you can no longer be prosecuted. We do that for virtually everyone but murderers, why not for workers who entered the country illegally some number of years ago?

In the end, my only serious problem with McCain is his association with Feingold.

With 22 states going on the same day, Romney doesn't have any opportunities to prove himself a winner after Florida in order to convince voters in these states to support him. Florida and South Carolina are not natural settings for a first win, and Romney's perceived advantages in Michigan puts a great deal of pressure on the campaign to score a big victory.

Let's not get too far out in predicting Romney's demise, however. He can self-fund for a while still, and so he will remain in the race.

Am I just cynical? Why would anyone want to spend that much of their own money even if it did get them elected president in the end? Or am I being naïve, instead, thinking that McCain is really the only one doing it out of a sense of duty? Romney's a businessman and people like him are motivated by money, not duty. Ditto Edwards, in spades.

I guess I'm discovering myself to be a McCain fan, the further we go along. I think Rudy would do a good job and I suspect Fred Thompson might be okay. Obama might be an inspirational president who could make good choices to help him with the hard work, but he'd be another dithering Clinton for 8 more years while al-Qaeda rebuilt without being challenged.

Carol and I both had mild cases a few years ago. I was hospitalized for mine, but in retrospect I think that was a bit of an over-reaction since many other locals here in town also had it and did not get the treatment that I did. Second infections, however, are much worse.

What can you do, realistically? The dengue-carrying mosquitoes fly by day, not by night, and we're in and out all day long.