Watch this.

E.J. Dionne:

There has long been talk about the rise of a "radical center," made up of voters essentially moderate in their philosophical leanings but radical in their disaffection with the status quo. This looks to be the year of the radical center. If it is, the Democrats will win. And if they win, their task will be to meet the aspirations of a diverse group of dissatisfied and disappointed Americans. Not an easy chore, but one that certainly beats being in the opposition.

The negative extremist brand has been stuck on the Rubber Stamp Republicans. Obama, take heed please.

Brilliant, not:

Kerry's spokesman, David Wade, sounds similarly entitled:

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, came under fire last week when it was pointed out that he had contributed only $15,000 this year to the party’s senatorial committee. Heyjohn.org, whose creator has remained anonymous, highlights the fact that Mr. Kerry has $14 million in his campaign accounts.[...]

“Cowards can hide behind anonymous Web sites,” Mr. Wade said, “but Democrats out in the country, party leaders and real net-roots activists know how hard John Kerry has fought to win these elections.”

So Kerry works hard to make inroads with the Netroots and David Wade decides to piss it all away. Nice job David.

The Media hard at work:

The New York Times sorted 362 of Mr. Lieberman’s war-related comments since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks into content-related categories, and found that he has alternated his arguments about the parties and the war’s prosecution, shifting tone at critical points as political circumstances have evolved.

In other words, the Lieberman Principle:

So this is the Lieberman Principle. What is good for Joe is good. When it is good for Joe to criticize the President, then it is good to criticize the President. Only then. When it is good for Joe to be partisan, then it is good to be partisan. Only then. When it is good for Joe to abandon the Democratic party, then it is good. Only then.

What a mendacious unprincipled hack Joe is.

Ezra Klein gets at one of the main problems of Obamarama:

There's a real danger here for the left who, so long out of power, are ready to jump on whichever train looks likeliest to pull into the White House on time. That may (or may not) be a good strategy for returning to power. But throwing your lot in with the smoothest talker and hoping for the best once he achieves power is a terrible method for building a movement, or popularizing ideas. The left needs to set up incentives so presidential contenders to pledge fealty to their priorities -- their support should be contingent on ideological agreement, and should never precede it. As other have remarked, when David Brooks and Joe Klein both throw their weight behind a putatively "liberal' cause or candidate, smart leftists will look for the catch.

Obama is not building a new Democratic identity. Indeed, he seems to be selling himself as an other-Dem, not like the rest of them. This disdain for party politics and Democratic Party branding is the essence of my complaint regarding Obama.

Phil Singer of the DSCC sounds the alarm:

NEW FROM BUSH: Yesterday, Bush revived his plan to privatize Social Security, calling it one of the “big items” he wants to get done next year. Watch video of Bush yesterday:

Watch Bush

And Bush's merry band of GOP Senate candidates who agree with him on privatizing Social Security on the other side.

Bink tells us that 5 days before the election, CNN plans to run a special titled Democratic incompetence:

Candy Crowley is on CNN right now previewing her new news special on Democratic Party incompetence. Apparently, it's called "Two Left Feet." . . . CNN will come to the conclusion that Democrats are just plain incompetent. How do we know this? "Candy" seems to says that it's because the party doesn't know how to balance the political goals of what she calls the "Democratic base" -- with the goals of "real Americans" -- you know, real Americans in the Heartland.

Candy Crowley seems like a nice person, and here is how she describes her show, but the next interesting, insightful, actual news she reports will be the first. CNN's political reporting is incompetent.

But this reveals, yet again, the bias in the Media, the incompetence bias.

This is hilarious:

America’s top military and civilian officials in Iraq said today that the Baghdad government has agreed to a timetable for a series of milestones to be pursued in the coming year, including cracking down on Shiite militias, completing a “national compact” between competing political groups, persuading Sunni insurgents to lay down their arms and settling contentious issues like the division of oil revenues. . . . “Iraqi officials have agreed to a timeline for making these difficult decisions,” Ambassador Khalilzad said.

But but but our enemies, they now know to lie low until we leave and we can't have a set timeline and . . .

Worst Administration in history.

Hillary Rosen at HuffPo writes that Obama is no threat to Hillary Clinton in a 2008 Presidential run.

Yet Hillary's detractors see her as too liberal, too fresh, too ambitious --- too unelectable. Next to Obama you can't help but think she looks a downright conventional choice.

I see Obama as a centrist, not a liberal. I see Hillary Clinton as a centrist.

Wouldn't that be a close to perfect pairing for 2008, the two centrists, a female and an African-American?

One of the questions I have with a Hillary Clinton candidacy is which male contender would agree to run with her in the VP slot? For John Edwards, John Kerry, and most of the other names we know, they might perceive it as a step down to accept the VP slot after campaigning so hard for the Presidential nomination. But for Obama, who has limited experience in the national forum, it would be a step up. He'd probably jump at the chance.

So maybe that's where all this "Obama may run for President in '08" talk is coming from.

I still don't see who anointed him and why, but the media is biting and he's bound to become a household word before too long.

In the course of a long editorial on Iraq, the NYTimes says:

While the strategy described above seems the best bet to us, the odds are still very much against it working. At this point, all plans to avoid disaster involve the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. In America, almost no one — even the administration’s harshest critics — wants to tell people the bitter truth about how few options remain on the table, and about the mayhem that will almost certainly follow an American withdrawal unless more is done.

Truth will only take us so far, but it is the right way to begin. Americans will probably spend the next generation debating whether the Iraq invasion would have worked under a competent administration. Right now, the best place to express bitterness about what may become the worst foreign policy debacle in American history is at the polls. But anger at a president is not a plan for what happens next.

I don't know. Read the Times plan, if you have faith in their Hail Mary, then by all means embrace it. But frankly, WITHOUT anger at this incompetent President, the worst in history, that pass won't even be thrown.

Fifth Circuit Judge Carolyn Dineen King addressed an audience attending a Red Mass in Corpus Christi. After taking care to disavow the influence of her religious beliefs upon her judicial decision-making, Judge King chided the Catholic Church for its belated recognition that capital punishment is morally wrong:

When I asked one of my friends, who is a professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, about [the church's silence in the death penalty debate prior to 1995], he said that in view of the Church's rather speckled history, one could understand why the Church might not be out front on this issue. Well, I can't understand it. Redemption is possible, even for the Catholic Church.

Judge King used the occasion to criticize the Supreme Court's death penalty jurisprudence:

So says President Bush.