One of the chapters in Rudy's book is titled "Surround Yourself With Great People." As the Washington Post points out today, many of his appointments as Mayor of New York turned out to be dismal choices, based on blind loyalty to his friends rather than competence.

We all know about Bernie and Rudy, but there are plenty of other examples, which taken together, show "a pattern of rewarding loyalty over competence in personnel decisions:

There's Howard Safir, whom Rudy appointed Police Commissioner after the very competent Bill Bratton:

[Safir] came under intense criticism after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man, for failing to provide adequate oversight of the police unit involved in the shootings and for his detached response. He also came under scrutiny for, among other things, taking a corporate jet to the Academy Awards shortly after the shootings, for assigning eight detectives to his daughter's wedding, and for sending officers to investigate a woman who rear-ended his wife's car.

More...

Obviously, no one at Talk Left will ever support Mike Huckabee's candidacy for President but, via TPM, credit where due, Huckabee's response to the crazy GOP's hatred of, supposedly just, illegal, immigrants:

"If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he's on the hospital steps, what do the other candidates suggest we do, let him sit there and gasp until he doesn't have any air left and he dies? If a child comes to our school -- and our law, by the way, in most of our states, mine certainly says you've got to educate a child if he's of child age -- what do you, break your own law and say, `No, you can't come in the schoolhouse door'? "No, you don't do that. What you do is you elect a president who will fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don't then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That's not what this country does. We're a better country than that."

Unfortunately for Huckabee and for the Nation, the Republican Party is NOT a better party than that.

At Swampland, Karen Tumulty demonstrates the problem with the Obama campaign:

The leading contenders are having an argument over Social Security. That program, of course, is something that Democrats usually fight about with Republicans, not each other. Why now? As Obama strategist David Axelrod sees it, the real issue isn't Social Security: "We're not really picking a fight about Social Security. We're picking a fight about candor. [Obama] has been forthright about this, and Senator Clinton hasn't."

Obama's idea of candor is pandering to the Beltway Elite on Social Security? This is outrageous. As Paul Krugman wrote:

Which brings us back to Barack Obama. Why would he, in effect, play along with this new round of scare-mongering and devalue one of the great progressive victories of the Bush years?

I don't believe Mr. Obama is a closet privatizer. He is, however, someone who keeps insisting that he can transcend the partisanship of our times -- and in this case, that turned him into a sucker.

Obama wanted a way to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton -- and for Mr. Obama, who has said that the reason "we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions" is that "politics has become so bitter and partisan," joining in the attack on Mrs. Clinton's Social Security position must have seemed like a golden opportunity to sound forceful yet bipartisan.

This is what we do NOT need from our Democratic standard bearers. Axelrod will ruin Obama's campaign if he keeps this up. The Clinton campaign must be licking its chops on this.

More.

Rudy exposed by a surpising source:

[In 1996, Rudy] stepped on the podium at the Kennedy School of Government to deliver a speech on immigration. “I’m pleased to be with you this evening to talk about the anti-immigrant movement in America . . . I believe the anti-immigrant movement in America is one of our most serious public problems. . . . It can be seen in the negative attitudes being expressed by many of the politicians.” . . . At the moment [in 2007], Giuliani and fellow moderate Mitt Romney are attacking each other for being insufficiently Tancredo-esque. . . .

Even the conservative David Brooks recognizes that Rudy Giuliani is as phony as a three dollar bill.

Speaking for me only

My title is facetious. No one is trying to get my support. But the race starts in earnest today and I will support someone in the Dem primary race. Right now, my weak support goes to Barack Obama, with Chris Dodd as my second choice.

What am I looking for in a candidate? First of all, support and leadership on the issues that mean the most to me.

Iraq is the most important issue to me. Barack Obama opposed the Iraq Debacle while all the other leading candidates supported it. (I know, I know, they didn't vote for the war they say. Sorry, they did.) This is a big thing. The problem is what about now? Throughout his Senatorial tenure, Barack Obama has been quite weak in his opposition to the Debacle and has not strongly supported actions by the Congress to end it until recently. He said the Congress should not play chicken with the President on Iraq. It was a terrible moment for him. By contrast, Chris Dodd has been leading on Iraq, calling for Congressional action to not fund the Debacle without a date certain for ending our involvement in the Iraq Debacle. Clinton has largely tracked Obama's path on this -the weak path, also until recently. John Edwards has offered strong rhetoric. Bill Richardson has distracted with a phony argument about "residual troops." On this point, a very important one, advantage Dodd. Among the Big 3, Edwards has been the best of late. But Obama got it right in the beginning. Clinton lags.

More.

He keeps bringing up this "issue":

The former president's intervention . . . raised the second, and largely unspoken, issue identified by my friend from the Clinton administration: the two-headed campaign and the prospect of a dual presidency. In his view, which I share, this is a prospect that will test the tolerance of the American people far more severely than the possibility of the first female president -- or, for that matter, the first black president. As my friend says, "there is nothing in American constitutional or political theory to account for the role of a former president, still energetic and active and full of ideas, occupying the White House with the current president."

As I understand Broder's theory, the prospect of former President Bill Clinton being again in the White House and likely being Hillary Clinton's chief advisor is a political problem for clinton and the Dems. Is the man insane? Have whatever opinion of the actual Bill Clinton Presidency, but you have to deal with the fact that Bill Clinton remains extremely popular and his Presidency remembered fondly. Broder is either a fool or a shill on this.

Speaking for me only.

This is not only disappointing and shameful, it is stupid:

I believe I have the right kind of experience to be the next President. With a war and a tough economy, we need a President ready on Day One to bring our troops home from Iraq and to handle all of our other tough challenges. Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next President will face.

Hillary supporters will defend this by saying it was a response to this statement from Obama:

Probably the strongest experience I have in foreign relations is the fact that I spent four years living overseas when I was a child in southeast Asia."

That does not wash for me. Now it is a supremely stupid statement from Obama but that does not excuse Hillary's use of it to attack Obama personally. Never more comofrtable than in the mud, John Edwards jumps in:

Now we know what Senator Clinton meant when she talked about ‘throwing mud’ in the last debate. Like so many other things, when it comes to mud, Hillary Clinton says one thing and throws another.

The Edwards campaign is pathetic AND shameful. But this entire campaign is now one of the worst in history. Dems cover themselves in shame. Again.

Well, you knew this was coming.

Obama made the disclosure while working a crowd at Central High School here, after delivering an education policy speech. A man, Ralph Hoagland, asked Obama—who was mingling and shaking hands-- if Oprah was going to stump for Obama in New Hampshire.

“First she’s coming to Iowa,” Obama told Hoagland, who in 1963 was a co-founder of what is now the giant CVS pharmacy chain. “But we’ll talk about it. We’ll get her up here.”

Was it a planted question? Hoagland is "a member of Obama’s Northeast Steering Group, which is heavily involved in fund-raising. He hopes to bundle together $100,000 for Obama..."

Here's Hoagland's reasoning, or is it Obama's?

Oprah Winfrey can help, Hoagland said, “because I think that Oprah can say to women ‘you do not have to vote for the first woman president. Vote for what you need.”

So, is Obama now resorting to the gender card?

Good for Obama. He's not running from his early experimentation with drugs, including cocaine, and alcohol. He also says he was a "goof-off."

We've come a long way from the "But I didn't inhale" days.

Yesterday, I wrote about John Edwards' slippage in Iowa. Normally, I do not take great stock in polls this far out (yes, it is still too far out to take polls too seriously), especially the famously difficult to poll Iowa Caucus. My reasons for thinking the latest Iowa poll was not so much the numbers, as the fact that Edwards has dropped while Obama has risen since the end of July. Edwards now lacks a POSITIVE narrative for his candidacy for the critical last phases of the campaign. He has become the "attack Hillary" candidate (as opposed to being the Not Hillary candidate, the position he has now ceded without a shot to Barack Obama.)

At MYDD, Jerome Armstrong sees it differently:

Chiming in, it's great that the pollsters are now adding whether the voters attended the 2004 caucuses or not . . . I would tend to bank more on those that caucused in '04 . . .

With due respect to Jerome, I think he misses a very important point here, on the night of the caucus, the differences between previous caucus goers and first timers is simply not that great - both in choices and participation. For example, in 2004, the entrance polling showed:

Things are looking up for Mitt Romney in New Hampshire.

The WMUR-CNN poll of likely Republican voters conducted by the University of New Hampshire shows Romney with 33 percent support, up from 25 percent in the same poll in September. Giuliani has declined, slipping to 16 percent compared to 24 percent in September.

Giuliani is now third choice among Republicans, behind both Romney and McCain, in that state. The poll results are here (pdf).

I wonder if the Bernie Kerik Indictment had a bigger impact than he expected.

A new WaPo/ABC poll shows Obama gaining supporters from John Edwards:

NET LEANED VOTE: 11/18/07 7/31/07

Barack Obama 30 27

Hillary Clinton 26 26

John Edwards 22 26

Edwards has decided to run a negative campaign filled with personal attacks on Hillary Clinton. If Edwards' goal is to help Obama, his tactics are working well. If he is trying to win, his tactics are disastrous.

BTW, the WaPo story is headlined "Clinton Slips . . " As you can see, it is Edwards who lost support. Clinton's support is exactly the same as this poll showed in late July.