Rummy out soon
The Pentagon may be coming under new management. The buzz inside the White House is that Donald Rumsfeld is being pressed to retire with full Iraqi battle honours early in 2006, after what is assumed to be a successful outcome to the Iraqi elections of 15th December. This is more than rumour, since there is talk of two factions arguing hard about his successor. The Pentagon brass and those who know something about managing the vast and unruly Pentagon want Rummy's deputy, Gordon England, to succeed him. Meanwhile, the political staff are urging, with Dick Cheney's backing, the nomination of Joe Lieberman, the Democratic senator from Connecticut and Al Gore's vice-presidential candidate. Karl Rove is on the fence, pointing out that although it would be splendidly bi-partisan to appoint Lieberman, it might be shrewd to keep him as a pro-war voice inside the squabbling Democrats. Nobody has yet had the bad taste to point out that as a highly observant Jew, Lieberman might not be the most persuasive spokesman for a war against Arab terrorism. Nor has he ever run anything bigger than his Senate staff.
Not so fast, Hillary Carl Cannon's Prospect piece last month explaining why Hillary is a good bet for the White House in 2008 looks like bad timing. Hillary appears to have succeeded rather too well since 9/11 in repositioning herself as a hawkish centrist who is sound enough on national security to be elected president. Her decision to take a seat on the Senate armed services committee startled her fans but fitted the Clinton dynasty's rule of triangulation—at least until it became clear that the Iraq occupation was going badly wrong. Now she looks out of touch with the surging anti-war mood among Democrats, and her poll numbers are drooping significantly. A new Rasmussen poll has only 25 per cent of voters planning to back her in 2008 and 40 per cent determined to vote against her. These are some of her worst numbers since she became a senator. So a recent carefully crafted 1,600-word letter to constituents tried to triangulate yet further. On the one hand, she wrote "I do not believe that we should allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end." But on the other hand she went on: "Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately." But it's hard to have it both ways when 54 per cent or more of Americans want troops out within six months, and 60 per cent say it was a mistake to send troops in the first place. This means that we can expect to see an anti-war Democratic candidate in 2008, because, as pollster James Zogby puts it "that's what the base demands."
Senators Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, John Kerry (and his running-mate John Edwards) all voted for the resolution to use force. And they are all holding back from supporting Congressman John Murtha's clarion call to withdraw troops immediately. And now that Murtha has been joined by Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, there is real anger between the populist Dems in the House and those cautious elitists in the Senate who get all the media attention and make the Democrats look more pro-war than they really are. Lieberman, who returned from a Thanksgiving week trip to Iraq to declare that the war is being won, is privately warning the dwindling band of Democrats who are still on speaking terms with him that this is indeed just like Vietnam—for his own party. If the Democrats are once again going to get labelled as the peacenik party, they will exclude themselves from power for a generation.
Happy holidays
There's not much chance of a Christmas truce in a Washington where political correctness is so powerful that for the last few years, the Christmas tree placed on the Capitol lawn has been called a "holiday tree." Now the backlash has started. The speaker of the house, conservative Republican Denny Hastert, has renamed this year's yuletide erection the "Capitol Christmas tree." Meanwhile, televangelist Jerry Falwell has launched a "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign," with 750 lawyer volunteers offering to file lawsuits against anyone who tries to stop the public celebration of Christmas. Falwell took on the city of Boston for calling its gift from Canada a "holiday tree." This became an international incident when Nova Scotia premier John Hamm complained: "When it left Nova Scotia, it was a Christmas tree." The campaign is even starting to hurt Wal-Mart, whose store banners proclaim "Happy Holidays," provoking Fox TV's right-wing ranter Bill O'Reilly and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights to launch boycott campaigns.
Speaking for Cameron Norman Lamont has been in town talking up David Cameron, and identifying him as "a reversion to pre-Thatcher conservatism—but more like Harold Macmillan than Ted Heath." Lamont scandalised the conservative faithful at the Hudson Institute think tank by telling them that Cameron thought, "Margaret Thatcher had been needed in her day, but the times and the challenges have changed." American conservatives would not be so cavalier with the sacred memory of Ronald Reagan, he was sternly told.
The Pentagon may be coming under new management. The buzz inside the White House is that Donald Rumsfeld is being pressed to retire with full Iraqi battle honours early in 2006, after what is assumed to be a successful outcome to the Iraqi elections of 15th December. This is more than rumour, since there is talk of two factions arguing hard about his successor. The Pentagon brass and those who know something about managing the vast and unruly Pentagon want Rummy's deputy, Gordon England, to succeed him. Meanwhile, the political staff are urging, with Dick Cheney's backing, the nomination of Joe Lieberman, the Democratic senator from Connecticut and Al Gore's vice-presidential candidate. Karl Rove is on the fence, pointing out that although it would be splendidly bi-partisan to appoint Lieberman, it might be shrewd to keep him as a pro-war voice inside the squabbling Democrats. Nobody has yet had the bad taste to point out that as a highly observant Jew, Lieberman might not be the most persuasive spokesman for a war against Arab terrorism. Nor has he ever run anything bigger than his Senate staff.
Not so fast, Hillary Carl Cannon's Prospect piece last month explaining why Hillary is a good bet for the White House in 2008 looks like bad timing. Hillary appears to have succeeded rather too well since 9/11 in repositioning herself as a hawkish centrist who is sound enough on national security to be elected president. Her decision to take a seat on the Senate armed services committee startled her fans but fitted the Clinton dynasty's rule of triangulation—at least until it became clear that the Iraq occupation was going badly wrong. Now she looks out of touch with the surging anti-war mood among Democrats, and her poll numbers are drooping significantly. A new Rasmussen poll has only 25 per cent of voters planning to back her in 2008 and 40 per cent determined to vote against her. These are some of her worst numbers since she became a senator. So a recent carefully crafted 1,600-word letter to constituents tried to triangulate yet further. On the one hand, she wrote "I do not believe that we should allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end." But on the other hand she went on: "Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately." But it's hard to have it both ways when 54 per cent or more of Americans want troops out within six months, and 60 per cent say it was a mistake to send troops in the first place. This means that we can expect to see an anti-war Democratic candidate in 2008, because, as pollster James Zogby puts it "that's what the base demands."
Senators Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, John Kerry (and his running-mate John Edwards) all voted for the resolution to use force. And they are all holding back from supporting Congressman John Murtha's clarion call to withdraw troops immediately. And now that Murtha has been joined by Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, there is real anger between the populist Dems in the House and those cautious elitists in the Senate who get all the media attention and make the Democrats look more pro-war than they really are. Lieberman, who returned from a Thanksgiving week trip to Iraq to declare that the war is being won, is privately warning the dwindling band of Democrats who are still on speaking terms with him that this is indeed just like Vietnam—for his own party. If the Democrats are once again going to get labelled as the peacenik party, they will exclude themselves from power for a generation.
Happy holidays
There's not much chance of a Christmas truce in a Washington where political correctness is so powerful that for the last few years, the Christmas tree placed on the Capitol lawn has been called a "holiday tree." Now the backlash has started. The speaker of the house, conservative Republican Denny Hastert, has renamed this year's yuletide erection the "Capitol Christmas tree." Meanwhile, televangelist Jerry Falwell has launched a "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign," with 750 lawyer volunteers offering to file lawsuits against anyone who tries to stop the public celebration of Christmas. Falwell took on the city of Boston for calling its gift from Canada a "holiday tree." This became an international incident when Nova Scotia premier John Hamm complained: "When it left Nova Scotia, it was a Christmas tree." The campaign is even starting to hurt Wal-Mart, whose store banners proclaim "Happy Holidays," provoking Fox TV's right-wing ranter Bill O'Reilly and the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights to launch boycott campaigns.
Speaking for Cameron Norman Lamont has been in town talking up David Cameron, and identifying him as "a reversion to pre-Thatcher conservatism—but more like Harold Macmillan than Ted Heath." Lamont scandalised the conservative faithful at the Hudson Institute think tank by telling them that Cameron thought, "Margaret Thatcher had been needed in her day, but the times and the challenges have changed." American conservatives would not be so cavalier with the sacred memory of Ronald Reagan, he was sternly told.
