Vice-presidential tension
It's so crazy it might just work. As John Kerry intensifies his search for the perfect vice-presidential running mate, there is a lot of buzz about the political soulmate and fellow senator who voted with Kerry against the Bush tax cuts and against Bush's plan to drill for oil in Alaska. The same senator has also co-authored with Kerry a new scheme to raise automobile fuel efficiency standards. The only problem is that John McCain is an anti-abortion free trader who has endlessly condemned tax and spend Democrats. But McCain also hates Bush. When McCain was Bush's rival for the Republican nomination four years ago, Bush deployed the blackest arts of negative campaigning to depict McCain as the "Manchurian candidate," brainwashed during his North Vietnamese captivity. Kerry and McCain are chums as well as fellow Vietnam war heroes. McCain refused to campaign against Kerry in the latter's 1996 Senate re-election battle against William Weld. And when Bush's attack dogs were ravaging McCain during the 2000 primaries, it was Kerry who organised a Senate letter of support attacking Bush's campaign. And visitors to Kerry's Senate offices in Boston and Washington are struck by a framed photo of the two senators strolling arm in arm through the Senate corridors. McCain is playing cute, saying first that he would never run on a Democratic ticket, and then that he would have to at least consider any V-P offer. But in McCain's Arizona, the word is that he'd really like to run the Pentagon in a Kerry administration.
Kerry's chief of staff
If Kerry does win, he'll face a tricky choice for White House chief of staff between his two key consiglieri. The first is Kerry's current Senate chief of staff and his key aide on the banking committee, David McKean (who is also Kerry's fifth cousin through the patrician Winthrops). McKean, better known as the biographer of two of Washington's most famous fixers, is the chap who greeted Kerry after one lugubrious performance on Meet The Press with the single word "smile." The other is Kerry's neighbour in the plush Idaho ski resort of Sun Valley, Jim Johnson, now a banker with Perseus LLC, but formerly chief of staff to Walter Mondale. Johnson, now charged with running the search for Kerry's V-P, has a dreadful record in picking winners. Before joining the doomed Mondale, Johnson worked for Gene McCarthy in 1968, for Ed Muskie and George McGovern in 1972, until striking lucky with Carter in 1976.
A safe house?
Now that the secret service has given its full-scale protection to the Democratic presidential candidate, they are looking for a property in Louisburg Square in Boston's posh Beacon Hill that has a clear line of sight to the Kerry-Heinz residence. One apartment on the plush square is for sale at $1.6m but has bad sightlines. Local estate agents say that house prices in the neighbourhood "start at $6m" and suitable dwellings only come on the market every other year or so. For now the agents will just have to make do camping out with chemical toilets in their black vehicles.
The right will dominate congress
Even if Kerry pulls it off in November, he won't be in power. The Republicans are certain to control both houses of congress - and the supreme court. The Republicans currently hold the Senate by 51-49, but the Democrats look vulnerable in five seats where popular incumbents are retiring. Bob Graham in Florida, Zell Miller in Georgia, John Breaux in Louisiana, John Edwards in North Carolina and Fritz Hollings in South Carolina are all leaving, and these are states that Bush carried last time. The Republicans are also mounting a big effort to unseat Tom Daschle in South Dakota. The Democrats think they can win back Colorado from the Republicans, and are hoping that the Alaskan opinion polls are right in suggesting that their popular state governor Tony Knowles can win the local seat from Lisa Murkowski. The smart money says the Republicans gain at least three Senate seats. In the House of Representatives, where the Republicans rule with a 228-207 margin, only 36 of the 435 seats look at all competitive. The Democrats look vulnerable in seven of them, the Republicans only in four. And the Republicans' ruthless gerrymandering of boundaries in Texas looks likely to increase their total by six seats.
A Zionist plot
You may think you know why Bush and Blair went to war over Iraq, but Phil Zelikow, a member of the Bush administration's transition team, has a better informed view. Zelikow, now director of the 9/11 commission investigating the terrorist attacks on the US, was a member of the president's foreign intelligence advisory board when he gave a little-noticed speech at the University of Virginia on 10th September 2002. "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?" Zelikow asked. His answer: "I'll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990 - it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat... And the US government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."
