I'm taking bets now on the Democratic ticket

I'll pick "Hillary in 2008" for the Democratic nomination. Just to warm things up, I'll bet somebody a whole dollar that Clinton rolls.

10 to 1 : I get the Clinton/Obama ticket to win it all and you get the field. I'll put down ten and you put down a hundred. Anyone want to take my ten bucks?

Who do I want to win? Al Gore. I don't think he's going to run. I hope he grabs an Oscar though.

Clinton Reminds New Hampshire, I’m With Bill

New York Times
February 13, 2007
Political Memo

By PATRICK HEALY
As she made her first outing to New Hampshire as a presidential candidate last weekend, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton left her husband at home, yet she tried to tap his old political magic at nearly every turn.

Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, mentioned Mr. Clinton at least eight times on Saturday — at one point talking about “Bill’s heart surgery” to illuminate her own travails with health care bureaucracy — and a few times on Sunday, most memorably when she said of Republicans, “Bill and I have beaten them before, and we will again.”

For the first time in her bid for the White House, Mrs. Clinton directly laid claim to the legacy and popularity of former President Bill Clinton — and did so in a crucial primary state where her husband showed his resiliency in 1992, when he finished second despite weeks of troubles.

“It helps her because we know Bill Clinton and we love Bill Clinton. We know him and his foibles. We know he loves his Dunkin’ Donuts; we know his love for burgers,” said State Representative Patricia M. McMahon, a longtime ally of both Clintons. “It shows that she’s human, too, and appreciates her husband and likes him as much as we do.”

This latest chapter in the Clinton political relationship is still a work in progress. Twice as a candidate for the Senate, and during her six-year term, Mrs. Clinton has kept a measure of professional distance from her husband, partly to keep the spotlight on “the politician in the family,” as he has called her. Where the two have appeared together — for example, at the funeral of Coretta Scott King last year — his skills as a speaker have overshadowed hers.

Now that Mrs. Clinton is a presidential candidate, however, her advisers say it would be folly to minimize Mr. Clinton’s role in her life: as a potential first gentleman, as her “full-time political counselor” (as she called him on Saturday) and as a source of emotional support.

Mr. Clinton is an asset in particular with his fan base, which was obvious as Mrs. Clinton drew smiles and laughter by recalling their White House days, “what Bill did” with the government in the 1990s (which she said she would try to replicate) and his famous tardiness, which, she noted with humor, she has endured with everyone else.

“The way she talked about him gave me a better feeling for her warmth,” said Karen Ryan of Concord, who attended a question-and-answer forum with the senator there on Saturday. “And the Clinton administration is a much better memory than the one we have now.”

Yet Mr. Clinton is also a potential liability because of the questions he provokes, as both a polarizing former president who could return to the White House and as a husband whose behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair lingers in the some minds.

“It’s nice that she stayed with him, but as strong as she is, I think she should’ve dumped him after Monica,” said Karla Frasse, a dental assistant in Concord. “I want to see her in her own right and not really be reminded of the two of them together.”

Mr. Clinton stepped in for Mrs. Clinton on Sunday for the first time since she announced her candidacy, speaking at a breakfast of Westchester County Democrats in New York. It was not an official campaign event, though he did say that her huge re-election victory in November helped catapult her to New Hampshire. It was a reminder that Mr. Clinton will be a chief surrogate at fund-raisers and political events through November 2008, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said.

There are no plans for Mr. Clinton to campaign on his own or to appear with his wife at events right now, though they will eventually campaign together, said Howard Wolfson, a senior campaign adviser.

Mr. Wolfson said that Mrs. Clinton’s references to her husband were not scripted, and that he did not know whether the couple had cooked up a Dunkin’ Donuts joke — in which she said, a few times, that Mr. Clinton had gained 20 pounds from his pit stops there, and that she would need voters’ help to keep off the pounds.

“I think it’s hard for her to think about New Hampshire without thinking about him,” Mr. Wolfson said.

Mr. Clinton finished second in the New Hampshire primary in February 1992 despite a winter of controversy over his draft record and other problems, and he declared himself “the comeback kid.”

Today he is exceptionally popular among Democrats in the state; in interviews this past weekend, several New Hampshire Democrats recalled their first conversations with him in 1992 as if they had just happened.

Mrs. Clinton’s informal references to “Bill” turned off a few Democrats, who said they found it distracting or informal. Yet political analysts said her casual references showed a certain assuredness, since many politicians, particularly women, are careful about saying or doing anything to suggest they are under the sway of their spouses.

“I think the way she was teasing about him, and not shying away from their years together, projected a nice confidence,” said Dante Scala, an associate professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. “It helps engender early good will that can help build a candidacy.”

War supporters disdain a withdrawal, but what about winning?

At this point, it's kamikaze strategy in Iraq
Jonathan Chait
L A Times

February 11, 2007

THERE IS something genuinely bizarre about those remaining supporters of President Bush's strategy in Iraq. It is not just that they are wrong — being wrong happens to all of us from time to time. It's that they are completely detached from reality.

Their arguments have nothing to do with what is actually happening in Iraq. They aren't claiming that Bush's critics have a wrong impression of what's happening in Iraq. They just seem to have no interest in the subject themselves. Their arguments take place almost entirely at the level of abstraction.

If you follow the news in Iraq, the story has become depressingly familiar. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is a creature of hard-line Shiite sectarians, and his government has been deeply infiltrated by Shiite militias. Everything he has done in his job has been toward the end of giving the Shiites an upper hand over the Sunnis.

Shiite militias have infiltrated the Iraqi army. We're equipping and training the bad guys. The Shiite militia members who haven't joined the army lay low when our troops patrol Baghdad, so that we fight the Sunnis and leave them standing. As Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers reported a week and a half ago, "The U.S. military drive to train and equip Iraq's security forces has unwittingly strengthened anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army militia."

That's why Maliki supports the surge. To the extent it succeeds, the surge will do a faster and better job of driving Sunnis out of Baghdad. But why should we want to help him do that?

The critiques of Bush's strategy all flow from this interpretation of events. The administration's critics say that our current role has the unintended but unavoidable effect of furthering sectarian warfare. If we stop cooperating with one party to a civil war, we can't make things much worse. We might possibly make them better: If we're no longer doing the Shiites' fighting for them, perhaps they'll have to bargain with the Sunnis.

What do the administration's supporters say to this? Let's look at a brief survey. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), one of the most vocal supporters of Bush's strategy, has made two major statements on the war in 2007. In the first, a letter in January, he wrote that "withdrawing from the fight is not a sound, long-term policy for the national security of the United States. Withdrawing from the fight is a recipe for defeat." How did Lieberman envision us winning? What about the reports that our actions are simply fueling the civil war? His letter had nothing to say.

Since then, Lieberman delivered a speech on the war, and that was even worse. The entire point of it was that a Senate vote of no confidence in Bush would demoralize our allies and embolden the enemy. Nothing at all about how the Bush strategy could work.

OK, you say, so maybe Lieberman has nothing of substance. But he's a politician, and they craft their words for sound bites. So surely the intellectuals who support Bush must have something deeper, right?

Sadly, no. The Weekly Standard — Bush's strongest bastion of remaining support — has editorialized about the war for three consecutive issues. The first editorial asserted that "abandoning American efforts to control the violence in Iraq would lead to an increase in violence" but offered no evidence to support this claim. It did not mention Maliki's clear lack of interest in making peace with the Sunnis nor the infiltration of the Iraqi armed forces.

The next editorial, by Executive Editor Fred Barnes, consisted of an extended analogy to Vietnam. The closest Barnes came to a substantive point was pointing out that war opponents had denigrated the Vietnamese government too. Did this mean we're wrong to denigrate the Iraqi government today? Barnes did not say.

And the next editorial consisted entirely of attacking proponents of the anti-surge resolution as cowards. It didn't even bother to make a claim that we're winning, or we could still win, or withdrawing would make things worse.

So, there you have it, the case for supporting Bush: Trust the commander in chief, don't undermine the troops, withdrawal equals defeat. These aren't arguments to support Bush's strategy, they're generic pro-war arguments. Change a few details and these lines could support Napoleon's invasion of Russia or the Crusader occupation of Jerusalem or almost any war. Generic pro-war arguments may be trite, but that's what you turn to when you've given up on reality.

Putin Says U.S. Is Undermining Global Stability

February 11, 2007
New York Times

By THOM SHANKER and MARK LANDLER
MUNICH, Feb. 10 — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia accused the United States on Saturday of provoking a new nuclear arms race by developing ballistic missile defenses, undermining international institutions and making the Middle East more unstable through its clumsy handling of the Iraq war.

In an address to an international security conference, Mr. Putin dropped all diplomatic gloss to recite a long list of complaints about American domination of global affairs, including many of the themes that have strained relations between the Kremlin and the United States during his seven-year administration. Among them were the expansion of NATO into the Baltics and the perception in Russia that the West has supported groups that have toppled other governments in Moscow’s former sphere of influence.

“The process of NATO expansion has nothing to do with modernization of the alliance,” Mr. Putin said. “We have the right to ask, against whom is this expansion directed.”

He said that the United States had turned the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which sends international monitors to elections in the former Soviet sphere, “into a vulgar instrument of insuring the foreign policy interests of one country.”

The comments were the sternest yet from Mr. Putin, who has long bristled over criticism from the United States and its European allies as he and his cadre of former Soviet intelligence officials have consolidated their hold on Russia’s government, energy reserves and arms-manufacturing and trading complexes.

Rubble from the Berlin Wall was “hauled away as souvenirs” to countries that praise openness and personal freedom, he said, but “now there are attempts to impose new dividing lines and rules, maybe virtual, but still dividing our mutual continent.”

The world, Mr. Putin said, is now unipolar: “One single center of power. One single center of force. One single center of decision making. This is the world of one master, one sovereign.”

With the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the American defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, and a Congressional delegation sitting stone-faced, Mr. Putin warned that the power amassed by any nation that assumes this ultimate global role “destroys it from within. It has nothing in common with democracy, of course.”

“Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations — military force,” he said.

“Primarily the United States has overstepped its national borders, and in every area,” said Mr. Putin, who increasingly has tried to re-establish Russia’s once broad Soviet-era influence, using Russia’s natural resources as leverage and defending nations at odds with the United States, including Iran.

American military actions, which he termed “unilateral” and “illegitimate,” also “have not been able to resolve any matters at all,” and have created only more instability and danger. “They bring us to the abyss of one conflict after another,” he said. “Political solutions are becoming impossible.”

The comments irritated some European leaders and prompted sharp criticism from the Americans in attendance. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican widely expected to make a bid for the White House, made a rebuttal that began, “In today’s multipolar world, there is no place for needless confrontation.” He said that the United States won the cold war in partnership with powerful nations of Western Europe, and that “there are power centers on every continent today.”

Mr. McCain then hit back at Mr. Putin more directly. “Will Russia’s autocratic turn become more pronounced, its foreign policy more opposed to the principles of the Western democracies and its energy policy used as a tool of intimidation?” he asked. “Moscow must understand that it cannot enjoy a genuine partnership with the West so long as its actions, at home and abroad, conflict fundamentally with the core values of the Euro-Atlantic democracies.”

Russia has also faced criticism from the United States and other Western countries that believe it has used energy reserves and transport pipelines to reward friendly countries and to punish those seeking to distance themselves from Kremlin control. Some analysts saw the tone of the speech as evidence of how much oil and mineral revenues have strengthened Mr. Putin.

The occasion of the speech was the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy — an event begun deep in the cold war, when Germany was divided and hundreds of thousands of American troops were stationed in Western Europe as a bulwark against Communist Warsaw Pact forces.

Mr. Putin began with an apology for the tough talk to come. But during a lively question and answer period full of challenges and rebukes, the Russian president indicated that he relished provoking the international audience of legislators, government leaders, political analysts and human rights advocates.

“I love it,” Mr. Putin said as he reviewed a long list of questions. He has long enjoyed high and durable public approval ratings at home, in part for standing up to the West and for pursuing an assertive foreign policy with former Soviet states.

He did offer at least two significant and conciliatory statements to the United States.

President Bush “is a decent man, and one can do business with him,” he said. From their meetings and discussions, Mr. Putin said, he has heard the American president say, “I assume Russia and the United States will never be enemies, and I agree.”

And while Mr. Putin denied that Russia had assisted the Iranian military with significant arms transfers, he also criticized the government in Tehran for not cooperating more with the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency or responding to questions about its nuclear program.

Other American lawmakers offered measured criticism after the speech. “He’s done more to bring Europe and the U.S. together than any single event in the last several years,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “It was seen as unnecessary bravado.”

Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, described the speech as “confrontational,” saying, “some of the rhetoric takes us back to the cold war.”

Iran’s top nuclear official, Ali Larijani, listened impassively from the back of the room. Mr. Larijani’s attendance at the conference had become a sideshow in itself. After accepting an invitation to speak on Sunday, he canceled, citing health reasons, after a tense meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna that concluded with a decision to freeze technical cooperation projects.

Mr. Putin joked that he worried the United States was “hiding extra warheads under the pillow” despite its treaties with Moscow to reduce strategic nuclear stockpiles. And he indicated obliquely that the new Russian ballistic missile, known as the Topol-M, was being developed at least in part in response to American efforts to field missile defenses.

He expressed alarm that an effective antimissile shield over the United States would upset a system of mutual fear that kept the nuclear peace throughout the cold war. “That means the balance will be upset, completely upset,” he said.

Addressing tensions between Europe and Russia over energy exports, Mr. Putin noted that 26 percent of Russian oil was extracted by foreign companies. While Russia is open to outside investment, he said, it has found its businessmen blocked from deals abroad.

The Kremlin has been criticized for attempting to impose registration and taxation laws that could restrict the work of foreign nongovernmental organizations with offices in Russia to aid democratization.

But Mr. Putin said his concerns about the work grew from the fact that they “are used as channels for funding, and those funds are provided by governments of other countries.” This flow of foreign money to assist opposition Russian political organizations, he said, is “hidden from our society. What is democratic about this? This is not about democracy. This is about one country influencing another.”

Mrs. Merkel, in her opening speech, struck a far more diplomatic tone than Mr. Putin, though she alluded to the tensions between Europe and Russia over energy shipments and the independence of Kosovo.

Addressing herself to Mr. Putin, who was sitting in the front row, Mrs. Merkel said, “In my talks with you, I have sensed that Russia is going to be a reliable and predictable partner.” But she added, “We need to speak frankly with each other. There’s no point in sweeping things under the carpet.”

Mrs. Merkel sharply criticized Russia’s recent shutdown of oil shipments to Belarus, which followed a dispute over the price of natural gas deliveries. She is pressing Russia to sign a charter with the European Union that governs energy, which Moscow has so far resisted.

Mrs. Merkel also alluded to another potential confrontation between Europe and Russia. The United Nations is weighing a proposal that would put Kosovo on the path to independence from Serbia, which Russia opposes because it fears that such a move could upset its own turbulent relations with ethnic groups in the Caucasus. Russia has crushed one separatist-minded people within its own borders, in Chechnya, but supports breakaway regions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both in Georgia.

“We’re going to come to the stage where we have to decide: does Serbia, does Kosovo want to move in the European direction?” Mrs. Merkel asked. “If that’s the route they choose, both will have to make compromises.”

C. J. Chivers contributed reporting from Moscow.