The Opinionator

July 10, 2007, 3:01 pm
Keeping Their Own Counsel
By Tobin Harshaw
Tags: David Vitter, John McCain, the d.c. madam

“John McCain’s top two advisers – John Weaver and Terry Nelson – quit the campaign today as Mr. McCain struggled to get his once surging campaign back on course,” reports Adam Nagourney at The Times’s Caucus blog. “Their departure came after Mr. McCain announced last week that his campaign had just $2 million in the bank, and was forced to lay off most of its staff.”

And then things got worse: “One Republican directly connected to today’s events said that Mark Salter, McCain’s long-time chief of staff and co-author of his five books, had also left the campaign payroll,” reports Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic Online.

Ana Marie Cox at Swampland is uncharacteristically wistful. “The departure of Salter and Weaver marks the end of one of the most charismatic and legendary political braintrusts this town has seen — especially considering that they never actually won the presidency,” she writes. “Journalists regarded Salter as McCain’s alter-ego and he was the source of some of the Senator’s most memorable lines — both in speeches and in the form of the some half-dozen books that the two wrote together. (Their next one debuts next month. That oughta be a fun book tour…) Salter leaving the campaign — and the Senator’s side — is the most visible sign that the McCain [campaign] is not just desperate but hopelessly astray.”
More gleeful are the sarcastic conservatives at The Llama Butchers.

“Money doesn’t mean you’re going to win, but over the long haul it’s the life-blood of a Presidential campaign,” notes one contributor, Gary. “And Ron Paul has more cash on hand than the former front-runner for the GOP nomination. Yikes! If you can’t pay your people, they see the hand-writing on the wall.”

Rich Lowry at The Corner, however, doesn’t think this is all bad news for the McCain campaign. “It probably means Rick Davis is taking over,” notes Lowry. “He had run the campaign last time, but had no day-to-day responsibility this time and had been pushed upstairs. Then, John Weaver brought Terry Nelson in to run the campaign. As one strategist puts it, ‘They ran it into the ground.’ So this was a fight between Weaver and Davis that Davis won.”

Of course, McCain isn’t the only senator, or presidential candidate, having a tough day. The titillating tattle in Washington today is all about Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, whose phone number turned up in the newly released records of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called D.C. Madam. What does this have to do with the race for the nomination? Leave that to the all-knowing Ambinder:

“Recall that Vitter was among the first Republicans to endorse the presidential candidacy of Rudy Giuliani and has come to serve as one of Giuliani’s chief liaisons to social conservatives. He is also Giuliani’s chief whip in the Senate and serves as the Southern regional chairman of his campaign.”

So, the Republican campaign has become a swamp of sex scandals, nasty divorces and personal betrayals. Anyone think the Democrats are feeling a few pangs of nostalgia?


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July 10, 2007, 9:20 am
A No-Strategy Exit?
By Tobin Harshaw
Tags: worth a click

So, if the United States does pull out of Iraq, what do we think we’ll leave behind? Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch doesn’t think the Bush administration is doing any better a job planning for this eventuality than it did for the postwar insurgency:

In earlier days, Wise Men would have corralled Bush and insisted he appoint a James Baker, say, to supplement Tony Blair’s Palestinian institution-building, the better to rush to the region on a non-stop basis to build a regional consensus for an American withdrawal from Iraq that doesn’t leave a massive power vacuum in its wake. Instead, we’re flailing. Badly. It’s amateur hour, and the fires are only growing worse.

More soon, I hope, on what a sufficiently empowered special envoy of caliber could hope to accomplish, including, per [Senator Chuck] Hagel, a non-American one. But with Bush in power and this approach so unlikely, one is left feeling as if counseling such action is but a waste of time. … The President doesn’t like to listen to critics, alas, and so the folly continues.

Bradford Plumer, a reporter and researcher at The New Republic, is interested in studies showing that scientists think lead abatement in the 1980s might have been a major driver in the great crime decline of the 1990s. “On this theory,” writes Plumer on his personal blog, “children who are exposed to lead paint or gasoline fumes are more likely to become violent teenagers. Rick Nevin, an economist, argues that the reduction in lead pollution in the 1970s and 1980s can account for most of the decline in New York City’s crime rate over the past decade.”

Plumer feels there’s a problem, however:

“The Bush administration loves lead. Loves it. They want it everywhere. Okay, that’s only a slight exaggeration: Back in 2002, the White House tried to stack an advisory committee on lead regulations with industry types. Last December, the administration announced that it would consider doing away with the standards that cut lead from gasoline, at the behest of battery makers and lead smelters. And its EPA has weakened a rule on removing lead paint from older residences.”

When Senators talk about raising their state’s profile, they usually mean they’ll try to bring home prestigious new federal facilities or other pork projects to their voters. Ted Kennedy has more animated plans — involving “The Simpsons” — according to Ryan Kelly at CQPolitics:

“Last week, Kennedy urged everyone on the e-mail list of his leadership political action organization, the Committee for a Democratic Majority, to vote for Springfield, Mass., in a USA Today contest to determine which of the 14 American cities named Springfield should assume the status of real-world equivalent for the Simpson clan’s hometown.”