Mark Schmitt

The Reform Group That Came In From the Cold

At last, one campaign finance reform organization has stepped up to its obligation to the public interest, with regard to Senator McCain's machinations. And it's a big one: Common Cause, under the welcome new leadership of Bob Edgar, formerly head of the National Council of Churches, and earlier a member of Congress from Pennsylvania, one of the best of the legendary class of 1974.

Common Cause sent letter to McCain that gets it exactly right:

[W]e are concerned that your recent actions in regard to public funding in the presidential primaries may undermine respect for the federal campaign finance laws, especially the presidential public financing system. Having opted into the system last summer – and having signed a binding certification agreement with the FEC – it is clear to us that you need an FEC vote to allow you to withdraw.

You can read the full letter here (pdf) and the press release here. Common Cause says it "is not prejudging the legal ins and outs of whether your campaign can still withdraw from the system after using the prospect of public matching funds as an active ingredient in a private $4 million loan agreement and to secure free ballot access in several states," which is appropriate -- it's all totally unprecedented, which is why the FEC has to decide. The letter goes on to strongly encourage McCain to support reform of the public financing system, and to support for full public financing for congressional elections and encourages him to return to it, and it asks him to do all he can to break the impassed on nominations to the Federal Election Commission, which are currently held up by Mitch McConnell's insistence on packaging four nominations together, including that of Hans von Spakovsky. My favorite thing about the letter is its straightforward declaration that "As a presidential candidate, you have set aside the reform mantle," and the absence of the fulsome, obsessive, you-still-love-us-don't-you praise of previous reform-group letters to McCain.

The phrase "your actions...may undermine respect for...the presidential public financing system" is particularly important. Right now, a number of candidates who honestly and earnestly opted to participate in the public financing system, such as Chris Dodd, Mike Huckabee, and Dennis Kucinich are still waiting for their checks. The reason they haven't received the funds yet is that the system doesn't have enough money. It doesn't have enough money because taxpayers don't have enough confidence in the system to check of the $3 box. And given McCain's manipulation of the system, why should they? So McCain's manipulation is not a victimless crime. The victims are those candidates in both parties who tried to use the public financing system as it was intended.

A few years ago, McCain and his allies made life very difficult for Common Cause, for not following their line on 527 committees and other regulations. So this letter cannot have been an easy.

I've often been critical of some of the campaign reform groups. But as the only group with a real sizable membership, with a history as "The People's Lobby" that goes back to its opposition to the Vietnam War, Common Cause is different. We need it to be strong, and unafraid. I've long been a supporter of Common Cause, today, I became a member.

Superdelegates and the "Responsible Parties" Tradition

Who would imagine that there was more to say on the subject of the Democratic Party's superdelegates? Yet two posts this week on The Democratic Strategist and on PolitickerNJ add some important context to the historical role of superdelegates, and make clear that their role amounts to a lot more than avoiding an unelectable candidate. On the New Jersey site, former Senator Robert Toricelli recalled the Hunt Commission, which devised the superdelegates, drawing on his role in his youth as Walter Mondale's representative to the commission:

The most important [goal] was to get Members of Congress back in the process. First, unless Congressional leaders participated in the process, they would feel no accountability to the platform and no responsibility for the nominee. To choose a candidate without Members of Congress and Governors participating was bad politics and bad government.

Ed Kilgore puts it similarly:

As I recall from the original discussions surrounding superdelegates, there was another, much simpler rationale: ensuring that major Democratic elected officials would get to attend the convention as delegates. One of the byproducts of the earlier reforms in the nominating process had been to significantly limit elected official participation, except for those who happened to run for delegate positions on successful candidate tickets. And this in turn reinforced a fear that the Democratic Party was increasingly becoming bifurcated into a national party dominated by constituency groups and issue advocates, and state and local parties (and their elected officials) who represented voters, and arguably, the Democratic rank-and-file.

The language of "accountability" and "responsibility" is an echo of the language of "responsible parties" -- a political tradition Matt Yglesias and I have been trying to revive. The idea that there were two Democratic Parties -- a congressional party which was somewhat more conservative and Southern, and a presidential party which was more liberal but also somewhat dominated by constituency groups was inherent in James McGregor Burns  theory of four parties, although it took a different form by the 1980s. Even then, though, there were a lot of Democratic members of Congress who didn't have much interest in their presidential candidate, and didn't care much whether the president was a Democrat or not. Democratic House members in particular assumed that they would control the institution forever, while presidents would come and go. The contempt with which Bill Clinton was treated in 1992-93 was related to that attitude.

After the successive shocks of 1994, the complete alignment of the Southern white conservatives into the Republican Party, impeachment, the 2000 election and the Bush years it's pretty hard to recreate that mindset. Now every member of Congress is deeply invested in both who the next candidate is and who the president would be. That would probably be the case even without superdelegates, but bringing together a single, ideologically coherent, responsible party is still a worthy goal. With the elected officials who are superdelegates now split evenly between Obama and Clinton, it seems that there are now two congressional parties, defined not by ideology but by attitude: On one side, older liberals like Ted Kennedy joined with those elected more recently who have the combativeness necessary in the Bush years; on the other side, a middle-generation elected and brought up under the assumptions of the '80s and '90, very roughly speaking.  But the gap they have to bridge is far smaller than between, say, Southern committee chairs in 1972 and candidate McGovern.

Toricelli (excuse his sleaziness for a minute) and Kilgore remind me why I don't think there's anything illegitimate about superdelegates (although the DNC members are a little more dubious), and why they should be free to vote as they please. It is part of the reconstruction of the kind of political party that can take concerted action. The next Democratic president will be able to govern with far greater support from congressional Democrats than Clinton or Carter ever had, and for anything that plays even a small role in making that happen, we should be grateful.

Person Matt Yglesias

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Public Justice for McCain, Thanks to Bloggers

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake, along with Joe Sudbay of Americablog and the Rev. Lennox Yearwood have done a great service by putting together a well-argued complaint to the Federal Election Commission over John McCain's violation of the campaign finance law. While the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint earlier raising all the complex issues posed by McCain's loan and his promise to use public financing to pay off the loan while also avoiding the limits imposed by the public financing system, the Hamsher/bloggers' complaint is much simpler: It uses McCain's recent campaign filing to establish the simple fact that he is now over the spending limit for the primaries and therefore in violation. Since his last official action at the FEC was to apply for and receive certification for public funding, he is still in the system, a view reinforced by FEC Chair David Mason's letter to that effect to McCain.

Even at the best of times, FEC complaints take months to resolve, and a great many complaints that end in even the Commission's strongest resolution -- that there is "probable cause to believe" that a violation occurred -- go into a "conciliation" process that often end in little or no penalty. At the moment, of course, there isn't even an FEC to hear the complaint.

So the best thing we can do is ask for a public judgment on McCain's scam, which as Jane puts it, amounts to regulation "for thee but not for me." So far, almost 35,000 people have signed the complaint. I certainly have. You can join them here.

[cross-posted from TAPPED]

Opening the Box.

The news yesterday and today about a number of Democratic superdelegates moving toward Barack Obama or, even if ardent Clinton supporters like Joe Andrews of Indiana, admitting they would hesitate to be responsible for the superdelegates overruling the pledged delegates, reaffirms a point I've been making for weeks: All this talk about what the superdelegates "ought" to do is a distraction, part of the "fog of nonsense," to use Josh Marshall's phrase, that is keeping the illusion of a Clinton candidacy alive. The relevant question was always what they will do, and there was never a reason to think that they had any pressing desire to overturn the will of the pledged delegates.

As to the "ought" question, even though the historical record shows that superdelegates were created as a way to prevent nominees who would be abjectly unelectable (not that either George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, or Walter Mondale was thought to be unelectable at the moment of the convention), they were given free will and what they ought to do is, whatever they want. If a superdelegate decides to follow the national pledged delegates, the national popular vote, the popular vote in his or her district, some assessment about electability, or his or her own deep preference about who would make a better president, all those are legitimate reasons. And chances are that various superdelegates will make their choices on any and all of those reasons. As a result, the movement of the superdelegates as a bloc in the direction of Clinton was always unlikely; the qualms expressed by even strong Clinton supporters like Andrews make it impossible.

The Clinton campaign now kind of reminds me of the physics metaphor of Schroedinger's Cat. If you recall, this is a thought-experiment that is supposed to help explain transitional sub-atomic states: imagine a cat in a closed box with a vial of poisonous gas and a geiger counter. If an atomic particle decays, the gas is released and the cat dies; if not, the cat lives. Until you open the box, you have a cat that is maybe dead/maybe not.

I have to admit, I've never really understood this metaphor. It seems like it might be simpler to just explain the physics. There's a box with a cat in it and the cat is either dead or alive. So what? It's not both dead and alive. And that seems to be the state of the Clinton campaign now. As long as they can keep spinning -- e.g. Bill Clinton's new line that it's the delegates elected in primaries that count, not caucuses -- they can keep the box closed. The campaign is both dead and alive. But eventually someone will open the box. I suspect it will happen sooner than we think.

[cross-posted at TAPPED]

The Communitarian

(Cross-posted from TAPPED.)

My first reaction to reading the text of Obama's speech on race and Rev. Wright was that it was too long and defensive. And echoing in my ears was still the insistence of a colleague on the subway this morning that "white people don't want to hear a long lecture about the complexities of race. They want to feel good about themselves." (In other words, they want to "purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.")

But it was a very good speech, in part because it was delivered in such a relatively flat and straightforward way, and because just when you thought he would dodge a point (even having read the text), he stepped up and dealt with it. I've really appreciated that each Obama speech has become slightly more mundane, workmanlike, and thus presidential, because you can't build a long campaign and a presidency on incandescent moments.

Like Ed Kilgore, I'm continually fascinated not by the content of Obama's religious experience but by how he got there. Most politicians talk about religion from the perspective of having been raised in families that are somewhat more observant than they are as adults, so they are elevating religion from their childhood and their parents or grandparents. Others, like George W. Bush, found in religion a private salvation. Obama's experience is unlike either one, and frankly unlike anyone's I know: His work as an organizer led him to the church, the church was the heart of the community in which he was working, he became religious because of his commitment to social change. It was neither personal, nor familial, but part of his forming an identity, but not just as an individual, as a member of a community. And thus, race, his public life, and religion are intertwined in a way that they are not for most people, even people whose social values and work originates in their faith.

Kilgore comments that this "won't make a lot of sense to those Americans who view church membership as an expression of consumer choice, and ultimately, of the spiritual discrimination and good taste of the religious consumer." Indeed, this was the viewpoint of my colleague this morning -- if you don't agree with what you hear in a church, go to another church. But Obama's analogy to family answered that about as well as could be answered -- the church wasn't serving just a personal function for him, it was situating him in a community in which he had chosen to live and work -- and work on behalf of.

I'm mystified when people talk about Obama as if he were pure ego, as if he believes that the "Barack Obama brand" itself delivers change. He is in fact the most deeply communitarian politician (in the sense of Michael Sandel or Charles Taylor's point that our identities cannot exist outside of our of social interactions and networks) I have ever seen. His identity -- as African-American, as Christian -- is chosen and it is chosen because it situated him within a community.

For Sandel and others, "communitarianism" was a critique within liberalism to the overly "atomistic" and legalistic view of identity of rights-oriented liberalism and particularly John Rawls. There was an attempt in the 1990s to build a kind of political movement around the idea, and Bill Clinton adopted some of the language, but it didn't really go very far, partly because, as Paul Starr writes in Freedom's Power, "it has at best been a supplement or corrective to tendencies within liberalism." But in Obama that supplement or corrective can be quite substantive, as I thought was shown in Alec McGillis's comparison of Obama and Edwards in their approaches to poverty -- for Edwards poverty is about not having enough money, and the solutions are economic, including helping people move to where jobs are, where Obama was attracted to comprehensive efforts to rebuild community, including the non-economic aspects of life.

In today's speech, community played a role of lifting the question out of the stale argument about identity politics, and remind us that it's about much more than who's black, who's a woman, who said something that might be considered racist, who has an advantage because of their identity. One's identity is indeed the sum of your experiences and social interactions and where you situate yourself in a community. I thought Obama basically did that for everyone in his speech: himself, Rev. Wright, his own white grandmother, and even Geraldine Ferraro.

I guess I liked the speech a lot more than I thought I was going to on first read.

-- Mark Schmitt

Why Clinton Doesn't Want a Revote.

(Cross-posted from TAPPED.)

There aren't many windows into a strongly pro-Clinton/anti-Obama view in the blogosphere, making TalkLeft invaluable, where "Big Tent Democrat" (the former Armando of DailyKos) has been focused like a laser on the issue of how to deal with the Michigan and Florida Democratic delegations. The claim made there, and on some of the other pro-Clinton blogs like Taylor Marsh, has been that it is Obama who is blocking re-votes in Michigan and Florida, raising legalisms or obstructing agreement, but that the Clinton campaign should be more aggressive in pushing for revotes. Big Tent Democrat puts it in the context of the argument about the popular vote:

[T]he problem with the Clinton campaign's refusal to fight for revotes in Florida and Michigan [is that] to be perceived as the popular vote winner, Clinton needs revote wins in Florida and Michigan. I do not understand the Clinton campaign strategy at all on Florida and Michigan.

But it's actually easy to understand. What would happen if an agreement were announced today that there would be re-votes in Florida and Michigan? Immediately, the previous primaries in those states would become dead letters. Instead of being 200,000 votes down in the popular vote (by her campaign's count), or 500,000 down (by my count, which gives Clinton her Florida votes), Clinton would be down in the popular vote by almost 1 million. And 193 delegates that they are currently counting would suddenly disappear.

And at that point, the magnitude of Clinton's deficit would be too obvious to spin away. Yes, there would be two additional large-state contests in which to win back the million popular votes and hundreds of delegates. But unless she did significantly better in both states than she did in the illegal primaries, she would lose, not gain, ground, by her own calculations. Since she was on the ballot alone in Michigan before, it's highly unlikely that she will do better there. It's very possible that she could do better than the 50 percent she won in Florida in January, but since it would now be a two-person race, it's a dead certainty that Obama would do significantly better than the 32 percent he got in January, thus adding to his total popular vote margin and delegate count even if he lost again, and so it would be a net loss for Clinton. Re-votes cannot help Clinton be "perceived" as the winner of the popular vote.

Contrary to the gullible media's belief that "time" is a "powerful ally" on Clinton's side, in fact, Clinton's only ally is uncertainty. The minute it becomes clear what will happen with Michigan and Florida -- re-vote them, refuse to seat them, or split them 50-50 or with half-votes, as some have proposed -- is the minute that Clinton's last "path to the nomination" closes. The only way to keep spin alive is to keep uncertainty alive -- maybe there will be a revote, maybe they'll seat the illegal Michigan/Florida delegations, maybe, maybe, maybe. In the fog of uncertainty, Penn can claim that there is a path to the nomination, but under any possible actual resolution of the uncertainty, there is not.

So far, Obama is playing this situation well -- agreeing to abide by any rules the party establishes, but not pushing to embrace any particular solution other than the existing rules. But soon it will make more sense to call the question: Move toward some certain resolution of Michigan and Florida. I think my seat Florida/re-vote Michigan scheme makes sense and now seems a likely outcome, but the specific resolution doesn't matter, because whatever it is, it will introduce certainty and finiteness, and without the comfort of ambiguity, the Clinton spin-campaign cannot survive. The Clinton campaign began -- unwisely -- by spinning inevitability; it ends, equally unwisely, by spinning cosmic uncertainty. In between the two spin campaigns, they apparently forgot to give people enough of a positive reason to actually vote for Senator Clinton.

UPDATE: Commenter weboy [at TAPPED] complained that I should have sought out more pro-Clinton blogs, and recommends a few, so I will link to Tom Watson's recent post, "The Few, the Proud, the Pro-Clinton Bloggers," and to riverdaughter, as well as his own.

Nothing to See Here

Sorry, haven’t been posting here much. But not for lack of writing. You might be interested in:

* A post today on TAPPED, revisiting an argument I made a year ago that the Republican takeover in 1994 is not the model for this year’s elections.

* Two articles that just came out in the Washington Monthly, which had the brilliant idea of printing alternate covers, front and back, one assuming Republicans win next Tuesday, the other Dems win, with mostly the same writers on both sides.

Here’s my pre-election post-election speculation on a Democratic victory.

And here’s what I think follows from a Republican victory.

And finally, a contribution from last week to a fascinating discussion of Jacob Hacker’s new book, The Great Risk Shift.

Enjoy!

Of Coups, Their Plotters, and the Next Era of Politics

At moments like these, as I watch the civil war among the Republican congressional leadership, I’m glad that a long time ago I worked my way through all three volumes of John Julius Norwich’s history of the Byzantine Empire. When was the last bloodless, orderly transition in the Republican leadership? Like the Byzantines (and apparently, according to an e-mailer, like the Klingons, but that’s never been my thing) it’s been all coups, beheadings, indictments and instant resignations, as far as I can tell, going back at least to Newt Gingrich’s victory in the race for Republican whip in 1989. There was the failed coup of 1997, which resulted in at least one coup-plotter, Bill Paxon of New York, being exiled (opening the seat now held by the equally ambitious Tom Reynolds.) There was the successful defenestration of Gingrich in 1998, followed within days by the elimination of his successor, Bob Livingston, by Tom DeLay, who replaced him with the more malleable Denny Hastert. While Hastert recently became the longest-serving Republican Speaker in history, he was also by all accounts the most impotent. When DeLay’s inevitable fall came, it was followed by the unlikely victory of John Boehner -- a throwback to the original Gingrichites -- over a DeLay protege, and an actual ideologue, both of whom remain ready to pounce. Without DeLay, Hastert could not lead on his own, and in the months since DeLay’s resignation, the House has been basically paralyzed (thankfully!) except to pass legislation permitting their president to torture people. As my wife points out -- and she gets out more than I do -- when Republican members of Congress go out to campaign over the next month, they inevitably are asked some version of, "So, you Republicans control both houses of Congress? Why couldn’t you pass something on immigration reform?" And they hate not having an answer to that.

So who knows what happened now? Robert Novak wrote this morning that there has always been "distance" between Reynolds and Hastert. As of last week, Reynolds was perhaps scheming to depose Hastert, by pulling victory in the House races from the jaws of defeat and being "heralded as asavior" -- in Novak’s words. Last week for a moment that seemed possible. Today, Reynolds and his (former) aide Kirk Fordham are succeeding all too well in bringing down Hastert, but will destroy themselves as well. Leaving the Republican campaign committee rudderless, and a leadership election in the spring that has no easy answers. If the Republicans lose, will they let Boehner -- their leader during the annus horribilus -- become minority leader? Will they let whip Roy Blunt, rejected in the last showdown and as shamelessly corrupt as DeLay, remain? What other potential leaders -- such as Conference Chair Deborah Pryce of Ohio -- will themselves lose reelection? If they go outside of leadership, usually it’s with a committee leader, as they tried to do with Livingston, who chaired Appropriations. Oh, too bad -- all their major committee leaders are at risk of indictment at any moment: Jerry Lewis, Duncan Hunter -- or already indicted: Ney, or generally disagreeable: Bill Thomas. (Rules Committee chair David Dreier is still available, but they are still homophobes after all.) The Mike Pence wing of so-called fiscal conservatives could take power, which would only further alienate voters who expect government to do something besides cut taxes.

The big question in my my mind is whether the revelations about Foley were merely the spark that ignited the war within leadership, or whether they were actually a tactical move on the part of some faction. There’s no obvious beneficiary -- certainly not Fordham/Reynolds -- so I can’t flesh out this theory, but maybe when we know more it will make sense.

Much more interesting to me about this leadership crisis is not what it heralds for the election, but what it means for the next era of American politics. I’ve generally operated under the assumption that if the Dems win the House, they actually don’t win much besides subpoena power. (Not that there’s anything trivial about subpoena power, except why would an administration that believes in absolute presidential power obey a subpoena?) I’ve assumed that the narrow Democratic House majority would face off against an extraordinarily disciplined and fierce opposition party, working with the Republicans in the Senate whether minority or not, that would continue to frame the agenda and define the fights much as they did in the early Clinton years. In many ways the modern Republicans are a machine constructed for opposition, and far less effective as a governing party that has to make choices based on consequences. I want the Democrats to win, but I’m terrified of it at the same time. I’m worried that to win they will promise things they intend to "do," but they will not have the power to do anything.

But what happens if the Republican structure is not capable of discipline, if it’s riven by infighting and finger-pointing?? That’s going to be a very different story. If the White House can’t count on loyal and effective allies in the House, even in the minority, they are even more stuck than they already are. Tony Snow’s comments yesterday on the scandal attracted a lot of attention for his dismissal of Foley’s abuse as "naughty e-mails." But there was more to the statement than that. He also basically dismissed Congress entirely, saying "there are a lot of scandals up there," and basically treating Congress as if it was already controlled by another party. Members of Congress think Bush is dragging them down; Bush thinks its Congress dragging him down, and he’s got numbers on his side.

If Bush rejects "Congress" altogether, without regard to party, at some point he has to come back and deal. And if the GOP doesn’t get its act together to form the fierce opposition that protects Bush, then I think there’s a real possibility that Bush and the Senate Republicans have to think about a different approach, a kind end-of-life turn to "triangulation," actually working with the congressional Democratic majority to find some common ground and get things done. That’s still a long-shot, but I’m more optimistic not just about the election, but about the possibility that we don’t have to wait until 2009 for this whole Byzantine approach to politics to come to an end.

It's All the Liberals' Fault, or Maybe George Soros's

So far there are two versions of right-wing spin to make the Mark Foley scandal and the cover-up go away. First there’s the complex postmodern pseudo-politically correct spin from the Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich and the Family Research Council: "Senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert’s head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices...Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts’ decision to ban gay scoutmasters?"

As the FRC said, Hastert and his colleagues "probably did not want to appear homophobic" by taking on Foley. A friend commented last night that, "We know the avoidance of homophobia is the guiding principal for the house leadership."

One of the stories that the right likes to tell about itself is that they believe in moral absolutes, that there is such a thing as good and bad, while liberals are all relativists, we have no "foundation" for our views of what’s good and bad. This comes in lots of versions, from the bumper sticker to the erudite, Alisdair MacIntyre-wanna-be’s like Princeton professor Robert P. George, but that one sentence sums up the argument.

But when it comes to Foley, this is a case where it is us liberals who have the absolute moral value: Don’t mess with kids sexually. Adults must not mess with kids, people in positions of authority should not mess with kids. It’s not about the legal line or the age of consent in Florida or DC. It’s morality: Fifty-two year olds must not mess with 16 year olds. Remember that rule and all this complexity falls away. Don’t tolerate people who mess with kids, gay or straight. Not complicated. As Robert George would say, it’s "foundational." If you know that basic rule, and don’t hesitate to take action if people break it, or raise alarms if you suspect them of breaking it (as in, asking for a picture) then guess what?: Life gets a little simpler. Gays can be Scoutmasters because, like any other Scoutmaster, they know that you don’t mess with the kids. Straight men can be high school teachers of girls because they maintain that boundary, they treat it as a moral absolute. And so on.

So what do you call the belief that gay people somehow by their nature cannot respect that rule, that they in fact can’t appreciate moral absolutes? Yep, that’s it.

While that spin on the cover-up is disturbing, the other spin is actually funny. It’s all George Soros’s fault. This is the story behind the "dirty trick" theory being peddled by Katherine Harris, Gingrich again, Hugh Hewitt, and apparently now being peddled on Fox News. Whenever the right runs into trouble, it seems their first move is to play a game of "Six Degrees of George Soros": What’s the fewest number of moves we can make to blame this on George. You can imagine them testing out various theories: How about this one: Soros’s operatives in Eastern Europe starting in the 1980s bred a super-race of sexually irresistible young men, taught them perfect English, had them placed as congressional pages and programmed them to tempt Mark Foley. Hmm, nice try, but a little more Blofeld than Soros.

No, the new line, from Gingrich to Katherine Harris, and the weirder corners of the right-blogosphere, is that it’s all George Soros’s fault because a "Soros-funded organization" had the e-mails and waited until just this critical moment in the election cycle to release them. Meanwhile, kids were put at risk. Someone named Clarice Feldman who writes at The American Thinker (modesty in blog naming has never been the right’s strong suit) seems to have figured this one out. Drat. If it weren’t for Clarice, Scooby and the rest of those meddlesome kids, George would have gotten away with it, too! Unfortunately there’s one loose end to the theory -- the organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which does get a small grant from Soros’s foundation, although the right referred to CREW as "Soros-funded" even when it wasn’t), immediately turned the e-mails over to the FBI, and released them only after ABC News made the story public.

So get back to the drawing board guys: Connect Mark Foley to George Soros in six moves or less!

Dude Look Like an Echo

I’m obsessed, but don’t really know what to say, about the torture bill passing the Senate. But then I come across this, and fortunately for my sanity, I know exactly what to say. This is the third paragraph, the third paragraph of the New York Times’ front-page story about the self-destructing candidacy of Westchester County attorney Jeanine Pirro for attorney general of the state:

But to many people who have been watching the couple for decades, the Pirros look a lot like an echo of that other Westchester power couple, the Clintons, who are also political and financial partners whose fates and fortunes are profoundly intertwined. The Pirros live in Rye, the Clintons in Chappaqua.

"Look a lot like an echo of" is one of the great weasel phrases of modern journalism, even apart from the simple fact that echoes don’t "look" like anything. Here are the "echoes" between the Pirros and the Clintons:

* Apparently they live in towns that are a mere sixteen miles apart.

What are the odds of that? My family lives about two miles from Karl Rove. Echo? You be the judge. We used to live about a mile from Jennifer Connelly. I like that echo better.

* Hillary Clinton is an attorney. Jeanine Pirro? Also an attorney. What are the odds? Not to mention, both are attractive and dress well.

Why don’t we just stop here? The echoes are blinding me.

* Apparently, Mr. Pirro had some extra-curricular dalliances. Well, more than a few, since at least one resulted in the birth of a child, and another one resulted in his wife hiring Bernie Kerik to bug their yacht, pleading, "“What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f--k her every night?" Mr. Clinton apparently has also been unfaithful to his wife.

Such activity is highly unusual, of course, and to find it in two families living a mere sixteen miles apart, both of them lawyers, is quite obviously something that "looks a lot like an echo." . Or maybe it sounds a lot like a shadow.

* Mr. Clinton has a secretary named Pirro, and Mr. Pirro has a secretary named Clinton.

Holy cow! Oh, never mind, I was thinking of Lincoln and JFK.

Sadly for the perfection of the analogy, there are some very minor notes that don’t quite fit with "look like an echo." For example:

* According to the Times, "Two decades ago [Ms. Pirro] dropped her bid for lieutenant governor in the face of questions about her husband’s ties to a company in the garbage-hauling business, an activity that was often linked to the mob."

Bill Clinton was an extremely successful two-term president of the United States, and presided over a period of near-full-employment and peace in the world. Mr. Pirro was in the mob-run garbage-hauling business.Maybe if we just say that each was near the top of his chosen profession, then "looks like an echo" would still work.

* "In terms of bad publicity, probably nothing compared to Mr. Pirro’s tax evasion case. In 1998, the Pirros paid close to $1 million in back taxes, but Mr. Pirro was indicted the following year, basically for billing personal expenses to his businesses and taking tax deductions on them.

Among the purchases were a portrait of the Pirro children commissioned by Ms. Pirro, the set for her cable television show when she was a judge, furniture for their vacation home in West Palm Beach, Fla., and drivers and maids (in uniforms) to tend to the children, the wine cellar and the family’s pet pot-bellied pigs.

In June 2000, a jury convicted Mr. Pirro on 34 counts of conspiracy, tax evasion and filing false returns. His brother, Anthony, an accountant, was also convicted. Albert Pirro served 11 months in federal prison."

Okay, well, Bill Clinton never did anything like that. Never even came close. His half-brother Roger got into some trouble, though, just like Pirro’s brother. That sure "looks like an echo."

When I read something like that third paragraph, and consider the fact that it can wind up on the front page of the most thoroughly edited paper in this country, I can’t help but think of Michael Kinsley and David Broder and all the others who this week seem to be losing it about "foul-mouthed bloggers" and people getting their news from "some acned 12-year-old in his parents’ basement recycling rumors from the Internet echo chamber" or from "myleftarmpit.com." I wonder not so much what blogs are they reading, but what newspapers?

The byline on this story, by the way, is Leslie Eaton and Mike McIntire.