It was a very smiley version of the Sunday news shows.

Barack Obama appeared on Meet the Press, and John McCain popped up on This Week. And both of them smiled a lot. Perhaps McCain’s aides thought he had been coming through as too cranky and that the best way to counter to such an impression would be to smile frequently. To still further humanize the GOP nominee, the McCain house pets invaded the set mid-interview. What a crazy, unplanned and completely spontaneous accident! Unfortunately, the senator didn’t leverage the incident and failed to show his dogs any love. Opportunity missed.

Obama had his own reasons for smiling. As he has positioned himself ever more frequently as a savior responsible for nothing less than mankind’s redemption, Obama has become an increasingly grim and dour figure. What’s more, after Friday’s explosive People Magazine revelation that he denies his children both birthday and Christmas presents, it was necessary for Obama to show a human side. So he sat across Tom Brokaw for almost the entire hour, frequently grinning and occasionally laughing. He even tried his hand at a lame joke or two, quipping after Brokaw mentioned his recent travel itinerary, “It makes me, makes me tired just listening to you read it.” Ha! Haven’t I been telling you this guy is almost as funny as Dukakis?

How’d they do for substance? Generally speaking it was a big nothing-burger from both candidates. Still, the more engaging Obama had a pretty good go of it, while McCain had a couple of cringe-inducing moments. McCain’s embarrassing fumbles on gay adoption and his insistence that Wall Street is “the villain” in the subprime crisis likely put conservative teeth on edge. His further expressed willingness to have payroll tax increases “on the table” as a potential means of “saving” social security also likely failed to thrill his base. Nevertheless, McCain’s populist streak is nothing new and will probably be an asset in the general election if he uses it.

As for Obama, the only interesting thing of substance that came through during his lengthy appearance with Brokaw was his suffocating self-regard. Did he learn anything new on his trip? Of course not. But when you’re blessed with other-worldly intelligence not to mention super-human judgment, learning new stuff is virtually impossible.

On Fox News Sunday, Claire McCaskill and John Thune gamely recited campaign talking points that had grown moldy weeks ago. Zzzzzzz. Both surrogates acquitted themselves well given the thanklessness of the task. Karl Rove then came on and offered some predictions/analyses about the election. I forget what they were, but seem to recall thinking they were interesting. When the panel convened, our own Bill Kristol went out on a limb and made a truly bold prediction – Barack Obama will name his running mate next Monday at 11:00 a.m. Virginia governor Tim Kaine (who has been Obama’s most impressive surrogate if you ask me) will get the honors.

On Face the Nation…well, I didn’t watch Face the Nation. I have a life, you know. Even though I didn’t watch it, I think we’re safe in assuming that the show continued it’s long running tradition of avoiding anything remotely interesting, thought provoking or newsworthy.

The kids gloves were snugly on the Sunday morning talk shows this morning, as Democratic luminaries Barack Obama and Al Gore popped up on Face the Nation and Meet the Press, respectively.

Obama was “questioned” on the situation in Afghanistan, leading to this exchange:

Sen. OBAMA: Well, mission accomplished would be that we have stabilized Afghanistan, that the Afghan people are experiencing raising--rising standards of living, that we have made sure that we are disabling al-Qaeda and the Taliban so that they can no longer attack Afghanistan, they can no longer engage in attacks against targets in Pakistan and they can't target the United States or its allies.

LOGAN: So losing is not an option.

Sen. OBAMA: Losing is not an option when it comes to al-Qaeda, and it never has been. And that's why the fact that we engaged in a war of choice when we were not yet finished with that task was such a mistake.

You heard it on Face the Nation first: Obama has taken a brave stand against losing. Unless, of course, the nation is Iraq. Then it’s okay.

Al Gore, environmental hero, was on Meet the Press and fawned over by Tom Brokaw. This was the toughest question asked by our fearless host:

Let me ask you about your personal lifestyle, because it's been the subject of a lot of dialogue on the blogs, as you know. You and Tipper have bought a big home outside of Nashville, and you had it retrofitted. But for a time there was a comparison between what the president has in Texas at his home as being more environmentally correct than your home. The Building Green Council gave you its second highest award. But Stephen Smith, who is with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, is troubled by the scale of your home. He said, "We all need to evaluate what we ... need in square footage." Present company included. We all have to look at scale, don't we? Why was it necessary for you to have a 10,000 square foot home? Because that is going to be more energy intensive than a smaller home for just the two of you.

Note: It’s wrong to criticize Gore without pointing out that he’s “retrofitted” his house, won an important green award, and that the controversy exists only in that dirty little world of the blogs. The more enlightened section of the media, however, knows that Gore is doing his best.

Getting back to reality, Fox News Sunday talked to joint chiefs of staff Adm. Michael Mullen, who had this to say about setting timelines. “When I have discussions with commanders on the ground, and I did a couple of weeks ago, they are very very adamant about continuing progress, about making decisions based on what’s actually happening in the battle space, and I just think that’s prudent. That’s served us very well--certainly since the surge, which has been very successful--and I think will continue to serve us well based on the overall conditions I see in Iraq right now.”

For the second time in a month, a lion of the Washington press corps has died. On Saturday, Tony Snow succumbed to the cancer he had battled for the last three years. Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace spent the entire hour eulogizing the founder of the show he now hosts, and we learned many tidbits (did you know that Snow could dunk a basketball? So sayeth Juan Williams). Bill Kristol said what a lot of us thought after hearing the bad news: “I always liked and respected Tony, but in the last three years I really came to admire him because of his incredible serenity and courage in fighting the battle he fought.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger was on This Week, and had some supportive words for John McCain’s foreign policy. “I think that Senator McCain is absolutely correct to be honest with the people, and to look at them in the eye and say ‘I cannot promise you that we will not have some troops in Iraq in many more years from now. It could be a hundred years,’ he said that. But then he says ‘look at what happened with Japan. How many years has the war been over, since 1945, second world war was over, and we still have troops in Japan. Germany, the war has been over since 1945: we still have troops there. We have troops all over the world so it would be a lie to say that there would be no more troops there. He is just saying it the way it is: it’s reality. … I think that we have to win over there, I think it’s very important to stabilize the middle east.”

On Face the Nation, Ed Gillespie said that some of those troops are coming home. “Well, Bob, as you know, this month … the initial return on success brigades, those five brigades that are coming home and have been coming home from Iraq because of the increased security there and the increased ability of the Iraqi government to handle its own security, and that is a process that was put in place and announced-- recommended to the president by General Petraeus, … we're in a period now where General Petraeus and General Odierno and other commanders in the field are evaluating the conditions on the ground as these troops have left, and they've always said that they would come back with further recommendations as to whether or not we can bring home more troops. Understand, it's always been the goal of this administration to bring troops home from Iraq, but to do so based on conditions on the ground and understanding that we do so based on success that allows for a stable Iraqi government to take root.”

Another McCain supporter, meanwhile, was busy cleaning up the mess made by Phil Gramm earlier this week when the former senator called America a nation of whiners. Said Carly Fiorina on Meet the Press: “Well, John McCain, after making the statement that you just played, was asked directly whether Senator Gramm would have a position in his Cabinet, and his response was, "Well, perhaps he'd make a good ambassador to Belarus, but I'm not sure the citizens of Minsk would welcome him." I think John McCain's been real clear that Phil Gramm wasn't speaking for him and, in fact, John McCain has said now for many months that he believes the economy is in a recession. It's clear Americans are hurting. They’re hurting when they fill up their car with gas; they're hurting when they go to the grocery store.”

Barack Obama’s policy adjustments (read: flip flops) were the main topics of discussion on Sunday morning’s talk shows. On This Week, Joe Lieberman said that “what’s significant about what’s happened in the last week, frankly in the last month since Sen. Obama clinched the nomination, is how many big positions--Iraq, Iran, free trade, the death penalty--that Sen. Obama has moved to alter his position on.” Lieberman argued that Obama is moving closer to John McCain on every major position, a sign that McCain’s judgment is clearly superior to his younger colleague’s.

Lindsey Graham drove the point home on Face the Nation with regard to the most important issue of the day: Iraq. “The big test for this country is how do you avoid losing in Iraq? If we were to listen to Barack Obama, we would've lost. If we listen to him now, we will lose in the future and undercut all the gains we've made. We're winning because John McCain understood Iraq better than anybody else. The surge has worked. The political, economic and military progress in Iraq is undeniable. The biggest loser in Iraq is al-Qaeda because the Muslims in Iraq joined with us and turned on them and they've punished al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

Mara Liasson, meanwhile, argued on Fox News Sunday that these moves weren’t necessarily crippling for Obama. “He can weather this [the flip flopping], the left wing base is not going to go vote for McCain--he has a partisan, resurgent party that wants to win. I think the total effect, though, is that he’s not so much a new politician any more; he looks a lot more typical and politics as usual. Now: In a year when the Democrats have the wind to their back, I don’t know if that really hurts him.”

Joseph Lieberman was on Face the Nation, and the one-time Democrat explained just why he is so disillusioned with his former party and their presidential nominee. “My problem is with the party overall, for sure. In other words, this is a separation that has occurred mostly on matters of foreign and defense policy, where I feel very strongly that the party that I joined when President John F. Kennedy was its leader, a party that believed in progressive government at home and a principled, strong internationalist foreign policy, economic policy, pro-trade; that party is not represented by the leaders today. And that's why I decided to endorse Senator McCain. I did it last December, when all the candidates in both parties were there, and I did it for two main reasons. One is that John McCain is ready to be commander in chief on day one. He knows the world, he's been tested, he's ready to protect the security of the American people.”

Flip flopping is becoming a key part of the election cycle. On Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol tried to guess the next evolution in Obama’s beliefs. “The next big flip for Obama, and this will make Brit [Hume] even more astonished, will be on Iraq. He’s going to go to Iraq, meet with General Petraeus, decide the surge is working, and walk back from his immediate, unconditional withdrawal. And all of the sudden it’s going to be very careful, gradual, honorable withdrawal.”

Hugh Hewitt, meanwhile, wondered what impact Obama’s lack of consistency will have on a key group of voters. “The Nation and the Huffington Post readers are very comfortable with Obama; it doesn’t matter what he says, they’re going to turn out in huge numbers. What’s important is that middle. And what John McCain did in Lordstown … John McCain said, as he has always said, I’m a free trader. The way to persevere in the economic renewal of America is with free trade. He doesn’t change, he doesn’t shift.”

Meet the Press featured an interview with California governor and McCain supporter, Arnold Schwarzenegger. McCain, the governator said, “is terrific with the environment. He has been there four years ago and stood by my side when I talked about the environment, when I talked about the--fighting global warming and putting together a good energy policy and starting with the green building initiative or start building the hydrogen highway in California and the million solar roof initiative. He was there and he supported me on every step of the way, so he's the real deal when it comes to the environment.”

First up on This Week was the issue most pressing for the average American: the skyrocketing price of energy. After some idiotic comments from Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey about Republicans' attempts to stymie energy production, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson explained just why gas costs $4 a gallon. “I would say that the Democrats have thwarted every effort we have made to increase our supply. This is a supply and demand issue: demand has skyrocketed, mostly because of global increases, and we have not done anything about supply because we are thwarted on nuclear power, we’re thwarted in using our own natural resources (drilling off shore on a state by state option is something that I think we could do very environmentally safely). And yet anything that says production is killed by the Democrats.”

Obama’s rejection of public campaign finance was the most talked about issue of the week. McCain surrogate Lindsey Graham took issue with Obama’s flip flopping on public financing while on Meet the Press. “Senator McCain supported campaign finance reform at his detriment with Senator Feingold on our side. It did not go over well, but John did it anyway. He took a beating to try to change the campaign finance system. Senator Obama looked in cameras all over the country, literally signed his name, ‘I will accept public financing,’ and now, for whatever reason, he has broken his word. And is it 1.4 million donors that allows you to break your word? This is reinforcing everything that's wrong with politics. This is a game changer in terms of the general election.”

On Face the Nation, Carly Fiorina took on the ridiculous claim by the Obama camp that their candidate is rejecting public financing because he’s a reformer of the system. “It's been well documented just in the last week that there are far more 527s gearing up and already announcing, for example, they're going to spend $53 million to attack John McCain. Moveon.org is the one I reference. The reality is that Barack Obama made this decision because he's raised a lot of money from all kinds of sources and he wants the opportunity to spend all that money. That's fine, that's his right to do so. But I really--I'll go back to my original point. I think it's disingenuous to say that he's doing so in the spirit of reform. No one has invested more in reforming public finance than John McCain.”

On Fox News Sunday, meanwhile, Brit Hume picked up on the silver lining of Obama’s decision: the crippling of public finance. “I say, by and large: good for him. For a couple reasons. One is that Obama really has proved that the limits necessary because of public financing, if you take it, do not merely screen out the evil influences of all the rich people in America, but they also make it impossible for a great many individual donors to make their voices heard through their contributions. Obama really has created a different form of financing, and it shows how unnecessary this whole public financing idea is. If you’re a popular candidate and you make a grassroots effort and you use the technology you can raise all the money you need. And you don’t even have to go to big oil!” Not that there’s anything wrong with big oil.

The overarching theme of this week’s Sunday morning talk shows was the untimely death of Tim Russert. Each program’s host had kind words, and Meet the Press dedicated the entire show to their show’s fallen leader. If you have five minutes or so, check out this video celebration of the man’s life, presided over by Tom Brokaw.

On Face the Nation, Newt Gingrich made the case for Bobby Jindal’s inclusion on the McCain ticket, and made quick work of the charges he is unprepared. “Look, Bobby Jindal, at 37, is fully as prepared to be commander in chief as Senator Obama. I mean, they--you could argue that in fact, Jindal's experience in the executive branch and the legislative branch, is greater than Senator Obama's experience. So it strikes me it's going to be very hard to explain that Jindal, as a governor who has served as an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, has served as a Congressional staffer, has served as a Congressman, is not qualified, but Senator Obama is qualified. I mean, they can't work both ways.”

This Week featured an interview with Fred Thompson, who took issue with the Supreme Court’s granting habeas corpus rights to enemy combatants. “What the court has done, in a nutshell, is to basically give access to our federal court system on a habeas corpus basis the same rights an American citizen would have. These are rights given to foreign enemy combatants, held in foreign territories, in a time of war. And not only is it an erroneous, I think, reading of the Constitution and historical precedent, it’s bad policy. They basically have taken something that’s been under the purview of the other two branches, the elected branches of government, for all these years and arrogated that to themselves.”

Meanwhile, Karl Rove appeared on Fox News and intimated that Obama’s VP-selection committee troubles might not be over yet. One of the remaining members on the team is “Eric Holder … who green[lit] the Mark Rich pardon. In fact played an active role in helping make certain in the final days of the Clinton administration that this happened. That seems to me to present a problem.”

The general election is (finally) upon us! Tim Pawlenty was on Fox News Sunday, making the case for John McCain as a leader for change. “Look at Senator McCain’s record on the big issues of our time: changing of the war; being for climate change; cracking down on pork barrel spending; being against earmarks; reaching across even on things that are controversial, like campaign finance reform as a United States senator. Not casting a vote as a state legislator, but leading, being the person that was in the middle of it. The Gang of 14, that Senator Obama was against, that gave us Justice Roberts and Alito … Senator Obama was even against that.”

Lindsay Graham, meanwhile, was on This Week and fired a warning shot across the bow of the Obama campaign, daring them to come after McCain for having ties to lobbyists. “Well, Charlie Black helped run Ronald Reagan’s campaign, he is not lobbying now,” Graham said in response to a jab by Obama surrogate John Kerry. “Rick Davis ran John’s campaign in 2000. Mark Salter’s his alter ego. Phil Gramm is a great friend. John McCain didn’t borrow money from a guy going to jail to build his house, so if we’re gonna start talking about associations, that’s fine, we’ll do that.” He also hit on McCain’s strong record of reaching across the aisle, contrasting it with Barack Obama’s faux-bipartisanship: “Let’s talk about the question of bipartisanship. I can’t tell you how many phone calls I got about the ethics vote. I got beat up. Not. I can tell you I got my brains beat out helping John on immigration. I can tell you it was tough on campaign finance reform. I can tell you it was tough to go back to South Carolina and support Sen. McCain’s efforts to reform interrogation policy. I can tell you I’ve been in a lot of bipartisan fights with John McCain where the Republican party really didn’t like what John was doing. And when it comes to Senator Obama it’s all talk: he never did anything that the left didn’t want to hear, whether it’s Iraq policy or anything else.”

On Meet the Press, Chuck Todd tried to blow up the myth that Hillary Clinton had everything going for her in the leadup to the primary campaign. “You know, the biggest myth of this campaign was that somehow the Clintons controlled the apparatus. They didn't. … Two moments before the campaign even started were clues as to how difficult this was going to be for them. One was the election of Howard Dean as DNC chair, and the other was Democrats winning control of Congress in 2006 and the ascension of Nancy Pelosi as one of the leaders. Here they had two of the sort of three cogs of the Democratic leadership, in Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, who were waiting for there to be a crack in this inevitability armor of, of the Clintons. And once there was, it's as if they were just waiting. And it wouldn't have mattered if it was Barack Obama, Mark Warner, had he run, or John Edwards. Whoever ended up filling the vacuum of the anti-Clinton, they were going to rush to them.”

Byron York was on Fox News Sunday’s roundtable, and he summed up the hopeless naiveté of former White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “What distinguishes McClellan is that he was amazingly naïve in his belief that George W. Bush could kind of bring us all together, which is why he comes to Washington,” York explained. "You remember that press conference where Bush is asked to name a mistake he has made? And he gives an awful performance, he can’t name a mistake, it was just terrible. But Bush realized, and he told McClellan, 'look, if I name a mistake my enemies are just going to keep pushing for more and more and more.' And McClellan doesn’t see it that way. He actually writes in the book 'believe that by embracing openness and forthrightness it could have redeemed him, it could have transcended partisanship and brought together leaders of both parties to try to chart a consensus way forward on Iraq.' That is a naïve point of view."

McClellan himself was on Meet the Press, and he tried to explain why he didn’t leave the administration after disagreeing with its practices. “The reason I didn't [leave] was because that was the final 10 months of my time in the White House, when my disillusionment increasingly set in,” he said. “I became dismayed beginning in July of 2005 with the revelations that I had been knowingly misled by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, and then ending with the NIE. And I had made a decision at that point, right around that--right after that, that that was the final straw, that I would leave the administration. My intent was to do it at my three-year mark in July of 2003, just a couple months later, that I'd do it quietly and leave, because I could no longer continue to go through this when I had been decrying the selective leaking of classified information for years, as had the president.”

The Democratic primary slowly creaks to the finish line, as Hillary Clinton once again whups Barack Obama, this time in Puerto Rico. Clinton surrogate Terry McAuliffe was on This Week to talk about the Michigan/Florida delegate compromise. Since Obama got more than zero delegates, suffice it to say he’s not pleased with the outcome. “What they did is they took all the uncommitted--and they actually ran on the ballot as uncommitted, and they have to go the convention as uncommitted--they gave all of those to Senator Obama, and then they took four votes that Hillary Clinton had won, four delegates, and they also gave those votes to Senator Obama. I have never in history—and I’ve been involved in this party for 30 years and I was the last chairman of this great party—I have never seen a party take away votes from someone who earned them, and that’s our complaint coming out of yesterday.”

Clinton surrogate Mandy Grunwald, meanwhile, was on Face the Nation to drive home the issue of Hillary’s electability. “But if you look at the Electoral College based on the polls right now, she is far ahead of Senator McCain and he's about tied. So if you look at the electoral map and if you look at the swing constituencies--rural voters, where Democrats have gotten killed in recent years and where a lot of people think the race will be won--Senator Clinton is doing far better than Senator Obama.”

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed up on Meet the Press and This Week, respectively, to talk about the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. More interesting than the normal campaign platitudes, however, were the views espoused by the candidates on Iran.

Clinton came off as slightly schizophrenic on the Islamic Republic; when asked by an audience member what she would do if Iran attacked Iraq, "I don’t think any of us can predict what Iran will do. . . . I do not believe Iran will go into Iraq. If Iran were to go into Iraq, there would have to be a determination at that time. But it’s not something I’m anticipating." But she stood by her comments about "obliterating" Iran from earlier in the week, saying "Well, the question originally, as some may remember, was ‘what would we do if Iran got a nuclear weapon and attacked Israel.’ And I think we have to be very clear about what we would do. I don’t think it’s time to equivocate about what we would do. They have to know that they would face massive retaliation. That is the only way to rein them in."

While Clinton deserves credit for standing by a stalwart ally and brooking no nonsense from Iran on the issue of nuclear weapons, why wouldn’t she extend the same support to a nation we’ve spent billions of dollars and thousands of American lives to rebuild?

Obama, on the other hand, excoriated Clinton on Meet the Press for saying she would retaliate against Iran if Israel was attacked. "Israel is a ally of ours. It is the most important ally we have in the region, and there's no doubt that we would act forcefully and appropriately on any attack against Iran, nuclear or otherwise. So--but it is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we're shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we've seen out of George Bush." Apparently lost on Obama is the fact that diplomacy will have already failed if Iran has attacked Israel.

Back on the campaign trail, on Fox News Sunday Terry McAuliffe laid out the case he’s making to the superdelegates on behalf of Clinton. "When we finish this up on June 3rd, at that point the superdelegates got to make the decision: who is it that can best beat John McCain? Because this is what this is about, winning the election on November 4. Hillary in the last week has moved ahead in every single poll against John McCain. Senator Obama is either tied or, on Fox, behind Senator McCain. Hillary’s ahead in every poll. More importantly she now has a huge lead among independents."

Meanwhile, James Clyburn took to Face the Nation to explain just how disastrous stealing the nomination from Obama would be for the Democrats. "There are 103 historical black colleges and universities in this country, seven of them are in my congressional district. And what I was saying is, as I visited those campuses in recent weeks, that is what these young people were saying to me. They were very, very upset at all this talk about superdelegates overturning their energies and overturning their efforts. They wanted to know from me whether or not I felt that this is what was going to happen. And a lot of them were saying that they felt that all of this talk about Senator Obama were just ways to damage him permanently for--and make it impossible for him to win even if he were to get the nomination. So I was sharing with the American people what young people were beginning to say."

As my colleagues noted earlier, Barack Obama made his long-awaited sojourn to Fox News Sunday. Barnett and Goldfarb hit on a couple of important topics, but the boss may have had the most succinct evaluation: An "elegant and attractive performance, but somewhat substance free." About the only thing of interest was Obama’s insistence on raising taxes on the upper-middle and upper class.

On This Week, meanwhile, Clinton-surrogate Evan Bayh laid out the groundwork for counting Florida’s vote in the overall popular vote. "Florida does count in terms of the popular vote. The DNC can choose not to seat the delegates, but they don’t have the right, by law, to not count the votes; the state of Florida counts the votes. They voted for state legislator, for state senator, for Congress . . . they voted to amend the state constitution! As a matter of law, those votes count, and the DNC can’t override state law." Clinton’s newfound lead is, literally, the worst case scenario for the Democrats--it creates the possibility of a convention in which the superdelegates will be forced to choose between a candidate who wisely gamed the system to rack up a big pledged delegate lead by taking caucus states and a candidate who won the most total votes.

Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson showed up on Face the Nation to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the superdelegates on his boss’s trump card: Obama’s electability. "I think after significant losses in Ohio and Pennsylvania on behalf of Senator Obama," he said, "I think Democrats do have questions about whether or not he is going to be able to reach out and successfully win over the kind of blue-collar voters that Democrats need to win in order to take the White House back in November."

Closing in on the Pennsylvania primary, it’s no surprise that the principle topic of conversation on the talk shows this weekend was Hillary vs. Barack. Their surrogates were all over the place, and Ed Rendell made an intriguing point on Face the Nation about Obama’s spending. Earlier in the race, Rendell had predicted a cakewalk for Clinton (who, at the time, was leading by double digits in the polls). "I had no idea that the spending would be at a record level," Rendell said of Obama’s advertising expenditures. "I've always been a good money raiser, and I've put a lot of money on TV in the closing weeks of my campaign, but I never exceeded $1.2, $1.3 million. The Obama campaign, $2.9 million. You can't go anywhere in the Philadelphia region, you can't listen to TV for 10 minutes without seeing an ad. Given that level of spending, it's even overcoming what was a subpar performance in the debate by Senator Obama and a great performance by Senator Clinton."

This is a point that transfers over to the general; as my colleague pointed out, Obama seems poised to break his promise to participate in public financing. McCain currently polls surprisingly well against the junior Illinois senator, but it will be interesting to see if his numbers can hold up against a $100-$150 million Obama media blitz in the campaign’s waning months.

David Brooks, meanwhile, pointed out the damage that this primary has done to Obama’s image on Meet the Press. "It's been 15 months since he's been running, and the last three months have been different. … The tone of that conversation, believe me, is very different from the tone of Barack Obama's speech in Des Moines three months ago. And the campaign has changed him. And I think it's changed him in two ways, which has made him less inspiring for a lot of us who are not orthodox liberals. It's changed him because he seems like a more conventional politician, trading jibes about who's throwing which negative ad at each other, which is not particularly hopeful. And then he's become--as he's had to chase Democratic primary votes, he's become [a] much more orthodox liberal."

Sam Donaldson warned of the damage a Clinton nomination might do to the Democratic party on This Week. "The Obama supporters, a lot of them feel that there’s an entitlement there…it’s not as if ‘I hope he wins, and we worked very hard and all of that.’ It’s ‘if he doesn’t win, it’s a cheat. There’s something unfair about this.’ Guys, grow up. This is politics."

And Karl Rove was on Fox News Sunday; when asked to choose the tougher candidate, he gave the ever-so-slight nod to the junior senator from New York. "She is a more durable candidate who is better known and tougher to move; on the other hand, Obama is the untested candidate and can either perform extremely well, as he did in Iowa, or extremely badly, as he did in the debate last week. I would have to say that on points I’d give it to Clinton, but not by much."

The most striking news to come out of the Sunday morning talk shows was Stephen Hadley’s dismissive response when asked whether or not the United States should boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. On Fox News Sunday, Hadley said the following:

“I think this issue is, in some sense, a bit of a red herring. I think, unfortunately, a lot of countries say ‘well, if we say that we are not going to the opening ceremonies we’ve checked the box on Tibet.’ That’s a copout. If other countries are concerned about Tibet, they ought to do what we are doing: through quiet diplomacy, send the message clearly to the Chinese that this is an opportunity with the whole world watching to show that they take into account and are determined to treat their citizens with dignity and respect. They would put pressure on the Chinese authorities, quietly, to meet with representatives of the Dalai Lama and use this as an opportunity to help resolve that situation.”

To a certain extent, Hadley is right: as Christopher Caldwell implied in his Financial Times column a couple weeks back, a boycott of the opening ceremonies is little more than an empty rhetorical gesture--a cynical attempt to gain the moral high ground without incurring any cost. But the “quiet diplomacy” so proudly trumpeted by Hadley will, in all likelihood, have the same effect of a boycott or a semi-boycott: none whatsoever. As former Olympian Joey Cheek (a founder of genocide awareness organization Team Darfur) said after Hadley’s appearance, “quiet diplomacy takes place while people are being slaughtered.” China’s atrocities cannot go unchallenged by the West, but neither has anyone resolved upon an appropriate response.

The biggest political news of the weekend was undoubtedly Barack Obama’s gaffe late last week in San Francisco, when he went out of his way to insult working class Pennsylvanians to the delight of his upper crust, liberal donors. George Will struck at the heart of the problem on This Week, noting the two distinct questions that have arisen as a consequence. “First is he condescending, b.) is he out of touch? Condescending: It’s an old liberal tradition to explain away cultural and political conservatism as a personality defect, a mental disorder--some kind of irrational flight from reality, hence ‘clinging’ to religion not ‘embracing’ religion. Out of touch: this is a man who went to Iowa and commiserated with Iowans over the cost of arugula at Whole Foods stores, of which there are none in Iowa.”

Mary Matalin believed that Obama’s biggest problem is that this wasn’t really a “gaffe,” per se: it’s what Obama and the Democrtaic elite actually believe. “Well, the damage here is that what he said accurately reflects the current Democratic party. It's more affluent. It's more liberal. That's the way it's moving. He was saying it to San Francisco Democrats, rich San Francisco Democrats, and it reflects the kind of Democrat that loses at the presidential level. In the last half century--greater than the last half century-- Democrats have not won at the presidential level unless they have a centrist southern--a centrist Southerner."

John McCain appeared on Fox News Sunday this morning to discuss the presidential campaign with Chris Wallace. The Arizona senator called for more honesty from the Obama campaign and its surrogates when they claim that he called for our military to stay in Iraq for a century. "This, quote, ‘100 years in Iraq,’ it was obvious when you read the whole quote," he said, "where I was in an exchange with a voter in New Hampshire, a town hall meeting, the kind of exchanges that I enjoy most. He said, ‘How long are you going to be there.’ I said, ‘It could be 100 years, but it's a matter of U.S. casualties, and we have presence in countries like South Korea, Japan,’ et cetera, et cetera."

Senator Lindsey Graham, a McCain surrogate, made an appearance on This Week. There he articulated the thinking behind McCain's position on Iraq, saying "I do not want to leave Iraq as an extension of Iranian theocracy in the south; I don’t want to leave Iraq where Anbar province is occupied by al Qaeda; where there’s a war between the Turks and the Kurds in the north. There’s a tremendous amount of reconciliation--politically and militarily--that has been achieved since the surge," he told George Stephanopoulos. He added "We want a winning outcome in Iraq so when we do leave, we’re gonna leave behind a country that’s part of the solution, not the problem."

Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell was on Meet the Press, and repeated a line he’s been using throughout the primary season in regards to Hillary Clinton’s uphill battle against Barack Obama. "We elect a president of the United States, as we learned in 2000, by the Electoral College. And no Democrat can win the Electoral College without carrying three of the four big states--Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Michigan. Assuming Senator Clinton wins in Pennsylvania, she will have demonstrated, and she's running way ahead of Obama against McCain in all four of those states, and those are crucial and that's why she's the strongest candidate in the fall, without question." This statement is almost certainly true, but Rendell’s logic is faulty: success in a primary against another Democrat does not necessarily correspond to success in the general against a Republican, as Mark Murray points out in this MSNBC piece.

Ed Rendell and Bill Richardson showed up on Fox News Sunday yesterday to shill for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama respectively. The Pennsylvania governor struck at what he sees as the heart of the Obama campaign’s hypocrisy. "The Obama campaign tries to have it both ways," he said. "They say the campaign’s too negative, and they go out and turn an innocent remark--Bill Clinton was saying what a lot of us feel, we wish the issues of race and all of this other stuff would be pushed to the background so we could have a discussion about who’s got the most experience, who’s got the best healthcare plan, who’s got the best plan for the economy. And instead, they launch this all-out attack trying to take an inference out of President Clinton’s words that no fair person could take."

Peggy Noonan was on Meet the Press, and she discussed the importance of Richardson’s endorsement of Obama. "You know what I think the Richardson thing means?" she asked Tim Russert. "It means that this wonderful voodoo magic thing that the Clintons have, that they are always in control, that they run the Democratic party, that no matter what is happening on the ground or who's winning this race or the popular vote or getting the elected delegates, they're in charge, they're really secretly plugged in, they got secret wires that they're pulling, they will triumph. When a Bill Richardson comes forward, it just reminds you, the Clintons may not be in charge. They may not be pulling the wires in this race."

George Will also feels like the race is quickly slipping away from the Clinton machine. "I would much rather have had Obama’s week than Hillary’s week. She loses Michigan and Florida: that’s her only path to the nomination, electability. And she has to do that by passing him in the popular vote which she is not going to be able to do. We don’t know yet whether Bill Richardson is a pebble that presages an avalanche, but he might be. He’s a very important superdelegate. And finally, we have the release of her White House schedules, which raises the question: if being first lady like that qualifies you to run for president, why didn't Mimi Eisenhower run for president?"

Lindsey Graham took to Face the Nation to discuss just how much progress has been made in Iraq over the last year. "On the political front, we've had the de-Baathification law passed. . . . That means members of the Baath Party, who ruled the country under Saddam Hussein, are now allowed to get some of their jobs back. That means the Shias and the Kurds are saying to the Sunnis, 'come back in and help us run the country.' They passed a $48 billion budget where every group in Iraq gets to share the oil resources. There was an amnesty law telling the prisoners in Iraq that 'we're going to let some of you go; go back home, stop fighting, help build the new Iraq.' And most important of all, we're going to have provincial elections in October. The Sunnis boycotted the election in 2005, and everywhere I went in Anbar province the Sunnis are ready to vote and be part of democracy. So there's been major political breakthroughs."

It was a rough week for Barack Obama thanks to some of his reverend’s more hateful comments coming to light. Brit Hume got to the heart of the problem on Fox News Sunday. "It’s worth noting also, I think, certainly Obama knew what sort of church this is," Hume said. “Now I have no doubt that the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has done many good things; it is clearly a thriving parish with active programs for youth and anti-drugs and all sorts of other good things. There’s no doubt about that. On the other hand, for a candidate who would like us all to believe that he is post-racial this is an interesting institution. For example, this is what it says about itself: ‘We are an African people and remain true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.’ And it goes on to say this is a congregation with a ‘non-negotiable commitment to Africa.’ Not to Chicago, not to Illinois, not to the United States of America. But to Africa. Now look, there’s nothing wrong with that, and I wouldn’t say it’s racist, but it’s racial.”

George Will was even more direct, saying on This Week “This strikes right at Obama’s strength: I am a.) post-racial, I’m not obsessed with race, and b.) I will get you away from the acoustics of the 1960s, this blame America first, God Damn America. Of course, the candidate’s wife says America is a mean country. Why not have ‘God Damn America’?” This flap is almost certainly taking a toll; as Dean Barnett pointed out this weekend, Obama appears to be sinking in the Rasmussen tracking poll.

Who will take the Democratic nomination remains to be seen. Obama’s surrogates were out in force, making the argument that whoever leads in pledged delegates should take home the prize. On Face the Nation, Deval Patrick said he hopes that “the superdelegates, in the end, will ratify the will of the people and the pledged delegates, whichever candidate has the majority of them. I certainly hope so.” But former senator Bill Bradley painted a less rosy view of things on Meet the Press, fretting “where this is headed, potentially--and I hope it doesn't get there--is a Credentials Committee battle. Last time that happened was 1972, and the Credentials Committee made a decision not to seat the Illinois delegation of Mayor Daly and to say that the California primary was a winner-take-all, not a proportional. And if either one of those decisions had gone the other way, Hubert Humphrey would have been the nominee.”

Howard Dean made the rounds this weekend to discuss the increasing likelihood of the nasty fight inside his party continuing all the way up until the convention. "There's two things they can do," he said on Face the Nation. "One is to have this kind of an alternative process, which we're talking about now, and the other is simply to appeal to the Credentials Committee at the--at the convention, which is controlled, actually, by the delegates, not by me. And they can do a lot of things at the Credentials Committee. I think it's very unlikely that Florida and Michigan, given how close this race is, are going to be seated as-is. But everybody's going to work very hard to find a compromise within the rules that's fair to both campaigns that will allow Florida and Michigan, in the end, to be seated."

Despite the fact that it seems increasingly likely that Clinton will be down in both the delegate count and the popular vote, her supporters haven’t given up hope yet. "Well, sure, Tim, because, number one, Hillary Clinton has won states with about 260 electoral votes. Barack Obama has won states with about 190," said Ed Rendell on Meet the Press. He added that "the traditional role of the superdelegates is to determine who's going to be our strongest candidate. Tim, you and I have been doing this for a long time, as Tom has, and we know the big four in any presidential election recently are Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Michigan. And in all four of those states--Pennsylvania hasn't voted yet, but I assume we're going to do real well--Hillary Clinton will have taken those states."

And it’s not just about the math. As George Will pointed out on This Week, "for her to beat Obama in the Spring and the Summer, she has to argue—to John McCain’s advantage—that Obama is not winnable, not plausible as a president in November. She started doing that and it may be working."

Fox News Sunday guest Rep. Mike Pence talked about the overriding issue of this campaign: the war in Iraq. "As the Kurdish prime minister told me over lunch, I think it's seen as fragile because while the enemy has been in many respects largely beaten back in the center part of the country and in al-Anbar province, as we saw in grim detail in the car bombing and suicide bombing in Baghdad this week, this is still a lethal enemy that will use deadly force to upend the progress of stability and democracy in this country. … I did run into anxiety among many Iraqi officials about talk of a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq. Several Iraqi leaders with whom we spoke and, frankly, regular Iraqis on the street, see the vital and critical importance of a durable American presence, at least in the near term."

On Fox News Sunday, Karl Rove explained why John McCain had to distance himself from the conservative radio host who tried to use Barack Obama’s name against him. "Using his middle name helps Obama, it doesn’t hurt him," he noted, adding "I think people look at it and say ‘hey look, that’s one step too far.’ You’re trying to leave an implication that he’s a Muslim when I know he is not. A lot of times attacks in politics fail--in fact, they turn into a negative for the person who’s doing the attacking--because people think it’s gone too far. And this, frankly, goes too far." That’s not to say Obama’s untouchable, however; Rove pointed to one possible area of attack going forward: "Now, having ties to Louis Farrakhan and his anti-Semitic comments, that’s a reasonable question."

The Democratic primary isn’t quite over yet, but we’re nearing the end. Regardless of who wins the remaining states, the math makes Obama the prohibitive favorite going forward. Mike Murphy laid out the weakness of the Democrats’ system of apportioning delegates compared to the Republican counterpart on Meet the Press:

"The great irony here is the Democrats have this kind of Mr. Nice Guy delegate system of proportional delegates. So even if she starts winning primaries, it's hard to win big enough to get the delegate advantage. We Republicans like these sudden-death, winner-takeall--because we're mean. That's why I joined up. We're all social Darwinists. And if they had had winner-take-all primaries in California and New York like the Republicans do, the vast right-wing conspiracy, she'd be in front and hard to beat right now."

(Murphy also suggested Tom Ridge as a potential VP for John McCain. You heard it here first, though not everybody likes the idea.)

Because it’s exceptionally unlikely Clinton can win the primary fair and square, the Clintons must decide whether it’s worth tearing the party apart to get the nomination. Matt Dowd warned against such a course on This Week. Whoever is "leading on pledged delegates, the party has to unite, the Democratic party has to unite behind that person. Because Barack Obama is the one that has motivated the voters in this country right now that the Democratic party needs to sort of establish a sense of leadership going forward. That’s the younger voters in this country that haven’t turned out in years gone by, and if the Clinton machine puts the screws on and is allowed to take the nomination because they’ve gone against the rules or gone against what the voters said, then your ability to motivate those voters in the fall" disappears. And that, Dowd added, "is John McCain’s dream."

The biggest news of the week was undoubtedly John McCain’s smearing by the New York Times. While the senator may have gotten the best of it so far--even the Times’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, felt the newspaper shouldn’t have published the piece’s most scintillating passages--E.J. Dionne pointed out that the paper’s bumbling was something of a break for McCain, and that this story might not be over yet. "Sex is to journalism what the queen of spades is to a game of hearts, it overwhelms everything," Dionne said on This Week’s roundtable, but he thinks "short term, McCain had a good week because all of these conservatives rallied against the New York Times. I think long term this story hangs around because the core question . . . the sex kind of drove out the legitimate part of the story in the public’s mind, which is, ‘is this Saint John McCain?’"

The Democratic primary rumbles on. New Jersey governor Jon Corzine dodged a question as to whether or not his party’s "super-delegates" will decide the nomination, saying "we’ll see how March 4th comes out. I’m a lot more upbeat about Senator Clinton’s chances in that period. We have a big state in Pennsylvania still to vote." Knowing that those states probably won’t be enough to get his candidate, Hillary Clinton, over the top, Corzine ominously pointed out that his party "still [has] to sort out two very important elements, or states in our system, that is Florida and Michigan. How that ends up being decided, how those votes are taken into consideration."

Why does the Clinton camp need to break the rules and get Florida and Michigan’s delegates seated? Chuck Todd explained on Meet the Press:

"She'd have to do something impossible, which is win [in Texas and Ohio] by some 15 or 20 points. I mean, I sort of crunched some numbers from March 4th to see if she, she can win three of the four states, she could win Texas 52-48, Ohio 52-48, Rhode Island 52-48, lose Vermont, say, 55-45, and she will net all of three delegates in that scenario, because there's a couple things working against her. First of all, this Texas primacaucus, whatever you want to call it, where two-thirds of the delegates are going to be distributed by statewide vote in the state Senate districts and then a third of the delegates are decided later that night in a caucus."

Oh, and Ralph Nader announced his candidacy for president as well, taking up a full segment on Meet the Press to do so. I’ll be curious to see if Tim Russert grants Lyndon LaRouche equal time. The two will have about the same level of impact on the race this year.

Hillary Clinton’s continued troubles, and what she might do to right the ship, dominated the Sunday morning talk shows. George Will pointed out that Wisconsin could be rough sailing for the New York senator on This Week: "The way you stop losing is you start winning. And she has to start in Wisconsin. The problem is Wisconsin is an open primary, in that independents can vote there. There’s no fight on the Republican side, they’ll all vote on the Democratic side. Furthermore, they have same-day registration; that’s the wonderful system that gave us Jesse Ventura next door in Minnesota. Even before that . . . Democrats abroad will announce their result, they have 11 delegates . . . so that could be two more losses. Then it seems to me she has to spike, to kill this talk of winning with the super delegates. And, even worse, the Florida and Michigan delegates."

But the Clinton campaign is loathe to give up one of its few remaining advantages. Howard Wolfson invoked Howard Dean on Face the Nation in an effort to deflect the anger of the party’s left wing in the event of a nomination decided by superdelegates: "You know, I agree with Chairman Dean, who said that the superdelegates are supposed to vote their conscience, they're supposed to vote who they think will be the best person for the nation and for the party. That's why they were created, and that's what they're going to do. And I think that the reason so many of them are supporting us . . . Obama's campaign is vigorously attempting to secure their support--but the reason that so many support us is because they know that Senator Clinton is the candidate with the real solutions that we need to tackle our problems."

The Obama camp is understandably concerned. Obama supporter Dick Durbin was on Meet the Press to decry the possibility of superdelegates picking Clinton over his man. "That'd be a serious problem," he said, and he warned that it could spark a backlash. "You know, the voters will have the last word in November. The elected delegates should have the last word in Denver. Those are the delegates who have stood before the voters. I'm one of those superdelegates. . . . There are almost 800 of us. We've been involved in this party and given a lot of our lives to it. But let's be very honest about this. The final word has to be decided by elected delegates."

On a slightly different topic, Mike McConnell was on Fox News Sunday to point out just what is different as a result of the stalemate over FISA. "When the program was returned to the FISA court in January of ’07, initially we had coverage that we had asked for. But over time, because technology had changed, and the law of ’78 had not been changed, because technology had gone from a wireless world to a wired world, foreigners communicating in a foreign country, more than likely the communications would pass through the United States. Therefore the court said that if it touches a wire, consistent with the law, you have to have a warrant. Now, a warrant means probable cause, which is a very time consuming process to go through. So we were in that situation last summer, we passed the new act to improve our situation--that act has now expired."

Yesterday President Bush sat down for an exclusive interview with Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace, talking about everything from the war on terror to his legacy. His philosophy on the 2008 election:

“What really matters in a campaign is, what are the basic beliefs? What does one view as the role of the federal government? We believe the federal government ought to be empowering people, ought to trust people, the other side tends to want to empower government. We believe taxes ought to be low, they want to raise taxes. We believe we ought to be on the offense against an enemy, that this war on terror is not just a simple law enforcement matter; it requires all assets, all hands on deck, to protect the American people. We believe in the transformative power of freedom.”

Bush refused to talk about the election in terms of a McCain candidacy since Huckabee hasn’t yet dropped out. Tim Russert laid out exactly what Huckabee’s up against when the former governor showed up on Meet the Press. “You need 1191 delegates; you have 231,” Russert informed Huckabee. “That means you need 960. … There are only 819 delegates to win. So how are you going to do that?” Undaunted by the impossibility of getting to the needed number of delegates, Huckabee replied that he doesn’t “know how the math works out, but there's always the chance something stumbles. The thing is it's not just how many I need, Senator McCain also needs that many. And if he doesn't get that many, he's not the nominee either. This thing could go to the convention. Who knows? But the one thing I know, when people say, ‘Isn't it a rather complicated and convoluted path to victory?’ You bet it is. But it's a real easy path to defeat.”

New Fox News contributor Karl Rove popped up on Face the Nation to break down why McCain is the GOP’s best hope for retaining the White House:

“This is out of the latest Fox poll, and as you can see, this is Senator McCain matched against Senator Clinton. And of the Republicans, as you can see, Senator McCain gets 86 percent of the Republicans in a match-up against her while she gets 7 percent of the Republicans. He takes 15 percent of the Democrats while she takes 79 percent of them. In a match-up with Senator Obama, Senator McCain takes 80 percent of the Republicans. Senator Obama gets 10 percent. Senator McCain gets 18 percent of Democrats and Senator Obama gets 77 percent of Democrats. So in other words, Senator McCain has done at this point a better job of getting Republicans united behind him in a head-to-head with the Democrats than either one of the Democrats has done in getting Democrats united behind them.”

Byron York, on the other hand, posited on This Week that Republican hopes might rest on Democratic super delegates--the unpledged “party leaders” who get votes at the Democratic national convention--choosing the Democratic nominee. “I think that would be great for Republicans. And if Barack Obama, if it’s essentially tied or he’s slightly ahead, and he doesn’t get the nomination, we’ve had all this talk about lack of Republican enthusiasm for the Republican candidate--if you have lack of Democratic enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate you turn what is a Democratic year by all measurements into an even match.”

Barack Obama’s shellacking of Hillary Clinton was obviously the big news of the weekend, and Obama showed up on This Week to discuss his victory, and Bill Clinton’s race baiting. In one of the Clinton campaign’s most naked references to Obama’s race, the former president tried to downplay an Obama victory in South Carolina by reminding reporters that “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in 1984 and 1988.” Obama let it roll off his back, sticking to the message of change his campaign adopted early on.

“Well, Jesse Jackson ran historic races in 1984 and 1988, and there’s no doubt that that set a precedent for African Americans running for the highest office in the land. But that was 20 years ago, George, and I think that what we saw in this election was a shift in South Carolina that I think speaks extraordinarily well not just for folks in the South but all across the country. I think people want change, I think they want to get beyond some of the racial politics that has been so dominant in the past.”

It should also be pointed out that Obama pulled in nearly a quarter of the white vote this weekend, a feat Jackson never got close to in ’84 or ’88.

Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor that he is, knows full well what the Clintons are capable of. “There are not two people who are better at street fighting politics than Bill and Hillary Clinton,” Huckabee told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, adding “I’ve been telling people a long time, ‘Don’t underestimate the scrappiness with which they’ll approach this race.’ So no, I’m not surprised. And in fact, I think the one thing you have to keep your eyes on is that tactics will change, but the goal will never, ever fade, and that is win, what it takes to do it.”

Republicans obviously have a vested interest in the Democratic presidential primaries, and nothing warms their hearts more than the brewing identity politics battle on that side of the aisle. As David Brooks pointed out last week, the first viable female candidate for president and the first viable African-American candidate for president are reaping what their party has sown--and Democratic apparatchiks couldn’t be more terrified. On This Week, Katrina vanden Heuvel said that she thinks "the important thing is that this race not become a fractious fight about race and gender." And why, pray tell, is it important not to race bait this time around? As former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd pointed out in response to Vanden Heuvel’s comment,

"The big problem is, for Democrats to win the presidency, in this day and age, they have to have an unbelievable turnout and support among African Americans, and they have to have an unbelievable support and turnout among younger voters: Both of which groups are voting for Barack Obama right now, in fairly large numbers."

On the Republican side, the sniping between Mitt Romney and John McCain is getting almost as nasty; the former Massachusetts governor used his time on Fox News Sunday to accuse Sen. McCain of, essentially, being a corrupt pawn of special interest groups. "I just don’t think that somebody who has spent their life inside Washington, that has lobbyists on every elbow, that has been chairman of one committee or another, and has all those connections, and all the favors that are owed, and owed in return, all of the scores to settle: I just don’t think that’s going to get Washington fixed," Romney said. Nevermind the irony of calling one of the Washington insiders committed to cutting pork barrel spending a pawn of lobbyists; consider instead the irony of Romney, whose key advisors (as Glen Johnson rudely, argumentatively, and unprofessionally pointed out on the campaign trail) are, you guessed it: lobbyists!

I’ve been arguing with friends for the last couple of weeks that Clinton’s campaign is cooked once John Edwards drops out of the race and stops splitting the "change" vote with Barack Obama. Jay Carney made a point on This Week that is worth considering, however, noting of Edwards’s supporters that "While there’s a change vote that will favor Obama, they’re also downscale Democrats who might favor Hillary Clinton." If the lower class, less educated voters who comprise Edwards’s base break for Clinton--as they did in New Hampshire--once Edwards finally faces reality and drops out, Obama might be in a lot of trouble.

My favorite moment from Hillary's performance on Meet the Press? This shameless prevarication, hot on the heels of crying to gain sympathy (and a victory) in New Hampshire: "Well, you know, I don't think that either of us should use gender. I don't think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it's not about race. It needs to be about the individuals."

Over at Fox News Sunday, Mara Liasson pointed out that Obama can’t run on shiny oratorical skills alone:

"The legitimate point that the Clintons did make about Obama in New Hampshire was this ‘where’s the beef?’ question. And I think that he was running out the clock in New Hampshire; he came into New Hampshire with a huge lead, he thought all he had to do was give the same inspiring speech over and over again. She, meanwhile, scared to death, answered questions for two hours at a time, pulled everything out of herself that she could. He needs to start doing that more in these upcoming contests."

Face the Nation focused on the GOP, and Romney, despite a good showing in current Michigan polls, seemed to downplay the state’s importance in the grand scheme of things.

"Well, of course, I've already won one in Wyoming, and so we each now have one win. I've also got two silvers, so I've got more votes for president than anybody else in the race at this stage. I plan on winning Michigan, and there's no question, if it were just Republicans and independents, I'd win Michigan. But Democrats also get to vote in the primary here, so you can't be 100 percent sure."

The Democrats are a wild card, but what Romney doesn't mention is that the Daily Kos is running a "Mitt for Michigan" campaign. The netroots seem to think he'll make an easier target in the general.

The primaries are (finally) underway, and the Sunday talk shows were chock full of interviews, analysis, and inter-campaign squabbles. Mitt Romney showed up on Fox News Sunday, making a last-minute pitch to the voters of New Hampshire as to why he should be nominee instead of John McCain:

“He’s just been there 27 years, and hasn’t been able to get the job done. He’s somebody who wants to change Washington; he talks about changing Washington. But he’s been there for so long, he’s got so many lobbyists at each elbow, he’s worked so long, in many cases, he’s a maverick against his own party, he has brought some bills in place like McCain-Feingold, which hurt our party and I think hurt the first amendment. He fought for immigration law which I think was a terrible course, which said that all the illegal aliens that had come here illegally would be able to stay in this country forever, and I think that was a mistake.”

McCain didn't take it lying down. He popped up on Face the Nation and Meet the Press, and continued to turn what many had thought his greatest liability--his support for the war and the surge--into his biggest asset.

“But recently, in the last few years, I made the greatest change I've ever been responsible for and was part of it, and that is the change of strategy in Iraq. … No one else said the Rumsfeld strategy's going to fail and we've got to adopt a new strategy that--led by General Petraeus. That has turned this conflict around. We've got a long way to go. Al Qaeda's on the run, but they're not defeated. But I believe that's the biggest change you can make, is to save young Americans' lives.

From there he went straight into another one of his favorite themes, his long fight against waste and mismanagement at the Pentagon:

And I've been involved in--you know, if you think I'm an insider, ask Jack Abramoff, ask the lobbyists for Boeing and the Air Force guys and the people that are in jail now because we saved the taxpayers $2 billion on a bogus tanker deal. In fact, you might even ask former Secretary Rumsfeld if I'm--if I'm not an agent for change.

New Hampshire has long been forecast as a Romney-McCain showdown, but don’t forget about Mike Huckabee, even if Huckabee might want to forget about his appearance on This Week. For the second time in a row, George Stephanopoulos took the Arkansan to the woodshed on topics as varied as the surge, his lack of support for the president, and other issues. Here’s the video, watch the whole thing to get a sense of how brutal the interview was.

Mitt Romney showed up on Meet the Press for the full hour, and the blogosphere focused on the former Massachusetts governor’s mistaken claim that he was endorsed by the NRA in 2002. What was more interesting to me, however, was the fact that the following quote contains the entirety of the discussion on Iraq, totaling about two minutes of screen time:

"If you're, if you're, if you're suggesting that, that, that it's equivalent to say that we made a number of errors and that we have a very difficult situation in Iraq, that's the same as saying the president is arrogant and bunker mentality, that's, that's where he went over the line. I've been saying for months, and I think all the Republican candidates, in fact, have been saying for months, if not years, that, that following the collapse of Saddam Hussein our policy was, was unprepared, unplanned, understaffed, undermanaged, that we made a number of errors and that much of the difficulty we face today is due to those errors. But it's very different to point out the mistakes that have been made--and the president's pointed out the mistakes as well--and then to say that the Bush administration, our president, is arrogant with a bunker mentality, that's a completely different statement for which Mike Huckabee owes the president an apology."

The lack of discussion about Iraq suggests that the situation in-country is getting better and the issue is losing salience with the media--surely a good thing for the GOP, regardless of whoever ends up being the nominee.

On Face the Nation, Fred Thompson showed up and took some shots at Mike Huckabee:

"If you look at his policies, ‘liberal’ is the only word that comes to mind. When he was governor, I mean, the things that he said, things that he did, I mean, he was very resistant to any kind of effort to stop illegal immigration, any kind of effort to make sure that those who came in illegally were not on the--on the public roles, you might say, in terms of social services. Cato Institute rated him one of the worst governors in terms of taxes and tax increases. He wanted to lift the embargo on Castro. Now he wants to close Guantanamo because he thinks it will curry some favor with other nations. It's basically a pretty social liberal policy that he has followed for several years and hasn't made any bones about it up until recently. And now I understand that he's got a tough immigration ad going on, but it--but it's not consistent with his record."

Bill Kristol continued to hammer Hillary Clinton for her performance at the last Democratic debate:

"But it does come down to the candidate, and I do think that the moment you just showed was very revealing. Why was Hillary Clinton laughing, or if I might say, cackling, when this perfectly innocuous, silly question is asked of Obama. … As if everyone’s foreign policy advisors at this stage on the Democratic side hadn’t served in the Clinton administration somewhere. But anyway, it’s an innocuous question, Obama’s about to answer it, and suddenly there’s this kind of high pitched laugh and then: ‘I want to hear this.’ Isn’t that revealing? What does that mean? Why does she want to hear it? She thought this was some kind of gotcha moment where Obama would have trouble with the answer, and I think he showed something with his quick comeback. Not just quickness, but toughness."

The biggest non-political news of the week was sports-related. This Week’s George Will talked about the Mitchell Report, Major League Baseball’s examination of the role steroids have played in the game:

"George Mitchell threw a lot of stuff in here, and some of it--these are varying degrees of accusations. Andy Pettitte of the Yankees yesterday came out and said I used Human Growth Hormone for two days because I had a sore elbow. It supposedly has healing properties. … In any case, I don’t see the moral difference between that and taking a cortisone shot as a one time healing episode as opposed to a regimen to give you an unnatural advantage."

The Sunday morning talk shows were dominated by two intelligence-based stories this weekend: the CIA tapes and their destruction, and the NIE’s take on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

On Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol gave one theory of the CIA’s reasoning for destroying the tapes, and the mainstream media’s overreaction to the story.

"These tapes were destroyed at the direction of the Director of Clandestine Operations at the CIA: a 24 year CIA veteran praised on his retirement earlier this year by the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The idea, Ted Kennedy, the idea that this is like Watergate, that it’s politically motivated is on its face ludicrous. Ted Kennedy should be ashamed of himself--I don’t know if that’s possible. Look, we don’t know what’s on those tapes. These tapes apparently were destroyed shortly after the existence of the secret prisons abroad was leaked. Obviously, people in the CIA were very concerned about leaks. There could be very sensitive information on these tapes. Zubaydah may have given up the names of people who we then turned, we bugged, we eavesdropped on. That could have been the real fear: That really important American intelligence assets would be revealed if these tapes or transcripts of these tapes were leaked. … I think it was probably prudent to have destroyed them. Nothing could have been gained by keeping them around."

On This Week, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was on to talk about the National Intelligence Estimate and assessment of Iran’s nuclear programs. Gingrich bemoaned the politicized nature of the report and offered a reason for the sudden about face on Iranian capabilities:

"What you have is a release which, first of all, could not have been written to be more damaging to the Bush administration than it was. And the three people who wrote it are all three former State Department employees … they’re all three people who dislike what Bush is doing. I think they deliberately undermined the administration. I think this is the equivalent of a coup d’etat by the bureaucracy. If you actually read what they said … even the unclassified version doesn’t say what the front, what the headline said. The unclassified version says that there’s a big civilian program, they have at least 3,000 centrifuges already working--and 3,000’s enough to produce one bomb a year. They have a clear commitment to get nuclear weapons; there’s no evidence they’re going to give up that commitment. What the report technically said was that there was one particular program that was secret that we were certain was ongoing, we’ve now had a defector, that’s my guess, and the defector’s told them this, and my question is: How do we know that defector’s not a plant?"

Rudy Giuliani used his time on Meet the Press Sunday morning to emphasize that progress wouldn’t have been made on the Iraninan front if the military option had been left off the table, and pointed out that something pretty specific happened in 2003 that coincided with Iran’s shifting nuclear status:

"And of course we don't, we don't want to use the military option. It would be dangerous; it would be risky. But I think it would be more dangerous and more risky if Iran did become a nuclear power. We should utilize sanctions. We should utilize as much pressure as we're capable of. But the fact that that is there, that military option is there, not taken off the table ultimately increases the pressure, doesn't it? The reality is the pressure works. They said that, too, right? They, they said in 2003 Iran abandoned its nuclear program, they believe, because of all the pressure, all the threats, that they are susceptible to that. 2003 was the year in which we deposed Saddam Hussein. It was the year in which America showed massive military strength."

Mike Huckabee found out what it’s like to lose the goodwill of the media this weekend. Up to this point, the Arkansas governor has enjoyed the image of the wily underdog, surmounting overwhelming odds and a lack of cash to mount an insurgent presidential campaign. But now polling reveals he’s the front runner in Iowa. And front runners must be destroyed.

Enter George Stephanopoulos. The This Week host wasted no time at lighting into Huckabee over an issue that causes him trouble with GOP voters: immigration reform. When asked about the children of illegal immigrants receiving in state tuition, Huckabee juked, saying “I’ll tell you what I do believe: That you don’t punish a child because a parent committed a crime, or committed a sin. You just don’t do that. And that’s why …” But Huckabee didn’t get a chance to finish: Jumping in, Stephanopoulos blocked the dodge, interrupting with “Excuse me, let me just stop you right there. That’s why you pushed a bill that would allow the children of illegal immigrants, if they went through an Arkansas high school, to get in state tuition.” When Huckabee tried to say that the bill in question related to a scholarship, Stephanopoulos again jumped in: “Well governor, let me stop you right there because, and a lot of people have looked at this, I’ve got the bill right in front of me, and I know that what you’re talking about may have been in your original legislation, but you continued to push for a bill after the scholarship provisions were dropped that would simply provide instate tuition benefits to illegal immigrants.”

Sputtering, Huckabee tried to blame the problem on the federal government for allowing illegal immigrants to flow into his state willy nilly and insinuated that all non-college graduates are drains on the welfare system--“Is [an illegal immigrant] better off going to college and becoming a tax payer as opposed to not going to college and potentially becoming a tax taker?” Stephanopoulos went on to nail Huckabee for raising taxes and for lessening prison sentences for cooking meth. Welcome to the big leagues, governor. Get used to 12 more months of this if you do manage to win the nomination.

On Meet the Press, Michele Norris explained why Obama might be picking up ground in Iowa, and revealed the most depressing television viewing statistic I’ve heard in years:

“The, the use of Oprah Winfrey in this state is particularly strategic. She is--her program is the most watched program in the state of Iowa. When you look closely at her viewership here, it's women over 50. And, you know, Iowa is a very conservative state. There are a lot of stay-at home moms; there are a lot of people who watch Oprah. And when you look at Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey, both celebrities, but celebrities that touch people in very different ways. Bill Clinton a former president; Oprah Winfrey someone that many voters, many people, many women in that key demographic look at and see as--almost as a friend.”

William Kristol is also bullish on Obama’s chances; speaking on Fox News Sunday, he expounded on his underdog theory of politics.

“Missouri and West Virginia lost last night, the number one and number two rated teams in college football, and the number one rated people in each campaign could easily lose. Obama could beat Hillary Clinton, I now think it’s about a fifty-fifty proposition. He’s got momentum. … On the Republican side, Huckabee could win, McCain could win, Thompson could win; it’s a wide open five way race.”

Hillary Clinton’s camp is stuck doing damage control for the moment. Strategist Howard Wolfson was on Face the Nation to remind people that Hillary has never been the favorite in Iowa.

“Well, look, we started out this race, we were always ahead in the polls nationally, but when we started out, we were not ahead in Iowa; we were behind. We're running against somebody from a neighboring state. We're running against somebody in John Edwards who had been there for some time, had run there in 2003 and 2004. We've made progress, and I think the race now is, as I think David would probably suggest, pretty much a dead heat in Iowa, and it's going to be a very exciting month.”

The presidential contenders were making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows this week. John Edwards popped up on Face the Nation, repeating his ridiculous threat to take away Congress’s health care if the body doesn’t pass universal health care coverage in the opening days of his presidency:

“I will take away--do--use my power, the power that I have available to take away the health care for members of my administration. And the basic idea is I don't think politicians in Washington should be protecting their health care when we have 47 million people in this country who don't have health care coverage.”

Fred Thompson talked with George Stephanopoulos on This Week on a wide range of topics, touching on hot button topics like Islamic terrorism and abortion:

“The judicious application of soft power is very important, as well as hard power. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that if they just understood us better we’d all get along. . . .

“I think number one, that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned; we need to remember what the status was before Roe vs. Wade. It goes back to the states. States now, just about all of them or the heavy majority of them, have laws against abortion. They’re just restricted, they’re limited by what the Supreme Court has said about Roe vs. Wade.”

Huckabee was on Fox News Sunday to talk about his resurgent campaign, and showed off his new ad featuring Chuck Norris. Huckabee’s campaign, and the tactics he is employing, calls to mind another outsider candidate making an unexpected run at establishment candidates: Jesse Ventura. Off-beat ads intended to attract voters who might otherwise be uninterested? Check. A fractured electorate where support is split between several candidates and a plurality--not a majority--will get the job done? Check. All he needs to do to complete the checklist is pull off a surprise win in Iowa.

Meet the Press was the only candidate-less program this morning, but Chuck Todd was on hand to lay some awkwardly worded wisdom on viewers, noting “the quicker this is a two-person race, the, the better for Obama and the more stark--I mean, because when you go to this whole second choice thing--and I tell you, polling Iowa is a mess, trying to understand it. But when you go to the second choice, when you don't get that threshold and, you know, all this stuff, Obama does, right now, a lot better than she does because of this change argument, because he is more change than she is.” Got it?

The big story in the world this weekend remained the crisis in Pakistan. Responding to reports that Musharraf is making a number of concessions in the face of international pressure, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on This Week to discuss what remained to be done.

“President Musharraf still has extremely important steps to take beyond the ones that he talked about--he needs to make sure these elections go forward, he needs to lift the state of emergency--but we’re standing with democratic principle in Pakistan when we say there have to be free and fair elections; we’re standing with principles of moderation when we try to bring moderate forces together; we’re standing with principles of fighting extremism when we help allies create forces that can beat back these very violent people who have tried to kill president Musharraf, who took the Red Mosque and killed many Pakistanis.”

In domestic news, the presidential election marches on. Barack Obama was interviewed for the entire hour by Tim Russert on pretty much every topic imaginable. It’s worth taking the time to check out the transcript and take a look at the only candidate with a realistic shot at derailing the Clinton campaign from the Democratic side. (Also see Kristol on Obama's performance here).

Mike Huckabee showed up on Face the Nation to talk about his resurgent candidacy and the all-important martial arts movie star endorsement.

“Well, we like to think that maybe the Chuck Norris endorsement--people are now afraid not to vote for me. But whatever the reason, I can tell you this, Bob, it's on fire. And in Iowa earlier this week, we would have two and three times--sometimes four times the size of crowds we were anticipating or prepared for. In New Hampshire it's been the same thing. And these are not just people who kind of come casually. These are folks who are ready to sign up, and who are ready to walk through eight feet of snow to get to the polls. We've had to upgrade our Web server three times in one week. We've had to hire people to answer the phones and come in and open the mail. So something's working. I don't know all to explain it myself. I think it's a combination of a lot of people praying and a lot of people working, but it's really happening, and it's pretty exciting for us.”

Also notable, John McCain discussed his shock at the news that a key leader of the Christian right was endorsing Rudy Giuliani during his interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

“As I said about Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Mayor Giuliani, I’m not often rendered speechless, but I was at this event. … I’m still, I’m still surprised by it, and I’ll probably be surprised by it for as long as I live. [Why?] Look, for obvious reasons; Pat Robertson has usually advocated support for people that have a strong pro-life position, among other [issues]. I wasn’t the only person who was surprised in America.”

Fred Thompson showed upon Meet the Press this Sunday, sharing, among other things, his thoughts on the problem posed by Iran:

"Well, sometimes you're faced with two very bad decisions, and those are two very bad decisions. But what happens if, if a country like this, who talks in terms of the 12th imam coming back and maybe millions of people dying and so forth, including their own people. It would be, you know, on balance, it would be apparently OK with them as long as, as they would do the right thing, you know, from their own warped religious standpoint. And what would happen if they, if they sent a missile with a nuclear warhead and, and hit Israel? What would happen if they did the same to our people in the field with some kind of attacks by a nuclear weapon? What would happen then? What would happen if they held that whole region hostage in terms of oil? And oil, you know, which now, you know, $90 to $100 a barrel, much, much higher than that. Those are bad, bad circumstances and situations. I mean, that's why most people with good judgment don't run for president, I suppose."

The roundtables of both Fox News Sunday and This Week focused on Hillary Clinton and her response to the attack she weathered in the Democratic debate this week. Brit Hume pointed out that Senator Clinton’s mishandling of the debate’s aftermath is not without precedent:

"There’s something quite familiar about this, that those of us who covered Bill Clinton might remember, and that is, very often the Clintons are fumbling and inept in their first response when something goes wrong. Who can forget the famous … speech that Clinton gave at the height of the Lewinsky scandal; I thought it was the worst political speech I’d ever heard, it didn’t go over very well, he was all angry, but boy did he adapt after that. And he ended up surviving all that and moving on and now he’s the president of the world in the eyes of many people."

And Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson took a guess as to why Hillary isn’t pandering to the base of her party like some of her opponents:

"I also don’t think you should underestimate that some of her slipperiness, particularly on foreign policy issues, is preserving options as president that she’ll need. Both Obama and Edwards have not been particularly responsible on Iran, not particularly responsible on some of the Iraq related debate. She’s leaving herself room, she’s looking towards November, maybe an ability to run in that environment not jus the primary."

Iran was the topic of the day on the Sunday Morning talk shows. Republican presidential hopeful John McCain laid out the basic problem to George Stephanopoulos on This Week, saying

“This is the most unstable part of the world right now. The Iranians have dedicated themselves to a certain proposition, and that is the extinction of the state of Israel. They continue to foment unrest and terrorism in the region, they support terrorist organizations, so this is a major challenge for America.”

On Face the Nation, Sen. Carl Levin explained how he would take care of the Iranian problem:

“I think the sanctions are the right way to go. A lot of diplomatic pressure, a lot of economic pressure. Most importantly, keep the world together against Iran. Right now we've got most of the world, I think just about every country, that does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. It's in no one's interest that they have it, and I think most countries, including Russia, as well as Israel, obviously, but other countries in the region are not going to stand by and just simply watch if Iran gets to the point where they actually are getting to a nuclear weapon.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham wasn’t sure that sanctions are the most effective way to handle Iranian ambitions:

“Well, I have a little different take. I think Russia's sending all the wrong signals to Iran. When the Russian president goes to Iran and does a news conference with the Iranian president, embraces him, calls for other nations not to consider attacking Iran, it sends the wrong signal. I think the United Nations efforts to sanction Iran have been pitiful because of Russian--Russia and China vetoing a resolution. The European Union has some sanctions; they're fairly weak.”

And on Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol chided Sen. Barack Obama and his Democratic colleagues for his naïve (lack of a) response to Iran’s increased activity within Iraq’s borders.

“Is the position of the Democratic party and Senator Obama that the Revolutionary Guard sends those rockets into [Iraq], trains fighters to fire against and try to kill … American soldiers, and we’re to do nothing. Nothing. No sanctions, no pressure, just talk to them, try to persuade them to be nice guys. Is that really the position the Democratic party wants to take?”

Also on Fox News Sunday, there was this exchange between first lady Laura Bush and Chris Wallace inspired by an item that appeared last week on THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD:

John McCain made an appearance on Face the Nation this Sunday, laying out just how he would deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions:

I would say that the Iranians can't have a nuclear weapon, in my view. But I also believe that we've got a lot of things to do--that we could do, including getting other nations together to impose meaningful sanctions, painful sanctions on the Iranians, which I think could have a beneficial effect. I'm very pleased that the new president of France's leadership on this role. There's enough economic and political clout amongst European countries and other nations in the world who share our common values and ideals and goals to put enormous pressures on the Iranians.

On Fox News Sunday, House minority leader John Boehner pointed out the slippery slope Democrats are hoping to create by its massive expansion of S-CHIP, explaining “What we believe is that we ought to be insuring poor children first. … If you look at what the Democrats are trying to do, they’re trying to create a much larger share of health coverage in America run by the government. Most people don’t want government run health insurance.”

This Week’s roundtable took on the newest addition to Al Gore’s trophy cabinet, the Nobel Peace Prize. In many ways, this exchange is symbolic of the media’s exceptionally ignorant take on global warming, portrayed here by Sam Donaldson:

George Will: The panel does the science. [Gore] does the hyperbole that gets people to pay attention to the science. … The [IPCC] says ‘over the next century we might anticipate a one foot increase in the sea levels,’ approximately what we’ve had since 1860 without a planetary crisis. Mr. Gore says ‘20 feet!’ Hence the scene in his movie where Ground Zero is under water, because he assumes that all of the ice in Greenland melts. Which, the scientists say, could happen in a thousand years or more.

Sam Donaldson: Well, wrong, wrong. There are now studies which suggest that within 30 years the polar icecap may melt.

George Will: It’s not polar. We’re talking about Greenland.

Sam Donaldson: Well it’s near enough for government work.

Meet the Press did something interesting this week, spending an entire hour talking with Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint about their new book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors. Among the many good points Cosby made was this one, on the mindset of the single mother:

If a young girl says, "I want to have a baby because I want something that, that loves me," that young lady is saying something. And we've got to talk to her about herself and her idea of love. She hasn't graduated from high school, she's willing to, to have a child. All of these character corrections are not being done while record companies are putting out records inviting people to continue that kind of behavior, to, to not talk about get an education. It's just as easy to put that to a rhythm.

For a real-life telling of one such story, make sure to read David Simon’s The Corner, a harrowing account of a year in the life of an inner city family. If Cosby can do something to change the mindset of such families, we’ll all be better off.

The demise of Newt Gingrich’s campaign before it even began was probably the biggest story of the week, and the former speaker of the House took to This Week to explain his reasoning:

“The McCain-Feingold Act criminalizes politics. … well, we learned yesterday morning, this was the decisive moment: I had taken leave from Fox, Randy Evan had taken leave from his law firm, we had a website set up to launch on Monday, and we were informed yesterday morning that if I had ANY communication with American Solutions after I became a candidate, it was a criminal offense. … American Solutions is technically a 527, which is a form of fundraising which allows us to develop ideas. We’ve said publicly that any polling data we release we’re releasing to both parties; we launched a workshop Thursday night and all day Saturday we had 35 different workshops being broadcast to over 2000 locations; it’s an effort to reach out on a bipartisan basis … it’s really a serious effort to say, ‘can we begin a national conversation among all people focused on solutions.’ And I’m very proud of it and we’ve had about a year of work go into it and I thought there was a way that you could continue the momentum of those ideas while I began to prepare a presidential campaign. What we learned yesterday morning was it is literally a ‘go to jail’ criminal activity.”

As Byron York points out, Gingrich probably should have known about this before the eve of his rollout. And it might not be true; Gingrich could have realized he simply had no chance by making his entry this late.

Over at Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol discussed his newfound hope for the Republicans in 2008 in the wake of the most recent Democratic debate:

“Because the Democratic candidates have more passion in conducting the war on smoking than the war on terror. Most of them want to give up in Iraq, they don’t want to do anything serious to stop Iran from going nuclear or from killing American soldiers in Iraq, they want to increase taxes, they don’t want to be at all serious about illegal immigration. I think Republicans have a good shot in ’08 running against that agenda.”

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton made the rounds this weekend, appearing on several of the Sunday morning talk shows from her home in Chappaqua, New York. Sporting a brown blazer on top of a green shirt, Senator Clinton was bubbly and boisterous, and at times confusing.

Clinton made one puzzling statement on This Week, telling George Stephanopoulos “When my husband wanted to go and do what was necessary to end ethnic cleansing and to stop the spread of violence in Europe, he tried to get congressional approval and under the Republican Congress was unable to do so. He thought it important to put together a coalition for Bosnia and Kosovo, which he did.” I’m unclear as to which ethnic cleansing in Europe Clinton was itching to stop but the Republican Congress prevented. Surely it wasn’t the air war in Kosovo, which had wide, bipartisan support. Consider this headline from a CNN.com story back in 1999: “Clinton: Serbs must be stopped now; U.S. on verge of attack; divided Senate to unify on Kosovo mission.”

Perhaps she’s referring to the Croatian ethnic cleansing of Serbs in 1995? I kind of doubt it; then-President Clinton was less than impressive in dealing with that situation. Here’s what Charles Krauthammer had to say about Clinton’s foreign policy dealings in a column summing up his administration’s standing in the humanitarian realm:

“[A]t the time, the U.S. did not stop or even protest the Croatian action. The Clinton Administration tacitly encouraged it. Croatia was being advised by a shadowy group of retired American officers who had been sent to Croatia to help it fight against the Serbs.

No denunciation. No sanctions. No bombing. No indignant speeches about ethnic cleansing and the slaughter of innocents. In fact, in justifying the bombing of Serbia, Clinton made an indirect reference to this Croatian campaign when he credited the "courageous people in Bosnia and in Croatia" who "fought back" against the Serbs and "helped to end the war." Indeed, they did. Croatia's savage ethnic cleansing so demoralized the Serbs that they soon agreed to sign the Dayton peace accord of 1995.”

Anyway, it’s unclear to me exactly what Clinton was referring to. It would have been nice if Stephanopoulos would have pushed her on that statement.

Over at Meet the Press, Clinton again refused to condemn MoveOn.org’s attack on General Petraeus when given the chance, instead demanding that all “attacks” on public officials’ patriotism be condemned.

“I don't condone anything like that, and I have voted against those who would impugn the patriotism and the service of the people who wear the uniform of our country. I don't believe that that should be said about General Petraeus, and I condemn that. I didn't think it should've been said about Senator Cleland or Senator Kerry. I think it's important that we end this kind of attacks on the patriotism of those who serve our country.”

On Fox News Sunday, Clinton tried to reemphasize her leftward swing on the war by pointing out that she’d cut off funding for the troops, regardless of how much danger it put them in, in order to end the conflict a little sooner.

Clinton: “I will not vote for any funding that does not move us toward beginning to withdraw our troops, that does not have pressure on the Iraqi government to make the tough political decisions that they have. …”

Wallace: “But senator, some of this money, as you will know, goes to protect our troops from mines, and IEDs. No matter how you feel about the war, how can vote to cut them off when they’re still on the front lines?”

Clinton: “I think the best way to protect our troops is to start bringing them home.”

On Meet the Press this weekend, Chuck Todd used this analogy to describe the "complicated" relationship between MoveOn.org and the Democratic party:

MoveOn is sort of like this old friend of the Democratic Party. It's as if it's, you know, your, your teen - your - a friend of yours from high school, and you don't mind hanging out with them back in high school, and then they keep showing up at your parties, and they get a little drunk and obnoxious, but you'll still - you're afraid to criticize them because they know too much about you or something.

The Secretary of Defense made the rounds this weekend, appearing on both Fox News Sunday and This Week. Gates pointed out to Chris Wallace that political progress is coming along at a slightly better pace than the media cares to acknowledge, noting that "Although some of these laws haven’t been passed that we’ve put as part of the benchmarks and so on, things are actually happening in terms of oil revenues being shared, provincial empowerment, Baathists from Saddam’s army being brought back into the army. So some of these things that we refer to as reconciliation are taking place on the ground." On This Week, Gates pointed out some of the flaws in Jim Webb’s efforts to micromanage the war:

"It really is a backdoor way to try and force the president to accelerate the drawdowns. … We would have to cobble together units from various smaller units and individuals that wouldn’t have trained together. These are a number of the force management issues that we would have to deal with, and you end up with a force that goes in, we would have to gap unit--we would have gaps in the combat operations where a unit would be pulled out before its replacement got there, there might be a matter of weeks there and you wouldn’t have any overlap that we use for situational awareness and so on. So the point is, we would have to manage the force by individuals not by units."

Jon Kyl used his time on Face the Nation to draw some attention to the consequences of rapid withdrawal as advocated by most of the left.

"I don't know of any responsible foreign policy or military analyst that doesn't appreciate that a premature withdrawal would have severe national security consequences. The president has talked about it, Secretary Gates has talked about it, General Petraeus has talked about it. Start with Iran. Leaving a vacuum in Iraq for Iran to fill would have disastrous consequences for us. The genocide that would likely--and ethnic cleansing that would probably occur if the Iraqi forces are not able to keep peace and stability there would be blood on our hands, in effect. We went in there and bought it, and as Colin Powell said, when you buy it, you own it then. The consequences to our own security by al-Qaeda having a place to plan and a safe haven for their work we can't predict, but we know that it would be disastrous to have a place for al-Qaeda to be safe. All of these things would be horrible consequences for a premature--as the result of a premature withdrawal."

Over at Meet the Press, Michael Gordon talked about the progress that has been made since the beginning of the surge. The Cobra II author was somewhat optimistic about conditions as they stand now, telling Tim Russert

MR. GORDON: Well, I spent most of the summer in Iraq in Diyala province and then south of Baghdad, and really a lot has changed on the security front in Iraq. And there's been a very important development which has been the enabling of the Sunni tribes and some of the former insurgents. This is not just in Anbar. And there's a very delicate political game under way right now to try to find a way to connect these disparate Sunni groups who are working with the American military, with the Maliki government, and that's a work in progress. It's really just in the early phases.

MR. RUSSERT: If we, in fact, are arming the Sunnis and we’ve already armed the Shiites, are we arming both factions in a civil war?

MR. GORDON: Well, we’re not arming these groups. They’re not being given arms by the Americans, but you’re pointing to one of the very real risks. I mean, the potential here is by organizing these Sunni groups in Baquba and...(unintelligible)...and...(unintelligible)...and all sorts of places in Iraq, we do have a mechanism to provide local security and really to drive out al-Qaeda of Iraq. The downside is unless this becomes institutionalized and these people become either Iraqi police or somehow approved by the Iraqi government, we might be setting the stage for more intensified civil war.

Later in the program on the NIE and the surge:

MR. GORDON: Well, the natural life of the surge, if you were to do nothing and just let it run its course, would be around March or April. Because at that point the troop levels in Iraq need to—will decrease unless they extend the tours further, which they’re—have already ruled out doing, going beyond 15 months. So force levels will begin to recede, and indeed, that’s anticipated by General Petraeus’ two-year campaign plan which he’s projected out for the summer.

MR. GORDON: But there’s really—in the latest N.I.E., people are focused on the message that there’s not political reconciliation at the national level. But there was a second message in the N.I.E., and the N.I.E. said that a large-scale withdrawal of American forces and a change of the mission from fighting counterinsurgency to advising the Iraqis and just going after al-Qaeda would erase the security gains that were made over the summer so far. So that’s something that also has to be taken into account in this upcoming congressional debate.

MR. RUSSERT: So what do you do? If, in fact, you stop the surge, you could erase some of the gains you’ve made. And yet, we do not have the capacity to continue the surge because of the strain on our military.

MR. GORDON: Well, the surge will run its course, and then, as Tom said, we’ll begin to reduce our forces. There’s no question we’re going to reduce our forces, and it’s going to be more than 5,000 next year. The issues is at what pace these forces are reduced, what their mission is—no one likes to talk about the mission, they simply talk about the numbers game—and how this is connected up with the politics of Iraq.

And finally Richard Engel had this to say about calls for an American withdrawal:

And going back to, to their points, if you pull back the troops, the troops themselves are going to be furious. They have done so much and worked so hard and sacrificed so much that if you start pulling them back because of political debates and domestic pressure in the United States, they’re going to be livid. They’re not going to thank the Americans, and they’re probably going to end up blaming Democrats, who said, “We never got a chance to complete the mission and all of our hard work hasn’t been accomplished.” So I think there’s a real risk if you draw them—draw the troops down and don’t give them a new mission that they’re going to feel that they were just used and, and, and manipulated.

On This Week, guest host Terry Moran went after Virginia Senator Jim Webb, one of the foremost proponents for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

“[Video Clip] Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch: If coalition soldiers were to leave, having fought hard for that terrain, after denying the enemy that sanctuary, what would happen is the enemy’d come back. He’d start building the bombs again, he’d start attacking the locals again, he’d start exporting that violence into Baghdad, and we’d take a huge step backwards.

Terry Moran: So whatever security progress has been achieved, purchased with American sacrifice, you’d give up?

Jim Webb: I don’t think it’s a question of giving anything up. It’s a question of how you fight a guerrilla war and how you use your troops.

On Fox News Sunday Chris Wallace took Bill Moyers, revered liberal icon, to task for sloppy reporting. Responding to a Moyers letter (in which the veteran PBS journalist complained about having his facts questioned), Wallace lectured:

“If you want to find out about someone’s religious beliefs, a good first step might be to ask him. If you had talked to Rove as I did, you would have found out he reads a devotional every day, and the biggest charitable contribution he ever made was to his church. Of course, you never called Rove. That’s Reporting 101, but it would have gotten in the way of a tasty storyline about a nonbeliever flimflamming the Christian Right. I guess, Bill, reporting is easier when you don’t worry about the facts.”

This Sunday ABC’s This Week featured the first debate in Iowa among all of the Republican candidates. As with every other similar event so far in the presidential campaign, this was less a debate than parallel press conferences; very few moments of interaction occurred between the candidates, and everyone seemed frustrated with their amount of face time.

George Stephanopoulos, the moderator, opened the event by confronting Mitt Romney with a robo-call paid for by the Sam Brownback campaign. The message highlighted Romney’s pro-choice history, but the former Massachusetts governor dismissed the calls as "desperate " and "negative,"--the back and forth between Brownback and Romney got a little testy. As Romney explains--in a somewhat peevish tone of voice--"I was pro, pro-choice; I am now pro-life.… I changed my position." He gets some support from the crowd when he admits to being tired of the "holier than thou " attitude of his opponents on the issue. When a statement Romney made about Rudy Giuliani’s stance on social issues is brought up, Romney backtracks a little, saying that the former New York City mayor should be allowed to voice his own thoughts, and Rudy gladly does so:

"I support the second amendment. … I clearly believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, though I do support domestic partnerships and still do. A contractual relationship. And I believe the best way we can have common ground in this debate that you’re hearing is if we put our emphasis on reducing abortions and increasing the number of adoptions, which is something I did as mayor of New York City. But I think ultimately that decision that has to be made is one that the government shouldn’t make."

In one of the odder moments of the debate, McCain tried to connect abortion to his main strength, national security, by saying that America’s approach to abortion "says very much what kind of a country we are in our respect for human life; whether it be here in the United States, or whether it be in China or Bangladesh or the Congo, or anywhere else in the world."

Ron Paul spoke about the war in Iraq much as he has in the past, announcing he would "Just come home. … We went in there illegally, we did not declare war, it’s lasting way too long. … We shouldn’t be there, we oughta just come home." The libertarian has a disproportionate amount of supporters in the audience; though he’s polling at just two percent, according to the ABC/Washington Post poll cited at the beginning of the debate, he definitely has more than two percent of the audience cheering for him. Rep. Duncan Hunter is given a chance to respond, and makes a strong case for the American presence in Iraq.

"I watched the Democrat debate. I watched them say, as my colleague has said, just bring them home, come home, and it was a race to see who could stampede for the exit the quickest. And you know something? The Marines in Anbar province, which is almost half of Iraq, have turned that situation around. They’ve brought the communities there fighting on our side against al Qaeda. [Massive cheers, easily louder than Paul’s defeatist friends.] Not a single Democrat candidate paused in their rush for the exit to say to our Marines, ‘Good job. You guys are fighting and achieving with blood, sweat, and tears what this country needs.’ We’ve got our best military leadership in Iraq right now; we’re standing up the Iraqi military, the 129 battalions, when they are stood up, reliable and battle ready, they rotate onto the battlefield they displace American heavy combat forces. That’s the right way to lead, not a stampede for the exits."

The response from the crowd was impressive and made Paul’s support seem minimal by comparison. The rest of the candidates touched on the topic: McCain warned that if we don’t get the job done right the first time, we’ll just have to go back; Giuliani mentioned that in the Democratic debate, not one of the candidates used the phrase "Islamic terrorism"; Romney broke out one of the best lines in the debate (and elicited some chuckles from the crowd) when he mocked Barack Obama’s foreign policy plan--"I had to laugh at what I saw Barak Obama do. In one week he went from saying he’s going to sit down for tea with our enemies, but he’s going to bomb our allies. He’s gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week."

The main talking point for Democrats this week was that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales needs to go. After admitting he doesn’t care what David Petraeus has to say about Iraq this September ,Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold had this to say on Fox News Sunday about Gonzales:

“If the attorney general has committed perjury, or has made false statements to Congress, or has obstructed justice, certainly there should be a special counsel to determine if charges should be brought. Why wouldn’t you do this on such an important matter?”

On This Week, Utah’s Orrin Hatch countered that the Democrats should take a deep breadth and get back to the business of passing legislation.

“Look, to have a crime of perjury under the federal code … you’ve got to have a person who makes statements that he really does not believe are true, and frankly, nobody can say that about the testimony of Judge Gonzales.”

And Face the Nation featured two more Senators going on and on about the AG, but Bob Schieffer also helmed a segment on an issue that, if I had to guess, far more Americans actually care about: sports. Talking about the recent spate of scandals in the world of sports (Michael Vick’s indictment on drug fighting charges; Barry Bonds’s steroid-fueled assault on Hank Aaron’s home run record nearing its end; and the NBA official who may have gambled on games he himself was officiating), the Kansas City Star’s Jason Whitlock said that athletes are entertainers nowadays, and we shouldn’t put them on the pedestal that athletes once rested upon:

“I think that perhaps our expectations as fans, as citizens here in America, we have to change our expectations for athletes. They are entertainers and celebrities like the movie stars, and we need to treat them as such and not hold them to pretend like they have some integrity that other celebrities have. It's just not going to happen. I look at Kobe Bryant and the problems he experienced. He's basically a child TV star, and that's why he's been so immature. He got taken off to LA as a 17-, 18-year-old kid, given a bunch of money. What do you expect? This happens in TV, and we see these kids implode, and that's what's happened with Kobe Bryant. So I just think we need to recognize that the days of athletes holding such a high place in our society, those days are over. They've been hijacked by money and fame, and they're not coming back.”

Meet the Press featured a relatively boring all-panel episode, but there was one pretty handy insight offered by the Los Angeles Times’s Ron Brownstein. Speaking of the Democratic primary, Brownstein said,

“I disagree with both Dan [Balz, of the Washington Post] and John [Harwood, of the Wall Street Journal] that John Edwards winning Iowa would fundamentally change the race. It would change the race if he can--if he's able to follow it up in New Hampshire or thereafter, which is a challenge for him in particular, and for Southern candidates historically, in general, have not done well in New Hampshire. The Clinton campaign, I think, would rather have John Edwards do well in Iowa because of the belief that he is less likely to translate that into future success. Now, if Edwards crumbles in Iowa because of the difficulty of sustaining local support when he's not run--polling well nationally, the risk to Hillary Clinton is that Obama could win Iowa, and with the momentum from Iowa, going into New Hampshire, a state where he already leads among independent voters, though he trails among Democrats, that, it would seem to me, is a much greater risk to her than having John Edwards win and, in effect, potentially--unless he can translate it elsewhere--taking Iowa off the table, the way a Tom Harkin did. It--Iowa becomes much more of an all-or-nothing event for Hillary Clinton if John Edwards loses ground.”

Between Meet the Press and Face the Nation, viewers of the Sunday morning talk shows were given a glimpse of the deep divisions in the Senate's Democratic caucus. On Meet the Press, Sen. Russ Feingold announced he

“will be shortly introducing a censure resolution of the president and the administration. One, on their getting us into the war in Iraq and their failure to adequately prepare our military and the misleading statements that have continued throughout the war in Iraq. And the second, on this administration's outrageous attack on the rule of law, all the way from the illegal terrorist surveillance program to their attitude about torture, which we heard a little bit about today on this show. This administration has assaulted the Constitution.”

Feingold's resolution seems to annoy Majority Leader Harry Reid, who (after preemptively accusing Republicans of obstructionism on a bill that hasn’t even been introduced yet) announced on Face the Nation that he wouldn’t be throwing the weight of his office behind the effort.

“We have so many other things to do, the president's already--has the mark of the American people that he's the worst president we've ever had, and I don't think we need a censure resolution in the--in the Senate to prove that. We have to do ... at this stage, Russ is going to have to make his case as why we are going--should do that rather than do our appropriation bills, finish the defense authorization bill, homeland security appropriation bill.”

Over at Fox News Sunday, Fran Townsend, the president's Homeland Security advisor, discussed the National Intelligence Estimate and the media's reporting on it.

“I think we need to step back for a moment Chris and understand what the NIE says in the paragraph just before the one you read is that the U.S. worldwide global counterterrorism operations have constrained al Qaeda’s ability to attack and that al Qaeda believes that the homeland is now a more difficult target to attack. That said, there’s no question that as we keep them on the run, we’ve also gotten stronger; we have more capability now to bring them to justice, to capture them, and we’ve enjoyed quite a bit of success working with our allies like Pakistan. There’s no question that they’ve stepped back.”

Also on Fox News Sunday, WEEKLY STANDARD editor Bill Kristol incurred the wrath of the left wing blogosphere when he suggested that the Democratic field had “gone left” by agreeing to appear at YearlyKos.

The Daily Kos, Think Progress, and a host of other lefty blogs seem to be shocked that someone might question the respectability of Markos Moulitsas--the man who, "three or four years ago," was celebrating the deaths of four American contractors in Fallujah:

“I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.”

Is that the kind of thing respectable people say?

Iraq was once again the main topic on the Sunday shows. Over at Fox News Sunday, WEEKLY STANDARD contributor Frederick Kagan took on Democratic notions that no political progress is being made in the troubled country.

“I think we’ve focused excessively on centralized legislation, which is one of the hardest things to do given the makeup of the Iraqi government. And we have a problem that we’ve got a huge amount of political progress taking place at the grassroots in Iraq--especially in Anbar, but not just in Anbar--that isn’t accounted for in these benchmarks. So the question is at the same time as you have people demanding that we change our military strategy from month to month they’re insisting that we continue to pursue the same political strategy all through without any changes or any accounting for variations in the situation in Iraq. It doesn’t make sense.”

On Meet the Press, Senators Lindsey Graham and Jim Webb shared this testy exchange over the war.

John McCain’s collapsing presidential campaign has been the most important development in the race for 2008 in recent weeks. Karen Tumulty of Time magazine summed up his predicament on Face the Nation.

“Well, of course, you never say never in politics. But the real question here, at least for me, is where does any new support for John McCain come from? And where does any new money come from? Who is really going to want to be writing checks to this campaign that has shown that, you know, all they can do is waste money? And I think that what's interesting is how little this has seemed to affect the rest of the field. Mitt Romney is down in the national polls, but everywhere you go in those early states, people tell you he's running the best campaign on the ground.”

On Face the Nation two senators argued over the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence (among other topics). Utah's Orrin Hatch laid out the Republican case for the president's intervention, arguing that George W. Bush's actions were not nearly as egregious as Bill Clinton's pardons.

"I think both President Clinton and President Bush had an absolute right to grant pardons if they wanted to constitutionally. The only difference between the Clinton and the Bush pardons is in the case of the FALM, the Puerto Rican terrorists, case of Rich and Pinkus Green. In the case of the two, who paid $200,000 to Hugh Rodham, these--two of them were fugitives from justice, 16 of them were terrorists, and the other two, it seemed to me, may have bribed their way through."

Sen. Chuck Schumer explained why so many Democrats are bothered by the president's decision, and hinted that the Senate Judiciary Committee might call Patrick Fitzgerald for testimony about the case and the commutation.

"I've spoken to Senator Leahy about this, [and what] we're thinking of doing is calling Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, before us. You know, he's not allowed to talk about what happened before the grand jury, but he did interview the president and the vice president not before a grand jury, and he might have some very interesting things to say. He issued a rare statement after the commutation that was very harsh in condemning it, and with good reason. The average guidelines, the Justice Department guidelines in these types of situations call for 30 to 37 months in prison. That's what Libby got, and so there are thousands and thousands of people who committed the same crime who are sitting in jail, and Scooter Libby is not. And that's just not fair. That's not equal justice before the law."

On Fox News Sunday, Bill Kristol and Juan Williams debated the benefit of Bill Clinton attaching himself to his wife's primary campaign. According to Kristol,

"I would say that if I had a choice, just in terms of who I would like to think about occupying the White House for the next four years, I'd kind of prefer Barack and Michelle Obama to Bill and Hillary Clinton.… If you're a Democrat and you want change do you really want the Clinton's coming back with all the questions and baggage that raises?"

Williams countered,

"People are concerned about Hillary as a polarizing figure; someone who energizes the Republicans in a way that nobody else on the Democratic side might. Given that the political landscape at the moment favors the Democrats overwhelmingly, the argument might be, 'Why nominate Hillary?' She is the one Democrat who could actually lose. If Bill Clinton is standing there, Bill Clinton, suddenly people say 'well, they're experienced, Bill Clinton is a part of this, we have a positive feeling about Clinton.' It might actually give her a boost."

There was an interesting debate on Fox News Sunday over the fairness doctrine (the FCC regulation that required broadcasters to give equal time to opposing views and that met its demise 20 years ago). Mike Gallagher, a conservative radio talk show host, offered one possible explanation for renewed interest on the left for reviving the doctrine:

"It's an antiquated, 1949 dinosaur that would basically make radio stations try to keep up with conservative views vs. liberal views, and frankly it's just a transparent effort by, sort of, whiny liberals to silence the opposition. They don't like the heat that they've gotten from talk radio, particularly over the illegal immigration debate. Talk radio has widely been credited with sort of galvanizing the American public, and so liberals who don't like what we've accomplished in talk radio want to have the government mandate speech. It's unconstitutional, and it's un-American."

Mark Green, the head of Air America (the liberal talk network that declared bankruptcy near the end of 2006) made his case for the return of government regulation:

"My goal, and the goal of that Center for American Progress story, is that, gee, if we're going to give this [radio spectrum] away for free, at least broadcasters fulfill your promise to hear both sides and have local hearings for license renewals. Right now, three companies for example, Cumulus, Salem, and Citadel, have 1,000 hours of conservative talk and zero of progressive. … 1,000 to zero isn't fair and balanced."

Of course, the real point here is that liberal talk radio is not a viable business model, failing everywhere it goes. As Rich Lowry pointed out in his column earlier this week,

The report of the Center for American Progress on 'The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio' marks the latest phase in liberaldom's grappling with conservative talk radio. First came the attempts to create a liberal Limbaugh--Mario Cuomo, Jim Hightower, et al.--that fell flat. Then an entire left-wing network, Air America, was founded, and foundered. So there's only one option left--if you can't beat them, and you won't join them, you can agitate for government to regulate them.

On Meet the Press, Chuck Todd summed up the political ramifications of the collapse of George W. Bush's comprehensive immigration package:

The big news on the Sunday circuit this week was Joe Lieberman's declaration on Face the Nation that "we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq.'' You can watch the video here, and here's an excerpt of Lieberman's statement:

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just act--ask you about Iran. You brought up Iran. What should we do? Because we continue to hear more and more of just what you're saying. What should the United States do at this point about Iran?

LIEBERMAN: It's very important, Bob, because I didn't just go to Iraq, I went visited throughout the Arab world and Israel. And what you see throughout the Middle East is Iran in battle basically with us and the moderates, supplying the extremists in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas fighting the Fatah faction, our allies among the Palestinians, and, of course, committing terrorists acts against the Israelis. I'm not one to say we shouldn't sit down with the Iranians. I'm glad we did that in Baghdad a while ago. What we did was present them with evidence that we have that I've seen that I believe is incontrovertible that the Iranians are training and equipping the Iraqi extremists to come into Iraq, and they're killing American soldiers and Iraqis. And I think this is a very important moment. If we're going to sit and talk about the Iranians, tell them what we want them to do, which is to stop doing that, because it's killing Americans, we can't leave it at that. I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq. And to me that would include a strike into--over the border into Iran where I--we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.

SCHIEFFER: Well, let's just stop right there, because I think you've probably made some news here, Senator Lieberman. You're saying that, if the--if the Iranians don't let up, that the United States should take military action against them.

LIEBERMAN: I am, and I want to make clear I'm not talking about a massive ground invasion of Iran or--but it--we have good evidence. We've told them, we've said so publicly that the Iranians have a base in Iran at which they are training Iraqis who are coming in and killing Americans. By some estimates they have killed as many as 200 American soldiers. Well, we can tell them we want them to stop that, but if there's any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping for instance their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them. If they don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force and, to me, that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing now.

It will be interesting to see how the Democratic presidential candidates, who say they want out of Iraq but want to be tough on Iran, respond to this statement from Lieberman. Of course, toughness isn't exactly what their base is looking for judging from the flawless logic of this reaction at The Daily Kos:

If Lieberman really wanted to stop what he believes are Iranian-sponsored attacks on our troops, well, then, he should be demanding that we bring our troops home.

But it's not just Lieberman who 'believes' the Iranians are sponsoring attacks on American troops. In addition to the substantial and persuasive--dare we say incontrovertible--evidence of Iranian involvement in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Iran was recently caught "red-handed" supplying arms to the al Qaeda-affiliated Taliban in Afghanistan. We wonder if the Kos community would also demand we bring our troops home from that country in order to stop Iranian-sponsored attacks?

This Week featured interviews with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani and Democratic congressman Jack Murtha. The two offered strikingly different views of America’s role in world affairs. First, Talabani:

We are thankful to the great and glorious American people who liberated us. We think that liberating thirty million Iraqis was a big achievement. While I’m sorry for the blood of American soldiers shed there, and I present my condolences to the families who lost their beloved sons in Iraq. But I think the glorious American people have done it in history many times when they went to Europe and to Asia to liberate those peoples.

Murtha has a more limited, and somewhat less glorious, vision for American policy in Iraq:

The key in my estimation is to start redeployment, force them to change the constitution, force them to understand that America’s not going to step up; what we’ve got to do is what’s best for the American foreign policy, not what’s best for Iraq.

On Face the Nation Republican congressman Jack King gave his opinion on the state of immigration reform, and what he believes the American people want the Congress to do:

I would rather have the current law enforced. I will be introducing legislation of my own in the next several weeks. along with Congressman Smith. But this bill is worse than the current law because it weakens the enforcement provisions, and it gives amnesty to 12 million people who are here illegally. It sets the wrong precedent, it's the wrong thing to do. And even your own poll, Bob, would show that a massive number of Americans, when [asked if] they want deportation, they say yes. So that flies in the face of those first numbers that you already gave.

On Fox News Sunday Newt Gingrich echoed King’s concerns over the state of border security:

Just take this week. An American with tuberculosis shows up at the border. We're in the middle of a debate over immigration and controlling the border. He shows up at the border. The computer says do not let him enter and only deal with him in a hazardous suit. And the border patrol currently is so ill-trained, or the immigration service is so ill-trained, that the guy lets him in — looks at him with his eyeballs and says, "you know, I don't think he looks sick," and lets him in. You learn that there are three illegal terrorists in New Jersey who were in the U.S. for 23 years illegally, intercepted by the police 75 times in the last six years, and it was never indicated that they were here illegally.

Fox News Sunday and This Week both took a long look at second tier Republican candidates claiming to be the only choice for real conservatives this primary season. Mike Huckabee, taking a break from celebrating his wedding anniversary, talked to Chris Wallace about his plan to eliminate the IRS, a tactic sure to endear him to conservatives from coast to coast:

Here’s how the fair tax works: You get rid of income tax, you get rid of all of withholding, you get rid of corporate taxes completely, totally, because those taxes are not really paid by the corporations, they’re passed onto the customer. With a 22 percent embedded tax in the system, you eliminate that, which means that the prices of what you purchase will go down. You replace it with a 23 percent consumption tax. Now, that sounds expensive, but here’s what happens. You only pay when you purchase something new. Whether it’s a product or it’s a service. The point is it’s a completely transparent tax system, it doesn’t increase taxes, it’s revenue neutral, but here’s what it will do: it will bring business back to the United States that’s leaving our shores because our tax laws make it impossible for an American based business to compete.

Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, meanwhile, tried to cement his status as a Washington outsider in this exchange with George Stephanopoulos about the immigration compromise.

Let me tell you what conservatives are concerned about: conservatives are concerned that all the discussion, including on this show, was more of a technical, insider type of fix of the situation and not a real discussion of principle. And the real principle here is that we can’t have a sovereign state that doesn’t control its own borders. We simply have to put that first and make sure that we control our borders so that we can control the situation. Otherwise you’re going to do some kind of compromise or insider sort of deal, here in Washington, D.C.

On the Democratic side of the ledger, Bill Richardson staked out a position to the left of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with regard to Iraq during his appearance on Meet the Press.

Tim, I know this region well. I was U.N. ambassador. Eighty percent of my time was spent on the Iraq issue. I faced down Saddam Hussein, brought back two American hostages. I know the region well. I know the leaders there. I regret not having pushed more diplomatically early on with President Bush. I do regret that. But look where we are now. There's a civil war, there's sectarian conflict. Right now I believe we must withdraw all our troops by the end of this calendar year with no residual forces because our troops today are a target.

The immigration compromise was the top issue on the Sunday morning show this week. On This Week, Fareed Zakaria gave his interpretation of the events:

Both sides have compromised significantly on principles, so it is what legislation in a large, diverse country should be. When people hearken back to the good old days, when there wasn’t polarization, and when people reached across party lines, this is what it produced. … It is not amnesty; to say that these people who you are not going to deport are finally registered with the government and have legal status. Amnesty means “no punishment,” if you look at any dictionary definition of the word. These people have to pay fines, they have to go through very arduous processes, they have to return to their home countries, the fines are not $5,000, it’s probably more like $15,000 fully loaded, it will probably take 13 to 18 years. To call that amnesty is to suggest that there is no option other than deporting them that will satisfy.

Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer were on Fox News Sunday, where they shared their thoughts on the proposal with Chris Wallace. Schumer said,

You have to learn English, pay a fine, go behind everybody else who's been in line. It would probably take about 15 years. So those two are good things, and I think that's a good balance in the bill. I have two problems with it. One, while I certainly believe that immigration--we need to bring in people who have skills, who the economy needs, we also need to take care of families so they can be unified. I think the bill is a little stinting on that. I'd like to see some changes there. But the biggest objection I and many Democrats have, which could be a stumbling block to the whole bill, is this guest worker program. It's an additional program. Hundreds of thousands of people come in. There’re virtually no protections.

Graham echoed those sentiments:

I think we have struck the right balance here. We're securing our borders. We're controlling who gets a job on our terms. As Chuck says, this is by no means forgiveness. This is a probationary sentence for the 12 million” illegal immigrants currently in the country.

On Meet the Press, Newt Gingrich brought some historical perspective to the debate on Iraq:

But notice, there are two things there. First of all, even if you accept that this is a civil war, people have won civil wars. I devoted three novels about winning the American Civil War. And the fact is, civil wars are hard. But we also--I just did a novel on Pearl Harbor and the Second World War. The Second World War was hard. Guadalcanal was hard. If we'd had today's Congress during Guadalcanal, the number of people who had said beating the Japanese is too hard, let's find a negotiated peace, would have been amazing.

Meet the Press also featured an interview with Douglas Brinkley and Michael Deaver about The Reagan Diaries; not particularly newsworthy, but a fun and interesting read nonetheless.

And over at the Face the Nation, Senator Arlen Specter said he believed that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would soon resign:

Well, I think so. I think you already have six Republicans calling for his resignation. I have a sense, Bob, that before the vote is taken that Attorney General Gonzales may step down. … It is a very forceful, historical statement. Votes of no confidence are very rare. More than a century ago, one was leveled against a sitting president. And I think, historically, that is something which Attorney General Gonzales would like to avoid. And the most important thing, though, is the inability of the department now to function. I was about to say, U.S. attorneys met in San Antonio this past week, and there was a lot of criticism, a lot of dissension. And that department is very, very important, functioning for the welfare of our country.

Chris Wallace spent 30 minutes with Rudy Giuliani this morning on Fox News Sunday, leading off the interview with the issue that will present “America’s Mayor” with his biggest challenge in the Republican primary: abortion.

I oppose it, that’s a principle I’ve held for forever and I’ll hold it forever, that’s not gonna change. But I also believe that, in a society like ours where people have very very different consciences about this, it’s best for us to respect each other’s differences and allow for choice. … I am open and will continue to be open to ways to limit abortion. What I am not open to is to removing the right. … If you can find ways to limit abortion, which I would think would be a constructive thing to do, I will probably find a way to support that.

Over at This Week, Barack Obama was the featured guest, and George Will paid the freshman senator from Illinois an exceptional compliment:

He has perfect pitch, I think, for the mood of the country, which is a flinch from the rhetorical vitriol for the mood that is consuming this town. He’s a little like Ronald Reagan in this regard: Reagan used to drive people crazy, in the Democratic party, because they’d say “The public doesn’t agree with him on this or this or this or this, and they vote for him.” They voted for him because they said we like him, he’s not off putting, he’s not frightening, and I think this is another 1980.

Meet the Press spent an hour with John McCain, who was called on yet again to remind the American people of just what’s at stake in Iraq and what failure would mean (namely, chaos).

The consequences of failure, Tim, are that there would be chaos in the region. There's three--two million Sunni in Baghdad. The Iranians would continue to increase their influence, the Saudis would have to help the Sunni, the Kurds would want independence, the Turks will never stand for it. Some people say partition. You'd have to partition bedrooms in Baghdad because Sunni and Shia are, are married. This, this is a very, very difficult situation, but the consequences of failure, in my view, are unlike the Vietnam War where we could leave and come home and it was over, that these people will try to follow us home and the region will erupt to a point where we may have to come back or we will be combating what is now, to a large degree, al-Qaeda, although certainly other--many other factors of sectarian violence, in the region.

Countering McCain’s view was Chuck Hagel, who appeared on Face the Nation and repeated his call for retreat.

That's right, this is a--this is a civil, sectarian war. Yes, al Qaeda's there. Yes, terrorists are there. But they are not the predominant aspect of this. And I'm really sorry to see some of the administration continue to say that this is the [central] front [in the war] on terrorism, this war. It's not. This is a sectarian, civil war.

Meet the Press featured a hour long interview with former CIA director George Tenet. He continued to perform CYA/damage control on Russert’s program, but he also defended the president and his advisers from critics who claimed the executive branch was ginning up intelligence out of thin air to justify the war in Iraq:

Well, Tim, we thought, on the basis of the intelligence that we had, we thought we could declassify more data to make a case that we believed in. It's, it's very, very important for people to understand, Tim, we believed it. All of our partners believed it.

On Face the Nation, Newt Gingrich continued his under the radar run at the presidency, couching the battle with terrorists in the starkest terms possible:

Look, we--I want to say something which is very politically unpopular. We are caught up in a worldwide war against an irreconcilable enemy who seeks to destroy us and will use nuclear or biological weapons if they can get them. And they mean literally destroy us. We had a 12-year-old boy on videotape two weeks ago in Pakistan beheading a man. We had a couple in Britain in July who were prepared to use their eight-month-old baby to get a bomb on an airplane disguised as baby food. We're up against a savagery and a ferocity worldwide that we don't understand. And all I am suggesting is, whether it's Afghanistan, it's Iraq, it's Iran, it is the problems in Syria, it's the 300 people who were killed in Algeria a week ago, the 200 people killed in India a month ago, we had better have a national debate as we did over the Cold War. We didn't debate over the Cold War about Berlin—the Berlin blockade. We debated the larger question: What's the nature of the world? What would it take for the United States to survive and its allies to survive?

Fox News Sunday gave Chris Dodd time to talk about his quixotic run at the White House, and John Boehner used his interview to blame the media for driving the start of the primary season earlier and earlier. On the panel, Brit Hume talked about Hillary Clinton’s recent effort to deauthorize the president’s use of force in Iraq:

Listen, the vote to authorize the war in Iraq is the original sin of this democratic primary election, and Hillary Clinton is guilty of it, and therefore needs to do something to atone for it . . . It is all about positioning herself, it is really not a serious legislative effort.

This Week saw John Edwards recommit to a firm policy of flipflopping (he proudly repudiated his Senate votes on the Iraq War, No Child Left Behind, and the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste site; one gets the sense he wishes he had more positions he could apologize for taking during his Senate career). Tom Tancredo was also interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, and he discussed a wide variety of topics with the ABC newsman, from the philosophical underpinning of hit HBO series The Sopranos to the political ramifications of the French elections. (Just kidding. Tancredo talked about border security.)

Fox News Sunday:
John McCain was the featured guest on Fox News Sunday, and the Arizona senator laid out his vision for a McCain presidency in one quick sentence: “Reform government, fight this Islamic extremist element that challenges the world, and restore integrity to government.” While the Reaganite sound bites may have allayed the fears of some rank and file conservatives, they were probably not quite as happy when he said, “I would probably announce the closing of Guantanamo Bay, I would move those detainees to Fort Leavenworth, I would announce we will not torture anyone, I would announce that climate change is a big issue, because we’ve got some image problems in the world.”

On the roundtable, Bill Kristol mocked George Tenet for his self-serving 60 Minutes interview. “It turns out that George Tenet, in addition to being a mediocre CIA director, is a cry baby. Can you believe that clip on 60 Minutes you showed? Oh, it’s so disgusting that people are criticizing him, it’s hurting his reputation. Give me a break!” Mara Liasson felt that the Democratic debate served little to no purpose, noting “I don’t think the dynamic of this race was changed one iota. … Obama didn’t hurt himself, Hillary came off just fine.”

Meet the Press:
On Meet the Press, Joe Biden was given a chance to show off his famed loquaciousness after being on his best behavior for the Democratic debate. Nothing particularly interesting was said, but if your Sunday feels incomplete without a (60 minute) cup of Joe, click here to check out the full show.

This Week:
Condoleezza Rice was the featured guest on This Week, taking on George Tenet and refusing to rule out a conflict with Iran. Russ Feingold and Sam Brownback also appeared. Feingold took the president to task for daring to disagree with the Democratic Congressional majority. “The American people want us to provide the funds that the president has asked for,” Feingold said, “but they want us to end this war, and the only way to do that is to have some sort of approach, like the timeline in this bill.” Brownback took issue with his colleague’s plan, noting “This is assured defeat. Defeat will happen in America, not Iraq. That’s not what the American people want.”

ABC’s roundtable was just as dismissive of the Democratic debate as Fox's Mara Liasson. George Will remarked “These are not debates; they are parallel press conferences--and not even particularly good press conferences,” while Fareed Zakaria felt “the whole spectacle was somewhat depressing for all of us as voters. The whole thing was so rehearsed, so planned, they say nothing of any interest, they don’t take any risks.”

Face the Nation:
Condi also showed up at Face the Nation, as did Democratic congressman John Murtha, who spoke of impeachment as "a way to influence a president." The Politico's Roger Simon spoke to the wisdom of proceding with an effort to impeach the president:

I don’t think the Democrats want this on the table. For one thing, do they really want Vice President Cheney to become President Cheney? I mean, is that their goal? Secondly, I think they want to fight an election campaign next year. I don't think they want to fight to impeach a president, to prove that he's actually committed high crimes and misdemeanors, to go through a trial in the Senate. I think they just want to win at the ballot box next November.

Face the Nation had the best show of the weekend, managing to squeeze into one tight half hour interviews with one of the fired assistant United States attorneys, two of the senators leading the investigation into the Justice Department, the New York Times’s best columnist, and the head of the insurgent Capitol Hill publication the Politico.

First up was the fired attorney, Bud Cummins, who reinforced the idea that this is not a case of broken laws but of bruised egos:

Well, what they did is they tried to tell the Senate, when the Senate asked them . . . why did you make these unprecedented decisions regarding the United States attorneys, and they have told the United States Senate that they were trying to improve management in the districts and that there were performance issues. And all of us knew that that wasn't true, and--and all the evidence since has shown that the--whatever went on behind the scenes to arrive at these eight decisions was probably petty, maybe personal, and probably had some politics involved in it. But performance wasn't on the table in a respectable way, in the process, when it occurred.

Senator Patrick Leahy followed Cummins, telling Bob Schieffer “You know, this is--our founders devised this system of checks and balances. This administration has been used to going unchecked. The balances kicked in last November, and they're going to have to deal with that reality.” Lindsey Graham was up next, discussing his uncertainty about the constitutionality of forcing the president’s inner circle to testify:

The firing of several United States Attorneys was the big story of the week. Meet the Press featured an interview with Sen. Chuck Schumer, who laid out the Democrats’ case, and took a guess on Alberto Gonzales's prospects. “I think it's highly unlikely he survives,” Schumer said, adding “I wouldn't be surprised if, a week from now, he's no longer attorney general. He has just miscast his role, misperceived his role. Instead of just being the president's lawyer who rubber stamps everything the White House wants, he has a role as attorney general as the chief law enforcement officer for the land without fear or favor.”

When asked if he believed that the U.S. attorneys serve at the will of the president, Schumer replied,

“of course, every president has the right to hire and fire U.S. attorneys at will. Every president, when they come in in a new term, like President Clinton did, basically cleans house and puts in new U.S. attorneys. Ronald Reagan did within his first year, George Bush, the first, did within his first year, and this president, Karl Rove's employer, George Bush, our present President George Bush did it. All the U.S. attorneys were replaced. What's different here is not simply that the president wanting this choice, not that choice, but, in these instances, the evidence is becoming more and more overwhelming that certain U.S. attorneys, and only certain ones, not all of them, but certain U.S. attorneys were fired because either they wouldn't prosecute a case that was politically advantageous to the White House or they were prosecuting a case that was disadvantageous to the White House.”

Republicans are trying to turn the issue back on Schumer, who, in addition to serving on the judiciary committee also acts as the head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Arlen Specter pointed out the apparent conflict of interest:

“Let’s look at what the facts are: Senator Schumer is leading the inquiry. And the day after we had the testimony about Senator Domenici, he puts his name up on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, criticizing, or making the argument, that he ought not to be reelected. I think that the inquiry by the Judiciary Committee ought to have a modicum of objectivity.”

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace got the week started by interviewing former Tennessee senator, and current film and television actor, Fred Thompson about his intentions with regard to the 2008 presidential race. He came off as a true conservative, positioning himself against gay marriage, strongly against gun control, for the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and for allowing individual states to decide the issue of civil unions for gay couples. He told Wallace “We ought to give great leeway to the states and not have federal government and not have the Supreme Court of the United States making social policy that’s contrary to the traditions of this country.” While some GOP primary voters may not be thrilled with his support of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, he made a strong case in positioning himself as a true conservative.

Maxine Waters, one of the chairs of the Out of Iraq Caucus in the House of Representatives, was also a featured guest. She told Wallace that “The Sunnis and Shiites were getting along before the occupation.” Really? Maybe Waters needs a refresher on the war crimes of Saddam Hussein. She should pay special attention to in the annihilation of the marsh Arabs, a Shiite sect that Hussein reduced from 250,000 to approximately 30,000 people during his brutal reign.

In the roundtable, Juan Williams went after the liberal blogosphere and their decision to attack Democrats for attending a debate hosted by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic party, a move that will earn the NPR correspondent no love from Markos Moulitsas and his acolytes. Said Williams,

You don’t like the kind of broadcasting that FOX does, although it’s quite successful and has a legitimate audience, people are listening and being informed on the basis of Fox journalism, and then you say ‘we’re not going to play ball with them.’ To my mind, that is contrary to the principles that should be advocated by anyone who is liberal or progressive, or whatever kind of language they want. You want open and full fledged, full throated debate, that’s what you want. And nobody has said that this wasn’t going to be a legitimate debate with real questions that would put candidates in position to offer real answers.

On Face the Nation, Senators Chuck Schumer and Arlen Specter chatted with Bob Schieffer about the war in Iraq and the attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez. When asked if he would support more troops being sent to the Middle East, Schumer replied,