Smooth Operators

John F. Harris makes the case that we could be in for a contest between cool-rocking pragmatists in era of angry extremism:

Any comparison between Obama and Romney shouldn’t be pushed too far. They are men of different generations, different formative experiences, different cultural tastes, and — no matter their shared instinct for pragmatism — different ideas of what the country needs.

But at the moment they do have a common bond. They both will run this year — and one of them will govern after 2012 — in a political system that demands balancing their own coolness and instinct for compromise against the hot and unyielding temper of the times.

Hat tip to Jim Lusby

Reporter Cast In An Eerie Light

When Watergate reporter Bob Woodward was at the Nixon library in April 2011, I snapped a photo of James Hohmann, a 24-year-old Politico reporter who was taking notes on his laptop. I was gratified to see the other day that Hohmann (who's now following the Republicans around the country) is using the photo on his Twitter account. In the original, that's Paul Reza of St. John's Church on the left.

Birthers And The Big Lie

Two perspectives on Donald Trump, his accusations against the president, and the latest polls. First, from Jonathan Martin at Politico:

With no other Republican hopefuls gaining traction, Trump has become a blinking neon stand-in for a candidate who will go beyond mainstream boundaries and make the case for why Obama isn’t just a bad president presiding over a declining America but perhaps an illegitimate one.

Trump’s mastery of media culture is what’s landed him at least 24 interviews on national network and cable television since his effective debut as a candidate at CPAC in February, providing him with the blanket media attention that his past presidential flirtations never quite enjoyed. But it’s Birtherism that serves as the rocket fuel launching Trump into presidential orbit.

But then Jim Rutenberg, summarizing a New York Times/CBS News poll on the GOP field, cools Trump's jets:

While that might indicate that there is a receptive audience for the real estate mogul Donald J. Trump as he raises questions about Mr. Obama’s citizenship, the poll also pointed to potential roadblocks for him should he pursue a formal candidacy.

Mr. Trump has been getting considerable attention as a possibly strong contender, but just about as many Republicans view him favorably as view him unfavorably — 35 percent favorably and 32 percent unfavorably— and nearly 60 percent of Republicans interviewed said they did not believe he was a serious candidate. (Far more of all voters view him unfavorably — 46 percent — than view him favorably, 25 percent.)

So birtherism hasn't gotten Trump much traction after all. But now that he's taken it mainstream, all those who have taken the birther pledge should at least be held accountable for what they're really saying. They're accusing Barack Obama of the impeachable offense of stealing the presidency by means of fraud and other crimes. They're telling the world that the U.S. doesn't have a legitimate president.

I suppose that it could be construed as some kind of a well-meaning if totally misguided act of patriotism if a sophisticated elite like Trump really believed it, but if not -- if he or anyone else is just saying it to gain an advantage with the 47% of Republicans who have convinced themselves that Obama is a fraud and usurper -- then they should be kept as far from power as possible. The U.S. doesn't need a home-grown version of the big lie.

Mad And M.A.D. In Yorba Linda

Rereading my April 19 post about the war against the Nixon Center by the White House and Bob Haldeman operatives controlling Nixon's foundation in Yorba Linda, I've come to regret suggesting that what is now the un-Nixon center (thanks to angry Watergate revanchists who forked over $2 million of a non-profit organization's assets to diss center president Dimitri Simes) had violated the parties' non-disparagement agreement.

On Monday, the center's journal, "The National Interest," published a post by veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, titled "Diminishing Nixon," about the Nixon-Haldeman foundation's embarrassing, impotent campaign to block the federal government's new Watergate exhibit.

That indeed looked at first like a first strike. But then I reread Ben Smith's analysis at Politico of the foundation's war on Simes, the U.S.-Russia relations expert Richard Nixon chose as center president. Smith names Simes foes such as Tricia Cox (wife of New York GOP chairman Ed Cox) and longtime Cox water carriers Rob Odle (a former CREEP official) and the Nixon White House's Ken Khachigian. All three are foundation board members.

Some of the hits on Simes aren't attributed. If he got wind of the smears as the article was being prepared and concluded that they were coming from persons associated with the foundation, he would naturally have surmised that they considered the agreement they had signed to be (as Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler might have said) inoperative. Whether or not Simes would have been correct in such assumptions, Kalb's blog post would then have been (in the increasingly apropos mutually-assured-destruction language of the Cold War) a Simes counterstrike.

Interviewing Each Other

James Hohmann is a 24-year-old Politico reporter who covered last night's Bob Woodward-Ben Bradlee appearance at the Nixon library. He majored in U.S. history at Stanford and gets assigned stories that require a bit of historical perspective.

As he labored on his laptop, I pestered him with questions about the dramatic changes afoot in the newspaper business (my parents' field and briefly my own) and the role of his scrappy news organization, which prints five issues a week when Congress is in session but seems to be better known for its web site. The president and CEO is former Reagan aide Fred Ryan.

Hohmann smiled ruefully and nodded when I observed that Politico reporters appear to file a lot of copy, as they used to say in the business. From his lengthy report, which he filed within three hours of the end of the event:

In the crowd was John Taylor, the longtime director of the museum and a former chief of staff to Nixon after his presidency.

“Mr. Woodward is the most famous journalist in the world, not an ideological figure by any means, and someone who is integrally, along with his editor Mr. Bradlee, part of the story of those times,” he said beforehand. “And eventually it would look strange if the library didn’t invite people like Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bradlee because, again, the visiting public understands that they’re part of the story.”

Taylor approached Woodward after the event.

Woodward told him that he didn’t want to sugarcoat his message — that Nixon loyalists tried to manipulate history — just because he was speaking at the Nixon Library.

Taylor, who stepped down in 2009 from his museum post and now serves full-time as an Episcopal priest, indicated that he understood and joked with his wife [Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's last chief of staff] about the two of them being “field marshals in the war against history.”

“History will work it out,” he said, expressing confidence that Nixon will be judged better with the passage of time.

My own take on the evening here.

Nixo-Politico

It's Nixon day at Politico, with an extensive story on last night's Woodward and Bradlee traveling salvation show and an exceptionally revealing analysis of the Haldeman foundation's war against the only aspect of the Nixon library's work Nixon actually cared about. More later!

Watergate Breakthrough

Kathy and I were in distinguished company tonight when Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee spoke at the Nixon library. At left is our St. John's friend Paul Reza, who came with his wife, Paula Neal Reza. Nearby was 24-year-0ld James Hohmann, Stanford-educated staff writer for Politico, who flew in from Washington to cover the man-bites-dog story of Woodward and Bradlee giving a talk (moderated by library director Tim Naftali) a few yards from Nixon's Yorba Linda birthplace. The Orange County Register's coverage is here. James' is coming soon, and mine as well.

It's Incredible! It's Disgusting! It's Trump!

Maggie Haberman and Ben Smith wrap up a "what's really up with Trump?" thumbsucker with the following testimony:

“I don’t see Donald Trump trudging around in the snows of Iowa wearing ear flaps and trudging around the country fair,” said a top official at the Southern Baptist Convention, Richard Land. “But look, we live in the celebrity age. He is a celebrity. He's got the name recognition. He’s got the money. He certainly appears to have the moxie. So maybe Americans are ready for a brash New Yorker.”

I'd speculated that Trump's longtime friend and adviser, former Nixon-Reagan operative Roger Stone, was the one who'd nudged him into the swamp of birtherism, where many a 2012 GOP prospect risks getting irretrievably mired. But Haberman and Smith report that Stone denies any direct involvement with Trump's current political activities. That could be because it's true. It also could be because the always controversial Stone doesn't want to end up as a stumbling block for the sufficiently controversial Trump.

Obama In "You Talkin' To Me?" Mode

Mark Knoller, the veteran CBS News radio reporter, had stayed behind in the press room Thursday afternoon in Chicago after listening to an audio feed of President Obama's speech at a fundraiser. Obama's microphone was left on, so Knoller heard his private conversations with home town donors about last week's 11th hour budget deal. "Politico" reports:

Obama, recalling a conversation with Boehner staff: “I said, ‘You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We'll have that debate. You're not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we're stupid? … Put it in a separate bill. … We'll call it up. And if you think you can overturn my veto, try it. BUT DON’T TRY TO SNEAK THIS THROUGH.’ … When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he's just being America's accountant … This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill -- but wasn't paid for … So it's not on the level.”

Victimgate

"Politico" and the Watergate revanchists.

This Romney Hasn't Been Brainwashed

Go here to read about a Republican who isn't willing to call the president of the U.S. a liar and usurper to get nominated.
Hat tip to Politico

Reordering The Universe

Ben Smith profiles my former colleague Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center (I took this photo of Steve with the ambassador of Singapore, Chan Heng Chee, at the last Center dinner I attended in 2009; with typical graciousness, he was squatting):

The 6-foot-5, same-sex-married son of an Air Force master sergeant is the quintessential Washington figure for the new age: a self-made, uncredentialed blogger and social butterfly, intellectual entrepreneur, name-dropper and media networker. He’s both a very new kind of Washington figure — his Washington Note cracked the foreign policy establishment open for the blogosphere back in 2004 — and a very old one, the spiritual descendant of great Washington hostesses like Pamela Harriman and the nearest thing to an inheritor of the largely dead, civil, bipartisan salon of the old foreign policy elite.

“Steve is a really important part of the foreign policy universe, and he deserves a huge amount of credit for reordering that universe,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official...

Palin's Failin'

Politico:

A detailed examination of [Sarah] Palin’s polling in the early going suggests that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the media splash of her late entry into the presidential caucuses and primaries would barely rock the electoral boat. While her endorsement is likely to be a key 2012 prize, pollsters and Republican operatives in the three states repeat the same mantra: Unusual numbers of Republican voters actively dislike her; and among the majority who like her, few think she can serve as president.

Win? That's Just What They EXPECT Us To Do

According to "Politico," in a story filed early Tuesday morning, GOP conservatives like Sarah Palin have  chosen an additional ten moderate or liberal Republican candidates to target in 2010 primaries -- all thanks to Doug Hoffman's impending victory in the New York 23rd. So will that be ten more general election victories for Democrats like Bill Owens, who defeated Hoffman tonight? At this rate, with Sarah's help, by 2020 all Republicans will be just like she: Out of office.

The Reason JFK Named His Brother

I'm sure the President is acutely grateful, even in the midst of the massive bipartisan health care push that will help define his term, for his attorney general's tender conscience:

Aides said Holder himself was so troubled by some of the reports [of alleged abuses by CIA interrogators] that he felt a prosecutor might be needed – even though the move is likely to be viewed as an unwelcome distraction by the White House.

Let's At Least Avoid The Political Torture

If there's one place where President Obama's political and diplomatic interests coincide, it's keeping the controversy over whether the Bush administration illegally sanctioned torture from descending into a partisan witch hunt. While cultural elites may think that an exhibitionist accountability exercise will ennoble the U.S. in the eyes of the world, it's more likely to provoke opportunism among our enemies and bemusement among our friends. At home, it will make it harder for Obama to command the center and rebuff the GOP in the 2010 midterm elections.

Though Nancy Pelosi and other liberal Democrats, seemingly intent on punishing Republicans, want a special panel on alleged torture, Obama and Senate Democratic leaders don't, and they held the line today -- an improvement on several days' mixed signals from Obama. A bright partisan spark was thrown by one of his lieutenants yesterday when House Republicans, angered because Obama released Bush-era memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques (which some call torture), pressed Secretary of State Clinton on charges by Dick Cheney that the Obama administration is covering up evidence that the interrogations worked. She pressed back:

It won't surprise you that I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information.

Ouch! Yet the same day, "Politico" reported:

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a memo to the intelligence community that Bush-era interrogation practices yielded had "high-value information,” then omitted that admission from a public version of his assessment.

So Clinton accused Cheney of being a liar even as it was made clear that her colleagues are spinning the torture story, just like he said. If there was ever a subject in need of a no-spin zone, it's this one. And yet the Clinton-Cheney contretemps is a reliable preview of what Pelosi's process would look like. I say full disclosure on the alleged torture as well as all terrorist plots discerned and thwarted since 2001. If it's still too dangerous to talk about the latter, then it's probably premature to investigate the former and impossible to do so fairly and dispassionately.