(Crossposted from my own blog.)

A lot of people have been pointing out the stupidity of the New York Times' recent decision to pick up the tab for Bill Kristol's career life support. But it's a decision too patently ridiculous for me to not throw in my two cents.

On the one hand, I can sort of understand the rationale behind such a hire. The Times op-ed page is frequently derided as too liberal - or even socialist - by the conservative media (using a strange sort of math that makes Tom Friedman a foreign policy liberal and assumes Maureen Dowd has any kind of political convictions besides a love of Beltway high school gossip). What the Times needs, then, is another David Brooks - a self-styled conservative "intellectual." Kristol's cultivated an image as such an intellectual. And there's got to be somebody in the Times headquarters reading all of the negative reactions to their recent hiring and smugly deciding that if the paper is now pissing off both the left and the right, they must be doing something right.

I wouldn't really call Brooks an intellectual, but at least he has some ability to form opinions independent of the Republican Party. A good op-ed columnist should be able to do that - after all, Times official policy is supposed to bar columnists from outright endorsements. As my favorite NYT columnist, Paul Krugman, said in a recent interview: "In principle, you don't even know which party I favor."

There's no question which party Bill Kristol favors. The guy is a pure GOP talking point machine, through and through. He's spent the last seven years as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration and when the GOP picks a nominee he'll be that nominee's unofficial press secretary throughout the rest of the election.

Despite the image of himself that Kristol has tried to cultivate, he's no intellectual. I'm still waiting for evidence that he's even sentient.

(Crossposted from my own blog.)

You've really got to feel sorry for Mitt Romney right now. This is the guy who is [probably] going to be the Republican nominee and yet he is beset on all sides by indignities within his own party.

Romney's main pitch is that he's a good synthesis of the three legs of the Republican stool, as he'd call it - the corporate lobby (that one's not hard to explain and is perhaps the only thing he's been consistent on throughout his entire career), the theocons (due to his willingness to ditch his previously moderate positions on social issues and wage an all-out pander assault on Christian fundamentalists), and the foreign policy neocons (due to his constant attempts to out-Giuliani Giuliani with mindless blather about radical Jihadists and doubling the size of Guantanamo).

The latest slew of attack ads from the Romney campaign show how little large voting blocs of the Republican Party are buying this pitch. Why settle for a Mormon faux-fundamentalist who used to actually tolerate gay people when you can have Mike Huckabee? Why have John McCain's foreign policy-lite when you can have the actual John McCain? Romney may have been able to take out a piece of Giuliani's advantage by feigning the über-hawk, but McCain's been pretty consistent about that all along.

So now Romney is in a weird position - beset by Huckabee in Iowa and McCain in New Hampshire. And things are getting even more awkward now that McCain is aggressively campaigning in Iowa this week too. The thing is, even this could be part of the cutting-down-Romney-in-NH strategy; Josh thinks that McCain is hoping a third-place finish in Iowa would give him momentum into the granite state. We'll see how doable this is - I'm skeptical that either Huckabee or McCain can unseat Romney in the end since they've got little appeal outside of their own legs of the stool - but what's remarkable here is that Romey is being forced to run attack ads in Iowa and New Hampshire.

In particular, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Romney now that he's been forced to actually acknowledge McCain in New Hampshire. The schandenfreude kind of overwhelms the sympathy, but it's still there. Massachusetts governors aren't supposed to have to fight for New Hampshire and the fact that up until a few weeks ago all McCain was doing at the debates was taking up valuable podium space compounds the embarrassment.

As I've said before, I still expect Romney to be the nominee. But what's happening right now is that two other insurgent candidates are draining all of the GOP enthusiasm out of a Romney candidacy, which is going to make mobilizing the base really hard for him in a general election. And we get to see him sweat a little bit - I'd be lying if I said that wasn't entertaining.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

(And Andrew Sullivan in particular)

In the spirit of the season, everyone needs to chill the hell out. As Matthew Yglesias points out, people have a tendency to overstate their case when it comes to supporting or knocking down candidates during the primary season. Everyone's guilty of it, including me. But for whatever reason, that seems to be particularly true of the Obama supporters of the Internet. So here are some things to keep in mind:

1. I don't like Hillary Clinton either. That doesn't mean that every single criticism of her, no matter how off-the-wall, illogical, or just plain silly (like the assertion that another Clinton presidency would be the continuation of a Bush-Clinton monarchical dynasty) has merit.

2. Regardless of the merit of Paul Krugman's attacks on Obama's rhetoric, Krugman is not Karl Rove. He does not have some kind of wild-eyed personal vendetta against Obama. He is not camped in the bushes outside of Obama's campaign headquarters with a screwdriver and a sock full of quarters. He has serious concerns about Obama's policy and rhetoric which should be treated as such, not as personal attacks on the level of salacious rumors about Obama's mother.

3. And while we're on the subject of his critics, not everyone who criticizes Obama is a secret enemy of the campaign or whatever. Re: Ezra Klein.

4. Barack Obama has screwed up. He has hedged, and he has pandered. Candidates do that from time to time, even the best ones. His campaign isn't a small part of some huge movement or a political realignment - it's a relatively conventional campaign being run by a guy with an unconventional personal biography. It's not "people-powered politics," like the Dean campaign. It's a campaign all about electing Obama. That's what most campaigns are.

5. Lastly: Take a deep breath. Seriously.

Happy holidays, everyone. It's weird to think that Huckabee and I share a Christmas tradition, but I guess that's some kind of metaphor for something. Or something.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

That are rumors swirling that McCain and Edwards might be doing stronger in their primaries than current polling indicates. On the GOP side, Greg reports that McCain is trending upwards and could possibly get a strong second-place finish in New Hampshire. That would be potentially embarrassing for Romney, considering, as one McCain staffer points out: "no Massachusetts candidate has ever won in New Hampshire by less than eight points."

My initial reaction to all of this was to write off the McCain surge (extra points for irony in the name) as wishful thinking on the part of a lot of beltway Republicans who clung to the old image of McCain as some sort of maverick freedom fighter. But with Giuliani slipping fast in the early states and no plausible alternatives, I could see McCain becoming the candidate of choice for the GOP hawks. Sure McCain doesn't seem to share Giuliani's distaste for checks and balances and civil liberties, but if video evidence is correct he's still got the "national security candidate's" full-on war-boner for Iran.

The fact that the media loves McCain would give him a huge boost too, particularly since right-wing punditry is flailing for somebody who can be the anti-Huckabee. Right now they've more or less settled on Romney, but I'm willing to bet that if McCain started to look like a viable choice again they would dump him.

Edwards looks like a little bit less of a long shot, considering how tight polling is in Iowa right now. Obviously the race doesn't begin and end in Iowa, but if Edwards finished first there and Obama second, we're looking at a three-way race. If Edwards finishes first and Clinton second, then it's a two-way race. I predicted a first-place finish for Obama in Iowa, but Chris Bowers seems to think that Edwards has a couple percentage points in his pocket that aren't represented in polling. We'll see about that.

It might not be relevant, though. Bowers is still reporting that Edwards will finish in second to Obama, which I think would be more of a reflection of Clinton's current weakness than Edwards' strength. If this is what the lineup looks like after Iowa, I don't see a two-way race or a three-way race - I see a month or so of Obama playing touch football in front of a phalanx of cameras and pausing every once in a while to flash a youthful and vigorous grin and tell the American people about the importance of hope and optimism.

So as of right now? Both of these secret-surge theories have merit, but I don't think they're going to change the ultimate outcome. My prediction is still for a Romney v. Obama general election.