TGIF quickies:

Put your hands together for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who earlier this week at the U.N. delivered a stellar imitation of Alec Baldwin playing Saddam Hussein on Saturday Night Live. Rarely have we ever witnessed a mass murderer walk such a fine line between thuggery and buffoonery. The black hat was a nice touch, but, given the loony nature of his filibuster, his head should have been topped with whirling propellers. It was nice that he wants to solve the Kennedy assassination, but, since we're on the subject of murder conspiracies, let it be said that if Gadhafi had spoken up soon after that Pan Am plane was blown up over Scotland in 1988, he could have saved investigators a lot of time and trouble.

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Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, was smart to bypass Michael Dukakis for the newly-created job of interim Democratic senator. Patrick yesterday tapped former Democratic national chairman Paul Kirk (he'll be sworn in today), reportedly at the urging of the Kennedy family. That makes sense, since Kirk is a Kennedy family loyalist who worked as a top staffer for Ted. But just as importantly, Kirk doesn't have Dukakis' baggage. The aim is to theoretically give the Democrats a 60th Senate vote for health care reform, without any media distractions. If Dukakis had been named, the journalistic plot line would be "The Duke's Comeback," and cable TV, as we speak, would be running (and re-running) that '88 footage of doomed presidential candidate Dukakis looking wonky-nerdy inside a military tank. No Democrat wants to relive that era and step on the party's current message.

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»  More Gadhafi and other riffs

As I've noted twice here recently, President Obama's biggest political challenge is not health care reform. It is Afghanistan. And now that he's reportedly deliberating whether to OK the military's impending request for a sizeable troop hike, apparently with a fair degree of skepticism as to the value of such a move, his potential domestic quandary is coming into sharper focus.

The prime political task of any president is to secure the strong support of his party base. But the Democratic base is strongly opposed to a troop hike in Afghanistan; the new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reports that two-thirds of all Democrats are saying no. So if Obama says yes to the military, and the troop hike fails to improve our prospects for success (which would not be a shock, given the current prowess of the insurgents, and the corruption and perceived illegitimacy of the Karzai government), he risks splitting his own party in ways reminiscient of what doomed LBJ 40 years ago in the wake of Vietnam.

Yet if Obama essentially says no to the military's recommendation, and that decision also fails to improve our prospects for success, the Republicans - 60 percent of whom support a troop hike, according to the aforementioned poll - will work overtime to morph Obama into Jimmy Carter, to roll out the traditional rhetoric about how Democrats are timid and weak on national security, and to complain that this president is losing a war he only recently described as crucial ("a war of necessity") and specifically vowed to win ("to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: we will defeat you").

Of course, the Republicans will do all this (actually, they're doing it already; Newt Gingrich this week referred to the Obama team as "the second Carter administration") while conveniently ignoring the fact that George W. Bush screwed up Afghanistan and thus bequeathed to Obama a steaming pile of dung with few cleanup options. But hey, that's politics.

»  More Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't

Given all the obstructionist complaints and ideological catechisms uttered yesterday by Senate Finance Committee Republicans on the timely topic of health care reform, it's no wonder that the GOP continues to be held in such low esteem nationwide.

As the Senate Democrats prepare to go it virtually alone on reform legislation, amidst the predictable hardening of Republican opposition, it's worth taking note of the newly-released NBC-Wall Street Journal poll - in my estimation, the best of the nonpartisan surveys, because it is jointly conducted by Republican pollster Bill McInturff and Democratic pollster Peter Hart. Even though the public continues to voice concerns about how President Obama is handling health reform, he is rated far higher than his implacable Republican opposition; whereas 45 percent of Americans endorse the way Obama is dealing with the issue, only 21 percent endorse the GOP's approach. And perceptions of the congressional parties are markedly different; whereas Americans generally give the Democrats a split verdict (41 percent view the party positively, 39 percent negatively), the verdict on the GOP is thumbs down (28 percent positive, 43 percent negative).

It's easy to diagnose the GOP's continued low standing. Despite the concerns that Americans may have about Obama's ambitions to reform health care, there is still a broad-based belief that the current system cries out to be fixed in some fashion...and yet, most Americans clearly understand that the Republicans have no passion for this issue whatsoever, and that, now as always, the Republicans would greatly prefer to do absolutely squat.

And the beat goes on. In the opening session of Senate Finance Committee deliberations yesterday, the GOP lawmakers were again true to their naysaying instincts. They complained that the reform effort was moving too quickly (it's been 61 years since Harry Truman called for health care reform); that the Democrats are pushing "artificial deadlines"; that the reform bill should be torn up so that everybody can start all over; that certain reform bill provisions (such as requiring all Americans, with appropriate federal help, to have health insurance, just as they are already required to carry auto insurance) constitute "a stunning assault on liberty" and an "intrusion into private lives." The best moment came when Jim Bunning, the lame duck Kentucky Republican, railed about how the reform effort simply "confiscates more money from taxpayers" - and within an hour, right in front of everybody, he literally fell asleep. The nap as metaphor.

»  More The passionless party of no

Put yourself in Barack Obama's shoes. What a relief it must have been yesterday to sit with David Letterman, in front of some fawning New Yorkers, and parry a handful of questions that barely even qualified as softballs.

Hey, that's why the president was appearing on Late Show in the first place - precisely because he could pitch health care reform without any concern that he might be substantially challenged to explain anything. Letterman's show is all about the power of celebrity, not the fine points of policy (the late-night shows haven't been substantive since Dick Cavett in the early '70s and Jack Paar a decade earlier); and, besides all that, Letterman as an interviewer is generally as dogged as an adolescent with ADD.
     
Not that I'm telling you anything new. Still, it was fascinating to watch Obama punch his ticket for a free ride. Here, for instance, was the sum total of the health care reform discussion:

Letterman began by asking, "What is it I don't understand about this?" That kind of question basically gives a president (or any politician) a license to say whatever he or she pleases. Obama naturally obliged, at length.

He framed the stakes as he sees them, noting that there are "at least 30 million people" who lack health insutance, that those who have health insurance are more imperiled than ever before, and that "if we don't do anything about it, then five years from now, 10 years from now, far more Americans are not going to have health insurance, far more businesses are going to say 'I can't afford to deal with our employees,' and in the meantime those government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, the VA...if we don't bend the curve overall, we're going to go bankrupt." He then restated the goals he has stated so often: to help the uninsured by making it possible to buy some, to protect those who already have it, to make the system more efficient and thus to save money. He said, "There are a lot of folks in Washington who have a stake in the system staying as it is...It's hard to (change). If it wasn't hard, it would have been done 40 years ago."

»  More Ticket to ride

My Sunday print column, updated and expanded:

The latest fit of conservative paranoia is that Barack Obama, the alien in our midst, seeks to transform America into Mother Russia, crafting a new totalitarian state that will be run by his own private army of policy "czars." The lunacy never ends.

Yes, the Republican right has suddenly discovered the word czar - roughly 36 years after it was first used by the press as a nickname for Republican Richard Nixon’s in-house energy guy, a Republican named John Love. The word has been popular for decades, in part because, frankly, it fits snugly in a headline. The word actually makes no sense in the American context – after all, the real czars ordered pograms - but it has become a thumbnail descriptive for the scores of policy mavens hired by virtually every president since Nixon. 

The word was rarely if ever cited as prime facie evidence of a president’s evil intent – until now, naturally. With strong assists from Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck at Fox News, Republican politicians are suddenly complaining that these policy hires are “an affront to the Constitution,” that Obama "has more czars than the Romanovs" (the Mother Russia insinuation, courtesy of John McCain), that Obama is "giving half the White House staff the title of czar" (a blatant lie, uttered this weekend by Mitt Romney while pandering to a Christian conservative convention; the truth is, not a single White House aide has that title).

»  More Czar wars

Drive-by observations:

I bet that President Obama and his people would dearly prefer that Jimmy Carter and Nancy Pelosi simply shut...the...fug...up. The president is trying to focus people's attention on health care reform (ideally, the substantive pros and cons of reform), and the last thing he needs right now is for people to be distracted by a ratcheted-up, cable TV-driven debate about whether "the overwhelming portion" of his critics are racist (Carter's twice-enunciated view), or whether the prevailing vibes today are as darkly portentous as they were in San Francisco 31 years ago, shortly before Mayor George Moscone and gay leader Harvey Milk were assassinated by an aggrieved white guy (tearful Pelosi's view). Not helpful. Obama is set to run the media pentathlon on Sunday morning (five TV interviews), but thanks to Carter and Pelosi, he won't be able to control the message. He'll want it to be about health care, but he'll undoubtedly be compelled to answer questions about whether he agrees with what Carter and Pelosi said. This must be frustrating for the White House. Pelosi is not very deft at the outside game (communications), and as for Carter...well, there were many reasons why he was the sole Democratic presidential incumbent in the entire 20th century to be tossed out of the office. His uncanny instinct for bad timing was one of them.

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Judging by yesterday's predictable Republican hysteria, one would think that Obama's decision to scrap Ronald Reagan's outmoded, unbuilt Star Wars fantasy (a Cold War antiballistic missile shield for Eastern Europe) was tantamount to a white-flag surrender. What Obama actually intends, of course, is to rejigger America's defenses so that we can actually use existing, proven, and cost-effective technology to address what the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls "the realities of life" - to wit, the potential threat to Israel and Europe posed by Iran's short and medium-range missiles. The most noteworthy aspect of the GOP's hysteria is that it no longer seems to matter that Obama's security decisions are vetted and supported every step of the way by a prominent Bush appointee, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates used to provide Obama with political cover, but apparently no longer. Yesterday's classic attack line was uttered by House GOP leader John Boehner, who declared that Obama is showing "a willful determination to continue ignoring the threat posed by some of the most dangerous regimes in the world." Willful determination? Under the quaint rules of civility, a president's critics would at least acknowledge that the man in charge sincerely cared about his country's safety, however wrong-headed his decision might be. But Obama doesn't even get that level of respect; rather, Boehner says that Obama is willfully determined to weaken his country. But that's actually no surprise, since many Republicans don't believe that America is Obama's country anyway.

»  More Drive-by Friday

Time is tight today - which is fine, because not much time is needed to dispense with the conservatives' pet notion that the latest ACORN story is some kind of monumental news development.

It has been fascinating in recent days to watch our right-leaning fellow citizens behave as if they had exposed an imminent al Qaeda plot to render unto dust all of midtown Manhattan. The current party line is that "the media" (defined in their circles as everyone except for Fox News and the conservative talk jocks) has been refusing to cover the earth-shaking scandal (prompted by conservative filmmakers in a sting operation) in which a handful of ACORN employes made the egregiously stupid and potentially criminal mistake of giving tax-evasion advice (to those selfsame filmmakers, who had shown up at ACORN disguised as a pimp and a prostitute in search of advice).

First of all, the appalling behavior at ACORN - the anti-poverty group officially known as the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now - has in fact received mainstream media coverage, notwithstanding the insistence of conservatives convincing themselves otherwise. There were reports last week in at least nine newspapers ranging from The Washington Post to the Baltimore Sun, plus at least 11 separate reports on CNN in the four-day period starting last Friday and ending this past Monday.

But the ACORN story has not been given the same attention as, say, the health care debate or Afghanistan, for a very basic reason: It doesn't deserve that level of attention.

»  More Small potatoes

Emptiest threat of the week (so far): Organized labor's purported vow to hold President Obama accountable if he fails to fulfill his promises to organized labor.

In a speech today, Richard Trumka, the incoming AFL-CIO president, is expected to make that vow crystal clear; as one of his aides told the press earlier this week, "We're going to hold the politicians we've elected accountable more than we have in the past," and "there will be consequences" for any Democrat who makes nice to labor but fails to follow through.

Yeah, sure.

If Obama fails to go to the mat for organized labor's top issues - a health care public option, a law making it easier for workers to unionize, a broad crackdown on imports that threaten domestic union jobs - where exactly is the AFL-CIO and its 10 million members supposed to go? To the Republicans?

»  More But the week is still young

Nobody has ever suggested that Jay Leno in his new prime-time slot would blaze new televisual trails for political humor. Jay, after all, has never been a particularly edgy entertainer. He's like a Big Mac, a juicy dependable American staple served up with all the familiar ingredients, and nary a surprise in store.

Nevertheless, the NBC brass have sought to create some buzz about Jay's plans to bedazzle people with political humor while they're still wide awake. Ben Silverman, one of the guys who greased the move to prime time, was quoted the other day as saying, "What we're so excited about is how important topical comedy is right now. All our research showed that America wants more comedy."

Well, I caught Jay's debut show last night, and suffice it to say that Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher need not quake in their shoes. Not that anybody should be shocked, but, given the massive publicity buildup, devotees of political humor were clearly led to believe that Jay would serve up a little something outside the realm of the comfy cozy.

Instead, I got the impression that, in addition to Jay's instinctive intent to play his shots down the middle of the middle of the fairway, there was also an institutional imperative on the big night to steer clear of all risk. Hollywood being Hollywood, a lot of people are rooting for Jay's show to fail, and therefore it may well have been deemed prudent to protect the first week's ratings by minimizing the odds that some viewers might find themselves offended.

»  More In the realm of the comfy cozy