Right Turn

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 1:44 PM

In the aftermath of Iowa, a striking number of conservative commentators were saying nice things about Barack Obama.

David Brooks: "You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this . . . This is a huge moment."

The Weekly Standard: "The classiest candidate on the Democratic side."

Townhall's Amanda Carpenter: "Who's not proud of this kid? He has a story people feel good about."

Peggy Noonan said Obama won the caucuses "with a classy campaign, an unruffled manner, and an appeal on the stump that said every day, through the lines: Look at who I am and see me, the change that you desire is right here, move on with me and we will bring it forward together."

Now, on the eve of today's Pennsylvania showdown, not so much.

Perhaps Obama has said and done things that have caused said commentators to reconsider their initial enthusiasm. Perhaps they were enamored of Obama only because he could sideline their longtime bete noire Hillary Clinton. Or perhaps, with Obama close to wrapping up the Democratic nomination, some are falling into line.

After all, many of them were quite critical of John McCain when he was running against the likes of Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee, and now they seem to have put aside their reservations and are making the case for Mac.

I always assumed that, when crunch time came, most of the righty pundits wouldn't be Obamacans.

David Brooks has evolved in his thinking:

"Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News are taking a lot of heat for spending so much time asking about Jeremiah Wright and the 'bitter' comments. But the fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry's windsurfing or John Edwards's haircut as clues about shared values.

"When Obama began this ride, he seemed like a transcendent figure who could understand a wide variety of life experiences . . .

"When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he's one of them. Obama has to address those doubts, and he has done so poorly up to now."

Amanda Carpenter: "His theory that people resort to the guns/marriage/faith/border security paradigm based on poor economic circumstances seems pretty carefully thought out. It's just a very bad, damaging theory."

Peggy Noonan:

"It is not that he is African-American, or half so, and it is not that he is liberal. Liberalism too, one senses, is having a moment.

"It is his youth, his relative untriedness, the fact that he has not suffered, been seasoned, been beat about the head by life and left struggling back, as happens to most adults by a certain time. This is what I hear from older people, who vote in great numbers. They are not hostile to his race, they are skeptical of his inexperience.

"The other is elitism, a charge that clearly grates on him and unnerves his wife, who has a great deal that would be attractive in a first lady (intelligence, accomplishment, beauty) but lacks placidity, which is, actually, necessary."

Even Rick Santorum is now on the McCain train.

It's Republicans who usually invoke terrorism in their advertising. Hillary uses an image of Osama bin Laden in her latest who-is-ready spot, and Obama uncorks a response ad hours later.

"Hillary Rodham Clinton played the fear card yesterday, unleashing a TV ad featuring wars, natural disasters -- and even Osama bin Laden -- in her latest and most aggressive effort to cast doubt on Barack Obama's ability to handle a crisis," the New York Post says. Here's my ad watch on that spot and Obama's response ad.

Does Obama have one unheralded advantage in the Keystone State? The Nation's John Nichols thinks so:

"Even in this era of 'new media,' the oldest media matters -- in fact, it may matter more than ever.

"In Pennsylvania, a state where most of the political machinery statewide and in the critical vote-generating center of Philadelphia is geared up to provide Hillary Clinton with a Democratic presidential primary win on Tuesday, the state's largest newspapers are urging voters to consider Barack Obama . . . .

"That's important because newspaper editorial pages have long maintained a love affair with Arizona Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. The strong editorial support for Obama in the race for the nomination provides one more indication that he will be able to compete with McCain in ways that Clinton cannot."

As an Obama ad trumpets:

" 'There's a reason every major newspaper's endorsed Barack Obama,' begins a new television advertisement that is running statewide. 'He knows how to bring people together, he's ready' -- says the (Philadelphia) Inquirer. The (Pittsburgh) Post Gazette calls Hillary Clinton's attacks the 'cynical responses of old politics.' She'd 'further the deep divisiveness' in our country. The (Harrisburg) Patriot-News says 'Barack Obama offers real change in the White House.' He isn't tied to lobbyists and special interests.' He'll 'listen to and represent all Americans,' says the (Allentown) Morning Call . . .

"While Richard Mellon Scaife's extremely right-wing Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is urging Democrats to back Clinton, most of the rest of the newspaper rack favors Obama."

I'll wait until tonight's results are in to get into the spin game, but Open Left's Chris Bowers floats one scenario that could end the Democratic contest:

"The national press could simply stop taking the Clinton campaign seriously at some point, just as they did to Mike Huckabee at some point in February. If the narrative becomes that there is no way Clinton can win, and the focus instead turns to McCain vs. Obama, then the nomination campaign will end."

Marc Ambinder notes that a new Clinton ad "used a headline from this blog to make the point that Barack Obama was on the attack. Indeed, my headline was: 'Obama on the Attack.' That was true.

"But my headline did not so much refer to his specific charges against Sen. Clinton on health care as it did to Obama's remarks on the stump, the slam on Clinton by an Obama supporter on a conference call, etc. In general, I don't consider a contrast ad on health care to be an 'attack.' . . . I will write my headlines more carefully from now on."

Kos reacts to Hillary's caught-on-tape remarks about disagreeing with MoveOn on foreign policy:

"Well, for a campaign that has morphed into nothing but 'Republican talking points,' it shouldn't come as any surprise.

"I'm curious though, what part of our foreign policy approach doesn't she agree with? The ending the war in Iraq part?"

McCain's poverty tour is drawing ample coverage:

"McCain was not hunting for votes in the overwhelmingly Democratic black communities of central Alabama," the L.A. Times reports. "Nor will he be looking for support from residents of the hurricane-ravaged 9th Ward of New Orleans on a visit later this week."

But at a time when President Bush and his party are highly unpopular, McCain's weeklong tour of places that he describes as forgotten by other presidential candidates is part of his drive to brand himself as a different kind of Republican -- one with wider appeal."

When a wealthy Arizona developer wanted to buy land at a former Army base, the New York Times reports, "Mr. McCain assigned an aide who set up a meeting at the Pentagon and later stepped in again to help speed up the sale."

The McCain camp is pushing back, big time, against Sunday's Washington Post piece by Michael Leahy on the question of his temper. National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru posted an e-mail from longtime McCain confidant Mark Salter:

"If one half of it were true, it would give me pause. As it happens, the piece is 99% fiction. Leahy is a nice guy, but the story was one of the more dishonest I've read in a while. I talked to him for over two hours. Some of the instances, like the Bob Smith one, he never even raised with me so I could respond. For others, he declined to print my rebuttal. He used my quotes in ways that made them seem as if I were confirming his thesis when I insisted that McCain's temper is no greater than the average person's, and that I personally know 20 or 25 Senators with much worse tempers. He argues, sometimes heatedly, with his peers, but he doesn't hold grudges or pick on people subordinate to him."

Leahy responds in an interview: "We obviously have different views on the merits of the story. I like Mark and look forward to working with him again."

An ABC/WashPost poll finds that 48 percent of those surveys "said McCain's temperament would hurt his ability to serve effectively as president. Fewer, 37 percent, said his often strident tenor would make him more successful."

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey evaluates the severity of McCain's response:

"Perhaps McCain's camp feels that a charge of media bias will help energize the conservative base, as it did earlier this year with the utterly vapid New York Times story on his supposed romance with Vicki Iseman. However, that story really had no basis at all, while McCain's temper is a quality to which even McCain himself admits. Exaggeration, maybe, but the WaPo piece isn't a tale out of whole cloth -- and it's ultimately a very minor point anyway. At some point, it will be better to make the rebuttal quickly and then get out of the way to let the meme die a natural death."

Says Power Line's Paul Mirengoff: "I do not agree that McCain's temper and vindictiveness are no greater than the average person's. Quite apart from the anecdotes reported by the Post, I know several people -- people I trust, some of whom still like the candidate -- who have experienced the wrath of McCain. At Power Line, we also received a reliable contemporaneous account of McCain's blow-up at Senator Cornyn during a conference on immigration reform legislation last summer. To suggest that there's no problem here strikes me as foolish."

ABC's Jake Tapper says he broke the incident of McCain's confrontation with Chuck Grassley while at Salon in 1999.

Plenty of talk about those NYT documents showing the Pentagon's effort to spread its message through the retired generals and colonels who blitz the airwaves, which I wrote about yesterday. HuffPoster Jon Soltz:

"The scarier point is how those retired military brass and defense consultants appear much more frequently to explain Iraq, than the troops who fought in the war. Note the names in the Times article, and think about how many times you have seen them on television. Then think about how many times you've seen the veterans who fought in this war on those same shows to offer a different point of view."

But Commentary's Max Boot can barely suppress a yawn:

"As I read and read and read this seemingly endless report, I kept trying to figure out what the news was here. Why did the Times decide this story is so important? After all, it's no secret that the Pentagon--and every other branch of government--routinely provides background briefings to journalists (including columnists and other purveyors of opinion), and tries to influence their coverage by carefully doling out access. It is hardly unheard of for cabinet members--or even the president and vice president--to woo selected journalists deemed to be friendly while cutting off those deemed hostile. Nor is it exactly a scandal for government agencies to hire public relations firms to track coverage of them and try to suggest ways in which they might be cast in a more positive light. All this is part and parcel of the daily grind of Washington journalism in which the Times is, of course, a leading participant . . .

"How dare the Pentagon try to break the media monopoly traditionally held by full-time journalists of reliably 'progressive' views!"

Update: I reached John Garrett, the Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, yesterday, and he said he was simply trying to gather information from the Pentagon: "You have to accept I'm a little bit biased. I've been in this business for 27 years," the Vietnam veteran said. "There's plenty of people out there to make a negative point. If there's anything that could explain or be constructive, it ought to be pointed out . . . Never once, in my recollection, did anyone in the Pentagon or DOD establishment tell me what to say."

The Murdoch era begins in earnest: The top editor of the Wall Street Journal is out.

ABC has got Facebook, and today NBC launches a political page with MySpace.

Finally, I once did a profile of Michelle Malkin, but you won't be reading one in the New Yorker. Bloggasm has the e-mails:

"Dear Michelle Malkin,

"I am the editor of The New Yorker magazine, and I believe that you have received some sort of contact from our office, but I just wanted to assure you that our desire to write about you is serious and genuine. I can be reached through email above or [phone number redacted].

"Best regards, David Remnick

*

"Dear Ms. Malkin, Thanks . . . but can we talk? I am at home at [phone number redacted]. Best, David Remnick

*

"Dear Mr. Remnick,

"Again, thank you for your reassurance that your magazine's 'desire to write about' my work 'is serious and genuine.' I have no doubt that your writer is serious and that your interest in printing some sort of profile for your audience is genuine.

"The question is: Toward what end?

"No disrespect to you and your august publication (of which my beloved in-laws are longtime subscribers), but I have neither the time nor inclination to sit down with your staff Jane Goodall and serve as an anthropological specimen for The New Yorker's readership. If I want to play ape for amusement, I'll do it for my kids.

"Best, Michelle"

Update: Malkin actually posted those e-mails on her site a month ago! So much for the big scoop.

Finally, it may have happened 216 years ago, but it's not that hard to check. Mary McNamara fesses up in the L.A. Times:

"When I wrote in Saturday's story about HBO that George Washington stepped down from the presidency after serving only one term, it was just a stupid, blind error, the sort that leaves you smiting your forehead, literally and repeatedly, the moment it is pointed out to you."