Who Has No Plan?

"The coming policy debate will . . . involve basic conflicts that have emerged in the past year over Middle East strategy -- for which the rough Beltway shorthand would be Condoleezza Rice's State Department vs. the office of Vice President Cheney.

"The central question for Bush . . . : Is America's best hope for stabilizing Iraq a broad effort to resolve tensions in the Middle East, including the Arab-Israeli dispute? This comprehensive regional approach to Iraq is controversial for two reasons: The United States would have to engage Iraq's troublesome neighbors, Iran and Syria; and it would have to push Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians as part of a broader peace deal."

Stump Watch

Here's the text of Bush's speech in Montana yesterday.

Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush warned Thursday that a Democratic Senate would block many of his judicial nominees and never allow justices such as John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. onto the Supreme Court, a message intended to win back his restive conservative base. . . .

"The visit to Montana opened a six-day, 10-state final campaign swing for the president as he left Washington for the last time until Tuesday's elections. . . .

"A Republican president normally would not need to come to a conservative bastion such as Montana this close to an election, nor to Nevada's 2nd District, which has never voted for a Democrat since it was created in 1982. But Bush is playing defense in red-state territory and sticking to states that voted for him two years ago."

Jim Rutenberg writes in the New York Times: "If there is one thing the White House can usually count on when President Bush campaigns in small, Republican-leaning cities like this one, it is friendly wall-to-wall news coverage of his arrival. And his visit here on Thursday did make the front page of The Billings Gazette.

"But news of his impending arrival took second billing in the paper. It ran below the fold and under a package of articles about the return of a local sailor's body from Iraq, accompanied by a photograph of the flag-draped coffin at Billings Logan International Airport. . . .

"During the last two elections, the fumes of Air Force One worked like political magic dust for the candidates lucky enough to score visits from Mr. Bush.

"Candidates flew to Washington just to be seen arriving back home on his 747. Local newspapers doubled as welcome mats, and television reporters and radio hosts excitedly echoed his verbal jabs at Democrats long after he had left."

Careful White House stagecraft still makes maximal use of Air Force One, however, which Mark Silva , blogging for the Chicago Tribune, correctly calls "a heckuva prop."

The White House used the plane as a backdrop for Bush's talk in Nevada yesterday. Silva describes "White House press office people politely but furtively asking arriving reporters and photographers to move out of the path of 'the picture' of the president and his plane."