Hillary's New Friends?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 2, 2007 11:10 AM

This may be more of a blip than a trend.

Maybe even a mini-blip.

It may mean less than Fred Thompson's yes-I-was-a-skirt-chaser-and-I'm-not-embarrassed line that could clear the way for his candidacy.

Still, the question arises: Could some Republicans support Hillary?

My knee-jerk reaction is that you could probably fit them in a phone booth, even if she was once a Goldwater girl. After all, who drives conservatives up a wall faster than the Clintons? Who accused her opponents of orchestrating a vast right-wing conspiracy against her husband? Who gets their blood boiling faster than you can say Rose Law Firm?

But now comes veteran conservative columnist and author Bruce Bartlett (who turned on Bush with his last book) to say that Hillary Rodham Clinton may be the best of a bad lot from the right's point of view. And, on that basis, he says, she is worth a second look. I await the formation of Republicans for Clinton, but here is Bartlett's argument:

"As each day passes, it becomes increasingly clear that the Democrats will win the White House next year . . .

"If I am right, conservatives are going to have to make an important decision at some point. Do they go down with the sinking Republican ship, or do they try to have some meaningful influence on the next president by becoming involved in the Democratic race? . . .

"To right-wingers willing to look beneath what probably sounds to them like the same identical views of the Democratic candidates, it is pretty clear that Hillary Clinton is the most conservative. John Edwards is the most liberal, and Barack Obama is somewhere in between . . .

"Given the views of the Democratic base and the enormous unpopularity of the Iraq War, it is a real act of courage for her to steadfastly refuse to say her vote for the war was wrong. Of course, like all Democrats and most Americans, she opposes the war today and favors a rapid pullout . . .

"On economics, it is reasonable to assume that Sen. Clinton's policies would not be altogether different from Bill Clinton's. This is not a bad thing. On trade, his record was outstanding, and on the budget was far better than George W. Bush's . . .

"At some point, politically sophisticated conservatives will have to recognize that no Republican can win in 2008 and that their only choice is to support the most conservative Democrat for the nomination. Call me crazy, but I think that person is Hillary Clinton."

I'm sure some will call him crazy.

First, of course, the former first lady has to win the nomination, and this Rasmussen poll has Obama catching her, in fact leading by a statistically insignificant 32 to 30 percent. Edwards is at 17.

And while we're in Hillaryland, TPM's Greg Sargent weighs in on the name game:

"As you may know by now, the non-story of the day surrounding Hillary Clinton is that she apparently uses the name 'Hillary Clinton' on Presidential campaign material while sticking with 'Hillary Rodham Clinton' on her Senate-related stuff.

"This alleged 'gotcha' story was first pushed by Hearst newspapers in a piece linked (natch) on Drudge, Newsmax, Free Republic and a few other far-flung outposts in the wingnuttia hinterlands. It's now the subject of an Associated Press story -- carried by ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN and others -- that actually says in its lede that Hillary has an 'identity crisis.' Both the Hearst and AP stories strongly imply that Hillary's people are calculatingly using 'Rodham' to speak to the New York audience while sticking with 'Hillary Clinton' to appeal to the national audience . . .

"It's unclear, in fact, that there was any kind of shift of this sort in any meaningful sense at all, really. After all, Camp Hillary, and Hillary herself, were calling her 'Hillary Clinton' way back in 2000, and as recently as 2006, and in both cases they were speaking exclusively to New Yorkers."

Here's how the papers are handling Bush's veto of the war-funding-and-withdrawal bill, starting with the Chicago Tribune:

"Democratic congressional leaders will be pressed to find a way to fund troops on the front line while keeping pressure on the administration to wind down an unpopular war. Bush faces his own challenge: to find a compromise with Democrats who gained power on a wave of public opposition to the war and who insist that they will not give the president a blank check to continue his Iraq policy."

New York Times: "The veto added new punctuation to a major war powers clash between Democrats in Congress -- buoyed what they regard as a mandate in last November's elections and seeking to force an end to the fighting in Iraq -- and a president working to defy what he regards as an incursion on his authority as commander in chief."

L.A. Times: "Republicans -- uneasy with their president but opposed to a withdrawal plan -- appear increasingly willing to back some form of benchmarks, although party leaders would not discuss specifics. GOP lawmakers in the past have balked at any benchmarks that would include deadlines or consequences for missing them."

On yesterday's anniversary of Mission Accomplished Day, Dick Polman collects some quotes from that era:

"Neoconservative leader Bill Kristol, April 1, 2003: 'There is a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni . . . There's almost no evidence of that at all.'

" David Asman, Fox News, April 9, 2003 (upon the toppling of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, where tight shots by the cameras masked the fact that the crowd barely filled one quarter of the plaza): 'My goose bumps have never been higher than they are right now.'

"Brit Hume, Fox News, same time: 'This transcends anything I've ever seen.'

" Dick Morris, Fox News, April 9, 2003: 'Over the next couple of weeks, when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing . . . the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years.'

" Fred Barnes, Fox News, April 10, 2003: 'The war was the hard part . . . And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war.'

" David Broder, The Washington Post, reacting to the events of May 1: 'This president has learned how to move in a way that just conveys a great sense of authority and command.'

"Columnist Robert Novak: 'Could Joe Lieberman get into a jet pilot's jump suit and look credible?'

" Judy Miller of the New York Times, talking on CNN, March 19, 2003: According to 'a slew of information from defectors' and her other 'intelligence sources,' American troops would soon find the WMD sites; indeed, 'one person in Washington told me that the list could total more than 1,400 of those sites.' "

Nexis is sooo annoying.

Editor & Publisher looks at how the NYT covered things. This lead is rather striking:

"BAGHDAD, May 2 -- The Bush administration is planning to withdraw most United States combat forces from Iraq over the next several months and wants to shrink the American military presence to less than two divisions by the fall, senior allied officials said today."

Uh, right.

Time's Karen Tumulty looks in the mirror after last week's Bill Moyers special on the press and the war:

"The media did a really bad job of covering the run-up to the war. Stipulated. But I'm not Judith Miller or Bill Kristol or any of the other people Moyers took to task; they can speak for themselves. I'm just a political reporter here at Time, not a columnist or a foreign policy expert or a media critic. And all I can account for is what I wrote and said. So last night, with some trepidation, I went back and looked at the cover story that I wrote on the eve of the congressional vote in September 2002. And you know what? It was a pretty good story, rooted in a lot of skeptical reporting by my colleagues. Please read the whole thing. We at Time didn't have the answers, but at least we were asking the right questions:

" ' Moral principles gain their power by being consistently applied. If it is dangerous for ruthless dictators to develop lethal arsenals, why attack Iraq but not North Korea? If the Iraqi people deserve to live in a free and democratic state, why don't the Saudi people? If we are willing to pay the price of toppling Saddam, will we also pay the price of staying to clean up the neighborhood? And the thorniest question of all: If the last Gulf War helped inspire evil in bin Laden, will a new one create many more like him?'"

The New Republic is a frequent target of Markos Moulitsas (Kos), Duncan Black (Atrios) and others in the lefty blogosphere, so I was interested in Jonathan Chait's take on how they are changing Democratic politics:

"Their newness makes them outsiders to the game. They are, by their way of thinking, self-made men and women who pulled themselves up from obscurity by dint of pure merit. They see the Washington establishment, by contrast, as a kind of clique, filled with mediocrities who attended the best schools or know the right people. The netroots shorthand for this phenomenon is 'Washington cocktail parties'--where, it is believed, the elite share their wrong-headed ideas, inoculated from accountability. 'They still have their columns and TV gigs,' Moulitsas wrote on his blog last December, describing the Beltway elite. 'They still get treated with reverence by the D.C. cocktail party circuit.'

"In point of fact, the most successful bloggers have been pulled into the warm embrace of the political establishment. Moulitsas consults regularly with influential Democrats in Washington. Presidential candidates hire popular bloggers or court them with private dinners. Last year, numerous top Democrats trekked to Las Vegas to attend YearlyKos, the liberal blog convention, where they sucked up to the attendees as relentlessly as if they were software executives . . .

"Like the New Right (and unlike the New Left), the netroots is committed to working within the two-party structure. They have relatively little use for street demonstrations and none at all for Naderite third parties. They fervently support Democrats and, with increasing frequency, work for them directly . . .

"For the netroots, partisan fidelity is the sine qua non . . . What they cannot forgive is Democrats or liberals who distance themselves from their party or who give ammunition to the enemy . . .

"In a posting about TNR, titled 'TNR's defection to the Right is now complete,' Moulitsas wrote that this magazine 'betrayed, once again, that it seeks to destroy the new people-powered movement for the sake of its Lieberman-worshipping neocon owners.' Both the DLC and TNR are perpetually described as 'dying' or 'irrelevant,' yet simultaneously possessed of sinister and ubiquitous control over the national discourse . . .

"The Democratic Party, as Moulitsas has written, is indeed undergoing a comprehensive reformation, as is liberalism in general. At the end of this reformation, what will the left look like? It will look a lot more like the Republican machine that prevailed in Florida. It will be nastier and more ruthless, and less concerned with intellectual or procedural niceties."

Fred Thompson has been blogging up a storm.

The Law & Order man wins 52 percent in a GOP bloggers straw poll. Those voting must not like the field, for Fred is followed by Rudy (15 percent) and Romney (10 percent), with McCain below 3 percent. As for Tommy Thompson, 0.7 percent.

Just about everyone, as I noted yesterday, has been beating up on George Tenet, but few dish it out like Christopher Hitchens:

"The only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was 'not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept' this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation . . .

"A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that 'hindsight is always 20-20.' Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all."

I thought I'd seen every possible study of racial bias, but the New York Times finds a new one, involving fouls in the NBA.

The Dow Jones union isn't enamored of Rupert Murdoch's bid for the Wall Street Journal:

"Mr. Murdoch has shown a willingness to crush quality and independence, and there is no reason to think he would handle Dow Jones or The Journal any differently."

The question, the Journal itself says, "is how much is a buyer willing to pay for what now is viewed as one of the media world's high-profile prizes? . . .

"The offer's premium raises the question of whether Mr. Murdoch views Dow Jones as a trophy property that would cap decades of media deal making. If so, the deal would be more akin to high-price acquisitions of sports teams and skyscrapers. That would also mean few other bidders might challenge him, leaving the Bancroft family [which controls the company] as his only hurdle.

"But even if Mr. Murdoch views Dow Jones as a trophy, there are strategic reasons for him to do the deal. Dow Jones's content and brands could help him build a global business brand, which would include the soon-to-be-launched Fox business news channel, which could benefit from an alliance with The Wall Street Journal."

Joe Nocera ticks off "all the reasons the deal makes sense for Mr. Murdoch -- and only him. There's the Journal's powerful editorial page, which meshes with his own conservative politics. The fact that he has a new financial network in the works that will compete with CNBC -- and CNBC has a critical alliance with the Wall Street Journal he'd like to bust up. His belief that he can use the News Corporation's online expertise to leverage Dow Jones's content in ways the company itself hasn't been able to. Plus, he's proved with The New York Post that he's willing to lose money on an asset that serves a strategic purpose."

What about the NYT's business acumen?

"So Tishman Speyer just sold the New York Times building for $525 million. It bought the building from the paper in 2004 for $175 million," Jeff Jarvis observes.

"So the building the Times no longer owns is worth more than the Boston Globe, according to most valuations.

"In the time the Times Company has owned the Globe, its value has gone down by 50 percent.

"In the [time the] Times Company has not owned its building, it has increased in value threefold."

I'm not the only one who has noticed Jarvis. From his new site, PrezVid:

"We here at PrezVid are proud to announce that we have done a deal with washingtonpost.com to contribute content to a new blog in their political section and to get promotion, traffic and revenue in return."

Finally, the D.C. Madam had all kinds of business acumen, according to ABC's The Blotter:

"In a January 1994 newsletter, she wrote, 'Congress is back in session. This always helps to boost business.'

"In another edition, she complained, 'That damn Monday night football . . . ruines [sic] business every single Monday night!' "