He's Still Not Gay

"The remark echoed one by Mr. Bush's immediate predecessor, Bill Clinton, who proclaimed after Republicans took control of the House in 1995 that 'the president is still relevant here.' "

That was the first thing that came to my mind, too.

As for those domestic battles, 81 percent in a new CBS poll say they're in favor of expanding the SCHIP program for children. Bush, you'll recall, just vetoed a $35-billion expansion.

Have you noticed the spate of articles about how Barack Obama just isn't cutting it, most recently this one in The Washington Post? Joe Klein calls the story, "about Obama's difficulty selling bipartisanship to the Democratic Party's base . . . flawed because bipartisanship can't be a blanket strategy. There are issues where Democrats and Republicans have differences. It's entirely appropriate for Democratic voters in Iowa to be ticked off about Bush's SCHIP veto--an act of purposeful, incendiary partisanship--and it would be appropriate for Obama to express some anger about it . . .

"The fact that the two leading Democratic candidates, Obama and Clinton, are essentially running moderate campaigns--and that John Edwards' populism hasn't exactly caught fire--is an indication that the Democratic base isn't nearly as partisan as the Post seems to think it is.

"In any case, I'm not so sure that the Obama campaign's stasis has been a consequence of his bipartisan pitch--it's more a result of his inability to find an issue that he owns, an issue where he has taken a substantially different position from Clinton. It's also about his cool, cool style: a certain amount of inspired ranting about the Bush debacle would certainly be justified (and might find eager auditors among independent voters)."

A very different take from the New Republic's Noam Scheiber (who's now blogging the campaign, along with the rest of the world):

"On some level, I'm not sure how credible Obama's promise to change (in this case 'challenge') our politics is. I personally believe in him--there are times when I hear him speak and think he could do pretty much anything. But when I consult his biography the way an ordinary voter might, I don't see any evidence to suggest he's capable of changing politics in some fundamental way.

"Yes, he reached across the aisle to pass some bills in Illinois. And he did work as a community organizer in Chicago. But there are probably hundreds (if not thousands) of people who could boast those achievements. Other than that, what is there?

"It would be one thing if like, say, John Kerry, Obama had helped lead a movement to end a war. Or if, like Rudy Giuliani, he had some non-traditional, non-Washington experience that was nonetheless pretty extraordinary. (You can quibble about how much credit Giuliani deserves for reviving New York City, but it still sounds pretty impressive.) But if there's nothing that immediately jumps off your resume like that, I'm not sure you can persuade voters it's suddenly going to happen when you get to Washington. Maybe Obama means to suggest that running his campaign is itself experience leading a movement, but I think that's a little too clever.

"There's something ironic about all of this: One impetus behind Obama's changing politics theme is to compensate for his perceived lack of experience relative to Hillary Clinton . . . But you arguably need more, not less, experience if you want to change politics, albeit a different kind of experience. And it's not obvious from Obama's resume that he has that experience either."

I've never heard John McCain talk about religion on the trail, but he does so with the Christian Science Monitor: