JFK’s poll numbers moved dramatically—up. There is something refreshing—though sadly rare—about a political leader saying “My bad.”

In the 19th century, a British politician stood in Parliament and remarked that trying to get his particular point across was akin to flogging a dead horse to make it pull a load. We call this beating a dead horse today. And every time President Obama or a member of his administration plays the blame Bush card, he is beating that proverbial dead horse. It is also getting really old.

Everyone on Facebook has an information page and there is an entry labeled “relationship status.” Some mark “married” or “in a relationship,” others say “single.” Then there are those who put: “It’s complicated.” When it comes to Presidents and those who come before or after, it’s really complicated. Some chief executives have managed to rise above the propensity for personal paltriness—others, not so much.

And it goes way back.

Thomas Jefferson, who ran a particularly aggressive campaign against former-and-would-be-again-much-later friend, John Adams, in the 1800 race, continued the attack on his predecessor well into his own presidency. He regularly smeared Mr. Adams for maladministration of presidential powers, though apparently willing to benefit from things Adams had done that he had opposed at the time. The anti-military, anti-big government Jefferson, had no qualms about using navy Adams had built (opposed by TJ) to deal with the Barbary Pirates; nor did he hesitate to use broad executive powers in the whole matter of the Louisiana Purchase—the kind of action candidate Jefferson would have likely decried as tyrannical.

Democrat Andrew Jackson wouldn’t even pay a courtesy call on outgoing President John Quincy Adams. Mr. Adams then refused to attend his successor’s inauguration. Jackson spent significant time in office tearing down his predecessor—blaming Adams and the whole fierce campaign for his wife’s death after the election. That one was very complicated.

Speaking of Presidents and courtesy calls, Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, sat famously in the car under the White House portico, snubbing the Trumans. But when it came to blaming his predecessor for the mess he inherited, he chose the path of just ignoring and dismissing Mr. Truman like the junior military officer he saw him to be.

Abraham Lincoln had great reasons and resonant issues to use to place blame for the country on the verge of disintegration he inherited in 1861 because his predecessor, James Buchanan, did virtually nothing to deal with the brewing national disaster. But Mr. Lincoln seemed to have a capacity to rise above cheap politics—dealings with his own Cabinet-made-of-would-be-rivals also demonstrated the 16th President’s ego tempering skills.

Of course, many times Presidents have succeeded men from the same party and, though they might have wanted to really make the guy before look bad, they realized that it was political suicide. Martin Van Buren could certainly have blamed the panic of 1837 on Andrew Jackson, who destroyed the National Bank, but party realities forbade it.

Warren Harding didn’t spend a lot of time or energy blaming Woodrow Wilson for the nation’s woes in the early 1920s. Ronald Reagan used Jimmy Carter as a punching bag for a short while, but quickly moved on. Even Richard Nixon didn’t waste time passing the buck back to LBJ. In fact, their relationship was remarkably good, considering their history.

Now, Franklin Roosevelt—well that’s another story. He used predecessor Herbert Hoover as his whipping boy for at least a decade—and one wonders if this example is the one that resonates with the current administration.

FDR ran a skillful campaign against Hoover in 1932, allied with the forces of economics and history in play at the time. Hoover was an unpopular president as a result of the onset of the Great Depression. Once hailed for his genius at organization and engineering, his name was even part of the vocabulary signifying good economy, as in the popular 1920 Valentine’s Day card:

“I’ll Hooverize on dinner,
On fuel and tires too,
But I’ll never learn to Hooverize
When it comes to loving you.”

By 1932, however, his star had fallen and shantytowns across America were dubbed, “Hoovervilles.” However, today’s prevalent narrative that Hoover was a do-nothing president and then the great activist Roosevelt rode to the White House on a white horse, is at best an apocryphal exaggeration—at worst, it’s a lie.

In fact, Mr. Roosevelt, famous smile and all, was simply an effective and cynical politician who knew how to practice demagoguery with the best of them. He was also a very petty man. One example is in the naming—better, renaming—of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. It had been named for Herbert Hoover in 1931 not just because he was the President at the time (there were already dams named for Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt extant), but also because he had been a major driving force in the project since the early 1920s during his highly successful tenure as Secretary of Commerce. He, being an engineer by training and trade, even played a crucial role in how it would work and be constructed—effectuating something called the Hoover Compromise allowing the project to go forward at a critical juncture.

After his humiliating defeat by the Roosevelt juggernaut in November of 1932, Mr. Hoover stopped at the construction site of the dam and remarked for the press:

“It does give me extraordinary pleasure to see the great dream I have so long held taking form in actual reality of stone and cement. It is now ten years since I became chairman of the Colorado River Commission—This dam is the greatest engineering work of its character ever attempted by the hand of man—I hope to be present at its final completion as a bystander. Even so, I shall feel a special personal satisfaction.”

But by the time the project was completed in 1936, it had been renamed by the Roosevelt administration as the Boulder Dam and Hoover was never invited to be part of any festivities. Of course, by that time Mr. Roosevelt was running for reelection against Republican nominee Alf Landon of Kansas.

But FDR was really running against Hoover one more time.

The other day, during that good-for-nothing White House meeting on health care, there was a telling exchange between President Obama and Senator John McCain. He told McCain that the campaign was over. He meant their campaign.

The battle against all things George W. Bush, however, still rages. And most likely this will continue through the 2012 campaign. After all, if you can’t run on a record of accomplishment—find a dead horse to beat and hope the people are dumb enough not to notice the abuse and absurdity.

The big question is: Will George W. Bush be as durable a whipping boy as was Herbert Hoover—or better yet—is Barack Obama as arrogant, cynically petty, or politically cunning as was Franklin D. Roosevelt?

An ODP [Ohio Democratic Party] document notes that the importance of the state to the Electoral College grows even more critical after this year’s census: “Projections suggest that Democratic stronghold states will lose as many as 8 electoral votes to growing Sunbelt-area states, giving the GOP nominee another Kentucky or a second South Carolina just from the reapportionment of the Electoral College.” It further predicts the party is unlikely to hold FL, IN, NC or VA in the next pres. cycle, and that Obama would have to carry nearly all of the remaining states he flipped in ‘08, if not Ohio, to win re-election, given these projections.

As in so many things, contemporary politicians are using RN’s playbook.  In Quest for the Presidency 1984, Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller recount Nixon’s September 1984 meeting with Ed Rollins and Lee Atwater.  The three discussed how to build Reagan’s own fortress.

Nixon warmed to the prospect and, as he often did in his consultations with Reagan’s men, took it one geopolitical giant step farther. Why not pick just one of Mondale’s big northern “must” states and carpet-bomb it — saturate it with mail, media, surrogates, and presidential visits as if Reagan were campaigning for governor instead of president? Mondale had to win everything in the industrial crescent along the Great Lakes. If they took a single high-yield state away from him, he was finished …. Ohio was twenty-three electoral votes, as Nixon knew without having to look it up. Ohio could be the ball game.

Next Tuesday comes the year’s first major opportunity to find out what voters are making of whatever Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid have been doing on Capitol Hill. In Massachusetts, voters will select the replacement for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy. The candidates are Democratic state attorney general Martha Coakley; Republican state senator Scott Brown; and Libertarian candidate Joseph L. Kennedy, who has constantly been explaining that he is no relation to those Kennedys. (This brings to mind the time in the 1950s when a John Kennedy, no kin to the future President, ran for office in Massachusetts – I forget if it was as a Democrat or a Republican – and got a solid percentage of support from presumably confused voters, though he did not win.)

As recently as last month, it was expected that Coakley would easily win. This is, after all, Massachusetts, the only state that voted for McGovern over Nixon in 1972. Where Ronald Reagan barely prevailed over Walter Mondale in his own 49-state sweep in 1984. Where President Obama prevailed over Sen. John McCain by 26 points in 2008. Where no Republican has been elected to the Senate since Edward Brooke’s re-election in 1972. Where no one from the GOP has been sent to Capital Hill since 1994 – ominously enough (if you’re a Democrat), the year the Republicans took control of Congress for the first time in forty years.

And the situation is, indeed, ominous for Democrats. The most recent poll, taken earlier this week, shows Brown ahead with 50%; Coakley with 46%; and the “other” Kennedy getting 4%. Among independent voters, Brown has overwhelming support, 65%. President Obama and former President Clinton have announced that they were appear in Massachusetts for Coakley over the weekend, and that is hardly a surprise, for they know the stakes. For the GOP to take the seat would spell the end of the (technically) filibuster-proof Democratic majority in Congress. It would require Reid and Pelosi to try to knock together a health-care bill that Obama can sign during the next two weeks if Brown wins, before he can take office (since the Democratic secretary of state in Massachusetts thinks he can stall certification that long). It would give the GOP a boost that it has not had at any time in the next decade, and, even this early, might raise the question of whether a re-election bid by Obama is as doomed in 2012 as Jimmy Carter’s was in 1980.

In fact, some liberal Massachusetts pundits are already starting to wonder what went wrong. Bernie Quigley at The Hill thinks it has to do with that elitist viewpoint that Democrats in the Bay State have cultivated for many a year:

[W]e, many of us, the most common of common people in all of America and possibly in all the world, developed a new contempt for the working class, classically seeing them as a threat and, as the old Southern planters did, scorning the “link heads” and the “white trash” and developed deep and sentimental affections instead for the meanest and lowliest of proletariat. You can see this with the “Car Talk” guys. We, the common working class of Massachusetts and now everywhere, desired to have the guys who fixed our cars have degrees from MIT. That is not what you want in a car guy. You want a picture of your mechanic in a photo-op at the Wilkesboro track with his arm proudly around the celestial No. 3, Dale Earnhardt.

But a passage in the new book The Audacity To Win by David Plouffe is worth mentioning. Plouffe, the campaign manager who handled President Obama’s race for the White House last year, says in it that just after then-Senator Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Obama in the New Hampshire primary in January 2008, “a senior Edwards advisor” telephoned him with a remarkable offer.

The advisor pointed out that Edwards’s failure to win in Iowa (where he finished second, just ahead of Clinton but well behind Obama) or in New Hampshire made it unlikely that he would be the nominee. The advisor also observed that Clinton’s win in the Granite State had put Obama in a difficult position going into the next primary in South Carolina. He proposed a solution: that Edwards drop out of the race, endorse Obama, and be anointed by the Illinois senator as his running-mate should he receive the nomination. The two senators would then campaign jointly. The Edwards advisor argued that this would give Obama the edge in South Carolina, Edwards’s native state, and in the other Southern states on Super Tuesday, and thus guarantee him the nomination.

Plouffe took this offer to Obama, who rejected the idea. The advisor then informed Plouffe that he would approach Clinton instead, but if the notion was even presented to Hillary, no evidence has turned up so far.

Leaving aside the question of why Edwards thought he might help lead a Democratic ticket to victory in the fall when his onetime mistress was due to give birth in a few weeks after this idea was floated, the proposal had one obvious flaw. In 2004, when Edwards ran with John Kerry, it was widely trumpeted by his supporters that as a Southerner he would help win North Carolina, and perhaps Florida, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, for the Democrats. As things turned out, the whole South (and mid-South) went Republican. In 2008, Obama won Florida, Virginia and North Carolina on his own; having Joe Biden, a Pennsylvanian serving from Delaware, was no particular plus.

Obama was also probably aware of an earlier case where a presidential hopeful committed himself to a running-mate before actually being nominated (or having the nomination locked up). In 1976, just before the GOP convention got underway, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, in the hope of gaining the support of enough delegates to overtake President Gerald Ford’s lead, announced that he would select Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker, regarded as a moderate-to-liberal figure, as his running-mate.

This choice generated little enthusiasm among the delegates Reagan sought, but it did upset his conservative base, with Sen. Jesse Helms urging the drafting of Sen. James Buckley to be Reagan’s running-mate instead. As a result, Reagan lost the nomination – though so narrowly that, though few liberal pundits believed it at the time, his ultimate journey to the White House was a sure bet.

For Obama to do something similar would have been a grave misstep; even if Edwards didn’t have the baggage he carried, had the Obama/Edwards ticket gone down to defeat in November 2008, it’s all but impossible that the Illinois senator would have been a viable candidate in 2012 or any time after. So, as the President looks back on 2008, he can rest assured that he made a wise choice.

Ronald Reagan did it. Arnold Schwarzenegger did it. Why not Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News?

The “it,” of course, is running for high political office. Both the Gipper and Arnold made the leap from the silver screen to the governorship of California and, in Reagan’s case, the presidency. Ailes, prodded by his buddy Frank Luntz, is rumored to be considered moving from the plasma screen to the White House. Ailes himself is denying it, which is usually the first sign that someone is seriously considering making a go of it. Hillary Clinton dismissed the idea recently as well. They’re all content. No reason to run for the presidency. Meanwhile, the exploratory committee gets set up on the side.

In Ailes’ case, there are compelling reasons to go for it. He’s already shaken up the Obama administration. President Obama and his janissaries have made no secret of their antipathy for Fox News. They don’t dislike it. They hate it. Charles Krauthammer noted the other day that the administration seems on its way to creating an enemies list that has Fox at the top.

Ailes’ genius has been to tap, not the silent majority, but the raucous minority, which is big enough to swell the ratings of Fox. These days almost any president seems to elicit deep animosity. Bill Clinton was regarded as a rogue imposter by his detractors. So was George W. Bush. Now Obama is regarded with a mixture of fear and loathing by many on the Right.

It was not always so. Initially, the Right was bewildered by Obama. His message of peace and brotherhood, coupled with his astute rhetorical skills, had it floundering. But I would date the beginning of the Obama backlash to the musings of Jerome Corsi’s book The Obama Nation. With its battalion of talk-show hosts, Fox essentially picked up on the Corsi message—illegitimate president, suspicious birth, socialist, radical steeped in the texts of Frantz Fanon, and so forth—and helped further mainstream it.

Which brings us to Ailes. Yes, Rupert Murdoch is the money behind Fox. But I would argue that no media figure has personally had a bigger impact on American politics in the past two decades than Ailes. Maybe even longer. It was Ailes who helped reinvent Richard Nixon after his disastrous run against Pat Brown in the 1962 race for California governor. Liberals dismissed Nixon as so much roadkill. They were wrong. Nixon made his comeback. Ailes also helped Reagan during his run for the presidency in 1980. But it is at Fox that Ailes has truly come into his own. He has become a central figure in liberal demonology, a kind of Dark Lord, an invincible Voldemort terrorizing the innocent.

At a minimum, Ailes is prepared for battle. According to today’s Los Angeles Times profile of Glenn Beck by Matea Gold, Ailes was unflinching when Beck told him he might be too much for him to swallow. Ailes would have none of it. The Times reports: “I see this as the Alamo,” Ailes said, according to Beck. “If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we’d be fine.”

How would Ailes himself fare as a candidate as opposed to impresario of the conservative movement? Whether Ailes has the willigness to undergo the grind of campaigning is a question-mark. He may decide that he’s already succeeded so well in helping to reshape the conservative movement that he has no desire to toss his hat into the presidential ring. But if he runs for the presidency, Obama might find that what ails him is Ailes.

The Times‘ editors manage to make both its outline and its significance clear:

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman and the White House finally responded to a controversial effort by political appointees of both the White House and the NEA to “leverage” government funding of the arts into cultural support for the administration’s legislative agenda.

This is the short version of the Obama administration’s position: Nothing bad happened. The rogue employee who didn’t do anything bad has been relieved of his duties (and has now resigned). In an effort to make sure that the same “nothing bad” never happens again, the administration has distributed a memo and provided some new training on how not to do “nothing bad.”

The facts are simple and public. During the transition, President Obama’s top arts adviser made it clear that his ambition was for the arts to become an integral part of the West Wing. After the inauguration, meetings of artists and political activists at the White House explicitly discussed how to keep the arts community in campaign mode to back Mr. Obama’s legislative agenda. An NEA grants official, Mario Garcia Durham, was at one such meeting for which the attendee list is public.

As those meetings occurred, Yosi Sergant, a key cog in the Obama campaign’s outreach to artists, was transferred from a position at the White House to a position as the communications director of the NEA. When the grant spigots opened at the NEA, more than $2 million went directly into the coffers of arts organizations (and their members) attending these meetings and publicly backing elements of the administration agenda.

Does that prove laws have been broken? Of course not. The worst appearances can be completely innocent. However, the administration’s assertions that Mr. Sergant acted alone (“unilaterally and without … approval or authorization” in Mr. Landesman’s words) and that the administration’s efforts were “completely unrelated” to grant-making are at odds with the facts. The public deserves more than bland reassurances.

A full investigation by both Congress and the NEA inspector general is the only way to bring this story to a close. Answers to these questions would be only a start:

c What was an NEA grants official doing at a White House political meeting? What other grants officials have been meeting with White House political officials?

c So far we know about a handful of conference calls last month and White House meetings last spring. Is this the full extent of the coordination between the White House political staff and the NEA?

c Has the grant-making process been compromised by politics? How were the brand-new stimulus grants insulated from politics? Were any of the safeguards circumvented?

c On the same day that Americans for the Arts, a lobbying organization that also runs a partisan Democratic political action committee, endorsed the key elements of the Obama health care plan, the president of the group met with Mr. Landesman, the new NEA chief. What happened at that meeting?

c Why was activist Yosi Sergant transferred from the White House to the NEA? Who made the decision?

From Day One of this story, Mr. Sergant’s statements, the NEA’s official statements and Mr. Landesman’s statements have been riddled with falsehoods and bluster. There’s no reason to take anything the NEA has said so far at face value.

That was the case until this morning, when news came that the Senator had sent a message to Massachusetts legislators asking them to reconsider a change in the law they enacted in 2004. At that time, Kennedy’s colleague in the Senate, John Kerry, appeared to have a good chance of attaining the Oval Office. This raised the question of what would happen were he to leave his seat. It was thought by many Democratic bigwigs in the state that Gov. Mitt Romney would appoint a fellow Republican as Kerry’s replacement, if it came to that, to serve until a special election could be called.

Even though no Republican has been elected from the state to the Senate since Edward Brooke was re-elected in 1972, the idea of a member of the GOP joining Ted in the Senate for even a few months was so horrific a prospect to legislators at the Boston statehouse that they enacted a law removing the power to appoint Senators from the governor and specifying that in the event of a Senator’s death or resignation, his or her seat was to remain vacant until it could be filled in a special election within 145 to 160 days – that is, about five months. As for the time in between – well, better, obviously, that Massachusetts be represented by only one person in the world’s greatest deliberative body than that a Republican should take the other seat for an instant.

At the time, neither Kennedy nor Kerry raised any objections to this line of reasoning. But now the senior gentleman from Massachusetts has had second thoughts. His statement informed the Boston lawmakers that, given the likelihood of a razor-thin vote in the Senate regarding health-care legislation, it was imperative that Massachusetts have two members at hand to help decide the issue.

There’s certainly more to this than just health care, however. For fully fifty-six years – over one-fourth of the Senate’s history – one of the two Massachusetts seats has been occupied, with a two-year interruption, by one of two brothers. First, there was John F. Kennedy, from 1953 until he won the Presidency in 1960. He resigned his Senate seat on December 22 of that year, and five days later Benjamin Smith, his Harvard roomate, was appointed to replace him. Smith remained a Senator until Ted Kennedy turned thirty and thus became Constitutionally eligible to be elected. The younger Kennedy won a special election for the seat in November 1962, and immediately after Election Day Smith resigned and Ted took his place.

The start and end of Smith’s tenure were situations where the Kennedy clan felt comfortable with having a Governor make appointments to the Senate, and now Ted seeks to have this power restored to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. So far, the Senator hasn’t specified whether he has anyone in mind to replace him; his wife, Victoria, has let it be known that she does not plan to do so.

But it has been reported that Ted wishes to see another Kennedy reach the Senate, though so far it’s been a difficult wish to fulfill. Regular TNN readers will recall that at the end of last year, when President Obama chose Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the Camelot clan attempted to stir up sentiment for Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg to take her place, resulting in a media frenzy of several weeks before Ms. Schlossberg took herself out of the running after a series of gaffes. A few months ago there was some talk of Robert Kennedy’s son Christopher, the president of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, seeking the Senate seat formerly occupied by Obama, since its present occupant, appointee Roland Burris, has said he will not seek election. But more recently it’s been reported that Christopher Kennedy is eyeing the Illinois governorship.

So speculation, after the Senator’s announcement, has started to focus on former Rep. Joseph Kennedy II, his nephew, as his replacement. The younger Kennedy’s career in the House was not especially distinguished and in a contested election, were he not the incumbent, he’d probably find it an uphill battle, not least because of his ham-handed annulment of his first marriage in the early 1990s. But being appointed to the Senate would give him something of an edge when the special election came around.

But even if Joseph II makes it into the Senate, I wouldn’t bet on his seeking a second full term. By 2012, when Ted Kennedy’s term would have expired, he’ll be sixty, and, even in Massachusetts, the electorate probably prefers its Kennedys to be young and charismatic. And, by that time, four or five of the great-grandchildren of Old Joe and Rose Kennedy will be out of law school and ready for high office. (At the present time, only one member of this generation is over thirty – Robert Kennedy’s granddaughter Meaghan Townsend, a yoga instructor in Los Angeles. And just seven or eight are old enough to join their cousin Patrick Kennedy in the House.) In any event, during the next year or so we’ll find out if Camelot is vanishing into the mists of memory or is ready to begin another chapter – assuming the voters want it.

President Barack Obama gets a lackluster 49 – 44 percent approval rating in Ohio, considered by many to be the most important swing state in a presidential election, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. This is President Obama’s lowest approval rating in any national or statewide Quinnipiac University poll since he was inaugurated and is down from 62 – 31 percent in a May 6 survey.

By a small 48 – 46 percent margin, voters disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. This is down from a 57 – 36 percent approval May 6. A total of 66 percent of Ohio voters are “somewhat dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the way things are going in the state, while 33 percent are “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied,” numbers that haven’t changed since Obama was elected.

John F. Kennedy was the last President to win an election without taking the Buckeye State, losing it to none other than Richard Nixon in 1960.

There are numerous theories to why JFK lost Ohio to RN, but according to then Governor Mike DiSalle, it was a repudiation to the state’s high tax policies:

Governor Mike DiSalle said the day after the election, “We have to find a scapegoat and it might as well be me.” He added that he was “willing to admit” the defeat was a negative reaction to his tax program and that “getting the state back to a sound financial basis might no have been politically wise.”

Similarly, according to the Quinnipiac poll, Ohioans were willing to scapegoat former President George W. Bush until recently:

“Until now voters have given President Obama high ratings on the economy, blaming former President George W. Bush for their problems. They might be taking out their frustration on President Obama, possibly deciding that the change he promised has not come as quickly as they expected.”

President Obama has plenty of time to get in the good graces of the Buckeye state, but with an unemployment rate creeping towards 10 percent it could be an uphill battle come 2012.

Beam refers in particular to the appointment made by President Kennedy on August 1, 1963, when he chose Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, the 1960 Republican vice-presidential candidate, to replace Frederick Nolting as American Ambassador to South Vietnam. At the time, Richard Nixon was still in the political wilderness after his defeat in California in 1962 and his subsequent “you won’t have Nixon to kick around” remarks, and Lodge was the favored figure among moderates who hoped to find a candidate for 1964 less polarizing than Gov. Nelson Rockefeller on the left or Sen. Barry Goldwater on the right.

Kennedy’s appointment of Lodge had a twofold advantage: it reminded the world of the Cold War maxim that “politics stops at the water’s edge” and it more or less confirmed Lodge in his disinclination to actively seek the Presidency in 1964.

Beam goes on to say that “after Kennedy’s assassination, Lodge came back and launched an unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination.” It sounds like the young reporter, three years out of Columbia, needs to sit down with a copy of Rick Perlstein’s Before The Storm. Lodge was never a declared candidate in 1964. After issuing nearly Shermanesque statements that he would not run or seek the nomination (though he did not prevent supporters from putting his name on primary ballots where his stated consent was not needed for that purpose) the ambassador won the New Hampshire primary in February 1964 as a write-in candidate, following a well-financed blitz by his Boston-based supporters. (Goldwater came in second in this contest and Rockefeller third, with Nixon, as an undeclared write-in candidate, finishing a fairly strong fourth.)

But even after similar victories in Massachusetts and New Jersey, Lodge remained in Saigon and made no concrete move to secure the nomination. He finally resigned his post at the end of June 1964 and returned to the United States, but by that time Goldwater had almost completely sewn up the nomination and desperate attempts by GOP moderates to deny it to him focused on Gov. William Scranton.

Beam also declares that “Nixon completed the process [of bipartisan support of the Vietnam War] by doubling down.” This is quite a mystifying statement. It was Lyndon Johnson, with the support of both parties in Congress, who escalated American involvement in Vietnam in early 1965. By contrast, Nixon was the President who completed, in phases, the process of de-escalating and concluding the conflict, in the face of resistance from a Democratic-controlled Congress which had many members who sought unilateral and immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. You have to wonder what the history books said in his classes up in Morningside Heights.

The Republican strategist who helped Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman prepare for a possible presidential run says the Republican party is in for a devastating defeat if its guiding lights are Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. “If it’s 2012 and our party is defined by Palin and Limbaugh and Cheney, then we’re headed for a blowout,” says strategist John Weaver, who advised Huntsman and was for years a close adviser to Sen. John McCain. “That’s just the truth.”

Huntsman, a favorite of GOP moderates, left the Republican presidential race last week after accepting President Obama’s offer to become U.S. ambassador to China. Before that, Huntsman appeared to be working hard on preparations for 2012. “He had not made a decision to run for president, but he had made a decision to prepare to run,” says Weaver. “We were probably a month away from announcing the formation of a political action committee, so we were pretty far down the road.”

Weaver is hardly the person the Republican Party should heed advice from. Aside from advocating for the eventual lackluster G.O.P. nominee, he was forced to resign from his post as top adviser when Senator McCain wasn’t carrying any traction on the trail, with campaign coffers so dry that the 72 year old Vietnam hero had to carry his own bags through airports. In any case, this is not to overlook Governor Huntsman’s credentials (and wealth), a combination that would have made him a very, very formidable candidate in 2012:

As a business executive, he was chairman of Huntsman Corporation, a multi-national petrochemical corporation based in Salt Lake City, and served as the first president and CEO of the Huntsman Cancer Foundation at the University of Utah. His public service career includes serving as a White House staff assistant to President Ronald Reagan. Under President George H.W. Bush, he was deputy assistant of commerce for trade development, deputy assistant secretary of commerce for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, as well as U.S. ambassador to Singapore (the youngest U.S. ambassador in a century). He is fluent in Mandarin. He also served as a deputy U.S. trade representative and U.S. trade ambassador under President George W. Bush.

Smart move by President Obama. Aside from the most obvious political considerations — and most importantly — the choice of Huntsman takes account of the strategic gravity placed on Sino-American issues. But the choice of Huntsman also puts another level of prestige, experience and expertise below Obama’s primary political nemesis, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Remember that it was Clinton who was supposed to compete for the China portfolio with the other Asian “expert,” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner? It appears that Dick Morris was right,  all that stands between Clinton and her legacy is a glut of foreign policy experts and diplomats with cabinet level status.

“Plus, Sarah Palin – now don’t laugh – is writing a book. Not just reading a book: writing a book. Actually, in the word of the publisher, she’s collaborating on a book. I love the way that sounds. Does that mean that she answers questions of the writer, and then the writer writes the book? I guess the reason to have someone write a book for you and claim it’s your book is you get to do a nation-wide book tour, and act the part of a, of an author yourself.”

Well, in the famous laugh-words of Ralph Kramden: “Har-har-hardy-har-har.”

I’m sure some network executive was at that very moment picking up the phone and calling yet another NBC bigwig. The conversation probably went something like:

“Hey, did you just hear Chris – what’s his name? – Yeah, that’s him. Well, I was thinkin’ that we might want to review our plans about sending the dude with the floppy hair out to California.”

“You mean Conan The Barbarian?”

“No, his name is O’Brien, I think.”

“Whatever – I usually watch the Hannity encore on Fox News at that time.”

“Ok, Ok – not the point. What I am saying is – I think this Matthews guy may be pretty funny – and we could get him for less money for chin man’s replacement. He’s cheap and easy, I hear. Real easy, in fact, you just gotta make his legs tingle and you have him at ‘Hello.’”

Of course, the MSNBC host of Hardball wasn’t the only talking head trying to hide a smirk – the way disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich tries to hide his hair – when describing Palin’s multi-million dollar pact with publishing giant HarperCollins. The widely reported story received coverage from the mainstream media that was occasionally only dismissive.

That’s because most of the time it was outright derisive.

The “Dan Quayling” of Sarah Palin continues and this make-her-look-stupid-campaign testifies to the fact that she remains a formidable political figure. The irony of this is largely lost on most of the “beautiful” minds over at NBC, MSNBC, CNN, CBS, & ABC, where the teleprompters double as mirrors.

The charismatic Governor of Alaska draws enthusiastic crowds wherever she goes – even after the defeat of the Republican ticket at the hands of the yes-we-can guys. And the very idea that she can make millions with a book at a time when publishers are shy about taking many risks in these challenging economic times, suggests that the lady has not-too-shabby metaphorical legs, as well as real ones.

Any nine-year-old child or MSNBC show host (pardon the redundancy) understands that the idea is to vex and therefore hex Sarah Palin. The goal is to click repeatedly on her image and drag her into a folder marked either “too dumb to lead,” or “demonize by caricature.”

The problem is, all this will do is make her more popular with an important constituency – her core base, in fact – that could very well propel her to the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Sure, it’s way too early. But did anyone really think a community organizer from Chicago, who had just been elected to his first term as a junior senator, would beat a presumptive nominee named Hillary, not to mention mop up the floor with a genuine American hero en route to the White House, way back in 2005?

For Matthews et al to mock Sarah Palin’s book deal in a way that suggests she doesn’t know how to write and therefore has to depend on a “collaborator” – that word used almost as a synonym for “sneer” by Chris Matthews – is beyond hypocritical.

It’s also stupid.

He apparently has so little respect for his audience that he assumes they won’t dig into this a little more. Or maybe Matthews has studied his show’s demographics and is therefore confident that his viewers themselves don’t read much beyond the titles touted on his show – and maybe those of Keith Olberman, Nora O’Donnell, and Rachel Maddow.

I write, you decide.

Chris Matthews is an all-things-Kennedy fan from way back (though as a kid, he wanted Nixon to beat JFK in 1960 and cried when RN lost), so while he mocks Palin he is, of course, aware that there is a ghost, or at least a skeleton, in the Camelot closet.

When I was a young boy, my dad gave me a copy of Profiles in Courage, written by none other than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It took me a while, but I made my way through it and still have that copy in my library. It was a cool book about statesmen who had defied the political correctness of their day (another irony?) and did what they thought was right. It was as much a work about character as it was about courage.

I loved the book and the author became an early hero of mine. When he was killed, I cried.

Later, though, I learned – as most of us do when we grow up – that the story behind the story is often the real story. Discovering that the man who wrote about two important virtues and values seemed himself to be deficient in both was, well, a bummer, to say the least. He had a lot of girl friends, a practice that didn’t seem to reinforce the idea of sterling character. But, at least, I still had that courage thing to embrace.

Then I found out – oh, sad, sad day that it was – that the book I loved, that little bestseller that had won a Pulitzer Prize (which I heard was, like, a really big deal), had been written mostly by, gulp, someone else.

I must have spent days walking around in a funk, looking down at bells at the bottoms of my not-quite-long-enough-geek-jeans, for days.

A guy named “Theodore” had done most of the work, I heard. Theodore? The very name didn’t not bespeak, “cool” as Kennedy’s did. I had an image in my head of a bookish guy with old-man glasses. So, I looked him up in the library – and sure enough.

Then it got worse. You remember that Pulitzer Prize? Well, I came to find out that John F. Kennedy’s daddy – a pretty rich and powerful guy, I was told – got a buddy of his on the Pulitzer committee, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, to champion his boy’s book. Originally, the book was not on the committee’s short list, one that had been submitted by some expert reviewers, but somehow it made it to that important table. At any rate, it wasn’t as “weighty” as prize winners usually turned out to be. But, before long “it came out of nowhere” and won the roses.

It was all pretty good publicity in the run up to the 1960 campaign. After all, though most candidates these days have books out while they run for the big office, Kennedy was one of the pioneers of the practice. And his had won a Pulitzer, which said that he was smart, erudite, eloquent, and therefore would make a good leader.

But his erudition and eloquence were implants.

So, Mr. Matthews – go ahead and make fun of Sarah Palin. Do your best to color her ditzy and as someone with no depth. But just remember, she actually has character and courage. And Americans will be seeing more of her graceful, politically popular, and winning profile for many years to come.

But on Tuesday an event happened that may well snowball into something that the White House, and Democrats on Capitol Hill, would probably not care to get involved with just yet. But more and more, it is becoming inescapable: after a Presidential campaign in which Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel (neither much of a mainstream figure) were the only candidates to support gay marriage, a situation is looming in which every Senate and House member may have to declare themselves on one side or another of the issue, and very soon.

Last year, there was talk about introducing a gay-marriage bill into the District of Columbia City Council. At the time, the capital’s newspaper for the gay community, the Washington Blade, argued that such a move was premature; it urged waiting until 2009. And so the proposal went unintroduced, as the nation elected a President who expressed support for the civil-union concept for gay couples, but drew the line at marriage.

This week,a few days after NBC News and the Washington Post announced poll results indicating, for the first time, that a plurality of Americans favor gay marriage (49%, with 46% opposed), the supporters of this legislation made their move, and so the City Council of the nation’s capital passed a bill recognizing gay marriages from other states, by a vote of 12 to 1.

The sole dissenting vote was cast by former Washington mayor Marion Barry. When it became evident that he would vote against the bill, this caused some surprise and consternation. For one thing, long before Barry’s drug use and lackadaisical administrative style gained him notoriety, he was one of the founders – indeed, the first chairman – of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee and, in those days, fought for civil rights alongside the iconic John Lewis, who now, as a Congressman, is a vocal champion of gay marriage.

And there’s also the fact that in his early years as mayor in the 1970s and early 1980s, Barry was a friend of gay rights, and his administration’s tolerant attitude had much to do with making the Dupont Circle neighborhood as much of a magnet for gays as Castro Street or the West Village. He also was a firm supporter of the Whitman-Walker clinic in the early days of its fight against AIDS, and Jim Graham, the longtime executive director of the clinic and one of the two openly gay City Council members, pointed this out (as seen in this Youtube clip) as he expressed his disappointment with Barry’s decision against the bill on Tuesday. (Meanwhile, David Catania, the council’s other gay member, represented the no-compromise attitude of younger gays in his remarks to Barry.)

Barry had actually gone on record as a sponsor of the bill when it was introduced. In the Youtube clip he suggests that his staffers had somehow arranged for this without his knowledge, but what is more likely is that strong opposition to recognition of gay marriages from churchgoers and older voters in Ward 8, which he represents, caused him to change his mind.

The council’s vote was greeted with a furious response from several African-American ministers in the area outside the meeting room, and it took the police to restore order, as seen in the clip. But this was far from the end of the story. On Wednesday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a onetime Brigham Young University football star and convert to the Mormon faith (and also to the Republican Party – his Democratic father’s first wife, Kitty, later married 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis), stated that he and other GOP lawmakers stood ready to challenge the new law within 30 days, as the Home Rule Charter provides.

Although the District’s representative in Congress, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, dismissed the idea that Congress will overturn the law, the situation is distinctly a worrisome one for the Democrats. It seems very likely that Republican lawmakers can garner enough support from their Democratic colleagues in the South and in the more conservative areas of the Midwest to force a vote.

And if the House votes to endorse the Council’s action, the next step for gay activists and their allies is plainly to seek the repeal of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by majorities of both parties and signed into law by President Clinton. Although voters, especially younger ones, seem to be steadily shifting toward support of gay unions, opposition still runs strong in a number of House districts that the Democrats only managed to recapture in the last two years, and in states, such as North Carolina, that were essential to Obama’s victory and which he would need in 2012. Therefore, both the White House and Congressional Democrats are walking a fine line for the next 18 months.

And the gay community is now determined to keep up the pressure, as shown in this editorial by Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff. He points out that President Obama, throughout his campaign, assured voters that he meant to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay service personnel in place since 1993, and this language was repeated on the White House website after his inauguration. But then, the text was altered to refer to the President’s intention to change the policy “in a sensible way.” Following protests, this text was changed yet again, to state that the Admistration’s intention again is to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell” – but, to the irritation of activists, the “in a sensible way” phrase was kept. Given the eagle-eyed attention directed at the website’s statements, it’s a sure thing that every statement Obama makes about the District’s new law, when it comes up for Congressional review, will be meticulously analyzed. This may be as thorny a situation as any Obama faces in his first term.

Today, there came two moments of considerable importance to the United States. The first one was the announcement (in terms implying that he would accept the post if offered it) by Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican, that he is under consideration for Secretary of Commerce.  This decision in itself is not that surprising; Gregg was elected to his first term by a whisker and won his second mainly because he was running against the 94-year-old activist “Granny D” Haddock, and New Hampshire has become more, not less, Democratic in recent years.

What’s surprising is that President Obama’s transition team did not offer Gregg the job of, say, Secretary of the Interior when the Cabinet was being selected last month, and, at the same time, offer either of Maine’s Republican senators (Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe) high-ranking positions, thus making it possible for the Democratic governors of these states to name replacements and thus have a filibuster-proof majority in place before Obama’s inauguration.

Indeed, with Gregg in the Cabinet and a Democratic replacement in his old seat, if Al Franken wins his court battle, the filibuster-proof majority will be in place. But that’s still a big if. Are the Democrats really certain that Franken can prevail through all the court challenges to come? Is it desirable to have 59 Democrats in the upper chamber during at least the initial legislative battles to come, when bringing either Collins or Snowe into the Administration could bring the total to 60 and thus forestall all the trouble that could be stirred up when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gets into a scrape like the one earlier this month, when he drew one line in the sand after another and Sen. Roland Burris kept crossing them?  This is a question that may be pondered in the West Wing over the weekend.

Later today, the GOP took a big step in the right direction when, after a long, drawn-out contest between a half-dozen candidates, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele emerged as the first African-American chairman in the history of the Republican National Committee.  During the last half-dozen years, Steele has emerged as not only the successor to former Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts as the most prominent black Republican, but has consistently shown himself to be a forceful critic of his party’s complacency, and a strong voice for a more inclusive GOP.

The last election showed, once and for all, that the Republicans have to get on the right side of the immigration issue.  All over the world, people dream of coming to the United States.  And the life that they dream of making here is not one burdened with gigantic bureaucracies and oppressive taxes; that’s what many want to escape from in their own countries.

Last week I saw the acclaimed film Slumdog Millionaire and, as I watched the scenes of Indian life, thought to myself: Here are hundreds of millions of people who dream of a better life, a more abundant life.  If one-twentieth of them were ever to settle in the United States, the Republicans would win every election in the foreseeable future – providing they cast aside the anti-immigration rhetoric. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants, exemplifies a generation of Americans from a multitude of different heritages and histories, all united by their readiness to embrace the economic and social vision that a Republican party under the guidance of Michael Steele could provide.

Many liberal commentators, last November, forecast the end of the GOP’s ascendancy, in terms almost as emphatic as were heard the morning after Election Day in 1964.  But as the months go by, and as the Democrats get to squabbling (as Democrats tend to do), we may see a different picture.  But that depends on the willingness of the Republican Party to reach out to those parts of the American electorate — including the newest Americans — most willing to hear its message.

It is certainly understandable that the party out of executive branch power for the past eight years would find positions for the faithful. Though for a man who campaigned on yes-we-can change there is more than a little irony in many of Mr. Obama’s decisions since the election.

What I find curious is something few seem to be noticing. History tells us that accepting a position in the cabinet, though a great way to serve, is not at all a good move for anyone who has ultimate presidential aspirations.

The last man to move directly from a cabinet position to the presidency was Herbert Hoover.

Mr. Hoover was the long-time and highly effective Secretary of Commerce under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge and by 1928 was widely seen as the inevitable Republican nominee. He probably brought the best resume ever to the White House. The rest is, as they say, history.

Across the pond in Great Britain, a cabinet post is not only prestigious – it is absolutely essential to anyone desiring to be Prime Minister. Since the days of David Lloyd George who molded the modern role of his nation’s PM during the demanding days of the Great War, all of the realm’s ultimate political leaders have come from the ranks of the cabinet. That’s the way their system works. A lot of real political power resides in the cabinet.

Nearly all British Prime Ministers, since the days of Sir Robert Walpole (c. 1741), have also held the title First Lord of the Treasury – the original designation for the PM’s role. In fact, 10 Downing Street is technically known as the residence of the person holding this title.

The point is that over there one must be a member of the cabinet of the party in power (and the leader of the shadow cabinet of the party out of power) to become Prime Minister. Most recent residents of 10 Downing Street have served as either Chancellor of the Exchequer (their big cabinet kahuna) or Foreign Secretary. Anthony Eden, who succeeded the retiring Winston Churchill in 1955, had been serving as Deputy Prime Minister – also a cabinet position.

But none of this transfers to American politics, due in large part to the fact that we have separate and distinct branches of government. For example, cabinet members in Great Britain retain their membership in the House of Commons.

In the United States, politicians tend to run for high office from the platform of a current (or previous) electoral position (or occasionally – as with General Eisenhower – from personal and heroic stature that transcends mere politics). In fact, history tells us that being a part of the cabinet du jour in this country is just about a sure ticket to the political graveyard.

If someone is in the Senate, or House of Representatives, or a Statehouse somewhere, they – even if in the same party as the president – can effectively mount a significant political challenge. But when you are “in” the government your hands are tied and any voice you might have is largely silenced.

For Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson, this means that they are, for all practical purposes, out of politics for quite some time – maybe even for good. Perhaps this is a conscious choice – maybe they have made peace with the idea that Barack Obama will be a formidable president to oppose or follow.

Whatever the case, these savvy politicians have made a serious tactical mistake if they hope to succeed their new boss in the White House, either via a failed single term, or at the end of eight years of Obama. The cabinet is not a place for the politically ambitious – it is a pasture for the politically resigned.

The other observation I have about the make up of Mr. Obama’s emerging administration is one that has been covered to death by the pundits. But I can’t resist a comment or two.

Mr. “Change” has turned out to have only really thus far changed one thing – his mind. What should we make of the fact that his “new” administration looks a lot like the third Clinton term he derided while campaigning against Hillary? And what’s the deal with keeping some of the Bush people in key posts?

The answer is obvious. President-Elect Barack Obama is not a messiah, nor is he a man who will usher in a new golden era of non-political post-partisanship. The fact is that he is every bit a politician.

And he is a very good politician at that – at least thus far. He is showing himself to be much more pragmatic than idealistic. He may not be in bed with the bad stuff coming out of Chicago these days, but he did learn the game there.

In fairness, there is historical precedent for someone coming from a place where corrupt politics reigned, yet emerging untainted. His name was Harry Truman, who rose to power with the help of a notorious Kansas City machine, but who proved himself to be a man of courage and integrity. This reference point should be kept in mind before many rush to judgment and try to tie the president-elect to anything before all the facts come out.

One of Mr. Obama’s heroes – John F. Kennedy – campaigned in 1960 on the promise to get the country “moving again.” But among his first appointments after he was elected (much to the chagrin of many who had voted for his promise of change) were J. Edgar Hoover to remain at the FBI and Allen Dulles at CIA.

Putting a cabinet team together is harder to do than it is to promise. Most presidential victors realize this early on. A close look at new presidents putting teams together yields many stories about surprises and notable oversights.

When Jack Kennedy decided (strongly influenced by dear-old-dad) to appoint his younger brother Bobby as Attorney General (though RFK was anemic in the legal experience department), he knew it would be controversial. He joked: “Well, I think I’ll open the door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2:00 A.M., look up and down the street, and, if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby.’”

The actual announcement was not made that way – but JFK did tell his brother to comb his messy hair to look more grown up before meeting the press.

When Richard Nixon was putting his first cabinet together, someone suggested the name of David Rockefeller for the treasury post – then immediately said, “but obviously we can’t have two Rockefellers in the cabinet.” This comment was based on the presumption that Nixon was going to give long-time rival Nelson Rockefeller a role in his administration. Nixon’s reply to the “we can’t have two Rockefellers” comment was: “Who says we have to have one?”

Nixon did, however, tap George Romney – the rival who just 18 months before was the number one contender for the Republican nomination – to serve as his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Romney accepted and faded away politically.

It will be interesting to see how the new Obama “team of rivals” fares. Lyndon Johnson used to say that sometimes it was better to “have someone inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

We’ll see.

Sean Hannity just had Newt Gingrich on his radio show. He asked Gingrich if the former Speaker will consider running for president in 2012.

“Yes,” Gingrich replied.

It’s not shocking news by any stretch. But it was a refreshingly honest answer. There was no “that’s the last thing on my mind right now” dance. He obviously wants to run and has been laying the groundwork.

I think conservatives are more liable to look toward new blood next time — someone who has been on the national scene, who is working behind the scenes, or at home in his state, or as a “Young Turk” on the Hill in the future. But who knows.

Newt, by the way, also denied reports he is running for the RNC chair job.

The bottom line is that the Republican Party needs to forget Sarah Palin and find a Richard Nixon-type candidate in 2012. Richard Nixon was a pragmatic conservative and was able to win two national elections when the electoral map was in a state of flux due to an increase of new minority voters, African-Americans. Richard Nixon used his presidency to add teeth to Affirmative Action policies and to begin Minority and Women Business initiatives in the federal government. Nixon made inroads to this new voting block while keeping his conservative principles of small business growth and development.

Can we leave behind the non-policy ideologue that is embodied by Sarah Palin? Or are we destined to repeat this failure of leadership in the 2012 election cycle? Finding this Nixon-esque balance is not only possible and achievable, with the changing demographics of the electoral map, this balance will be necessary to win back the Congress and the White House.

The first two to be named this week were Eric Holder as attorney general and former Senate Majority (and Minority) Leader Tom Daschle as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Holder, apart from his unfortunate stance where the pardon of arms dealer Marc Rich was concerned in the Clinton White House’s final days, has a strong record, and, as the first African-American in this position, will be making history in a major fashion. Daschle’s appointment is significant because it seems to indicate that the President-elect has a major health-care initiative in mind and has moved to ensure that the person in charge of it is someone with a lot of muscle on Capitol Hill.

Yesterday, just as the financial markets were set to tank for another day, word came of the President-elect’s choice of New York Federal Reserve Bank head Timothy Geithner to be Secretary of the Treasury, beating out Clinton-era Treasury head Lawrence Summers (who, instead, appears set to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Fed when the latter’s term expires in January 2010) and former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. This news sent the Dow right up past 8000 and inspired, at least for the weekend, a bit of confidence on Wall Street.  It’s interesting that Obama, for this job, chose someone almost exactly his own age, since most of his other selections are of people a decade or two his senior. (And it’s also worth noting that, once again, Christopher Hitchens has something to gripe about on the talking-heads shows next week: Geithner began his career as an employee of Kissinger & Associates in the 1980s.)

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, at one time a prospect for Secretary of State, seems destined for the Commerce Department now; his experience as an international negotiator should be helpful when it comes time to do his part to improve America’s standing in the field of world trade. And Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, with considerable experience in the field of border security, is a good choice to head the Department of Homeland Security.

Obama’s most interesting and surprising choices so far have been in the national security field. For the post of National Security Advisor (rather than former deputy NSA James B. Steinberg or former assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice, as the AP article suggested he had in mind) he is reported to have chosen four-star General James Jones, a 64-year-old onetime Georgetown University basketball star who has as extensive a range of experience as almost anyone ever selected for the post. For National Intelligence Director he is said to be favoring retired Admiral Dennis Blair, rather than former Indiana congressman Tim Roemer or Rep. Jane Harman as the AP article claimed. But the story did have one choice right – the President-elect is reported to want former National Couterterrorism Center John Brennan for the post of CIA Director.

When it comes to the selection of those who will represent his White House to the media and the public, today came the news that Obama has chosen Robert Gibbs, his campaign press spokesman, to be press secretary. Gibbs is a Southerner with very extensive experience on Capitol Hill working with politicians from below the Mason-Dixon Line, and conceivably can play a substantial part, come 2012, in improving the President-elect’s performance in Southern states. The choices of Ellen Moran, long an AFL-CIO activist, and Dan Pfeiffer to be, respectively, White House communications director and assistant communications director are also very significant. It’s evident that Big Labor will have some muscle in the executive branch to a degree perhaps unseen since the Carter years.

And still the question lingers about Sen. Hillary Clinton. It appears almost a done deal that a nomination for Secretary of State will be offered to her and that she’ll accept. But in recent days there’s been talk that former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the leading Democrat most experienced in the foreign policy field, will be offered the post of Deputy Secretary at Foggy Bottom. What could emerge from this synergy? I’ll look at that question tomorrow.

A friend asked what I meant suggesting that Gov. Palin could be the new Nixon instead of the new Reagan. Here are the two scenarios:

New Reagan: Several weeks before the election, GOP insider Ed Rollins said, somewhat chillingly, that some didn’t think Sen. McCain was the right candidate to rebuild the party, an echo of those who felt the same about President Ford in 1976. During 1977-80, Jimmy Carter made such a muck of the economy and foreign policy that a Republican victory was almost inevitable. Having challenged and weakened Ford in the ‘76 primaries, Ronald Reagan earned the ‘80 nomination, which was tantamount to winning the election.

Palin and her advisers can’t help but have grasped the possibility that Obama will falter or that the sheer magnitude of our economic and international challenges will overwhelm him. Every leading Republican has as well. The internecine sniping at Palin has nothing to do with ‘08 postmortems and everything to do with ‘12 prepositioning.

The fallacy is that the party needs a new Reagan — a candidate with special appeal to social conservatives — to beat the new Carter. The moderate, pro-choice John Connally or George H. W. Bush would almost certainly have beaten Carter had one of them been nominated. For ‘12, the GOP doesn’t need a far-right champion. It needs an agonized reappraisal of what makes it necessary and viable. Delaying that work in order to coalesce around the present Palin would be a disastrous mistake, as would her hurling herself against an Obama juggernaut in ‘12 unless she had a reasonable chance of success. From the moment Lehman Bros. failed in mid-September, she and McCain became sacrificial lambs. One self-sacrifice per career is sufficient.

New Nixon: RN would begin with the assumption that Obama will probably not fail. An incumbent is likely to be reelected, and Obama will probably not make Carter’s mistakes. Because circumstances may nonetheless hobble him, however, Mr. Nixon would advise Palin to keep her ‘12 options open, but he’d urge her to fix her attention on ‘16.

As for the present Palin, he would have enormous respect for the potential she embodies. She has an astonishing reservoir of political capital. But he would have some significant concerns. And so he would almost certainly write her a “Dear Governor Palin” letter beginning, “I am sure you are receiving a great deal of free advice from well-meaning fans and self-appointed advisers around the country. While you are of course under no obligation to give it any consideration whatsoever, I have taken the liberty of enclosing a memorandum containing just a few…” In such circumstances, his insights were usually based in the reliability of his own experience. He would make points such as this:

Take some time off the national stage. The temptation will be to accept too many of the invitations that are flowing in and to go out and challenge her critics. We’ve probably seen too much of her already just this week. Better to be a little scarce and mysterious. As RN liked to say, it never hurts to leave them wanting more.

Get back to work. Her critics say she’s a lightweight fashion plate. Confound them by being an effective governor (or senator).

See the world and meet leaders. RN would consider this crucial — first, because she’s justifiably seen as weak in foreign policy, and second, because it would help her prepare to be in power.

Do favors. Some of RN’s most important political work was done in 1964, when he campaigned loyally for the hopeless Goldwater candidacy, and in the midterm elections of 1966, doing favors that were repaid in 1968. In 2012, assuming she doesn’t run, Palin should be the most loyal and committed advocate of whomever does. Purely in terms of her own political interests, the worst than could happen is that he would win and she’d have her pick of jobs.

Don’t let your enemies define you. Palin provoked panic among abortion rights advocates. The weekend after she was named to the ticket, Andrew Sullivan republished a lie about her son Trig’s parentage on his Atlantic Monthly-owned web site that obviously still rankles. Yet Palin would close herself off from growth as a leader by taking it personally. If some people despise her because of her pro-life views, what might she learn from their passion? Some women experience the possibility of restrictions on abortion as an existential challenge. She is comfortable seeing the issue almost solely in terms of the rights of the unborn. What about the rights of the half of the population that wasn’t permitted to vote until 1920? Hillary Clinton did herself a tremendous favor three years ago with a speech in which she spoke respectfully of those who hate abortion. Palin should consider making an analogous gesture, both on the abortion and the gay rights front.

Read and think. At least from afar, Palin doesn’t seem curious or self-critical. Confidence is good in a leader; smugness is not. Mr. Nixon read hungrily all his life and spent long hours in Socratic dialogs with experts, advisers, and aides. While his core principles didn’t waiver, his approach to great issues changed with the times. The anti-communist of the 1940s became the internationalist of the 1950s, the course-changing peacemaker of the 1960s and ’70s, and the elder statesman of the ’80s, respected by all his Democratic and Republican successors in spite of the circumstances of his administration’s end.

As Palin matures as a potential national leader, her views will, one hopes, become more moderate and nuanced. Her New Reagan advisers will caution her against permitting this to happen. Lost in the fantasy that Reagan’s conservative bona fides (rather than the “R” after his name) won him the ‘80 election, they’ll urge her not to tamper with the time-tested Palin brand. But if she thinks she’s fully formed and ready to be President, she’ll never make it. She’ll fade away prematurely or, at best, squander her potential on a quixotic ‘12 bid that would probably relegate her to oblivion and her party to another generation in the wilderness. If she uses the next eight years wisely, focused more on substance than on politics, she could truly be the new Nixon, and a winner.

How Republicans handle this exile, and just how long the era lasts, will depend largely on what is done with and in the wilderness.

The idea of a wilderness period as a picture of exile is actually much older than American politics, or even anything from our ancestors across the pond. It is a concept dating back to Biblical history and the frustrations and wanderings of the ancient children of Israel. Poised to enter the “Promised Land” of abundance and fulfillment following centuries of bondage and privation, and in the wake of the clearly providential exodus led by Moses, that generation fell tragically short.

They missed their rendezvous with destiny.

Entering the wilderness – a place, but also a process – they lived out a forty-year reminder of what had left been behind, while also grieving the loss of a compelling future. They had allowed short-term frustration to short-circuit long-held principles and dreams.

And the Lord told them in the book of Deuteronomy that the reason for the wilderness was, “to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart.” In other words, the wilderness for them was a divinely ordained “time out” – the kind of thing my dad would do when he sent me to my room to “think about” what I had done (when it was really all my brother’s fault).

The wilderness was a time for purging and preparing. Attitudes, habits, and ambitions had to be dealt with, and priorities revisited and clarified. The duration of the wilderness depended on how well the lessons were learned. In that ancient case, a journey that should have taken no more than a year became a forty-year generational failure.

And something that was lost, forgotten, or just misplaced, desperately needed to be found.

As the Republican Party moves into its own desert of exile for a while, it is time for reflection. It needs to figure out what it really stands for and what it can offer the nation the next time it is called upon to lead. How it manages in the wilderness will determine whether it will come back in four years, or forty – if at all.

That another such time will come is, of course, almost inevitable – not just because of very real concerns about the capacity of recent victors to translate historically flawed policies into real success, but because of the inherent cycles of politics. What happened on November 4th was due nearly as much to the tendency of politics and history to repeat themselves and the public’s tendency to soon tire of anyone on center stage, as it was a mandate for real “yes, we can” change.

Writing in the book, In the Arena: A Memoir of Defeat and Renewal, the late and former president Richard Nixon dedicated a chapter to the phenomenon of the wilderness. He knew a thing or two about the ups and downs and ins and outs of political life. The period between his loss in the governor’s race in 1962 and the winning of the White House in 1968, is a textbook case of how to come back from the kind of defeat that tempts opponents to write someone off permanently.

Nixon mentioned something described by Arnold Toynbee in his, Study of History, described as “the phenomenon of withdrawal…a disengagement and temporary withdrawal of the creative personality from his social milieu and his subsequent return to the same milieu transfigured in a new capacity with new powers.” Throughout history, great leaders demonstrated this. Certainly Nixon did and clearly identified with others who went through deep valleys.

In the 1991 movie, City Slickers, Billy Crystal and his best friends head out west looking for adventure. Crystal’s wife in the film wanted him to, while moving cattle from point A to B, along the way find something. Something he had lost. Something he needed to recover. His smile. The movie ended happily with said smile finding its way back to Billy’s face.

For the Republicans, they do not need to find something as insignificant as a group smile. Rather, they should be looking for something much more vital if they are to have a real shot at coming back from this wilderness.

The key to this is found in another place where the ancient scriptures mention a wilderness. We learn about this from the writings of the prophet Isaiah, when in the 40th chapter of his book we come across the vital phrase, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

No doubt Winston Churchill, another frequent wilderness wanderer, identified with this little phrase during his years as a political has-been in the 1930s. He had no power, no position, and no prospects.

But he found his “voice” – and began to warn his countrymen about Hitler and dangers to come. Later, when he once again found himself in forced exile, having been voted out of office in the Labor sweep just a couple of months after the victory had been won in Europe, he found his “voice” again. This time he did not speak in the House of Commons, but rather in the gymnasium of a small college in the American mid-west. From that unlikely pulpit in the wilderness he cried out about an “iron curtain.”

The Republicans have clearly found the wilderness. Now they need to find their voice.

The GOP needs to figure out what it wants to be if and when it grows back up. Are ideas like limited government, the free market, and at least an interest in understanding the relationship between the morality of personal responsibility and self-discipline and the ills of the larger culture – now officially gone forever?

The word paradigm comes from the Greek language and the word paradeigma. It basically means a perception, or frame of reference – a lens through which to interpret reality. Author Steven Covey in his book, The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (hint: the eighth habit is “finding your voice”), insists that “if you want to make minor incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitude. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvements, work on paradigms.”

The time for tweaking is past. As the nation readies itself to enter a new era of “bold experimentation” under an activist Obama administration, it is time for the party now finding itself in the political wilderness to find what it has lost. By definition, something lost is not something new – it is something once possessed.

Republicans can find their voice during the wilderness period, but to do so will require a willingness to have the wisdom and humility to make a paradigm shift, one that surely involves a quantum journey back to the future. The must find what once worked – and has been lost.

And if anyone thinks that the idea of going to the past to find something that will resonate in the future is not politically feasible, please remember this: America just elected a guy who advocates policies and programs that failed 75 years ago.