Via Christopher Orr at The Plank, it was interesting to discover that not all the conservative evangelical Christians who hate Mitt Romney’s religion are keeping those views to themselves. Florida televangelist Bill Keller, in an email reportedly sent out to a 2.4 million-member subscription list, made this measured comment, among others, about the consequences of voting for the Mittster:

“Those who follow the false teachings of this cult, believe in the false jesus of the Mormon cult and reject faith in the one true Jesus of the Bible, will die and spend eternity in hell,” he charges. “Romney getting elected president will ultimately lead millions of souls to the eternal flames of hell!”

Placing “jesus” in lower-case when referencing the deity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was a truly original touch, eh?Keller also suggested that Pat Robertson was “out of his mind” for inviting Romney to speak at Regents University.So things ought to get pretty interesting in Christian Right circles between now and next year, what with some leaders endorsing the Mittster, and at least one suggesting he’s herding millions of souls straight to hell.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

So: after his disastrous debate performance on the question of abortion, Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani has apparently decided to recalibrate his position, and will be a sorta-loud, sorta-proud proponent of abortion rights. At the same time, his aides suggest, he may downplay the early-states gauntlet of Iowa, NH, and SC, and stake his candidacy on a smashing win in Florida on January 29 (assuming that state’s decision to move that far up survives pressure from the RNC) and in the quasi-national primary on February 5.To the extent that this “new” position is a lot easier to explain and is consistent with his longstanding record in New York, it makes some sense, but it’s obviously a big gamble. Sure, anti-abortion activists are stronger in relatively low-turnout contests like the Iowa Caucuses than in, say, a California primary. But no one should underestimate the extent to which this is a litmus test issue for broad swaths of conservative GOP rank-and-file voters in almost every part of the country. And while Paul Waldman at TAPPED is right in suggesting that Rudy won’t get much of a pass from social conservatives for whom a politician’s position on abortion is essentially a symbolic reflection of their shared belief that American culture is plunging hellwards, Rudy’s bigger problem is going to be with the significant number of conservatives who really do think Roe v. Wade initiated an ongoing American Holocaust. They will do anything to deny Giuliani the nomination, up to and including reaching agreement on a single alternative candidate if necessary.A more immediate problem for Rudy is that his recalibrated position supporting abortion rights happened to coincide perfectly with a statement in Mexico by Pope Benedict XVI adding his personal authority to the conservative clerical contention that pro-choice Catholic politicians should be denied communion. And right away, the rector of the parish where Rudy’s last church-sanctioned marriage was performed told the New York Daily News that he’d deny Giuliani communion if he happened to show up at the altar rail there.This last news was a bit odd, insofar as it ignored the more obvious reason that Rudy might be denied communion at this particular church, or any other Catholic church: his civil dissolution of the marriage performed there, and his civil remarriage to a woman who had also been married twice previously. I sort of doubt Giuliani is going to be seeking communion anywhere, unless he’s pre-arranged it very carefully with a priest who’s willing to take an enormous amount of hierarchical heat.The Pope’s statement is actually bigger news for the four Catholic Democrats running for president: Richardson, Dodd, Biden and Kucinich. In 2004 John Kerry managed to take communion regularly with only a modicum of church-shopping, despite considerable conservative rumblings about denying him access to the sacrament. That may be a lot dicier for pro-choice Catholic Democrats now, on and off the presidential campaign trail.As for Rudy, putting aside his personal religious convictions, he would be politically smart to just go ahead and leave the Catholic Church under protest. His official Catholicism is very unlikely to survive this campaign. Abjuring it would make him one of millions of American ex-Catholics, without offending the many millions of Catholics who disagree with Church teachings on divorce and abortion but who aren’t visible enough in their views to get denied communion.In terms of Giuliani’s position on abortion, he’s probably waffling his way towards a stance that (1) expresses support for reversal of Roe v. Wade on constitutional grounds, (2) makes it clear he’d appoint federal judges who feel likewise, and (3) suggests that in a post-Roe world, he’d support state-level legislative efforts to protect basic abortion rights, though not from the Oval Office. As a practical matter, reversal of Roe is the major objective of anti-abortion activists, and they’d be happy to take their chances with a technically pro-choice president if that happened. Unfortunately for Rudy, his serpentine path on this subject may have fatally undermined any confidence that anti-choicers could trust him to appoint their kind of Supreme Court justices.

Anyone interested in the intra-progressive debate on trade policy should check out Jamie Galbraith’s new piece at the American Prospect site, which takes apart much of the neo-populist argument for trade restrictions or strict bilateral labor and environment conditions on trade agreements as a panacea for the downside of globalization. To make a long story short, Galbraith thinks that it’s entirely possible to combine strong domestic wage supports and corporate regulation with a relatively laissez-faire attitude towards overseas labor conditions that we can’t really dictate and that only tangentially affect trade patterns to begin with. And in an especially interesting twist, given Galbraith’s impeccably liberal background, he argues that globalization has actually made a regimen of dramatic, European-style domestic economic and social improvements possible by all but abolishing inflation. Galbraith also engages in a follow-up exchange with EPI’s Jeff Faux, long an advocate of making all trade contingent on vastly higher overseas wage rates–i.e., of massively restricting trade, as an evil in itself.

Even as House Democrats prepared to offer George W. Bush the face-saving gesture of a short-term supplemental appropriations bill for Iraq that doesn’t impose a deadline and simply requires a report back to Congress on the progress made by the Iraqi government towards a security takeover and a political settlement, the White House is already threatening a veto.And at the bottom of the Post article on the veto threat is a nugget that indicates where the administration may be going next:

Military officials now say it will be several more months before they can determine whether the “surge” in troops authorized by Bush is helping quell sectarian and other violence. In announcing new troop deployments, top commanders said the increased troop levels may need to last until next spring — a timetable that could clash with congressional sentiment in favor of a quicker troop withdrawal.

If that’s the new party line, then Bush will not only insist on a “clean” supplemental appropriations bill through the end of the fiscal year, but will reject any conditions well into next year, the last of his presidency. So not that it’s any surprise, this president is going to finish his tenure in office with the same attitude towards “bipartisanship” he began with: Let’s compromise: Do it my way.

Well, I suffered through the first Republican presidential debate last Thursday night, and thought it was revealing if not dispositive. The staging of the event at the Reagan Library made the predictable pandering to the Gipper’s heritage seem more natural than it actually should have been, nearly twenty years after the man left office. And though I have never been a Chris Matthews fan, I think he did a pretty good job of cutting off the bloviating, and of following up on answers that begged follow-up questions.The most obvious thing about this debate is that with the exception of libertarian Ron Paul, none of the candidates could bring themselves to dissent from the Bush administration’s current policies in Iraq. If Chuck Hagel decides to enter the field, he will be able to fill an important vaccum on that issue.This being a debate among Republicans and all, I recommend the immediate commentary at National Review’s The Corner. Their reaction, which most observers have since more or less echoed, is that there was one big loser: Rudy Giuliani. He went into the debate the front-runner in the polls, and somehow managed to terribly flub the questions about his most vulnerable point among Republican conservatives, his position on abortion. For cultural conservatives, the defining moment of the debate was when candidates were asked what they’d think if Roe v. Wade was reversed. One after another, the candidates expressed variations on the theme of “O Happy Day,” until Rudy got his turn, and said “It’d be okay.” He then said it would be okay if Roe were not overturned, conveying an indifference to the whole topic that is guaranteed to offend people on both sides of the abortion divide.Rudy did an even more complicated and ineffective shuffle in answering a question on public funding of abortions. The fact that he joined John McCain in supporting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research may have pleased Nancy Reagan, the debate’s host, but further estranged him from anti-abortion voters.Equally damaging to Rudy, given his effort to make his anti-terrorism bona fides the central point of his campaign, was his answer, both inscrutable and wrong, to the predictable question about the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslisms.Ratings of the performance of the other members of the Big Three, McCain and Romney, seem to depend on preconceptions. I thought McCain looked younger and more energetic than in recent media appearances, and got some style points for quick and honest-sounding reactions on issues ranging from the idea of Tom Tancredo as immigration czar to his belief–modified slightly in a follow-up–in evolution. I also thought Romney looked and acted too slick and slippery, but Romney fans thought he did well.In terms of Everybody Else, Ron Paul won the Dennis Kucinich award for consistently and sometimes eloquently representing views that disqualified him from the nomination race. Duncan Hunter surprised viewers by expressing concerns about global warming; Jim Gilmore tried to trim on abortion; and Tommy Thompson probably blew his first mass media appearance by looking unbelievably saturnine, and talking too much about his record on the 1990s big issue, welfare reform.Two aspirants for the True Conservative Alternative to the Big Three, Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee, got very mixed reviews. Brownback missed a variety of opportunities to distinguish himself from the pack. Huckabee answered a lot of questions flunking Debate Prep 101, by facing the moderator rather than the camera. But he did, out of the blue, offer what was perhaps the entire debate’s most interesting answer:

MR. VANDEHEI: Governor Huckabee, this question comes from a reader in New York. In light of the scandals plaguing the current administration and its allies, involving corruption and cronyism, which mistakes have you learned not to repeat?MR. HUCKABEE: The most important thing a president needs to do is to make it clear that we’re not going to continue to see jobs shipped overseas, jobs that are lost by American workers, many in their 50s who for 20 and 30 years have worked to make a company rich, and then watch as a CEO takes a hundred-million-dollar bonus to jettison those American jobs somewhere else. And the worker not only loses his job, but he loses his pension.

That’s criminal. It’s wrong. And if Republicans don’t stop it, we don’t deserve to win in 2008.

That was clearly a planned answer, and indicates that Huckabee is willing to become a conservative populist candidate. He ain’t got no money, and ain’t got much buzz, but so long as the Republican field is as moribund as it now appears to be, nobody should count him out.

The LA Times’ Jonathan Chait has a big cover article in the current New Republic analyzing the netroots as a political phenomenon. I did a post on it over at TPMCafe, and won’t go through the whole thing here, other than to say that Chait’s piece, despite a few questionable assertions, is a very good introduction to the whole topic of the netroots’ role in Democratic politics. That it appeared in The New Republic, a favorite whipping-boy of many netroots activists, will probably negatively pre-dispose more than a few readers. Indeed, it’s a token of Chait’s excellence as a journalist that a fair number of bloggers have some good things to say about his article, overlooking not only his long association with TNR but his own early effort at blogging, the short-lived but venomous (and often very funny, at least to non-Deaniacs) Diary of a Dean-o-Phobe.If you’re interested in other reactions, you can check out Chris Bowers’ post at MyDD, or the responses published by TNR by Eric Alterman and Matt Yglesias. The criticism most consistently aimed at Chait is that he overemphasizes the role of a handful of high-profile bloggers in coordinating the netroots “message.” I think that’s a bit unfair, since the whole piece was about the netroots as a self-conscious political movement, which is obviously what most of its most prominent personalities think it is. Chait might have dwelled a bit more on the inherent tension between the medium’s decentralized nature and various effort to make it a unified political force; it’s a tension you see every day in the comments threads of most “activist” sites.But still, even with as many words at his disposal as Chait had, you have to generalize somewhat, and I think it’s fair to take this movement at its own word as a coherent political faction.I do have one small issue with Chait in his treatment of the DLC as an object of particular opprobrium in the lefty blogosphere.On the one hand, he shoehorns the DLC and TNR together as institutions that haven’t really earned the hatred they frequently elicit in the netroots:

When it comes to identifying its adversaries more specifically, the two institutions named most often are the DLC and tnr. Netroots activists speak of these two institutions in stark terms. “This is the modern DLC–an aider and abettor of Right-wing smear attacks against Democrats,” wrote Moulitsas, who proceeded to threaten to “make the DLC radioactive.” 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.In reality, of course, the DLC is a political enterprise and tnr a journalistic one; each has on its staff individuals who do not always agree with each other; and neither institution exerts total control over every individual on its payroll. While both the DLC and tnr supported the Iraq war, both stridently opposed almost every other element of the Bush agenda. The overwhelming majority of DLC missives and tnr articles are perfectly congenial to mainstream liberalism and perfectly hostile to the Republican Party of George W. Bush. But these sorts of subtleties generally escape the Manichean analysis that pervades the netroots.

That’s all completly accurate. though it should be noted that some who deplore the DLC and TNR would argue that being wrong about the Iraq War makes being right about anything else irrelevant (a position that becomes a bit complicated for the many netroots supporters of John Edwards’ presidential campaign). But Chait goes on to echo the often-expressed netroots take on the DLC as an organization that led the Democrats into a trap of moving “right” on issues in recent years as an accomodation of the conservative ascendancy:

Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 in part because he defined himself as “a different kind of Democrat”–one who favored capital punishment, welfare reform, and so on. But, over time, the DLC strategy led to a kind of ideological retrogression. Having reestablished the left pole of the national debate further to the center, the only way for Democrats to maintain their centrist image was to move further right still. By the late ’90s, the DLC had abandoned its preference for universal health insurance for small piecemeal reforms and flirted with partial privatization of Social Security.

Now if you happen to believe that the whole Clinton administration was, to use Howard Dean’s description, nothing more than an exercise in “damage control”–a rearguard effort to find a way for Democrats to win presidential elections in a conservative climate–then obviously the DLC was complicit in that effort. But the idea that the DLC “moved right” after 1994 just isn’t correct. If it ever abandoned its “preference for universal health care,” I missed it; like most Democrats, the DLC endorsed “small piecemeal reforms” as better than nothing. The “flirtation” with “partial privatization of Social Security” was in the context of broader social security reforms that would have made the system more progressive, and predated the late 1990s. As even Will Marshall, the PPI president most associated with the “flirtation” Chait’s writing about, was a good soldier and probably turned down 200 press inquiries during the fight over Bush’s social security proposal, which the DLC formally opposed.In reality, the DLC moved “left” in conventional terms during the late 1990s, and has continued in that direction ever since. During the late 1990s, the DLC, to the discomfort of some of its political allies, came out unambiguously for abortion rights, gay rights, public financing of political campaigns, and efforts to strengthen unions. It loyally supported Gore during the 2000 end-game, and warned against the Bush approach to “bipartisanship.” I am particularly aware, having written most of this, that the DLC published about a million words attacking the Bush tax cuts in a particularly hyperbolic way, worthy of a blog if such had existed at that time.Oh well. The broader point is not about the DLC, but about the widespread belief that Democrats lost in 2000 (technically), in 2002 and in 2004 because they were cowards. A lot of things were going on in all these elections, and reducing it all to an unwillingness to “fight” is one of the netroots conceits I really can’t share. It’s not that surprising that the viscerally pugilistic journalist Jon Chait finds that a point of common ground with the netroots, but for my money, it’s brains rather than guts that Democrats have too often lacked.

So you’re Mitt Romney, and you want to be President of the United States, but you’ve got this problem: a significant number of Americans think your religion is a weird cult that used to sanction polygamy. A reporter asks you one of those dumb but utterly predictable questions candidates get asked: What’s your favorite book? You suppress the impulse to say “The Book of Mormon,” but instead tout Battlefield Earth, the mammoth and virtually unreadable sci-fi novel penned by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology.This is hardly a big moment in the presidential campaign, but you’ve got to wonder what was going through the Mittster’s mind when he pulled this particularly ugly rabbit out of his hat. He might as well make the best of it, and fire off fundraising letters to Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

Over at The Democratic Strategist, Will Marshall and Ed Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute have published a provocative take on the taxonomy of progressive attitudes towards globalization. Two of their categories are well-known: the “neo-populists” who largely view globalization in its current form as a malevolent, corporate-driven phenomenon that must be resisted if not somehow overthrown; and “progressive modernizers” of the Clinton tradition who are unambiguously pro-trade but favor a stronger safety net for affected workers and communities.One of the most interesting things about the Marshall-Gresser essay is its treatment of a third perspective: “social democrats” who point to European models for policies and politics that might reconcile economic growth, a high standard of income and security for workers, and globalization itself. They conclude the “social democrats” have a lot more in common with “progressive modernizers” than with “neo-populists,” which is not how this fault lines are usually drawn.Check it out.

It took a few days, but now there are signs that Gov. Bill Richardson’s hard-won status as a preferred or back-up presidential candidate for leading elements of the left blogosphere and/or netroots has been seriously endangered by his performance in last week’s SC debates.Before wading into this subject, let me emphasize that I like Richardson, and that I have been and intend to remain studiously neutral in the presidential nominating contest, not that it much matters to anybody, other than those who think every blogger has a secret candidate-driven agenda. But the Richardson phenomenon does raise interesting questions about the instability of candidate preferences in the New Media age.Check out this post by Trapper John at DailyKos–previously a largely pro-Richardson site–for the case against Big Bill, which includes several things Richardson said just yesterday at the California Democratic Convention (more about all that later).To back up a bit, the netroots’ special interest in Richardson is two-fold. First are those facets of his biography that attract people from all over the party: his golden resume which combines international and domestic credentials; his electoral record; his Latino ethnicity; his laid-back personality and communications style; and his lack of identification with any controversial faction in the party (though he was very much a Clintonian for much of his career, and has been quite friendly to the DLC).Second are things about Richardson that especially attract netroots support. These include his current status, unique in the field, as a governor and thus (despite his long prior federal service) non-Washingtonian; his Western background (attractive to many bloggers for a variety of personal, ideological and empirico-political reasons); his active engagement of the netroots; and recently, at least, his adoption of a fairly hard line on withdrawal from Iraq. One leading blogger–Markos of DailyKos–even likes Richardson’s NRA-friendly record on guns as conducive to a “libertarian Democrat” movement that might expand the party base, especially in the West.And like all political junkies, netroots observers have largely concluded that past rumors about Richardson’s behavior towards women must be mostly hot air, since the hordes of oppo researchers and journalists lusting for documentation of such rumors do not appear to have turned up anything of note.That was all before last Thursday. To begin with, Richardson drew two questions that underlined his affinity with the NRA, and his occasional strong words about the Democratic habit of supporting tax increases (the latter came directly after Edwards was challenged to defend his support of a tax increase, or more accurately a rollback of Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, to pay for his health care plan).And then came Richardson’s immediate and startling citation of Byron “Whizzer” White as a model for the kind of person he’d like to name to the Supreme Court. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for posts to pop up noting that White was not only one of the dissenters in the original abortion rights case, Roe v. Wade (abortion being the context of the SCOTUS question), but also the author of Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 decision upholding the constitutionality of state sodomy laws. In one fell swoop, and for no apparent reason, Richardson managed to offend at least some abortion rights and gay rights activists.Over the weekend, at the California event, Richardson happened to follow Edwards at the podium, and repeated his I’m-not-a-tax-raising-Democrat line. Trapper John took that as a direct shot at Edwards (who is the number one favorite candidate on sites like Daily Kos), and worse yet, as one of the progressive blogosphere’s biggest no-noes: reinforcing Republican attack lines on Democrats generally while attacking another Democrat.Moreoever, while in California Richardson got asked to clarify his Whizzer White endorsement. There’s a quote flying around the blogosphere (here and here, in addition to Trapper John’s post), for which I have yet to see a primary source, wherein Big Bill allegedly responded: “White was in the 60s. Wasn’t Roe v. Wade in the 80s?” Way wrong, of course, on both counts (White was on the Court until 1993, and Roe was decided in 1973.In other words, the growing progressive blogospheric grievance with Richardson is growing, not going away.The irony is that there are reasonably easy ways for him to put the dispute to sleep, if not to rest. Richardson ought to say now what he might have said last week before even addressing the SCOTUS question: “You know, unlike the other candidates, I’m not a lawyer.” He could add: “I’ll spot them at least one factual error on diplomatic issues to even things up,” and then close off the subject by swearing his fealty to a constitutional right to privacy and non-discrimination in all matters involving abortion and gay rights.The tax issue should be even easier to clear up, assuming that Richardson agrees with virtually all Democrats that Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (the usual cutoff being individual taxpayers with over $200,000 in income) should be repealed. Interestingly enough, there’s nothing specific on that topic at the Richardson campaign web page, though a recent New York Times roundup on tax policy listed Richardson as in accord with all the other candidates–including Edwards–as favoring preservation of tax cuts for those earning less than $200,000). Every single Democratic candidate in 2004 favored this sort of rollback, with the only argument being over total repeal of the Bush tax cuts, supported by Dean on general principles and by Gephardt to pay for his health plan. Assuming Richardson isn’t staking out a truly unusual position on the subject, his only argument with Edwards might be over what to do with the proceeds of a rollback. He ought to just say so, and then go on to tout his record in New Mexico for cutting taxes there.I don’t know where if anywhere this “story” is going next, but it is a good indicator of how the development of blogs and other new media have made gaffes much easier to make and more essential to correct than in the past.

Don’t know if you watched the Democratic presidential debate from South Carolina, but I did, and I’ll get kicked out of the blogger union if I don’t pass on some impressions.The format was unusual, with lots of questions demanding (unsuccessfully) short answers, with lots of jumping around on topics, and virtually no candidate interaction, other than that randomly forced by the questions. The two candidates that got occasionally annoying in defying the rules and talking too long were Bill Richardson and (this year’s ultimate protest candidate) Mike Gravel.And speaking of questions, they were occasionally framed and followed-up in ways that betrayed even the “gotcha” instincts of debate moderators. Joe Biden got a question on the Supreme Court’s decision on the congressional “Partial-Birth Abortion” ban that didn’t mention he voted for the ban in the Senate. Bill Richardson offered Whizzer White as a model for the nominees he’d put on the Supreme Court, and nobody noted that (aside from White’s status as something less than a constitutional giant) the Whizzer was a dissenter in the original abortion rights decision, Roe v. Wade. And John Edwards was asked about his attitude towards hedge funds (a subject that most viewers probably knew little or nothing about) without any reference to his own employment by a hedge fund between his presidential runs.The post-debate punditry on the sponsoring network, MSNBC, seemed to endorse the obvious impression that nobody really won or lost, but also suggested that Hillary Clinton did the best job of meeting her goals. She was calm, reasonable, relatively responsive, and occasionally self-deprecating. And on a question that will probably be replayed a lot tomorrow, involving how they’d react to a second 9/11 where al Qaeda’s responsibility was clear, she used the muscle verbs “retaliate” and “destroy,” satisfying those who somehow think female candidates aren’t credible on the use of force (Richardson actually preceded her in immediately mentioning the use of force as a response, while Obama conspicuously omitted it).Obama had some of the most interesting moments. He initially flubbed a “gotcha” question about America’s “three top allies,” and didn’t mention Israel, but nicely handled the follow-up. He was more specific about health care than in past debates. And he did a solid job of answering questions about his position on Iraq.Edwards was subdued and wonky (I personally consider the latter a compliment). He gamely dealt with the inevitable and impossible questions about his expensive haircut. Casual watchers might have been struck by his answer to the question on Iraq, and his implicit challenge to Hillary, but he used almost exactly the same language as in past debates, so pundits and activists probably weren’t impressed.Biden had his classic sound-bite moment, answering a question about his ability to exercise verbal discipline with one word, “Yes.” Dodd went with his counter-intuitive but what-the-hell pitch about his experience. And Dennis Kucinich, partly thanks to losing his protest role to Mike Gravel, was more relaxed and reasonable sounding than I’ve ever heard him, both in the debate and in the post-debate interview.A quick review of the reaction in the progressive blogosphere shows a subdued take on the event. At DailyKos, a reader poll about “who won” shows (as of this moment) Edwards at 20%, Obama at 17%, Clinton at 11%, Gravel at 9%, Richardson at 6%, and the rest scattered, with 11% saying “nobody.” The main outliers here are HRC’s double-digit showing (she inevitably finishes at around 3%, well below Denny the K., in assessments of actual support), and Richardson’s pallid performance. I suspect the latter may have reflected the pub the debate gave to Richardson’s NRA support, and his reluctance to call for Alberto Gonzales’ resignation.So the debate probably moved few votes, but may slightly shift the future landscape. And I hope the formatters of future debates noticed what didn’t work tonight, and try to elicit longer, more substantive, and more interactive answers next time the donkeys gather.UPDATE 1: Richardson’s shout-out to the ghost of Byron White got noticed elsewhere. Scott Lemieux at TAPPED jumped on it before I did. And my buddy Armando at Talk Left went right out and said it disqualified Big Bill from the nomination. If this sort of buzz escalates, we’ll probably see some statement from Richardson’s campaign explaining where their candidate was going with that, before Brian Williamson told him to name someone actually still living. Maybe it was a Western Thing, since the Whizzer was from Colorado. But then William O. Douglas, a much safer liberal role model, was from Washington State. UPDATE 2: Matt Yglesias picked up on my reference to the question Obama got about our “three most important allies.” So naturally, I got kicked around some in Matt’s comment thread, based on the apparent belief that I was lecturing Obama about Israel’s value to the U.S. Actually, all I was doing was pointing to the silly “gotcha” by Williamson, who was clearly hoping Obama would forget to mention Israel (a bad idea in Democratic politics), as evidenced by his immediate follow-up with an Obama quote about the suffering of the Palestinians. Obama turned that around by replying that he was talking about the folly of the Palestinian leadership, and then said the appropriate things about Israel as a U.S. ally. For the record, like Matt, I think this was a ridiculous question. Ranking allies–or, as reflected in yet another dumb question posed to Biden–enemies, is not something any potential president ought to be doing in public.