This week’s column: I sing the praises of Kevin Calabro.

Another post by me–some silliness with top-10 lists and local political figures.

Huan Hsu used to write for the Weekly but moved to China to work for an Uncle’s business and work on a book. He wrote this entertaining piece on his adolescent struggles with Asian stereotypes and the success of Michael Chang.

My friend Bucky sent me this Washington Post op-ed a couple weeks ago. While one can cherry-pick events to show the similarities between eras, and while the author doesn’t provide much evidence to back his contention that the 1970s federal government was actually more inefficient than previous ones, rather than just perceived as such, he does lay out an uncanny array of ties between 1978 and 2008. It’s an entertaining read.

My friend/former co-worker and employer Doug Hiatt got a much-deserved write-up in the Seattle Times. Philip Dawdy’s longer (and highly entertaining) piece on Hiatt from a couple years ago can be found here.

John McCain may have gotten a little confused about the chronology of the surge and the Anbar Awakening, but CBS bailed him out. In covering the story, the NY Times turns to the ever-reliable war cheerleader Michael O’Hanlon for commentary. (A few questions: If Surge Cola were still around today, what would the surge do to its sales? It would have to help, right? Would they still call it the surge? Would people take the surge less seriously because it was seemingly named after a soft drink? Would Coca-Cola sue?)

Seth Kolloen put together a very funny graphic about former Mariners GM Bill Bavasi.

When word came down of Rudy Giuliani’s departure from the Republican primary race, I thought of his chief foreign policy adviser, Norman Podhoretz, and Axl Rose’s tortured wail from “Sweet Child o’ Mine” echoed in my head:

Where do we go? Where do we go now? Oh oh oh oh…

Indeed, where does Norman go? We’re down to the Final Four, there’s plenty of votes to be cast, and Iran remains uninvaded by democracy or American bombs. Norm finds himself in a position similar to that of Tiki Barber, who left football a year too early and now must watch his erstwhile teammates play for a Super Bowl title.

Sugar cube?

Yup, Norm hitched his battle wagon to the wrong war horse. Will he be forced to sit on the sidelines as a result? It’s not like Norm or his buddies to hype a war and then sit it out.

Ever get the feeling these modern sons of Sparta would’ve found themselves on the wrong side of a cliff back in the day?

While three of the remaining candidates can boast of statements or votes that hint at an answer to Norm’s hopes and prayers, there is one whose hawkishness is backed up by an actual record of going to war: Senator John McCain. The bellicose Arizonan should’ve been Norm’s choice all along. After all, Rudy’s real enemies are everyone who disagrees with him and/or got capped by New York’s Finest. By contrast, John was into bombing fools before bombing fools was cool.

So how ’bout it, Norm? Pride’s a bitch, but you gotta swallow it. Give John a call. It’s too late for Tiki, but you’ve still got a chance.

It’s no secret that the inordinate length of the primary campaigns and the saturation of media coverage leads to some amusing and far-fetched commentary, but Goldy’s post at Horsesass, comparing Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to The Producers’ Max Bialystock is particularly creative and entertaining. The only problem? Rudy’s “Florida strategy” became a strategy only when the previous strategies failed.

Fred Thompson has decided that this year’s presidential race is just too much to bear. I never thought I’d say this, but I feel you, Fred.

Mitt “Keeper of the Real” Romney celebrated Martin Luther King Day by posing with black children, asking “who let the dogs out?” and giving big ups for “bling-bling.” The campaign of Mike Huckabee had to distance itself from Chuck Norris, who speculated that a President John McCain would likely die while in office, leading a noted political blogger to wonder why the Huckabee campaign didn’t have someone less closely associated with it deliver the hit. Yup, that’s right: a major candidate is having to watch the statements of Chuck Norris because people assume they come from his campaign. Take a step back and think about that. Would your 2006 self have believed this if told of it by your 2008 self?

The other main G.O.P. contender, the aforementioned Mr. McCain, actually trails Romney and Huckabee in the delegate count, though he’s feted Mr. Inevitible by a fawning press and supported by majority winning 2000 VP candidate Joe Lieberman, who’s proudly gone from Freedom Rider to fake violence watchdog to real violence advocate. Why does the media so love McCain? Well, he tells funny jokes. And he leads all of the main contenders in Curtis LeMay seances and imperialistic pipe dreams, singing ditties on bombing Iran and professing his great-great-grandchildren’s willingness to hold it down in Mesopotamia. After all, those IEDs aren’t just going to detonate themselves.

On the fringes are Rudy “0.8181818” Giuliani (do the math), a tough guy who thinks McCain’s foreign policy isn’t balls-to-the-wall enough, and Ron Paul and his army of junior Larouchies and militiamen who just want to smoke pot and return to the gold standard because, like the god of William Safire’s late political column, they think that’s really solid economic policy. Also, the federal government is a frivolity.

Meanwhile, in Donkeyville, Hillary Clinton, who voted for the Iraq War and against a ban on the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas, has implied that she’s the heir to the civil rights change-makers of the 1960s, because she’s “experienced.” She’s experienced not because she’s been in office so much longer (she hasn’t), but because, well, she’s married to Bill, the dignified elder statesmen-cum-attack dog who’s classily dismissed his wife’s chief rival Barack Obama’s candidacy as a “fairy tale” and “roll of the dice”. Obama’s record on social issues and foreign policy is to the left of Edwards and Clinton, though this seems lost on the party’s primary voters, who still take marching orders from the guy who told John Kerry to support anti-gay marriage amendments in 2004. The “poverty candidate”, John Edwards, deserves credit for making the plight of the poor a campaign subject (rather than an embarrassing secret hiding in the shadows of “middle class” rhetoric), but has the worst voting record of the Dem candidates on spent his time in the Senate doing the bidding of the credit industry.

Can you bear it for ten more months? Only a fool would expect anything less, but this campaign’s so sexy it hurts.

Photo: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

I awoke this morning to a message from my friend Nirav, complaining that his copy of the New York Times had been “bedraggled” with the reproductive fluids of Senator and presidential candidate John McCain. Nirav was speaking figuratively, of course, (the Weekly has no intention of going South Carolina on the Senator) but a survey of today’s Newspaper of Record indeed confirms that the distinguished gentleman from Arizona received a bevy of favorable coverage.

First and foremost, the opinion page features dueling pieces by the Economist’s Adrian Woolridge and Times columnist Roger Cohen. Woolridge argues that, while McCain may be perceived as a maverick and moderate, he is really a bedrock conservative–hard to dispute, if you look at his voting record–and as such should be the choice of conservatives looking to bring the movement back to its small government/robust military roots. (contradiction?) Woolridge complies with the McCain campaign’s revisionism on the Senator’s opposition to the initial Bush tax cuts (a check of the record indicates that McCain opposed them because he felt they were too regressive, not because they were unaccompanied by spending cuts), then notes that the candidate has more centrist appeal than perhaps he should, which he argues is a good thing.

Cohen, in his measured op-ed, argues that while he finds McCain too conservative, the Senator is rightly admired for his centrism and is too honorable to dismiss as a candidate. In particular, Cohen praises McCain for his consistency and accuracy on Iraq. The consistency part is fair: hawks don’t change their stripes. (In fact, hawks don’t even have stripes). The accuracy claim has to do with McCain’s assessment of the costs and benefits of invasion and increased troop levels: I’ll leave that matter to your judgment, fair Readers, as I suspect little I’d say would sway you.

Praise from all corners, Johnny Boy. Not a bad day on the op-ed pages. So let’s move on to the news. You know they say all publicity is good publicity, meaning no news is bad news (in both meanings of the phrase), meaning that bad news is good news. Today, all these maxims held true for the Straight Talk Express, as the Times assiduously documents the smear campaigns to which the candidate is being subjected in the Palmetto State, as well as his response machinery, beefed up significantly since Bush knocked him off with the help of similar smears in 2000.

The above shouldn’t be read as a critique of the New York Times–I wouldn’t argue that their publishing decisions were irresponsible or favoritist. But McCain’s ability to generate favorable coverage is remarkable, as is his evasion of political classification–particularly when you consider the fact that he has a 20+ year record as a Senator. How does someone who’s cast so many votes remain such a chimera? How does a career hawk and Iraq War cheerleader do so well among voters who disapprove of the Iraq War? How does a guy who changes his rationale for opposing Bush’s tax cuts and then supports making those cuts permanent, who calls Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance” and refers to their movement as “the evil empire,” and then delivers the commencement speech at Liberty University avoid the easy charge of “flip-flopping”?

McCain’s personal charm is well documented, as is his accessibility to the media. Are these the keys to favorable coverage? Salon’s Glenn Greenwald recently received an angry e-mail from CNN’s John King after Greenwald documented and derided King’s softball interview of the candidate. In his e-mail, King acknowledged McCain’s accessibility and argued that it allowed him to be selective as to when he grilled the candidate. Another McCain staple is sense of humor, one of the themes of David Foster Wallace’s oft-cited Rolling Stone profile of his campaign in 2000. (Mike Huckabee’s gotten similarly favorable coverage for being funny, though the political press corps isn’t always so enamored of humor.) Conversely, McCain’s famous temper seems to have done little to lessen his appeal, and in fact may only heighten the perception that he’s a no-nonsense straight talker.

In a campaign in which race and gender are being discussed to no end, this obviously raises the question of whether a female or a black candidate could reap similar benefits from an always accessible, wisecracking, short-tempered, convention-bucking persona. While the number of women holding elected office is increasing (at least so it seems, anecdotally), few, if any, rise to power on media portrayals of their charisma. In her New York Times op-ed, Kerry Howley argues that female leaders are viewed either as likable and incompetent or unlikable and competent. (Kerry Howley’s not to be confused with Candy Crowley, who was immortalized by Matt Taibbi in an anecdote he saw as the essence of the 2004 election press corps’ shallowness.)

Likewise, it’s hard to picture a black candidate with a short fuse selling nationally–”angry black man” is a tough label with which to win. (One could argue, however, that Obama’s managed to use a particularly sunny persona to milk positive coverage out of the exceptionalist perception of him made possible by racial stereotypes (see Joe Biden’s statements for a disastrous articulation of this phenomenon).) It doesn’t seem unilkely that Mormonism would be similarly constraining, though it’s less obvious what personality stereotypes Romney would have to avoid. None of these thoughts is new, but they’re worth keeping in mind as we examine coverage of the candidates and, in particular, the more slippery and particularly influential construction of their personas.

Cross-posted to The Daily Weekly

This was originally published in the Seattle Weekly’s news blog, The Daily Weekly, where I now post about politics but probably have to refrain from my Dick Cheney NAMBLA jokes. The post can be found here—feel free to leave comments there so the Weekly knows how awesome I am and how I can stir up discussion.

Let’s see…Hillary cried, John E. talked tough, John M. talked straight, Dewey C. walked hard, and the nation, like a baby’s dirty diaper, needs a change. Mike’s got Chuck and Hill’s got Bill and sudden Mo, and Barack’s got game but less bounce than we thought (is he black enough?) and the wheel of electalikability still spins outside the punditry shop like a barber pole, the swirls of red, white, and blue dazzling the eye and alerting all comers to the professional hacking within.

The word of the day is…change!

It’s hard to swim through all the wisdom of the primary season, and drawing conclusions from the votes of a few thousand is silly. But let’s do it anyway. The New Hampshire primary was a victory for…knockin’ heads in Iran! That’s right: kickin’ ass and takin’ names in the Islamic Republic. How so?

Well, we’ll start with the Democrats, where policy differences between the contenders are like a cheap balloon: thin and easily overinflated. Despite their clashing rhetoric, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards have very similar domestic proposals (the small variations between their certain-to-be legislatively mangled health care proposals notwithstanding). The biggest beef between them is not this drivel about experience and change (it’s worth noting, as Seely did below, that all three have had short careers as legislators that were preceded or followed by work that would seem to be good training for political office), but in foreign policy.

Clinton and Edwards voted for the Iraq War authorization, something Obama, who publicly opposed it in 2002, likes to remind us of frequently. (Edwards has apologized for this vote far more often than he has for his vote for the bankruptcy bill, a more curious one for the poverty candidate and populist champion.) And while all three take great care to register their opposition to the current administration’s handling of the war, their approaches to Iran clearly diverge.

In a July debate, Clinton criticized as naive Obama’s stated intention of holding face-to-face meetings with Iranian leadership, and two months later, she voted for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. (If you follow the link, note that paragraphs b3 and b4 were cut from the final version.) Referring to Dick Cheney’s increasingly bellicose talk on Iran, Virginia Democratic Senator Jim Webb derided the Amendment as “Cheney’s fondest pipe dream,” and Obama and Edwards opposed it. After receiving heavy backlash for her vote, Clinton co-sponsored Webb’s bill to prevent Bush from using force in Iran without Congressional authorization. (Funny that such a bill is needed.)

Nevertheless, if you’re a Democrat who feels Iran is a threat and supports a more aggressive policy towards it, then Hillary Clinton is your woman. While the most recent National Intelligence Estimate will certainly be an obstacle, the drumbeat hasn’t fully flatlined, and now that Lieberman has left the party, she’s your best shot.

On the right side of the aisle, domestic platforms vary more widely, with, for example, Mike Huckabee’s flat tax being unlike anything his opponents propose. But if you support an aggressive policy toward Iran, who’s your best candidate?

It’s probably not Mike Huckabee, who seems entirely focused on domestic issues, even going so far as to argue that the assassination of Benazir Bhutto highlights the need for a border fence with Mexico. (He also didn’t know about the release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran after it had dominated the news for a full 24 hours.) You could vote for Mitt Romney, but he’s taken a sharp right turn in the last year or two, leading some to wonder as to the sincerity of his new positions.

No, If you’re set on clashing with Iran–getting them before they get us or Israel, or something like that–you’ll want someone who’s a true believer. Rudy Giuliani’s senior foreign policy adviser is Norman Podhoretz, the man who wrote “I hope and pray” we bomb Iran. I, for one, don’t so hope and pray, but nor do I doubt his sincerity, as he’s advocated such positions for his whole career. Further, anyone who followed Giuliani’s criminal justice policies as New York Mayor knows that he had a knock heads first, ask questions second approach. While I’m not a fan, it certainly won him voters, who felt the benefits were worth the costs. Still, few voters seem to like Giuliani these days, and anyway, he hasn’t been the most consistently neocon/interventionist of the candidates. That award goes to John McCain.

McCain was a co-sponsor of the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, has been one of the Iraq War’s most prominent and respected supporters, and has advocated aggressive foreign policy, military intervention, and regime change throughout his career. Moreover, he’s the only one who’s lent his voice to a jingle:

Regardless of how few they are or whether they knew they did it, yesterday the voters of New Hampshire took a hard line on Iran.

Michigan, you’re up!