Mark Shields from Creators Syndicate

Friday Morning Quarterbacks from Iowa for 12/29/2007

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

On the night of Jan. 3, 2008, two major national events will take place. In Miami, Virginia Tech will play Kansas in the Orange Bowl football game, and across the state of Iowa, the first-in-the-nation contest to nominate the major party nominees for president will be held. If the past is precedent, the college football game will result in a single winner while the Iowa caucuses w ...

Updated: Sat Dec 29, 2007

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The Story Up to Now for 01/05/2008

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Manchester, N.H. — Les Biffle remains the most legendary American "pollster" whose name nobody knows. During the 1948 presidential campaign — when literally all the Wise Men of the press corps (there were among the press no acknowledged Wise Women in 1948) had, long before a single vote was cast, named Republican Thomas E. Dewey the winner over Democratic President Harry T ...

Updated: Sat Jan 05, 2008

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The Gipper and Hillary: Strikingly Similar Comebacks for 01/12/2008

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Republican front-runner Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in 2008 -- their campaign stories are remarkably similar. Both, heavily favored, stumbled and were upset in the Iowa caucuses by younger, less well-known challengers -- George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Both Reagan and Clinton, on the strength of their personal campaign performances, rebounded to win the ...

Updated: Sat Jan 12, 2008

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A Debt of Gratitude Owed to Tom Davis for 01/19/2008

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

On Tuesday morning before a standing-room only crowd in Room 2154 of the Sam Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine — a man who almost single-handedly could give politics a good name — speaking in cogent and complete paragraphs commanded the entire room's attention.

Mitchell, the author of a 409-page report on the ...

Updated: Sat Jan 19, 2008

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Character Is Destiny for 01/26/2008

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The escalating ugliness of the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign calls to mind two very different individuals who lived some 25 centuries apart.

In the fifth century B.C., Heraclitus taught this timeless truth: "Character is destiny." In January 1992, just weeks before the crucial first-in-the-nation primary, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, plagued by charges of infidelity ...

Updated: Sat Jan 26, 2008

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Losing Is Publicly Painful for 02/02/2008

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Long before he would become Democratic Party chairman as well as the colorful and successful Washington lawyer, Bob Strauss grew up in the small West Texas cowboy town of Stamford, where, as he joked, his non-Jewish neighbors thought "Hanukkah was a duck call."

President George W. Bush once told an off-the-record press dinner of the political counsel Bob Strauss had volunteered ...

Updated: Sat Feb 02, 2008

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Liking Mike for 02/09/2008

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Most people who run for president, by definition, lose. And most of those unsuccessful candidates depart the presidential contest with their reputations and their influence diminished.

Republican Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor — whose chances of winning his party's nomination are closer to none than to slim — will be a conspicuous exception. He will leave the rac ...

Updated: Sat Feb 09, 2008

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Everything Is a "Poll" for 02/16/2008

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Let me tell you, from personal experience, what the presidential campaigns of Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton are experiencing hourly in late February of 2008.

Shortly after the cooling of the earth — in 1970, to be exact — I was managing the campaign of a gifted public servant, Democrat Jack Gilligan, to be governor of Ohio. Our opponent, the rather colorless Repu ...

Updated: Sat Feb 16, 2008

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Obama -- Hedge on Funds for 02/23/2008

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

During a political campaign, there are certain verbs you never want to see in a newspaper headline anywhere near your candidate's name.

Among the more obvious are arrested, indicted or convicted. But almost as bad are fudge, flip-flop and waffle. That's exactly what Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is being accused of by reformers, editorial writers and disappointed admirers in his retreat fro ...

Updated: Sat Feb 23, 2008

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Obama's "Gimmick" for 03/01/2008

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Politicians of the losing party are always quick to find the "gimmick" a winning opponent has so obviously mastered that explains the winner's success with the voters.

When Franklin Roosevelt became the dominant political figure of the 20th century by winning the White House four times, his Republican opponents concluded that FDR's masterful fireside chats, broadcast to the nat ...

Updated: Sat Mar 01, 2008

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The Race up to Now ... for 03/08/2008

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

What sauce do you eat with crow? That's the question asked by yours truly and an unhealthy majority of my fellow travelers on the press bus who could not resist speculating the fallout from Hillary Clinton's losing the Texas or Ohio primary.

Would she soldier on or get out in order to preserve her dignity and her future? Or would her campaign troops lead such a scorched-earth, take-no-pr ...

Updated: Sat Mar 08, 2008

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One Solution to the Florida-Michigan Dilemma for 03/15/2008

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In a burst of clear thinking, the national Democratic Party in 2007 permitted just four states — New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina — to hold their presidential nominating contests before Feb. 5, 2008.

The argument was straightforward: All four states are small enough that an underdog, underfinanced candidate who is not a household name — with ideas, energy ...

Updated: Sat Mar 15, 2008

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In Sixth Year, Iraq War Longer for America Than Both World Wars Combined for 03/22/2008

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

What have we learned after six years? That we went to war against a country that did not threaten the United States — a country that had never attacked the United States — and because of weapons that this country did not have, weapons that did not exist.

Let's hope we may finally learn how right Army Col. Steve Siegfried was when he told military journalist George Wilson why ...

Updated: Sat Mar 22, 2008

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"Pander Bear" for President for 03/29/2008

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In the 1972 Florida Democratic presidential primary, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, an especially admirable public servant, was featured speaker at a Miami dinner sponsored by combined Jewish philanthropies. In attendance was a group of voters widely known for their generosity and political clout, who had been regularly courted and wooed by the most importunate and creative of candidate ...

Updated: Sat Mar 29, 2008

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"Lyndon Johnson Would Be a Happy Man Today" for 04/05/2008

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Long before he would become a respected Washington attorney (no, that is not an oxymoron!), Harry McPherson, as a young man, had recently graduated from his home-state University of Texas Law School and come to Washington and gone to work in 1956 on Capitol Hill for Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. Nine years later, McPherson, by then a White House counsel, was in the House chamber whe ...

Updated: Sat Apr 05, 2008

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How Long Can Both Parties Pretend About the U.S. Army? for 04/12/2008

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Don't even talk about Iran. The United States Army is already way overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its recruitment record is the worst in a generation.

Standards have already been lowered. In 2003, the year the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, 4.6 percent of recruits — most of whom had committed either multiple misdemeanors or a felony — had to be given a &qu ...

Updated: Sat Apr 12, 2008

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Change Has Been No Friend to Pennsylvania for 04/19/2008

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

PHILADELPHIA — No state began with more promise than did the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Here was the new nation's first capital city. And what leaders! William Penn — whose Quaker values imparted charity, tolerance and acceptance of religious minorities — then the wise and brilliant Benjamin Franklin, the quintessential Founding Father.

Sadly, since those early salad ...

Updated: Sat Apr 19, 2008

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The Fierce Urgency of Indiana for Obama for 04/26/2008

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In the wake of Hillary Clinton's rock-solid Pennsylvania victory, David Axelrod, the able chief strategist of Barack Obama's campaign, attempted to minimize the political significance of his candidate's having been overwhelmingly rejected by Pennsylvania's working-class voters: "Let's understand — the white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections. This is ...

Updated: Sat Apr 26, 2008

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Could This Be 1924 All Over Again? for 05/03/2008

Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

While seeking his party's 1960 presidential nomination, John Kennedy used to warm up Democratic Party gatherings with an anecdote about the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York, where the delegates — bitterly divided over race and religion — took 103 ballots and 17 days before finally compromising on a nominee, respected West Virginia lawyer John W. Davis, who would win j ...

Updated: Sat May 03, 2008

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The Losing Candidate's Public Pain for 05/10/2008

Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

To mask the painfully public and publicly painful experience of losing a presidential campaign, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., turned to humor to mask his hurt: "Frankly, I don't mind not being president ... I just mind that somebody else is."

Unless one has actually run for president — and failed — it is all but impossible to grasp the life-altering permanence of that ...

Updated: Sat May 10, 2008

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