According to a high ranking official in Obama's campaign, JEWCY was informed this weekend that plans have been discussed for a joint Gore/Edwards endorsement of Barack Obama.

Why hasn't it already happened?

According to the official, the endorsement's value for Super Tuesday would be relatively minor given that it would only have 24 hours to circulate.

It would seem that the Obama campaign has determined that a Gore/Edwards endorsement would be more effective coming after what most expect to be a narrow Clinton win on Tuesday, helping the presidential hopeful rebound and regain some momentum going into the weekend's carousel of political talk shows.

Slate recently pointed out that Senator Hillary Clinton has some things in common with Tracy Flick, the protagonist of Election. But who do the other '08 candidates remind us of?

RUDY GIULIANI is Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit: a balding, bespectacled man who worked in law enforcement in the ‘80s, inspired fear in millions, and surrounded himself with weasels.

BARACK OBAMA is Peter Pan: Rival campaigns claim that Obama’s high-minded promises of “hope” and “change” instill “false hopes” in voters, but the youthful senator is not afraid to think “wonderful thoughts,” and hope that his campaign takes flight just like the hero of this "fairy tale."

MITT ROMNEY is Gordon Gekko from Wall Street: Eager to show off his business experience as global stock markets continue to plummet, the former CEO is touting his management background and extolling his personal fortune. He will also say anything to win.“Greed is good”? What do the focus groups say?



JOHN MCCAIN is Popeye: McCain spent last summer headed for disaster: He flopped in the polls, lacked in donations, and was widely considered a sad, beaten old man. But the grizzled Navy vet has enjoyed a boost of last-minute strength: Victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina. If a single phrase sums up McCain, whether you like him or not, it’s “I am what I am." (This comparison has been noted elsewhere).



JOHN EDWARDS is Atticus Finch: Those legal chops. That southern voice. The strident progressive outlook. The hair. Why, it's none other than the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird. Isn't he lovely?



RON PAUL is Dale Gribble from King of the Hill. As a gun-loving libertarian with a Texan accent, Paul has quite a bit in common with this fictional redneck. Heck, Gribble is a hysterical conspiracy nut, and a good number of Paul supporters are 9/11 Truthers.




MIKE HUCKABEE is Dewey Cox from Walk Hard : With his rock star aspirations, friendly blank stare and deep southern drawl, the former Arkansas governor reminds us of this Alabama golden boy.

DENNIS KUCINICH is Rick Moranis: Kucinich has much in common with the Rick Moranis character from the 1993 music video “Tomorrow’s Girls.” They are both perceived as geeks, they both score with women who are out of their leagues, and both have spotted a UFO. The resemblance is out of this world.

As the Democratic presidential candidates have engineered the primary race into a contest of "change vs. experience," and representing change has emerged as the more desirable quality, liberal commentators are struggling to divine which candidate is the true "change candidate," and which are just pretenders. Paul Krugman, who's been engaged in a pissing match with the Obama campaign for a few weeks, goes so far as to excoriate Obama as "the anti-change candidate" --- not just not as profound a change candidate as Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, but an outright anti-change candidate.

This is an exceedingly silly way to talk. Inasmuch as every candidate from either party would govern differently from the way that Bush has, they all represent change. When people speak of wanting change, they're obviously using "change" as a proxy for the implementation of their preferences; nobody wants change for its own sake, regardless of what's being changed.

If you think the problem with the Bush administration has been its timidity in arrogating powers to the executive branch and its overly-cautious management of international conflicts, Rudy Giuliani is your change candidate. Alternatively, if the change you're hoping for is the abolition of most departments of the federal government, Ron Paul is your change candidate --- and arguably a more radical change candidate on that dimension than any other candidate on any other dimension. For Krugman, health care is the most important issue --- "[a]s health care goes, so goes the rest of the progressive agenda" --- hence for him, the candidate willing to fight most aggressively for his preferred health care policy is the real change candidate.

The primary change Barack Obama is promoting is a change in political discourse and the procedures of governance. He may be misguided, he may be naive or unrealistic, but whatever the status of the practicality and justification of his agenda, it's just different from the focus of the Edwards and Clinton campaigns. Another way of putting this is that Barack Obama, unlike Edwards or Clinton, puts greater priority on procedural justice than liberal domestic policy.

I think that's a wise position --- particular policies can be enacted and dismantled with the variation in partisan control of government, but corrosion of the system of government itself is very difficult to repair --- and part of the reason I'm supporting Obama despite my disagreement with a lot of liberal domestic policy. (In concrete terms, Obama is by far the likeliest candidate to establish something like a Truth & Reconciliation Commission, and to carry it off successfully.)

Standing for change as a good in and of itself is a vacuous position --- one which all the Democratic candidates have postured around unconvincingly. Conversely, even though it's de rigeur right now to bash experience, experience is at least a quantifiable asset. (On this score, though, I'm not sure why Hillary Clinton goes unchallenged. She's spent less time in elective office than Obama and barely more than Edwards, and had a less distinguished legal career than either of them --- I, for one, would much rather put "law professor" or "successful trial lawyer" than "partner in the Rose Law Firm" on my resume.)

• The best 20 movie endings include "Reservoir Dogs" and "Lost in Translation." [Entertainment Weekly]
• Barry Bonds breaks all-time home run record with #756 [The New York Post] and Queens resident Matt Murphy, 22, caught the ball.
• Here's something you should know about Bonds: He is under investigation for perjury by federal authorities. [NPR]
• "The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation." [The Daily Telegraph]
• Presidential hopefuls McCain, Obama, Clinton, Edwards and Biden wrote in to the Jerusalem Post regarding how they'd deal with Syria. [The Jerusalem Post]

• Gawker fills us in: "Keith Richards didn't mix his dad's ashes with cocaine, he just snorted them straight." [R&M, last item]
• Bourne Part 3: Paul Greengrass makes one helluva action movie. [Slate]
• Responses to FEMA's toxic trailers given to Katrina victims. [The Onion]
• John Edwards earned $800,000 from a book deal with Robert Murdoch's News Corp. [The New York Post]
• R. Kelly back to court in September for child pornography trial. [Rolling Stone]
• National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne has faux-Van Gogh. [BBC]
  

• Hillary and Lindsay lead the headlines. [Drudge Report]
• Poor Paris is lost in the shuffle. [TMZ]
• White House never sought approval for spying program. [Think Progress]
• In attorney firing scandal, contempt charges for White House aides who ignored subpoenas. [The Huffington Post]
• 7-part biography on GOP/Mormon candidate, Mitt Romney. [The Boston Globe]
• John Edwards sports one expensive haircut (and a bit of sexism). [The Washington Times]
• India's first female president, Pratibha Patil, takes office. [The New York Times]

DFLP: Ahmad Jibril, left, and Naif Hawatmeh, head of Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

• House votes 223-201 to withdraw troops from Iraq by next spring. [The Huffington Post]
• DFLP leader could enter West Bank for the first time since the Six Day War. [The Jerusalem Post]
• With GOP defections, many Republicans calling for withdrawal. [The Week Magazine]
• What atheists and theists can and can't agree on. [The Washington Post]
• Hillary Clinton and John Edwards talk of paring down debates to only "serious" candidates. [WLUC]
• Kucinich pissed that Hillary and John in cahoots. [Yahoo]
• Celebs, like hot rod Mr. Kilmer, who can't seem to keep their girlish figures. [TMZ]

Did John Edwards vote for the Iraq war because Bob Shrum told him to? According to Shrum's devastating new memoir, he did:

Shrum went on advising Edwards for several years, including as Edwards was contemplating his vote on the fall 2002 Iraq war resolution. In the one passage of the book already widely leaked, Shrum recounts how he and other political advisers pushed Edwards into a vote for the resolution that Edwards--and, even more so, his wife, Elizabeth--didn't want to cast. The episode didn't make Shrum look great. But the real damage is to Edwards, who comes across as a cipher taking orders from his handlers. As Shrum puts it: "[H]e was the candidate and if he was really against the war it was up to him to stand his ground. He didn't."

The description of Edwards as "a Clinton who hadn't read the books" seems to me to be doubly damning, especially now that there's a Barack who has read plenty and has got at all the neophyte ambition that was part of the trial lawyer's charm the first time around the caucus.

The seriousness of the Edwards candidacy is well near the point of total flame-out: Forget the $400 haircut. More symbolic of his phony populism is this latest story about his receiving $55,000 to speak at UC Davis on the subject of poverty, the "greatest moral crisis" facing the country. (Never mind about an Islamist enemy that wants to destroy rich and poor alike.)

Two Americas, all right: Me and y'all.

You may think he lacks "gravitas," that his Two Americas dichotomy is false (for being just a single split, that is), and that his plan for Iraq amounts to little more than, "Screw you, guys, we're going home." But there is no arguing with Edwards' decision to withdraw from Election '08 because of his wife's continuing bout with breast cancer. I wish her well, and I admire him:

Mrs. Edwards, 57, received a cancer diagnosis in 2004 almost on the day that Mr. Edwards, the vice-presidential candidate, and Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, were defeated in their race for the White House.

Mr. Edwards has said he waited to announce a second bid for the presidency until he and Mrs. Edwards’s doctors were confident about her recovery.

* Negative. I thought his announcement today would confirm this, but he trudges on. 

In Edwards Israel Can Trust?Last week Newsweek was praising Democratic candidate Jonathan Edwards for providing voters with a refreshing honest voice, a major departure from the standard diplomatic rhetoric adopted by his opponents. Unfortunately, his honesty this week might also be his downfall, at least with the Jewish constituency.

The political star system has its built-in tensions, to be sure. Adam Venit, a honcho at Endeavor, hosted a reception for John Edwards at his agency the other day. Not present was Venit's partner, Ari Emanuel, who threw a hot Obama bash not long ago and whose brother, Rahm, may (or may not) remain in the Hillary camp.

At the same time, Hollywood loves box office, and Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," has become Paramount's single most profitable release. Suddenly Gore is a star again.

There are other emerging fissures, as well. The aggressively photogenic John Edwards was cruising along, detailing his litany of liberal causes last week until, during question time, he invoked the "I" word -- Israel. Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace, Edwards remarked, was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. As a chill descended on the gathering, the Edwards event was brought to a polite close.

Maybe Jonathan Edwards could get some advice from Hillary as to how to proceed after making a major faux pas in front of a Jewish lobby or better yet, take pointers from Obama on how not to piss people off and get them to like you. And if all else fails, abandon the ethical route and just fire those bloggers already.