My favorite campaign spin of recent days comes from conservatives who fancy Sarah Palin. Much of the reality-based world--which even includes a few conservative commentators, such as George Will, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, and David Frum--has rendered a verdict on Palin: she's not up to the job. Many voters seem to agree. McCain's post-Palin bounce is gone. Her approval rating in Alaska has dropped.

Blame Palin's fall on Katie Couric--if not Palin herself? No, declares a group of Palin fans on the right: blame it on the Bushies. That is, McCain campaign operatives--most of whom are veterans of the past Bush campaigns--who supposedly are not letting Sarah be Sarah. Here's Bill Kristol:

McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her -- aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she's a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice.

I'm told McCain recently expressed unhappiness with his staff's handling of Palin. On Sunday he dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to join Palin in Philadelphia. They're supposed to liberate Palin to go on the offensive as a combative conservative in the vice-presidential debate on Thursday.

Apparently Kristol believes that Palin's "political talents" can trump--or distract voters from--her lack of experience and knowledge (as she demonstrated with Couric). Shouldn't he loose his Official Public Intellectual Card for putting rhetoric ahead of substance?

Then there's Richard Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com and a longtime strategist for the conservative movement. He's released a statement chiding McCain:

He must free Sarah Palin to go after Barack Obama and the liberal Democrats, or he will almost certainly lose.

The McCain campaign has put this 'pit bull with lipstick' on a leash. The campaign has surrounded her with people from the Bush administration. And as we can see from the wreckage of the Bush presidencies, these folks don't have the slightest clue how to make a case to the American people.

McCain has to get rid of these Bush people around Palin, along with the lobbyists and the folks from the Washington PR firms, and replace them with principled conservatives who have experience making the case for conservatism.

If only more conservatives would lobby the McCain camp to set Sarah free. And if only the McCain camp would listen. I'd like to see an unhandled Palin. (So would Tina Fey.)

No doubt, Palin is a talented campaigner. That's been proven in the past few weeks when she appears at rallies. But she cannot handle basic questions. This no surprise--especially since she cannot name a single magazine or newspaper she reads regularly. (Not the Weekly Standard?) Palin has not spent much time in her life pondering such matters as foreign policy or economic national policy. That's the reality, and a month's worth of cramming is not going to change that and get her up to speed. The public witnessed the real Palin in the Couric interview.

Kristol and Viguerie seem to think that Palin can hide her ignorance behind slashing attacks on Democrats and liberals. But it may be too late for such a strategy of obfuscation.

After being out of the country for a week, I come back to discover that--gasp!--little has changed in Iowa. Mitt and Mike are still at it--though the Huckabee meltdown on Monday was darn amusing. Ready for prime time? Not quite. And now Huckabee's off to do Jay Leno rather than spend the last days before Iowa in Iowa. That must really piss off Dems rooting for Huckabee. As for the Democratic contenders, there were no surprises in the final week of '07. Experience versus change versus fight. Politics as Seinfeld: yadda, yadda, yadda. But that's to be expected. You dance with the message that brung ya. So the only real news I encountered upon my return was the fact that neocon godfather Bill Kristol had been hired by The New York Times as a weekly columnist.

I know that left-of-center bloggers have been fuming over this, and I'm late to the party. But let me ask you, dear reader, to imagine the following: A liberal commentator writes a series of columns in 2000 saying that Islamic jihadism poses no threat to the United States. September 11 occurs. Would the Times then hire this pundit? Don't bother answering. Yet Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. has handed a perch to a person who was equally wrong regarding Iraq. It is bizarre. The Times has editorialized against the war from the start. Now it is providing a platform to one of the war's chief cheerleaders. Is ideological diversity more important than getting it right? And why doesn't the Wall Street Journal's editorial page behave in such a self-emasculating manner?

This Kristol news does have a deja vu feel to it, for exactly one year ago, I wrote a piece about Kristol's then-new gig at Time magazine. That article applies too well to the latest Kristol triumph. So as an environmentally sensitive blogger, I will recycle it below, and I wonder if Kristol will next be named Katie Couric's successor.

KRISTOL CLEAR AT TIME
www.thenation.com
01/02/2007

The market doesn't work -- not when it comes to conservative commentators.

Before the Iraq war, rightwing (and middle-of-the-road) pundits claimed Saddam Hussein was a dire WMD threat, that he was in cahoots with al Qaeda, that the war was necessary. The neoconservative cheerleaders for war also argued that an invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to that nation and throughout the region. They were wrong. But they have paid no price for their errors. They did not have to serve in Iraq. None, as far as I can tell, have had sons or daughters harmed or killed in the fighting there. They did not have to bear higher taxes, because George W. Bush has charged the costs of this military enterprise to the national credit card. Though they miscalled the number-one issue of the post-9/11 period, they did not lose their influential perches in the commentariat. Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Gary Schmitt, Danielle Pletka and others (including non-neocon Thomas Friedman) who blew it on Iraq still regularly appear on op-ed pages and television news shows, pitching their latest notions about Iraq, Iran or other matters.

Foremost among this band is William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle. Kristol, a Fox News regular, has not seen his standing as a go-to conservative pundit suffered. Moreover, he has been rewarded with a plum posting. Time magazine's new managing editor, Richard Stengel, has invited Kristol to become what Stengel calls a "star" columnist for the magazine.

Both Kristol and Stengel are likable fellows. I usually enjoy debating Kristol on television or radio. He's no hater, and he's no autopilot partisan. Stengel is a thoughtful and cerebral person who once was a senior adviser to cerebral Senator Bill Bradley, a Democrat. So there's nothing personal when I ask, why in the hell does Stengel believe that what America needs now is more Bill Kristol? (Slate media cop Jack Shafer criticized Stengel's pick of Kristol by noting that "Kristol isn't much of a deviation from Charles Krauthammer, an occasional Time 'Essay' writer." Friendship declared: Shafer is a pal of mine.)

It's too late to affect Stengel's decision, but let's take this occasion to review Kristol's record on Iraq, courtesy of a rather cursory Nexis search. It holds no surprises.

On September 11, 2002, as the Bush administration began its sales campaign for the coming war, Kristol suggested that Saddam Hussein could do more harm to the United States than al Qaeda had: "we cannot afford to let Saddam Hussein inflict a worse 9/11 on us in the future."

On September 15, 2002, he claimed that inspection and containment could not work with Saddam: "No one believes the inspections can work." Actually, UN inspectors believed they could work. So, too, did about half of congressional Democrats. They were right.

On September 18, 2002, Kristol opined that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East."

On September 19, 2002, he once again pooh-poohed inspections: "We should not fool ourselves by believing that inspections could make any difference at all." During a debate with me on Fox News Channel, after I noted that the goal of inspections was to prevent Saddam from reaching "the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons, Kristol exclaimed, "He's past that finish line. He's past the finish line."

On November 21, 2002, he maintained, "we can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy."

On February 2, 2003, he claimed that Secretary of State Colin Powell at an upcoming UN speech would "show that there are loaded guns throughout Iraq" regarding weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, everything in Powell's speech was wrong. Kristol was uncritically echoing misleading information handed him by friends and allies within the Bush administration.

On February 20, 2003, he summed up the argument for war against Saddam: "He's got weapons of mass destruction. At some point he will use them or give them to a terrorist group to use...Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world....France and Germany don't have the courage to face up to the situation. That's too bad. Most of Europe is with us. And I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated."

On March 1, 2003, Kristol dismissed concerns that sectarian conflict might arise following a US invasion of Iraq: "We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together." He also said, "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president." And he maintained that the war would be a bargain at $100 to $200 billion. The running tab is now nearing half a trillion dollars.

On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, "I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq."

Such vindication never came. Kristol was mistaken about the justification for the war, the costs of the war, the planning for the war, and the consequences of the war. That's a lot for a pundit to miss. In his columns and statements about Iraq, Kristol displayed little judgment or expertise. He was not informing the public; he was whipping it. He turned his wishes into pronouncements and helped move the country to a mismanaged and misguided war that has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. That's not journalism.

In an effectively functioning market of opinion-trading, Kristol's views would be relegated to the bargain basement. And he ought to be doing penance, not penning columns for Time. But -- fortunate for him -- the world of punditry is a rather imperfect marketplace.