Well, we waited to count how many times the “H” [Hillary] name would be mentioned at Wednesday’s Republican CNN/You Tube debate in St. Petersburg’s, Florida – and guess what – hardly at all! (Four times, if you count the mentions of her in the campaign ad videos shown during the evening).

Rather than attacking frontrunner Hillary Clinton, the presidential hopefuls – Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo – preferred to attack each other focusing on immigration, gun control, abortion, the Iraq war, interrogation/torture techniques and in response to one questioner, the Bible.

OK David Corn, you’ve found the right guy. But your big idea is more than a year late.

Read my open letter to John McCain dated April 12, 2006 urging him to attack George W. Bush’s losing half-a-war strategy in Iraq and his across-the-board betrayal of conservative principles.

If you were told that the President of the United States had praised the frontrunner of the opposing Democratic party, you would probably tell me that I got that all wrong.

And yet, in an unprecedented interview with ABC News right before Thanksgiving, Bush said: “There is no question that Senator [Hillary Rodham] Clinton understands pressure better than any of the candidates, you know, in the race,” Bush declared. He called Clinton a “very formidable candidate” who understands the “klieg lights” that go with presidential politics.

Laura Bush, who participated in the interview, said Clinton’s experience as First Lady would be “very helpful” in the White House, adding: “you certainly know what it’s like. You know the pressure there is, you know the difficulties.”

On September 11, 2001, the terrorist attacks “changed everything.” And through the alchemy of mass communications, television made New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani into the symbol of the stricken metropolis’ resilient spirit. Overnight, the term-limited politician whose polls had sunk below 40 percent and who, for “personal reasons” sidestepped a Senate contest against Hillary Rodham Clinton, became in the words of his current mailings to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, “America’s Mayor.”

Who and what is the real man behind the blurred myth? Famously a Brooklyn-born Roman Catholic, he is thrice-married and twice-divorced. He is bitterly estranged from his grown children. During the 1960s, Giuliani was a self-described “Robert Kennedy Democrat” and voted for liberal George McGovern in 1972.

Yeah, you heard it right; we have a new “issue.”

Today, Al Gore is going to the White House to be part of a ceremony honoring this year’s American Nobel laureates. I hope he remembers to bring along a copy of his Academy-award winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth. President Bush does not agree with Gore’s climate warnings and it may be because he has not had a chance to see the movie yet what with being so busy with Vice President Cheney studying aerial photographs of Iran.

Last month, Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, describing climate change as “the defining challenge of our age,” said of the UN’s Synthesis Report: “Today the world’s scientists have spoken clearly and in one voice.” As reported by Elisabeth Rosenthal in The New York Times. Members of the panel said their review of the data led them to conclude as a group and individually that reductions in green house gases had to start immediately to avert a global climate disaster.

This year, hundreds of thousands of Americans will not be celebrating Thanksgiving at home.  Are they traveling to be with their families?  

No, they have lost their homes.

RealtyTrac® (realtytrac.com), the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, released its third quarter 2007 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report on Nov. 1, which shows “a total of 635,159 foreclosure filings — default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — were reported on 446,726 properties nationwide during the third quarter, a 30 percent increase from the previous quarter and an increase of nearly 100 percent from the third quarter of 2006. The report also shows a foreclosure rate of one foreclosure filing for every 196 U.S. households for the quarter.”

Last week, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben S. Bernanke, in a speech at the Cato Institute, unveiled his plan to demystify and democratize the Fed. As though talking to a faculty meeting, Bernanke announced his plans to dramatically increase the Fed’s “transparency,” and in effect, downgrade his own influence and office to promote the collective view of his Fed colleagues.

The changes will take effect this week and “will provide more frequent forecasts of Fed officials’ views on the direction of the economy – four times a year instead of two – and extend the forecast horizon to three years from two.”  The new disclosures, he said, “will help households and businesses better understand and anticipate how our policy decisions respond to incoming information, and will enhance our accountability for the decisions we make.”

Over four decades as a journalist, I have been an attentive Fed-watcher and have known well Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan. I don’t know Bernanke personally but he and his twelve colleagues on the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), all of whom are Ph.D.  economists and former Fed staffers, are getting into the deepest political-financial waters I’ve seen since the 1930s. And none of these bright academics has ever shown the survival instincts to swim with the world’s fiercest man-eating financial sharks, who could make literally tens of billions in short-selling transactions, tearing apart the vulnerable U.S. currency.

In the November 15th Las Vegas debate, my wife and I tried an experiment. She watched the debate on television and I listened to the debate on the radio in another room.

The result: She thought the frontrunner, Senator Hillary Clinton, had definitely recovered from the last debate and presented herself as aggressive and well-prepared.

Listening to the candidates’ words on the radio, undistracted by images and body language, I was more impressed with veteran Senators Joe Biden of Delaware and Chris Dodd of Connecticut.

Biden noted that he as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had spoken on the telephone to Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf and India’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto before President Bush had.

Dodd wowed a Hispanic questioner and the audience with a burst of fluent Spanish. Earlier he made a cogent case for laying out the arithmetic involved in “reforming” Social Security. Each spoke thoughtfully about the long war in Iraq and the imminent danger of war spreading to Iran.

Finally, a third seasoned politician – New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson – drew on his experience as he explained why heavily Hispanic New Mexico issues drivers licenses to undocumented Hispanics.

Voters are smart and “hip” to high-priced media managers’ slick moves. Presidential debates should not be simply entertainment. While the debates reveal the candidates’ intelligence and mental acuity, they are also our opportunity to discover how the candidates’ experience and moral character qualify them to become the single most powerful leader on this planet.

Who won? My radio, of course.

Just a week before Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season, the Commerce Department on Wednesday reported a surprisingly small 0.2 increase in retail sales in October -- a significant slowdown from a 0.7 percent advance in September.

The National Retail Federation says the 2007 holiday sales increase is expected to fall below the ten-year average of 4.8 percent that would represent the slowest holiday sales growth since 2002, when sales rose only 1.3 percent. “Retailers are in for a somewhat challenging holiday season as consumers are faced with numerous economic obstacles,” said NRF’s chief economist Rosalind Wells.

While the President and Vice President continue to threaten Iran with punitive, pre-emptive war, the admiral who would command any U.S. air and naval attacks against Iran is publicly urging peace-seeking diplomacy.

Taking up the “challenge,” in an interview in the Financial Times, Admiral William Fallon, head of Central Command which oversees military operations in the Middle East, disputes “the stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now, there will be another war, which is just not where we want to go.” Fallon declares: “Getting Iranian behavior to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. Attacking them as the means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book.” Admiral Fallon, a career naval aviator, was chosen to command Centcom last year.

This brave Admiral may very well be putting his career at risk! Try to imagine the uproar in Tokyo in mid-November 1941 if Admiral Yamamoto instead of sailing to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7 had called a press conference and denounced the “insane” war against overwhelmingly powerful America that he privately foresaw would destroy the Japanese Empire. Yamamoto confided his anguish in his diary and obeyed his orders. Fallon is obeying his conscience, as will many other American senior officers moved by his example.

In the 14 months remaining in Bush’s term, “the Decider” could find time and opportunity to extend the Long War beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran by many pretexts. Some observers believe that the Cheney-led “neoconservative” warhawks secretly intend to attack Iran by air and sea in the waning days of the Bush Administration. And, Admiral Fallon declines to rule out the possibility of a future attack. “We have to make sure that there is no mistake on the part of the Iranians about our resolve in tending to business in the region,” he says.

Retired General John Abizaid, Fallon’s predecessor, whom I have interviewed and respect as a warrior-statesman, expects the U.S. to be involved in Iraq for another 25 to 50 years. Iraq floats on an ocean of oil that the world desperately needs. Does the U.S. have the strategic vision and staying power to persist in a fixed design for a half century?

We Americans hold the great bulk of our national wealth in residential real estate. We live in our piggybanks and save nothing. When housing values are stable or rising, we feel wealthier and more confident in our borrowing and spending, which accounts for 70 percent of GDP. 

The chief executives of three giant banks – Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and UBS – were forced to resign in recent days. They were held accountable for billions of dollars of losses in their firms’ so-called investments in “subprime” mortgage-backed securities. The Financial Times reports that big U.S. and European banks are braced for many months and perhaps years of further disclosures of massive losses and housing sector depression.

Frederic Mishkin, a Federal Reserve Board member, said in a recent speech of intended reassurances to investors: “Conditions for subprime borrowers have the potential to get worse before they get better.” He urged mortgage lenders and loan-servicing companies to go beyond case-by-case bailouts of individual debtors and consider modifying all subprime loans under a sweeping program “to help large groups of borrowers.”

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs honcho, has opened the government’s predictably lengthy negotiations with the exposed banks to see how much of their subprime losses they will write off against their capital and how much of the losses the public will have to absorb.

The world price of light, sweet crude oil – known as “Arabian Light” – traded above $100 a barrel for the first time ever last week. Soon the price is expected to hit an all-time record high on an inflation-adjusted basis around $102 a barrel.

“The long-term trend of prices is clearly higher,” says the nation’s first Energy Secretary James R. Schlesinger. He took office 30 years ago. Since the first oil crisis, the U.S. government has created an energy bureaucracy but has not adopted a realistic energy policy. In fact, complacency prevailed through the 1979 energy crisis, too and it continues to prevail. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve consists of 700 million barrels, only about two weeks’ supply.

The 1979 crisis coincided with the Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Shah, the pro-Western strongman we had set up with the British to guard the Persian Gulf. Around that strategic waterway lay two-thirds of the world’s known oil reserves. The young radical students in Tehran who staged the Revolution took the U. S. embassy and made our diplomats hostage, a display of American impotence that deflated President Jimmy Carter and elected Ronald Reagan, to whom the hostages were at once released.

"'Extraordinary rendition' is the illegal U.S. practice of abducting foreign nationals for detention and interrogation in secret overseas prisons. Recent accounts of rendition have demonstrated a chilling pattern - black-clad masked men grab foreign nationals, beat and strip them down before loading them onto planes for destinations unknown to their families or governments. These victims are then taken to secret "black site" prisons around the world …. like Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Morocco that are notorious for torturing prisoners," the American Civil Liberties Union tells us.

The theme of Rendition, the movie, is more than adequately portrayed in ACLU’s description and is one of a rash of horrific, terror-related war movies this season starting with In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Redacted and soon Lions for Lambs, The Kite Runner and Charlie Wilson’s War -- none of which will enjoy the box office receipts of such similarly-themed but powerful movies such as Syriana or Babel.

There has been a great deal of discussion in the media about how poor Democratic frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton was repeatedly ”attacked” by her seven male rivals at the October 30th Democratic presidential debate at Drexel University in Philadelphia -- from every corner and issue – her “electability”, social security, Iraq, etc.  

However, when she appeared, at first, to endorse New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and then changed her mind, her opponents saw a golden opportunity to “get” her.  That then set up the next scene where the Clinton camp is now whining about sexism and her opponents are accusing her of playing the gender card.  
 

So now we are told that one of your son’s aides has secretly contacted New York state’s best -known Republican strategists about helping your son run for governor against Governor Spitzer in 2010 (New York Post), as though the road to Washington leads through Albany and fixing the Empire State’s potholes for eight years.

Mrs. Bloomberg, would you consider calling your son and telling him that his opportunity to lead our country comes out of the urgent dollar collapse and the loss of U.S. political and financial credibility abroad – which only he can fix?

Barring an unexpected pre-2008 election recession, Senator John Edwards comes off as too populist and “class-warfare” leftist. He currently stands at only 17 percent in the polls. His wife is much more popular. Some polls, such as CNN, reward former Vice President Al Gore’s Nobel Peace prize with a 14 percent rating – above Edwards and Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson.

The latter intrigues me. Richardson is at the top of the Democrats’ second tier--about where you would expect a Westerner in a small media market in an excessively urban party. Feisty and personable, he served seven terms in the House until joining the Clinton Administration as Ambassador to the United Nations and then Energy Secretary before being elected Governor in 2002. A polished pol with a relish for attention, The New York Times reports that Richardson enjoys “near-celebrity status in New Mexico where his comings and goings – like being driven around in a speeding S.U.V. and holding court at a popular Capital watering hole – routinely dominate the news…. Richardson ridicules blogs suggesting he acts improperly around women.

A presidential candidate needs to attract a bipartisan base of support in order to be elected president and, equally important, lead Congress and govern successfully. The 2008 election is shaping up as a true watershed national contest, defining America like 1932 (FDR,) 1960 (JFK,) 1968 (Nixon vs. Wallace), and 1980 (Reagan vs. Carter).

In a watershed election, all the issues tributaries of our politics converge on a single mighty torrent that sweeps everything before it. In 2008, the overwhelming issue will be the unending war-caused inflationary disorder of America’s political economy, represented by the collapsing dollar abroad and the collapsing housing mortgage debt structure at home. Bad U.S. housing debts, repackaged by global banks and made into collateral for additional mountains of transnational debts, have spread like a plague into the financial bloodstreams of Europe and Asia and the rest of the world. To save ourselves, America urgently needs a cure that will save the entire dollarized world as well.

Today, obviously, the urgent priority is winding up the costly, tragic Iraq war (now in its fifth year and already longer than WWII) in order to concentrate on restoring U.S. economic prosperity, now overshadowed by the spreading housing finance crisis and sharply declining home prices. The threat of a possible recession or worse in 2008-9 especially endangers the middle classes, those families who earn $50,000 or more a year. Across the country, these families who played by the rules, worked hard, saved and bought a piece of the American dream in the form of a heavily mortgaged house near good schools are in danger of losing everything because of predatory lending, steeply escalating adjustable-rate mortgages, and foreclosure and eviction. Their increasingly desperate plight will be the central economic issue in the 2008 election.

I worked as a senior policy adviser and campaign strategist for both Nixon and Reagan. A successful, electable candidate needs a strong, direct positive message. I helped both Nixon and Reagan define their winning messages. For Nixon, it was “order” at home after some 170 nightmarish urban race riots and “peace” abroad after the stunning Tet Offensive in Vietnam. For Reagan, it was “take charge” of double-digit hyperinflation and end weak, incompetent misgovernment under Carter.

That is ridiculous!

As a practical matter, New York’s Democratic Governor Elliott Spitzer whose state harbors an estimated several hundred thousand illegals, says he wants to give illegals licenses so that authorities can keep track of them.

Last week, Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, unwisely endorsed the governor’s dubious position. In a piece of shameless pandering, she showed that she’s afraid to offend anyone who might vote for her including illegal immigrants fraudulently using drivers licenses to register and vote. Her opponents roundly criticized her cynical flip-flopping.

If they don’t belong here, they should not be given legal documents reserved for citizens.

In the incredibly expensive, completely unforgiving blood sport of presidential politics, there are no parties, philosophies or ideologies as intellectuals imagine. As an operative, I have spent forty years in the arena learning there are only winners and losers. And winning is the whole game.

After a season of extravagant buildup and premature praise, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top-tier rival, the youthful Barack Obama, is now favored by only 23 percent in the polls. He is no longer a fresh face and is being cut down to size by many fellow Democrats who previously hailed him as the alternative to Hillary.

Obama is like a rookie baseball player rushed up to the major league “show” unseasoned. Now he must prove he can hit really wicked curves and sliders.

Here’s my practical, strategic suggestion for Obama: visit the smartest African-American Democratic politician alive – Representative Charlie Rangel of New York’s Harlem -- and explore a tactical alliance with an invaluable potential mentor. Obama needs something important and substantive to talk about. Rangel needs help with what he calls “the Mother of all Tax Reforms.”

Seventy-seven year-old Charlie Rangel, after waiting decades, has at last risen to the chairmanship of the Congressional tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. A lifelong “tax and spend” liberal, Rangel last month unveiled a long-awaited “reform” of federal tax policy that would sharply raise taxes for two-income families earning $200,000 a year; eliminate the alternative minimum tax (AMT); provide additional breaks for low and middle income households and overhaul corporate taxes. While Rangel acknowledges that his proposal has little chance of passage this year or next, reports the New York Times (10/30/07), the election of a heavily Democratic Congress in 2008 would give Rangel’s political and legislative reforms the chance of a lifetime.

Obama’s great opportunity is to become the current and future champion of Rangel’s dream to ensure that 90 million Americans would pay lower taxes under his proposal that would impact the neglected younger, educated voters and families like himself who are heavily overtaxed. These high earners, once called Yuppies, are exposed to the so-called “alternative minimum tax” (AMT) that was stuck in the code 30 years ago to prevent the very rich and well-advised from avoiding all federal taxes. Now, the AMT turns the law upside down and eliminates almost all middle-class personal exemptions and itemized deductions, like state taxes and mortgage interest payments.

In any 2008 election Democratic Congressional sweep, tax reform that “soaks the rich” would be near the top of the party’s legislative agenda. “What Rangel has done is put out a coherent plan,” Robert E. Rubin told The New York Times. Rubin, who was Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton and is now chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup, added: “You may like it; you may not like it. But it starts a discussion.”

Obama can establish his claim on the future by identifying himself with AMT reform, sparing the younger, educated classes who are the driving force of America’s knowledge-based, high-tech economy and are the decisive voters of tomorrow.

I thank my esteemed colleague David Corn for his comments on General Abizaid but I believe that when the U.S. is at war, with an Army of 160,000 in Mesopotamia, we need the experience of a seasoned military professional as commander in chief in order to extricate our forces safely. As for the comment from the academic gentleman from South Carolina, I yield to no man in my contempt for the neoconservatives’ reckless warmongering.

A year ahead of the November 2008 Presidential election – an eternity in fast-changing national politics – the Democrats, according to the latest polls, appear determined to nominate New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton. The first voters will cast their ballots in early January 2008 at the Iowa caucuses and soon after in the New Hampshire primary.  Hillary leads in polls in both states.

Hillary is “inevitable,” brag her managers at this very early stage of the race. Even though she leads in fundraising by a very comfortable margin and her organization, seasoned by President Bill Clinton’s two national victories, is superior to any other in either party, her campaign advisers should know better.

When the United States becomes involved in a long, frustrating war, the obvious possibility arises that a distinguished military man might be recruited to provide national political leadership. It is much easier imagined than accomplished, however, for reasons that are as much cultural and psychological as political.

The fundamental principle of civilian control of the American military, established by General and then President George Washington, divides ambitious young people early; would-be warriors go one way (often to the service academies) and would-be statesmen to the political arena. By the time a warrior retires in middle age, it is too late to take the other professional course and begin at the top of politics.

According to Michael Korda’s excellent new biography Ike: An American Hero (Harpers), five-star General Dwight David Eisenhower, who led the Western Allied armies’ 1944 D-Day invasion against the European continent dominated by Nazi Germany, made the transition in three nimble jumps: first, in 1945, to Army Chief of Staff; next, in 1948, to the presidency of Columbia University, and finally in 1952, to the Republican presidential nomination, which he won overwhelmingly with his promise: “I will go to Korea,” implying early resolution of the stalemated “limited war.”