All the buzz is Mark Halperin’s article: “Painful Things Hillary Clinton Knows – Or Should Know,” The Page.Time.Com. It goes like this (and then see why I think she won't):

1. She can’t win the nomination without overturning the will of the elected delegates, which will alienate many Democrats.
2. She can’t win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain.
3. Catching up in the popular vote is not out of the question — but without re-votes in Florida and Michigan it will be almost as impossible as catching up in elected delegates.
4. Nancy Pelosi and other leading members of Congress don’t think she can win and want her to give up. Same with superdelegate-to-the-stars Donna Brazile.
5. Obama’s skilled, close-knit staff can do things like silently kill re-votes in Florida and Michigan and not pay a political price.
6. Many of her supporters — and even some of her staffers — would be relieved (and even delighted) if she quit the race; none of his supporters or staff feel that way. Some think she just might throw in the towel in June if it appears efforts to fight on would hurt Obama’s general election chances.
7. The Rev. Wright story notwithstanding, the media still wants Obama to be the nominee — and that has an impact every day.
8. Obama might not be able to talk that well about the new global economy, but she (and McCain) can’t either.
9. Many of the remaining prominent superdelegates want to be for Obama and she (and Harold Ickes) are just barely keeping them from making public commitments to him.
10. She can’t publicly say more than 2% of all the things she would like to say about race, electability, beating McCain and experience.
11. If she somehow found a way to win the nomination, she would have to offer Obama the veep slot, and she doesn’t want to do that.
12. This is a change election, and Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton can never truly be change.
13. Obama is having fun most days, and she isn’t.
14. Even though her campaign staff is having more fun than it has for a long time, there’s hardly anyone there who, given half a chance, wouldn’t slit Mark Penn’s throat — and such internal dissension won’t help her in the home stretch.

My response is: Hillary won’t quit because:

1. She’s Hillary Clinton.
2. She has an oversize sense of entitlement.
3. She is arrogant.
4. She is controlling.
5. She is a pathological liar - i.e. the Bosnia story.
6. She truly believes she is qualified to be President.
7. She thinks of herself as “experienced”.
8. She chose power over divorcing Bill.
9. She won’t humiliate herself again with her daughter, Chelsea.
10. She is counting on the superdelegates to pull her out.

Barack Obama said March 29: "My attitude is that Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants. Her name is on the ballot and she is a fierce and formidable competitor." Obama, added that the notion that Democrats have been split by the prolonged nominating contest "is somewhat overstated." Obama, ever the gentleman, is giving Senator Clinton all the rope she wants. He can’t lose as long as her mistakes continue to make him look better and more electable.

In the showdown on Wall Street March 17-21, Timothy Geithner, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank dictated to Bear Stearns, the smallest major ($11 billion capital) investment bank that it would be sold to J P Morgan Chase, the fifth largest commercial bank, for a mere $2 a share, vs. $171 a share last year. Bear’s $30 billion of short-term derivative contracts, with a notional value of $10 trillion, would be guaranteed by the Fed.

Founded 85 years ago, Bear Stearns, originally a scrappy gang of money-making German-Jewish bond traders now reinforced by tough, bright Ivy leaguers, pocketed the New York Fed’s offer and kept on negotiating. By week’s end, the price of Bear’s stock had crossed $10 a share – and Morgan met it, raising its offer five-fold.

Actually, the Bear may have been in much less trouble than Morgan, which had some $46 trillion of notional value derivatives outstanding. Bear’s temporary cash-shortage – a classic run on the bank by rumor-driven clients – gave Geithner & Co. the opportunity to rescue Morgan, perhaps their real aim from the start.

A crucial conflict of interest: Morgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, sits on the New York Fed’s Board. Isn’t Wall Street a small place!

The New York Fed bank lent funds directly to the Bear – a major precedent – but one that could have happened without Morgan’s involvement. All the Washington Fed had to do was announce that the discount (loan) window was open to the Bear. In the panicky hours of confusion, the New York Fed facilitated the insultingly low-ball, two-buck offer for Bear and infuriated the employee-shareholders who owned one-third of the firm.

Now that Bear has survived with a Fed lifeline, many angry shareholders want to keep the feisty firm independent. Morgan’s takeover squad are on the Bear’s premises (the building alone is worth $1.2 billion), but the brokers could throw the bankers out.

As my son, Christopher Whalen, writes in his weekly newsletter, all Wall Street is horrified by the “rape of Bear Stearns” – he and I are both Bear alumni -- but we realize that expanded regulatory oversight is necessary. So is overdue Congressional oversight. We know this much:

• Bear Stearns is alive and independent, despite Morgan and the New York Fed conniving against them. A shareholders’ vote is needed to seal the deal.
• Plenty of capital is said to be available to the Bear from Europe and Asia.
• The needless tidal wave of liquidation and litigation unleashed by the New York Fed’s premature takeover of the Bear will prove costly and embarrassing to the Fed and American taxpayers.
• As insiders know, the “Crown Jewel” of the Bear, never mentioned in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal accounts written from the sidewalk, is its superb “back office” clearing operation, which clears the daily trades of some 2,000 smaller firms across the country.

Nothing like this marvel of money-moving efficiency exists anywhere else on Wall Street. And Morgan wants it. I think Bear Stearns will rise again!

Vice President Dick Cheney believes that Saudi Arabia “kept their word” when they promised three years ago to substantially boost oil production, investing $90 billion in the process. From a capacity of 10.5 million barrels a day in 2005, they will hit 12.5 million barrels by 2009, reports the Wall Street Journal. At $100-plus per Saudi barrel vs. $50 or less five years ago – not a bad bargain.

And Cheney also suggested in Baghdad last week that lack of surplus oil-producing and refining capacity around the world means there is little prospect of short-term relief on the supply side.

But, wait a minute, doesn’t everybody know that Iraq is sitting on an ocean of oil -- an estimated 115 billion barrels of oil. And aren’t most Americans assuming that the Iraqi oil the U.S. military came to protect five years and 4,000 GIs killed ago is being used to “win” the Iraq conflict.

Wrong. We are being played for fools by those we are defending.

The Iraqis are pumping and selling 2.4 million barrels of oil a day, the highest level since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. But the U.S. isn’t getting a drop of that oil or a dollar.

On the contrary, according to Robert Bryce, Managing Editor of Energy Tribune magazine and author of the newly published book Gusher of Lies, the U.S. is importing just over 3 million gallons of fuel into Iraq every day from Kuwait, Turkey and as far away as Greece. This is an average of 20.5 gallons of fuel per GI per day, more than twice the daily volume used by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2004.

Chief among the lies told by U.S. officials to “sell” the U.S. invasion in March 2003 was then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s claim to Congress that “…we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.”

Like so many neocon pipedreams, that one never materialized. Energy expert Bryce, writing in The American Conservative cites a November 2006 study by the U.S. Military Academy showing that it costs $42 to deliver one gallon of fuel to each GI – and that doesn’t include the cost of the fuel itself! All told, each of the 157,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq is costing $840 per day in fuel delivery costs or $923 million per week on fuel-related logistics alone.

The entire war effort in Iraq is now costing about $2.5 billion per week, so fuel costs alone currently account for one-third of the cost of the war. Fuel costs are soaring because only the heaviest steel armor offers GIs protection against roadside explosives.

After wasting billions on electronic countermeasures, the Pentagon went back to old-fashioned steel to protect troops. An armored Humvee covers perhaps 8 miles on a gallon of JP-8 military jet fuel used for aircraft and vehicles. Some 5,500 fuel-hauling tanker trucks are engaged in the fuel-hauling effort, each a potential target for insurgents.

And speaking of the Iraqis financing their own reconstruction, nobody in Washington seems to know where the Iraqis are selling their oil and what they’re doing with the money. Now two senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee – Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and Senator John Warner, (R-VA) – have requested a full accounting of how Iraq is spending its soaring oil revenue, asking “why has the Iraqi government not spent more of its oil revenue on reconstruction, economic development and providing essential services for the Iraqi people?” reports the New York Times. I think the Senators should seek criminal indictments based on their investigation.

The first, swiftly victorious 1991-2 Iraq and Gulf war showed U.S. military prowess to the world. The current Iraq war, 2003-8 – costly and indecisive -- shows the U.S. blindly bankrupting itself while rivals China and Russia make new geostrategic oil deals.

Our involvement in Iraq continues to be a blood-soaked farce and a many-sided tragedy – a study in stupidity, humiliation and disgrace.

Trying to impress the all-important voters of Pennsylvania – the primary with Senator Barack Obama is on April 22 -- as well as the 800-plus superdelegates who will decide the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Philadelphia on March 24 on the nationwide collapse in housing values and soaring mortgage foreclosures that are terrifying anxious middle-class homeowners.

Speaking about the housing crisis, Clinton said to the University of Pennsylvania audience: “The Fed extended a $30 billion lifeline to prevent Bear Stearns from imploding; homeowners, on the other hand have received next to no assistance.” In her plan, partly for symbolic reasons, Clinton urged that Congress provide $30 billion – the same amount of federal aid to the Bear -- to help states and communities minimize the number of foreclosures.

She proposed “tapping two former chairmen of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to lead a high-level emergency working group to recommend ways to overhaul at-risk mortgages.”

FYI: Volcker is for Obama; Greenspan is a Republican; and Rubin is for Rubin (see below).

Clinton endorsed federal legislation to expand the government’s ability to guarantee restructured mortgages, which she said would expand banks and other lenders dealing in mortgages. She also said she would introduce legislation to provide mortgage servicers – middlemen between lenders and homeowners – with legal protection from legislation when they modify mortgages. “Let’s be clear,” she said, “when families are losing their homes, that’s also a financial crisis.”

Clinton’s longtime pal and adviser, Bob Rubin, featured in her speech, told an aide over the weekend that Clinton’s private polls continue to slip, showing her neck-and-neck with Obama, although publicly published polls show her ahead in the state. At stake are 158 delegates, to be awarded proportionately.

In Pennsylvania, Republicans and Independents are switching their registration to vote in the Democratic primary. Last week, Democrats added a staggering 22,000 new registrants in a week, an average of 132 an hour sees this switch as a conservative ploy to vote for Hillary because she will be easier for McCain to beat than Obama.

Hillary knows she needs to win Pennsylvania – not just win – but win big. The last possible nail in her coffin: an endorsement of Obama by John Edwards.

New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson, the nation’s only Hispanic governor, shocked the political world in general and the Clinton camp in particular by endorsing presidential candidate Barack Obama for president March 21.

And while many political analysts have pointed out that Richardson’s timing was a bit off – Obama narrowly lost the Texas primary because Hillary Clinton ran strongly among Hispanics – nevertheless, Richardson’s endorsement is seen as crucial for Obama to win the backing of the nearly 800 superdelegates as well as America’s 35 million Hispanics. Richardson is a superdelegate and the 62nd superdelegate to endorse Obama.

Quite moved by Obama's major address on race relations and Obama’s response to the controversial remarks of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., Richardson said: “Your candidacy is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our country, and you are a once-in-a-lifetime leader….As a Hispanic-American, I was particularly touched by his words.”

Richardson’s endorsement is considered a stunning rebuke of Clinton because of his deep ties to both Hillary and Bill Clinton. Under President Clinton, Richardson was Secretary of Energy and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Naturally, the Clinton campaign shrugged off the endorsement.

While Richardson said his “affection for Hillary Clinton and President Bill Clinton will never waver, it is now time for a new generation of leadership.” He said he spoke with her on March 20 and later joked: “We’ve had better conversations.” Richardson is the second former Democratic presidential contender to endorse Obama, after Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut.

The New York Post reported that “The endorsement comes after months of heavy courtship by former President Clinton, who realized the importance of Richardson’s clout among Hispanics and understood just how devastating such a defection would be….the entreaties from the Clintons [were like] a carpet bomb with surrogates and supporters as well as calls from the candidate herself” all the time.

Richardson, a savvy politician and a practiced international troubleshooter with foes from Saddam Hussein to Fidel Castro, claims he loves his job in Santa Fe and doesn’t want to go back to Washington. But you know that line. His endorsement has touched off a flurry of speculation and rumors of a Obama-Richardson ticket – not really a bad idea.

The Clintons made Richardson and the only meaning behind his endorsement of Obama is that Richardson believes Hillary is over. I think he’s right.

Going all the way to the Mideast to make a fool of yourself is not exactly how you become the next President of the United States.

And how is it possible that Senator John McCain’s schedulers set a meeting with Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, March 17, ONE HOUR prior to Vice President Dick Cheney’s meeting with the Iraqi leader. According to The New York Post, both vowed that the United States would maintain a long-term military presence in the country until al Qaeda is defeated there. Maliki said he and the vice president discussed negotiations over a long-term security agreement between the two countries that would replace the UN mandate for foreign troops set to expire at the end of the year.

What kind of signals is McCain sending back to home front voters? No other candidate has linked his campaign so closely to the President’s unpopular war and this back-to-back visit has got to be right up there as a mega-political mistake.

But there’s more. Mistakenly, McCain said in Amman that “he continued to be concerned about Iranians taking al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back,” according to The New York Times.

He continued: “Well it’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.”

McCain, traveling with Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, was soon discreetly corrected by Lieberman who whispered the error in his ear. Correcting himself, McCain said” “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al Qaeda.”

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was quick to criticize McCain on Wednesday, March 19 for “misidentifying Iraqi extremists, adding that he fails to understand the war has emboldened U.S. enemies,” Reuters. “Just yesterday, we heard Senator McCain confuse Sunni and Sh’ite, Iran and al Qaeda,” Obama said.

“Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no al Qaeda ties. Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades,” said Obama.

Further, Obama attacked his Democratic opponent, Senator Hillary Clinton. “Who do you trust to end a war: someone who opposed the war from the beginning, or someone who started opposing it when they started preparing a run for president?” he asked.

A presidential candidate who claims that he is best equipped to run the world has to show foreign policy “smarts”. Next time, if there is a next time, McCain could accept the standing Iranian offer of help in pacifying Iraq and enabling the U.S. to withdraw some more of our military forces.

You went to the Mideast to reinforce your national security credentials and you will be returning as a presidential candidate that messed up unnecessarily your foreign policy image. It is time for a reality check, John. Come back to the real world where a recession is deepening and voters are desperately afraid of what’s happening to their 401ks and their future economic security. Get your priorities straight and start reading your domestic economic briefing papers.

Barack Obama has talked his way to the top of the Democratic heap, and in his eloquent speech from Philadelphia March 18th, he talked his way out of the trouble made for him by the black racist, white-hating rants of his longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr.

Obama repudiated Wright’s harsh words “Goddamn America” and the rest of his bitterly divisive bigoted sermons. But he did not abandon the flawed human being who had made him a Christian, married him and baptized his two daughters. Obama drew a clear line between what he believes about America – that we can change and steadily perfect our nation’s unity – and what the older, bitter black veteran of the 1960s racial clashes carries in his deeply scarred heart. More than any other African-American politician I have observed, Obama has the preacher’s requisite gift of gab and the born leader’s cool, common-sense presence to inspire confidence in his message. Even more than the Reverend Martin Luther King, with his Old Testament prophetic vision, Obama looks and sounds like a young man attuned to his time and the America we share and love in the 21st Century. I believe Obama is a brilliantly gifted and sincere politician. “I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible,” he said. “It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts -- that out of many, we are truly one.” He reminds me of the earnest young Senator John F. Kennedy in 1960. Obama has the same effect on my good friend, Walter Dean Burnham, professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Texas. Truly the “dean” of his profession, Burnham said: “Obama is a masterful charismatic figure who can re-energize the Democratic Party. Hillary simply wants the Clintons to return to power.”

As far as I am concerned, Obama has just won his party’s nomination.

Washington rescued Wall Street last weekend. J. P. Morgan Chase bought Bear Stearns (BSC) for stock equal to $2 a BSC share. In January 2006, Bear Stearns stock had hit a high of $171 a share. It closed at $30 a share Friday, March 14th, prior to the weekend-long negotiations with J. P. Morgan Chase. The Federal Reserve guaranteed the loan underlying the deal and $30 billion of the Bear’s complex, illiquid assets.

The smallest of the major Wall Street investment banks, Bear Stearns had just $11 billion in capital – all now swept away along with the one-third equity owned by the firm’s 14,000 employees. The Bear used very risky 30:1 leverage to compete and it lost everything when panicky clients staged a “run” on its accounts, depleting its operating cash.

I have known Bear Stearns’ people as consulting clients and friends since 1975 and I am saddened by the sudden collapse of an enterprise run by tough, street-smart money men. They lived a world away from the old-line WASP white shoe firms – and their moneymaking audacity made them feared and hated – permanent outsiders.

For most of its 85-year life, the Bear was an extended, mostly German-Jewish family, with a sprinkling of useful, politically connected Irishmen like ex-Governor Hugh Carey and special limited partners like me. I watched and reported on Washington politics and government, and traveled from Frankfurt to Tokyo advising the firm’s clients. My companion often was the firm’s senior partner, John Slade, a German Jew who in 1936 escaped Hitler and came to New York with $50 in his pocket.

Slade joined the U.S. Army, became a citizen and was the 40-year-old goalie on the U.S. field hockey team in the 1948 Olympics – one of the great events of his life. After the war, he returned to Germany to seek his late friends’ sons in Frankfurt and brought them to America and the Bear. There, they became “John’s boys.” In time, I sent my own eldest son Chris to school with John, who eventually sent him to London.

That old Wall Street is now gone with a mensch like Slade, who died in 2005 at the age of 97. Until just before his death, he worked every day from a desk in the midst of the Bear’s noisy, block-long trading room floor.

In a world awash in dollars, dominated by mega-banks and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) run by foreign governments, even the largest, best run U.S.-based old-line investment banks and their capital are too small to compete and are vulnerable to being squeezed or crushed.

“Financial Services” has become the largest U.S. industry, twice as big as manufacturing. I think the next evolutionary step is for regulated banks and government-sponsored enterprises (GSE) like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to become de facto government-owned and capitalized to compete with giant SWFs in a new form of state market capitalism. In their present form, the federal housing mortgage-guaranty firms created during the New Deal are poorly run and vulnerable to the next downturn in housing finance. Wake up, Washington.

Less than two months after President Bush’s trip to the Middle East, Vice President Dick Cheney left Sunday, on a trip that will take him to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the West Bank and Turkey. Bush said March 10 that Cheney would “reassure people that the United States is committed to a vision of peace in the Middle East.” What is really going on?

Cheney, who has always played his cards close to his vest, is saying very little about his itinerary and what if anything the Bush Administration is planning to deal with the potentially nuclear-armed Iran. Rumors among the Middle East media and wild speculation of a wider war here in the U.S. naturally follow the super-hawkish Cheney, who has publicly advocated planning an attack that would prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Cheney is sure to face many questions about the sudden resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of the U.S.’s Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East. An article written by Thomas P.M. Barnett in the March 11, 2008 edition of Esquire says: “As the White House talked up conflict with Iran, the head of U.S. Central Command, William "Fox" Fallon, talked it down. Now he has resigned.

“If, in the dying light of the Bush Administration, we go to war with Iran, it'll all come down to one man. If we do not go to war with Iran, it'll come down to the same man. He is that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance.”

Esquire quotes Fallon as opposing war with Iran and urging the renewal of diplomatic relations, broken off by Washington 29 years ago. Fallon, a 41-year-Navy veteran, retired to avoid the appearance of conflict with the White House. General David Petraeus insisted on reporting directly to the White House and Admiral Fallon insisted on the chain of command. Petraeus won, for now.

My contacts with senior retired military officers who remain close advisers and mentors to their younger active-duty colleagues in the services, as well as with senior retired civilian Pentagon and State department officials, reveal a broad, deep consensus opposed to U.S. military action against Iran. The obvious reason: there is no casus belli.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a onetime Navy Seal and one of the most knowledgeable covert warriors in Washington, has been quoted by The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh as flatly ruling out a direct U.S. assault on Iran: “You cannot use the Iraq template,” for many obvious reasons.

Iran backs the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas inside Lebanon where they launch rockets on Israel. But it is difficult to eliminate them. A direct U.S. attack on Iran itself could be expected to trigger both regional and global terrorist retaliation, including within the U.S. say American security experts. “We think Hezbollah sleeper cells are in Brooklyn,” says a New York counter-terrorism expert.

I recall Richard Nixon enjoyed putting out stories that he was thinking about doing this or he might do that to throw governments off balance. Hopefully, the Cheney trip is just another Bush ploy to scare the Middle East region into thinking that we might possibly attack Iran now that Fallon is gone.

Stirring up a war with Iran would be suicidal for the United States and would assure that the Republican Party would be out of office for at least a generation.

A vice presidential selection needs careful “vetting” to avoid nightmare situations. In 1968, I led a senior staff effort to persuade our boss Richard Nixon to select California’s newly elected Governor Ronald Reagan. Privately, Nixon, fearful of being overshadowed, rebuffed me with a growl: “He’s just an actor.” Then he alone, without any serious vetting, chose Spiro T. (“Ted”) Agnew , Governor of Maryland, whom he did not know and misperceived as a “Rockefeller moderate.” Vice President Agnew, corrupt to the core, was forced to leave office before Watergate destroyed Nixon himself.

Senator John McCain, a remarkably open Arizonan who has lived a hard, heroic life, faces the same tough, self-revealing choice of a vice president. After receiving counsel from his circle of advisers, he will trust his gut – the combat aviator’s instinct. He will need to choose as his running mate a compatible and experienced centrist conservative, perhaps a younger state governor with executive skills who can help him in very specific ways to win the 270 Electoral College votes he needs.

Others like Pat Toomey, a former Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania and president of Club for Growth, a political action committee that raises money for Republicans who support a lower-tax, limited-government agenda, have their own ideas. Toomey proposed in an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal Rep. Mike Pence from Indiana, among others.

“Over seven years in Congress, the former Chairman of the Republican Study Committee has established himself as a principled, determined conservative,” Toomey wrote adding that McCain would be wise to name a fiscal conservative as his running mate to unite Republicans.

Other Toomey picks are South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Phil Gramm, former Texas Senator and Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes, Inc. I think Toomey’s whole line-up is a puff-job that just won’t happen.

Mitt Romney, in his first televised interview since he suspended his presidential campaign last month, has just announced that “he would be honored to serve as Senator John McCain’s vice presidential nominee,” reports The New York Post. Some argue that Romney would help McCain among conservatives and lend him credibility on economic issues. I think it will be very difficult if not impossible to erase the memories of their bitter feuding.

Assessed with practical realism, based on the electoral map of the U.S., McCain may have only a couple of real choices. McCain is indebted to Governor Charlie Crist of Florida, because he endorsed McCain on the eve of his state’s primary, writes George F. Will. Florida is a crucial state for Republicans rich in electoral votes (27) but Michael Barone in his Almanac of America Politics writes about Crist’s election: “Here a candidate was attacked for being both gay and for fathering a child out of wedlock.”

Another candidate with impeccable conservative credentials writes Will, is Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, 60, who served as a political director in the Reagan White House and as National Party Chairman 1993-1997. Other prospects include center-right Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, twice elected in a state trending Democratic, South Dakota’s Senator John Thune and lest we forget, Mike Huckabee whose recent praise of McCain is considered a thinly veiled bid for the No. 2 spot.

Now let’s go way out. Paul Bedard in his “Washington Whispers” published in the U.S. News says that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is all the buzz in conservative circles – kind of a 7-Eleven for the GOP – “a fashionable Republican woman, African-American, over-the-top smart and a very able diplomat.”

My own idea about who would be the best candidate in an ideal world – Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. The Golden State is the biggest prize with 55 electoral votes. “Ah-nold,” is the media savvy, Kennedy-connected action hero, who could be the next star in the Republican Party’s dominant presidential galaxy.

Yes, I know, Schwarzenegger, who was born in Austria, is blocked by Article 2, Section 1, and Clause 5 of the Constitution, which reads: “No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of president.” Proponents of a simple, overdue change in the Constitution argue that 700 immigrants in uniform have been awarded the Medal of Honor since the Civil War and well over 60,000 now serve in our military.

McCain, at 72, would be confident enough to form a true “team” with the charismatic Schwarzenegger, 61, who needs federal government experience and visibility to step up to the presidency. And Republicans love their predictable seniority ladder

Despite Schwarzenegger’s incredible voter approval rating in California, this is a long shot to end all long shots. Let’s have a weekend vote by readers on changing the Constitution, even though the chances of doing that for this election are nil: how many yeas; how many nays?

After a slow but steady media buildup of the Clinton’s “Dream Ticket,” Senator Barack Obama arrived in Columbus, Mississippi on Monday, March 11 and suggested that the Clintons were being duplicitous in their [Vice Presidential] offer, implying on one hand that he was not ready to be president but that on the other, he could solve the party’s political impasse by joining together. “I don’t know how somebody who’s in second place can offer the vice presidency to someone who’s in first place,” Obama said http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/us/politics/11clinton.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=obama+vice+president&st=nyt&oref=slogin. His point was hammered home by his Mississippi win over Clinton 60 – 37 percent.

And so, it is official: the battle will continue well into the summer. The question remains how do you really determine who is “winning.” Obama rightly says that he has won twice as many states as Clinton and he has won more of the popular vote. He also claims that he has more delegates. But despite the outcome of future contests, especially the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, it is looking more and more like the Democratic super delegates will decide the nomination.

And now that Bill Clinton has been muzzled, Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign appears steadier. Hillary has it where it belongs, on top and unseen in the campaign’s backroom. According to a senior Washington journalist, Clinton’s counselors are a pair of smart, tough veteran Democrats: Dick Gephardt, 67, and Tom Daschle, 60. If she can win the nomination, their savvy expertise will count most heavily on issues against McCain.

Dick Gephardt twice ran for the presidency and lost badly, but learned useful lessons. He is a favorite of the unions – hence he turned to his base for Hillary’s string of union endorsements and volunteers. He is a convinced trade protectionist and economic nationalist, whose themes are attuned to the deepening recession. As House Majority Leader, he held hostage President Bill Clinton’s most important bill, the North American Free Trade Agreement until he got anti-Japan “fair trade” amendments. Hillary is cool to NAFTA, on Gephardt’s advice.

Daschle, a South Dakota liberal, rose swiftly to become Senate Minority Leader and risked everything to oppose Bush’s invasion of Iraq. On March 17, 2003, Daschle denounced Bush’s 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein and delivered an impassioned speech on television: “I’m saddened, saddened that the president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.”

The Iraq war is a personal as well as a political issue for Daschle, who narrowly lost his Senate seat to Republican John Thune in the 2004 elections that re-elected Bush. He’ll bring intelligent, energetic commitment to shaping Hillary’s anti-Iraq war strategy.

So Obama has made it very clear – there will be no “Dream Ticket” -- he is running for president, period. But despite his large victory in Mississippi, if he wants to pull it off, he has got to know that campaigns are won by candidates wise enough to listen to their backroom strategists and filter what he needs to win his party’s nomination.

New York’s Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer, formerly an aggressive Attorney General compared to Eliot Ness who brought down Al Capone, pulled down his own halo Monday, March 10. He was identified as the alleged “Client 9” in a federal investigation of a high-priced prostitution ring operating in Washington, D.C. and other cities.

What I see is that Spitzer is following his own book on Modern News Management and Damage Control.

Rule #1: If the allegation is true, don’t mention it but just express sincere regret and apologize. “I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong,” Spitzer said at a news conference 3/10/08. “I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public, whom I promised better.”

Rule #2: Before the allegation is published, tell your side of the story privately to your family and staff. Spitzer learned of his implication on Friday and informed his top aides [and presumably his family] on Sunday night and Monday morning. (New York Times 3/11/08)

Rule #3. Persuade your red-eyed, totally shocked wife to stand next to you during your one-minute news conference to show support and solidarity.

Rule #4: Stonewall any suggestions that you will resign even though a Democratic campaign veteran with staff ties says: “It is a 'when' question on the resignation, not an 'if.' It is hard to come to terms with, and there are legal issues that are related to any big political decisions. But Eliot knows he cannot hold on to his job here. He might want to, but he is absolutely aware of his predicament."

Rule #5: Hope that all of the psychiatrists who are analyzing your Shakespearean-type fall on TV talk shows will diminish this tragic situation by arguing that your high-powered position left you vulnerable to human weaknesses, etc..

Rule #6: Pray that the media will run the list of political leaders who have succumbed to various degrees of dalliances: Wilbur Mills, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and James McGreevey, etc., etc. so that it makes it OK, right?

Little matter that a wife is humiliated, three children are hurt beyond description and another office in this great country has been compromised and tarnished. We are all having a big laugh only no one knows what exactly is so funny. I don’t think Hillary is laughing.

Nixon once told me: “Don’t confide in your friends. Better yet, if you want a friend and companion, get a dog.” At this point in time, I am told Spitzer does not have many friends - I can’t verify a dog.

Senator John McCain is planning a trip to Europe and the Middle East later this month. While this trip, that includes Iraq, might bolster his foreign policy experience image, it does little to assure Republicans and potential Independents that he understands the desperate seriousness of America’s economic and financial crisis.

On several occasions, Senator John McCain has even joked about his lack of economic expertise – “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well a I should,” he told The Boston Globe in December 2007. “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.” In my opinion, that is not much help.

A self-styled “foot soldier” in the Reagan Revolution, McCain worked in the House with supply-siders Jack Kemp and Phil Gramm. Once opposed to President George W. Bush’s tax cuts, he’s now for making them permanent – and for more cuts like them, with spending cuts to reduce deficits.

He urges elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) and reduction in corporate taxes – now second highest in the world. McCain wants personal savings accounts to “supplement” Social Security. He urges “fundamental” reduction in deficit spending, starting with wasteful Pentagon procurement, such as $6 billion saved on Air Force tankers.

He calls for business deregulation and for a “cap-and-trade” system to combat global warming. Auctioning emission permits would generate money for ecological innovation and technology.

Reuters reports that “McCain would have a tough time cutting all of that spending because much of it would come out of the pentagon’s budget as the United States fights in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Joshua Gordon, senior Policy analyst at the Concord Coalition, a centrist budget watchdog group.

Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says McCain’s proposals are…”the most fiscally irresponsible plans we’ve seen by a presidential candidate in a long time.”

McCain has not yet explained how he will rein in health care and retirement costs. “Any changes in spending and taxes will be dwarfed by the ballooning costs of the Social Security retirement and Medicare health-care entitlement programs,” says Brian Riedle, the lead budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

A former Democratic Senator who has known McCain and tried to work with him over the years expresses worry about his ability to grasp the complexities of our deflating, recession-hit economy, adding: “McCain is not the brightest bulb on the tree.”

Worry-worn voters are going to get it pretty fast – McCain’s proposals simply don’t fit the economic hell we are facing. When it don’t fit, it don’t fit.

The classic confrontation between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could have a classic solution, played and proven at one of most exciting Democratic National Conventions in our time: July 1960 in Los Angeles. There, bitter rivals JFK and LBJ came together to form the winning ticket.

In 1960, Senator John Kennedy, only 42, was challenging the veteran Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, but came up short in delegate votes. LBJ controlled delegate-rich Texas. Old Joe Kennedy told his son: “Call Lyndon.” Jack Kennedy did. Johnson talked to “Mr. Sam” Rayburn, the venerable House speaker and fellow Texan. To his surprise, Rayburn urged Johnson to take it.

Even if Hillary wins Pennsylvania, and the Florida and Michigan “do over” elections, it is unlikely that either candidate will have enough pledged delegates to win the nomination outright, advisers to both campaigns say. But their relative strength in pledged delegates could affect their ability to attract support from super delegates, the elected officials and party leaders whose choices are likely to determine the outcome.

The closer the battling Democrats come to the Denver convention in late August, they might possibly see the wisdom of making love, not war. The winning compromise ticket now the current media buzz: Clinton-Obama. Once “inevitable” and now embattled, Hillary, at 60, would get her shot as senior figure, more credible on economic issues, the clear focus of this election. Obama, 46, would get much more than he ever dreamed possible: as Veep the necessary high-profile seasoning and the promise of a 2012 succession if Hillary loses.

Ted Sorenson, a figure from JFK’s inner circle who now quietly advises Obama is respected by all party factions and could be a persuasive advocate of an historic “double first” ticket – the first woman and the first black.

But the Clinton “hints” that she might consider running with Obama are not producing anything like enthusiastic responses from the Obama camp. In fact, Obama, not only has replied that it is premature to be having these discussions, but several political analysts believe these Clinton suggestions are more PR ploys.

I don’t see Obama, a tough product of Chicago’s Daley Machine, folding his cards and cashing in his chips. Why should he? After winning Wyoming 3/8/08, Obama now leads Clinton in total delegates 1578 to 1468, according to the Associated Press. Needed to win: 2,025 . Survey USA shows that Clinton would squeak by McCain in electoral votes, 276 to 262. Obama would beat McCain 280 to 258.

Good try Hillary, but from where I sit, it is going to be a long spring and summer.

As we walked across Capitol Hill a few years ago, Senator John McCain turned to me and said: “Dick, I’ve always been kind of neoconservative.” He was referring to his maverick image but evidently did not realize then that the word “neocon” had become an epithet in the Iraq war debate.

But it is precisely the war debate and President George Bush’s references to the “enemy” when he endorsed McCain that compel many to remark that a McCain presidency would represent Bush’s third term. “The good news about our candidate is there will be a new president, a man of character and courage,” Bush said. “But he’s not going to change when it comes to taking on the enemy. He understands that this is a dangerous world.”

Ahead of the fifth anniversary of Iraq, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, an ex-Bill Clinton adviser, has just published a provocative tract, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. McCain, a consistent hawk, has begun shifting his ground on Iraq. “I will defend the decision to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime” – a war aim achieved four years ago. This statement of past U.S. war aims could provide an obvious rationale for withdrawal in the near future.

Pentagon plans for U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq within 12-24 months are far advanced, using Kuwait as the exit to the sea. Rebuilding Iraq into a functioning modern democracy, as a President McCain presumably would discover, is not a mission suitable for the U.S. military.

McCain will soon have to indicate where he intends to go on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, if only to make his economic proposals, centering on tax cuts, credible in the light of that three trillion dollar price tag.

Senator John McCain proves the adage: “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.” After losing a gutter brawl for the GOP nomination to George W. Bush in 2000, McCain nonetheless campaigned for Bush’s re-election in 2004. McCain thus loyally got in line for 2008.

Now, McCain has the nomination and Bush’s rather defensive White House Rose Garden endorsement and prediction: “He’ll be the (next) President.”

Being loyal and showing up is what GOP presidential politics has been about ever since Richard Nixon’s nomination and election in 1968. Early that year, newly elected Governor of California Ronald Reagan tried to jump the line but Senator Strom Thurmond, as the Party’s reigning elder, firmly told him: “It’s Dick's turn, Ron.”

McCain is currently seriously short of campaign money and needs President Bush as his chief fundraiser. In the short-term, his role as Bush’s “legacy” meets his needs. Before the successful surge” in U.S. troop strength in Iraq, he was a sharp, informed critic of the woefully under strength U.S. ground commitment, the result of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s failed “war on the cheap” gamble. Now McCain claims credit for the “surge” and is gung-ho for staying in Iraq as long as it takes – his “hundred years” remark will haunt him through November.

The Democrats’ party-splitting battle between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama will continue until the Democrats’ August convention and will probably be decided by the 800 super delegates. This “war” is a blessing for McCain. He gets a few months of reduced media coverage in which to organize national staff, plan strategy, adopt a realistic budget and carefully “vet” his vice presidential choice – the most important campaign and self-revealing decision he needs to make. I don’t think McCain will make an imitative move by nominating a woman or a minority member.

McCain, after decades in the Capital, remains the feisty outsider untainted by Washington scandals and Bush’s appalling record of the past eight years. He must now emphasize that he carries the libertarian banner of Reagan’s authentic legacy as a limited government conservative and do nothing that might impair his all-important image of integrity and independence.

In the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” small town banker Jimmy Stewart faces a run on his bank and uses the money intended for his honeymoon to give the townspeople what they need to sustain them and quell the panic -- one of countless scenes during the Great Depression.

I am amazed that our media has given so little attention to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s semi-annual Congressional testimony, February 28, in which he warned that small banks might go under as the sub prime mortgage and housing scandals worsened. He told the Senate Banking Committee: “I expect there will be some failures….Among the largest banks, the capital ratios remain good and I don’t anticipate any serious problems of that sort among the large, internationally active banks that make up a very substantial part of our banking system.”

That’s OK – right? It’s only small banks that will fail. How many? Bernanke didn’t say.

Question: are we in a recession or are we going for the big “D”?

Some analysts believe that some of the huge writedowns in the value of bank assets related to subprime mortgages may have gone too far and accounting rules may be forcing banks to put artificially low values on little-traded assets when they mark them to market. The inability to value such assets on the basis of actual trades, Bernanke confessed, is “one of the major problems that we have in the current environment. I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know what to do about it,” reported *Bloomberg.com *this week.

These assets are mostly complex derivatives that were never intended to be traded. These were devised by banks using endless supplies of surplus dollars.

The international media, specifically Europe, has been all over Bernanke’s statements as the dollar fell to a new record low against the Euro on February 29, which soared to levels above $1.52 for the first time while the dollar’s overall value on its trade-weighted index also hit a record low.

The *London Times *reported last week: “Leading U.S. shares sank by 2 percent or more in morning trading. Equity markets in Europe also endured still more steep losses, with London’s FTSE 100 index ending the day down 110.8 points or 1.8 percent.”

Despite Bernanke’s rejection of suggestions that the U.S. economy could succumb to a bout of 1970s-style stagflation, some observers warn that the main conditions are in place:

• The world price of oil, which had been expected to level off or decline by late winter, instead soared back above $100 a barrel. Dollar-priced commodities are higher.
• Slower economic growth was supposed to restrain other prices, but inflation in January accelerated. U.S. consumer price inflation for the month hit 4.3 percent, exceeded only by China, the Czech Republic, Russia, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colombia, Venezuela and Egypt – odd company for the world’s only superpower.
• U.S. wholesale prices rose by 7.4 percent in the year to January, according to the Economist, the largest increase since 1981.
• Significantly, starting a trend, food and energy prices jumped in January. In reaction, the Conference Board’s index of consumer confidence plunged by 12.3 points, to 75.0, its lowest level in five years.

The sharp slowdown in the economy since the New Year has been consumer-led as consumers have decided en masse to put their credit cards away and cut back on their purchases of gasoline.

So, stagflation is a reality and GDP growth is flat. The U.S. economy is weakening, but the inflation rate is rising. Credit has tightened further, despite the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented January 1.25 percent rate cuts, which are expected to continue. Spreads between risk-free Treasury bonds and AAA-rated corporate bonds widened to the highest level since the 2002 corporate scandals.

But let’s be of good cheer. John Crudele, writing in the New York Post, has a brilliant solution: “Save the dollar” Fire Bernanke!” And despite his 80 years, he advocates bringing back “the legendary Paul Volcker, who successfully led the Fed during the inflation-wracked 1970s and 1980s.”

I am with you, John.

As Yogi Berra would say, it’s deja vu all over again.

The U.S. military’s Central Command wants to send a force of about 100 American “trainers” into Pakistan’s insurgent tribal areas in the Northwest Frontier Territory, according to the New York Times. They would help train the Frontier corps, a paramilitary force of about 85,000 Pakistanis. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, who lost badly in the recent parliamentary elections, is widely criticized as an American stooge and wants no American troops in his country.

Washington should listen to Musharraf. We are in danger of repeating the fatal mistake Washington made in Vietnam in 1961 when the CIA and the Pentagon overrode local Vietnamese objections and air lifted about 100 American “advisers” to Saigon to take over the counter insurgency that we feared the South Vietnamese were losing. They weren’t losing at all.

The U.S. Ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, a patrician Yankee Republican from Massachusetts who hated the Kennedys, accepted the Administration’s rationale for “victory at any cost,” and began secretly approving military coups and assassinations of South Vietnamese leaders. Soon, with blood on our hands, the U.S. was trapped.

Lyndon Johnson ultimately escalated the stakes by sending 550,000 U.S. troops to South Vietnam. After the U.S. took over the war, the “Americanized” war was hopelessly lost and the U.S. pulled out in 1975.

Today, the Pakistanis have better than a fighting chance to defeat the Jihadists by themselves in the Northwestern Frontier Territory, perhaps with limited U.S. air support and surveillance. President Musharraf’s weakness is not military but political and internal.

He needs to prove that Pakistanis alone can rule their country without any “American” or “European” post-colonialist assistance. Whatever a handful of American “trainers” might be worth, they can do their work discreetly in Islamabad and leave proud Pakistan, nuclear-armed but afraid of its Indian rival, to defend its own borders. Pakistan needs to succeed by itself.

Barack Obama, the most unexpected presidential candidate in recent U.S. history, is gliding toward the Democratic nomination and possible election without facing any of the tough questions.

A political career scarcely begun by conventional standards, what we know about Obama comes mainly from own writings and speeches. He spent seven years in the Illinois legislature and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. He came to national attention with his riveting 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech.

Obama is no conventional politician. Everything he says and writes, everything written about him by his admirers, radiates extraordinary optimism. His adherents have extravagant visions of what he can accomplish and have transformed him into a messiah-like “President of Peace.” He is especially hailed by those eager to forget the war-making incumbent in the White House.

Liberal columnist Michael Kinsley praises Obama’s “valuable experience…. as what you might call a ‘world man’ – Kenyan father, American mother, four formative years living in Indonesia, more years in the ethnic stew of Hawaii, a middle name of Hussein, and so on – in an increasingly globalized world.” Like so many enthusiasts, Kinsley displays the symptoms of a “man crush” on Obama and the glorious dreams he stirs as the savior of the corrupt, decadent Democratic Party, even the corrupt, decadent American political system and perhaps, all of America itself.

I repeat: We know less about Obama than any other popular presidential candidate in at least a half-century. He is the stealth frontrunner. And most of what we think we know about this “world man” comes from his own agitprop – his books and speeches. Beyond his attractive wife Michelle, we know none of his admirers and aides. It is surely time to get Barack Obama in sharp focus and examine who and what he is. For example, the right-wing weekly Human Events offered this week a special supplement illustrating the widespread lack of knowledge of Obama’s career and public record. And, in the American Conservative (February 25), the London-based journalist Brendan O’Neill sees Obama not as an icon of peace, but one likely to be more bellicose than Bush.

He writes: “President Obama would be a war-monger. He would be a wide-eyed, zealous interventionist who would not think twice about using America’s ‘military muscle’ (his words) to overthrow ‘rogue states’ and to suppress America’s enemies, real and imagined. He would go farther even than President Bush in transforming the globe into America’s backyard and staffing it with spies and soldiers. He would relish the ‘American mission’ to police the world and topple tyrannical regimes.”

Much is made of Obama’s October 2002 speech at an antiwar rally in Chicago, in which he called the planned invasion of Iraq “dumb” and “rash.” But he repeatedly told his audience that Bush was damaging the legitimate American case for wars of intervention and making it harder for future, perhaps Democratic administrations to deploy troops overseas to depose unfriendly regimes.

When he got to Washington, Senator Obama joined the lopsided bipartisan majority to fund the war in Iraq and opposed the withdrawal of American troops. In 2004, he talked approvingly of sending more troops to Iraq. He and Senator Clinton both voted “no” to ordering President Bush to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq by July 1, 2007. Both also voted against a June 2006 amendment proposed by Senator John Kerry for the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq. Not until May 2007 did Clinton and Obama vote to cut off war funds.

Obama is by far the most impressive candidate the Democrats have presented since John F. Kennedy in 1960. His wife, Michelle, is well-cast as the 21st Century Jackie. But who are Obama’s Joe Kennedy (money), John Bailey (strategy), Ted Sorenson (speech and image making) and Kenny O’Donnell (political organization)?