Day: January 24, 2007

Hillary Clinton has been called, ungallantly but perhaps accurately, the 800-pound gorilla of the 2008 presidential campaign and she has stepped on, and maybe squashed, public campaign financing.

It may not be dead yet but newspaper metaphors have pretty much written off the 32-year-old system. The Washington Post saw her decision to opt out of the federal funds as heralding the demise and The New York Times as sounding the death knell.

In a stinging Democratic Party response to President Bush’s State of the Union address, freshman Sen. James Webb of Virginia said Bush “took us into this war recklessly” and “we are now as a nation held hostage to the predictable and predicted disarray that has followed.”

Webb, whose Marine son is serving in Iraq, said Bush has lost the support of the majority of the country and the military.

President Bush wants Congress to give his controversial strategy for Iraq a chance to work. Defiant Democrats say they’ll give it a vote, and use their newly won control over the House and Senate to oppose the deployment of an additional 21,500 troops.

“And we will continue to hold him accountable for changing course in Iraq,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday night in a blunt response issued before the applause had fully faded on Bush’s State of the Union address.

President Bush wants Congress to give his controversial strategy for Iraq a chance to work. Defiant Democrats say they’ll give it a vote, and use their newly won control over the House and Senate to oppose the deployment of an additional 21,500 troops.

“And we will continue to hold him accountable for changing course in Iraq,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday night in a blunt response issued before the applause had fully faded on Bush’s State of the Union address.

It is a problem long recognized but rarely admitted: We in the news media too often end up fanning the flames when we cover the fires.

But our craft’s dilemma becomes far worse when the fires we cover were set by arsonists in our midst.

And that is what happened this week. Just days after the consensus presidential frontrunners got off to their way-too-early start of campaign 2008, a small but ever-ready segment of the news media sparked the first brushfire so quickly that even the traditional political dirty tricksters got caught with their matches down.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, a former Marine with a son in Iraq, called on President George W. Bush on Tuesday to change course in the unpopular war so American troops can begin to come home.

“If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way,” Webb said in his party’s response to the president’s annual State of the Union Address to the Congress.

A politically weakened President Bush implored a skeptical Congress Tuesday night to embrace his unpopular plan to send more U.S. troops to Iraq, saying it represents the best chance in a war America must not lose. “Give it a chance to work,” he said.

Facing a political showdown with Democrats and Republicans alike, Bush was unyielding on Iraq in his annual State of the Union address. He also sought to revive his troubled presidency with proposals to expand health insurance coverage and to slash gasoline consumption by 20 percent in a decade.

President Bush made big promises with no plan to fulfill them in tonight’s State of the Union address to Congress, according to experts with the Campaign for America’s Future and the Apollo Alliance.

ON KITCHEN TABLE ISSUES: