Stop the presses!

--Michael Crowley

Newsweek's Fineman:

I've recently spoken with two of the finalists for the role of Barack Obama's running-mate, and to two other sources who are close to the process.

My bottom line is this: Barring a big surprise or last-minute change of heart, the choice is likely to be Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

As a counterweight, this comes from a Democratic insider who has watched Biden for years and doesn't think it'll be him:

obama does not believe he needs foreign policy help, and does not want to create the perception that he needs the help....  he is very secure in his own skin with respect to what he knows, and the judgment and wisdom he brings, to national security decision making.  talk to hagel and reed and their traveling staff about the recent trip to learn about how confident and at ease obama is when it comes to the issues.  and, with respect to the most volatile aspect of the trip, the israelis may remain a tad nervous about the thin resume, but they are virtually unanimous in saying obama knows his stuff.  he clearly did not need biden on the trip to add credibility.  i have no doubt obama is looking forward to his debate with mccain on national security issues, especially since mccain will be set up as the expert and obama as the neophyte.  so, finally, when obama is in the white house, i bet he doesn't want joe biden, as much as he may like him, at his elbow thinking the VP is really in charge of foreign policy. 

--Michael Crowley

Weirdest election-related twist in a slow, pre-convention week: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg may be on the ballot as a presidential candidate ... in Virginia ... with Ron Paul as his running mate ... nominated by a party that describes its members as "happy hillbillies":

On Friday, under the radar, the Independent Green Party of Virginia successfully gathered enough signatures to put New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's name on the presidential ballot. They did it all without the mayor's knowledge or consent. Moreover, they wrote in as his number two Texas Rep. Ron Paul ...

"Indy Greens started the presidential petition drive on January 1, 2008 in Independence, Virginia," explained Carey Campbell, chairman of the party. "Eight months, 15 days later, the cake is baked. The deed is done. We're happy hillbillies. Since January 1st, Indy Greens collected 70,000 petition signatures. Seven successful petition drives to put five candidates on the ballot for U.S. House, and 2 statewide petition drives... and now Michael Bloomberg on ballot for president. We made a promise to Mr. Bloomberg, and now we have kept that promise." Virginia state law requires that a candidate receive 10,000 signatures of qualified voters, including 400 in each of the state's 11 congressional districts, in order to gain access to the presidential ballot. The Indy Greens, over the course of many months, collected far more than the minimum.

According to Ben Smith, Mayor Bloomberg has the option to put the kibosh on this, but is considering letting it go forward. That seems like a questionable move to me. Does he really want to be ginning up a) angst from both major campaigns, who could fear he would siphon off their votes, and b) lots of gleefully colorful stories in the press about how his new base of support consists of the guys who flew the Ron Paul blimp?

P.S. A colleague points out that the Bloomberg/Paul combo is particularly nutty because Bloomberg likes to do things like ban trans fats, the sort of vaguely-nanny-state-style move that drives Ron Paul supporters bonkers.

--Eve Fairbanks

Maybe it's time to bring the rampant speculation back to one of its earliest incarnations, dating back to last fall. Gore offers massive buzz and excitement, has vast national-security experience, and he opposed the war.

Some say he prefers his new life of floating "above" politics. But if Obama asks, can he really say no? And does he really believe he can do more about global warming from the outside than he could from the West Wing?

P.S. Unless I'm mistaken Gore is still mysteriously absent from the convention speaking list. Hmm....

--Michael Crowley

Let's be honest--with the possible exception of that Saddleback forum (on which I hold the minority view), last week was not a good one for Obama. McCain looked engaged and authoritative on the Georgia crisis, despite the tawdriness of his pronouncements, while Obama seemed AWOL. Mike was exactly right on this--though it wasn't necessarily Obama's fault (I mostly blame an unfortunate coincidence of vacation timing), the atmospherics were lousy for a candidate who still has to clear the commander-in-chief threshold. One hopes Team Obama is well-prepared for the Musharraf resignation...

Having said that, I think the re-emergence of Russia may actually provide Obama with an opportunity if he knows how to seize it. And it comes, of all places, from Maureen Dowd.

In yesterday's column MoDo wrote:

When I interviewed him at the start of his first presidential run in 1999, [W.] took an obvious shot and told me, “I believe the big issues are going to be China and Russia.”

But after 9/11, he let Cheney, Rummy and the neocons gull him into a destructive obsession with Iraq. While America has been bogged down and bled dry, China and Russia are plumping up. China has bought so much of America that we’d be dead Peking ducks if they pulled their investments out of our market, and Russia has transformed itself from a pauper nation to a land filled with millionaires — all through our addiction to oil.

What was so galling about watching W.’s giddy sightseeing at the Olympics was that it underscored China’s rise as a superpower and, thanks to the administration’s derelict foreign and economic policies, America’s fade-out. It’s as though China has become us and we’ve become Europe. Like Russia, China has also been showing jagged authoritarian ways and ignoring America’s preaching, including W.’s tame criticism as he flew into Beijing to revel in the spectacle of China’s ascension.

Despite his 1999 prediction that Russia and China would be key to security in the world, W. never bothered to study up on them.

Very good points. Obama's strongest response to the Russia situtation may be the same one he's used in other foreign policy contexts: By focusing on Iraq, we took our eyes off the real long-term threats to U.S. security. Global terrorism was one of them. Afghanistan and Pakistan were two others. The rise of Russia still another. Worse, Iraq has deprived us of all sorts of leverage we would have had with Russia. With our troops bogged down, we don't have much of a deterrent capability. (Not that we'd want to threaten force, but you'd like all options on the table so the Russians know there's a practical limit to their actions.) And we now desperately need Russia's help in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions, which we might not need as much if we weren't in Iraq and vulenrable to Iranian adventurism there. (Which is to say, Iran has leverage over us thanks to Iraq, which we need the Russians to counterbalance.)   

Better yet, I don't think McCain can even disagree with this analysis, though I'm sure he would. On some level it's basically a neocon critique: By getting bogged down in Iraq, we've fallen behind in a struggle against a great power (Russia) that we foolishly took to be benign amid all the happy talk of the 1990s. 

Update: I slightly tweaked the first graf with a few words about Obama's vacation.

--Noam Scheiber

As far as the crowd is concerned, it was clear that McCain was the favorite. That was hardly a surprise; at a small gathering I attended a few years ago, someone asked Warren how many of his parishioners voted for John Kerry. He thought for a moment and said 15 percent. So the conservative Saddleback crowd, while happy to see Obama in their midst, was not going to be on his side. What they wanted was proof that John McCain was on theirs, and that’s what they got.

Obama made no big mistakes. But his tendency to somewhat windy generalities meant he wasn’t particularly compelling. McCain, who went second, was crisp by contrast, and his anecdotes colorful.

The McCain camp is outraged at the suggestion that they may have cheated by not sequestering the candidate in Rick Warren's "cone of silence" during Obama's Saddleback appearance on Saturday night.

Their over-the-top reaction is a little ridiculous. On the other hand, McCain has a special obsession with honor generally and cheating specifically. In his first memoir, Faith of My Fathers, he writes of his father's genuinely angry reaction after his mother jokingly accused him of cheating at gin rummy:

"He reacted so strongly to the accusation, with such evident distress over the charge, admonishing her to 'never say such a thing again,' that she never did. Not even in jest."

It was McCain's fixation with the rules of fair play, I wrote last month, that fueled his strange crusade against ultimate fighting.

Meanwhile Nicole Wallace's suggestion that McCain's former POW status has anything to do with it is, of course, preposterous.

--Michael Crowley

A reminder not to get too carried away with praising the National Enqurier's credibility--especially when it comes to "love child" stories:

The tabloid, which is being celebrated for scooping the mainstream media on the John Edwards mistress story, has quietly settled a lawsuit filed by a Cape Cod woman who claimed the Enquirer published false and defamatory stories about her supposed "love child" with Senator Ted Kennedy.

Lawyers for Caroline Bilodeau-Allen provided DNA test results from 1985 that show Kennedy is not the father of Christopher Bilodeau, who was born in 1984....

The stories, published in 2006, alleged that Kennedy and Bilodeau - she was unmarried at the time - began dating in 1983, while Kennedy was separated from his wife, Joan, just before the divorce was finalized. The tabloid claimed that after Bilodeau became pregnant, the senator, then in his early 50s, begged Bilodeau, then in her early 20s, to have an abortion.

Bilodeau-Allen subsequently sued American Media and two of its reporters, Richard Moriarty and Alan Butterfield, who is one of the reporters writing about Edwards's affair with Rielle Hunter.

That said, I somehow doubt this is enough to get Edwards off the hook. But a DNA test might!

--Michael Crowley

Today's very interesting New York Times piece on John McCain's reaction to 9/11--highlighted by the reminder that McCain was talking openly about invading Iraq within weeks of the attacks--included a reference to a 2006 interview McCain gave to TNR in which he admitted to having become "too enamored" with Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraq National Congress. You can read John Judis's illuminating look at McCain's gradual evolution from realist to neocon here.

--Michael Crowley

This is probably the best intallment to date (yet I also suspect it's the last, as the tea leaves are just not pointing Nunn's way lately). 

P.S. While Nunn seems unlikely to be Obama's veep, he does seem a pretty good bet for a cabinet post....

--Michael Crowley

I just saw CBN's David Brody proclaim McCain the winner of tonight's joint appearance at Saddleback Church, saying (essentially) that McCain hit it out of the park. I didn't think McCain did as well as Brody did--a lot of his answers sounded pretty stilted and canned, like obviously recycled stump shtick. But, even if you did think McCain was objectively better than Obama, that's the wrong way to think about winners and losers in a forum like this. You've got to grade on the curve.

The audience, after all, was primarily evangelical Christians--a group among whom McCain leads by better than 2 to 1, according to recent polls. That means that if McCain did any worse than twice as well as Obama, it counts as a win for Obama. And, from where I sit, McCain didn't come close to doing twice as well. My sense is that Obama struck a lot of previously skeptical evangelicals as a reasonable and God-fearing man (a real achievement given that so many of the questions touched on issues that favor Republicans among these voters--abortion, judges, stem cell research, etc.). That's a big improvement in light of where Obama started. 

Advantage Obama.

--Noam Scheiber

Ed Kilgore thinks so:

For all the talk about Obama's "charisma" and "story," he actually may be less vulnerable than Kerry was to attacks on his "personal narrative." As a new Pew survey today illustrates, Obama's credibility as a candidate is heavily based on the popularity of his policy positions. McCain is the candidate who is dangerously dependent on "character" and "biography" as a credential.

Finally, of course, there is zero chance that anti-Obama smears will go unchallenged. The Obama campaign decided a long time ago to abandon the once-prevelant belief that responding to smears gives them too much attention. And the fact that most attacks on Obama's "story" inevitably go over the line into thinly disguised racism is a problem for the smear artists as well, as is evidenced by all the disengenuous whining from the McCain camp about Obama's willingness to play "the race card." Racist appeals are far more effective when they are subtle and implicit, not over-the-top. The fact that the whole political world is aware that race is a factor in this election means it won't be as easy to deploy racial weapons under the radar screen.

--Michael Crowley

A few months ago John McCain floated the intriguing idea of subjecting himself as president to unscripted "question time"-style grillings before the Congress. The notion tickled the fancy of even many a liberal McCain critic.

Now that McCain's staff has cut off nearly all his spontaneous interactons with the media, it might be time to reconsider the seriousness of this pledge. I know campaigns demand extreme message discipline--but it's not like a president is immune from gaffes either. If McCain beats Obama with his current tight-lipped approach, it's a hard to imagine him switching right back to his old freewheeling ways.

--Michael Crowley

The NYT reported today (as has the Enquirer, I think) that Rielle was living with Andrew Young, the supposed father of her baby, and his wife. Reader E.C. makes an excellent point:

no woman in her right mind, or even in her wrong mind, would allow her husband's mistress to move in with them, no matter how much cash Fred Baron was paying them.

Sort of obvious perhaps, but something that gets overlooked.

P.S. The only thing worse for Edwards than confronting all this continued speculation would be the silence he's now maintaining. Unfortunately the likeliest conclusion to draw is that there's some legal jeopardy at play here which is outweighing any (dwindling) hopes of salvaging some dignity. Which, in turn, only makes this a more legitimate story for non-tabloid media coverage.

--Michael Crowley

John McCain was asked today about the Corsi book. After McCain made a cryptic joke, his press secretary Brooke Buchanan physically intervened: "We're not doing that."

--Michael Crowley