Category Archives: Endorsement interviews

This time, a quick consensus

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
THIS TIME eight years ago, The State’s editorial board faced a choice in the S.C. Republican primary between a visionary, “maverick” lawmaker with an inspiring resume and a governor who said he’d take the CEO approach, delegating the vision to the team he would build. We chose the self-described executive type, much to our later regret.
    This time, we’re going with the hero.
    Our board — Publisher Henry Haitz; Associate Editors Warren Bolton, Cindi Scoppe and Mike Fitts; and I — sat down Friday morning and deliberated for about 90 minutes before emerging with a clear and unequivocal consensus: We like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee a lot, but we have no doubt that Sen. John McCain is better-prepared to be our commander in chief.
    As our lead editor on national affairs, Mike framed the discussion, speaking at length about each of the Republicans. As others joined in, it quickly became apparent that each of us had reached very similar conclusions.
    You may not think that’s remarkable, but it is. Ours is a diverse group, and we struggled through remarkably grueling disagreements over presidential primary endorsements in the Republican and Democratic contests in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Those debates led to outcomes that some of us were never happy with. This time was very different.
    Mike spoke for everyone when he said Ron Paul was running in the wrong party; he had been a far better fit as the Libertarian nominee in 1988.
    Fred Thompson’s campaign peaked before it actually began, and never had much appeal. His candidacy still seems to lack a reason for being, although Warren suggested one: In the Myrtle Beach debate Thursday night, Mr. Thompson seemed to be “carrying water” for his friend John McCain, with his unrelenting attacks on Mr. Huckabee.
    While Rudy Giuliani makes the case that being “out of line culturally” with S.C. Republicans should not be a deal killer, he’s not so convincing that he’s the guy to lead the country in a dangerous and volatile time. Beyond his constant refrain of “9/11,” he doesn’t articulate what he would offer that the others would not. Mike, who is much troubled by the Bush record on civil liberties, worried that the former prosecutor would actually be worse.
    Mike was sorry Mitt Romney never came in for an interview, because he had “heard so many different things about him.” Of course, the “different things” came from the candidate himself, who has reinvented himself on issue after issue in his effort to find a stance that sells. So how can he be trusted to lead? Cindi observed, and I strongly agreed, that Mr. Romney’s great mistake was not running on his solid record as governor, particularly health care reform. He ran from it instead, suggesting contempt both for GOP voters and for the people who had elected him governor.
    Mike Huckabee made a very good impression in his meeting with us, back when almost no one thought he had a chance. We particularly liked his lack of fear of the more virulent government-hating element in the GOP — he had been unashamed to govern in Arkansas. He has the best grasp of the nation’s health crisis among the Republicans, and the greatest ability to communicate. We don’t like his “flat tax” or his vague protectionist notions, and he’s very weak on national security. That last point is his biggest drawback. His “gates of hell” bluster about the Iranian gunboats Thursday struck a jarringly false note, and it’s not what we’d want a president to say.
    John McCain has no such need to prove his toughness, so he’s comfortable speaking more reasonably. His understanding of America’s role in the world greatly exceeds that of his rivals (and of the current administration). He will always fight for what he believes in, but will not dismiss those who disagree. He’s never been an executive (in civilian life), but he’s a leader, which is better. Henry, the only businessman in the group, said the economy and health care are important, “But Iraq and foreign affairs are still the top concern,” and no one is better suited to address them.
    Warren demurred, especially with regard to Iraq: “I don’t think we ought to be there.” But while he disagrees with the senator (and me) on that, he respects and appreciates his military record, his willingness to work across party lines and his integrity.
    Henry’s one concern about Sen. McCain was his age. The rest of us were less worried — he seems unfazed by the strain of campaigning. But we agreed that should be a consideration in his choice of a running mate.
    Before we broke up, we agreed that the two leading (in the polls, and in our estimation) Republican candidates were preferable to either party’s nominee in 2004. Americans deserve a choice, at long last, between “good” and “better,” rather than being forced to settle for “sad” or “worse.”
    In a few days, our board will convene again to decide whom to endorse in the Democratic primary. I don’t know where we’ll end up on that; we have yet to meet with the major candidates.
    But however that comes out, we feel very good about the growing likelihood that one of the candidates on the ballot in November will be John McCain.

To read our endorsement, click here. To see video about the endorsement, click here.

We endorse John McCain

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Folks, here’s The State‘s endorsement for the  2008 S.C. Republican Primary. Officially, it’s being published in Sunday’s paper. But it’s available online now.

At long last, eight years later than we should have, we are endorsing John McCain of Arizona. As readers of this blog will know, this makes me a lot happier than I was this time in 2000. This time, we’ve done the right thing.

Just click here to read the endorsement.

Video about the McCain endorsement

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Andy Haworth of thestate.com shot a video late Friday of me talking about the McCain endorsement.

I haven’t seen it yet myself — I’m typing this at a computer that lacks Flash, or something. I’ll have to wait until I get back to my laptop later in the day.

The video seemed like a really good idea yesterday morning with a couple of cups of coffee in me. I had noticed that the EPE at The Des Moines Register had done a video to go with their endorsement, and that seemed like a cool sort of extra little thing to do.

But at 5 or 6 p.m. — after our meeting to make the endorsement decision, after I wrote the endorsement, after I wrote my Sunday column, after I put the Sunday page together in Quark, then put it together again after it blew up because of the antiquated processor I try to paginate on, after I had printed out proofs — it didn’t seem like such a hot idea. But Andy was there with the lights and camera so, through multiple takes on practically every sentence I mumbled through, we got it done.

So I’m really counting on Andy’s editing skill here. At least I know the production values will be better than the Register’s.

To see my video, click here.

Watch for endorsement, 3 p.m. Saturday

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There are several things I want to blog about this morning — from last night’s GOP debate, other things — but I’m out of blogging action for the next few hours. We’ve had our editorial board meeting to determine our endorsement. It started at 9:30, and ended 15 or 20 minutes ago, as I write this just before 11:30. There was a lot to discuss, even though to our great disappointment, not all of the candidates came in for face-to-face interviews. (I’m beginning to really, really hate this compressed schedule, which has pulled candidates in too many directions.)

Now I have an editorial to write, and my Sunday column, then I have to paginate the Sunday edit page, and get proofs to my colleagues before the day is over.

When I’m done with all that, I have an engagement with Andy Haworth of thestate.com to shoot a video of me talking about our endorsement.

That, and the endorsement itself, will be available Saturday afternoon. The endorsement will go up on thestate.com at 3 p.m. Saturday. (Actually, I’m just guessing that’s when the video goes up; I haven’t asked.)

The endorsement will be in the newspaper Sunday. Between now and then, though, I have a lot to do. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

Clock running out on GOP endorsement

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Folks, not much has changed since my Sunday column with regard to our upcoming endorsements. As you’ll recall, our plan is to endorse in the GOP primary Sunday (Jan. 13), and in the Democratic on the following Sunday. In each case, that means we’ll be publishing the Sunday before the respective primaries.

Even though we’ve had our invitations out to the major candidates since
last summer, only McCain, Brownback, Huckabee and Biden chose to take
advantage of the opportunity before the last minute. That makes this year somewhat unusual for us — an unfortunate result of the compressed primary schedule this year, which caused some campaigns to avoid even thinking seriously about South Carolina before this morning. In 2000, McCain, Bush and Keyes all came in with time to spare. In 2004, Edwards, Lieberman, Dean, Gephardt and Carol Moseley-Brown all came in early enough to allow careful consideration. Only Kerry waited until the very last minute, which created a problem (since we didn’t think we should deliberate until we’d heard from him), one which we vowed to do our best to avoid this time.

Here’s what I sent my publisher earlier today by way of an update, since he and I didn’t have a chance to speak today. Since I’ve been tied up with internal editor stuff today, keeping me from posting as much as I did yesterday, I thought I’d just go ahead and share it with y’all as well:

I need to tell you these three things:

  • No word from any of the campaigns yet on interview appointments. At this point, the only Republican I’m still trying on is Romney. It would be a mistake on his part not to come in, so I still have some hopes in that quarter — but it likely will be very short notice when it comes. Giuliani is apparently not going to spend any more time in SC (other than going to the debate in MB tomorrow). Thompson had wanted to come in, but has apparently changed his mind, which is OK … that’s one we would have agreed to on request, but were not particularly seeking. Remember, we’ve already talked with McCain and Huckabee.
  • Now that they’re all turning their attention to SC — and now that Sen. Clinton is NOT going to skip our state (as most folks thought yesterday), I’m optimistic about getting them [the top Democratic candidates] in next week. Still no appointments, though. With things changing this fast, everybody is trying to keep their options open as to where they want to be when. Among the Democrats, the ones that most concern us are Clinton and Obama. The only Democrat we’ve already interviewed was Joe Biden, and he dropped out last week.
  • As discussed, we’ve decided to release our GOP endorsement (which will run Sunday) early on thestate.com. We’ll put it out there at 3 p.m. Saturday. We’ll do the same the following week with the Democrats. At Mark Lett’s [executive editor, the guy over the newsroom] request, I’ve given the newsroom all my contact numbers in case of media inquiries regarding the endorsement coming through the newsroom. I’ll give Kim Dalglish [the newspaper’s marketing director, who might also receive inquiries, and who might want to promote the endorsements] a heads-up on all this as well.

Remember, our [editorial board] discussion about our GOP endorsement will be at 9:30 a.m. Friday (UNLESS Romney agrees to come in, and the only time he can come is Friday). I’ll be writing that editorial and a column, and paginating the page, starting the instant that meeting is over.

That schedule — assuming everything goes well — is about as tight as we can make it, and still have a page out in time for all board members to read the proofs and raise any questions or problems. That’s standard operating procedure with every day’s page, but it is particularly important to avoid shortcuts on such a high-profile endorsement. Procedurally, something like this is sort of the opposite of this blog, which is a more or less stream-of-consciousness thing that no one looks at but me before it’s published. Since we operate by consensus on editorials, I don’t want any member of the board to feel left out on this. (Warren Bolton will be coming in on his day off, by the way, since we were unable to get this done before Friday, thanks to the campaigns’ procrastination.)

For more on this subject, I refer you to an comment I posted on an earlier post, in response to something Doug Ross had said:

Doug (way back up at the top),
transparency has always been my main goal in writing columns, and that
goes double for my blog. Why on Earth would I spend this time doing
this otherwise?

No invitation has been extended to Ron Paul
— or to Dennis Kucinich, Tom Tancredo, Mike Gravel or Duncan Hunter.
But had any of them wanted to come in over the last few months, we
would have made time. We’ve already had our interviews with McCain and Huckabee.
They did a wild and crazy thing that too few campaigns have done — the[y]
accepted back when invitations were first extended to them and the
other main candidates. Late summer, as I recall. (You’ll recall that Brownback and Biden also came in — before dropping out.)

Giuliani, Romney, Clinton, Obama, Edwards and Thompson were all
invited way back then, and invitations have been re-extended since then.

At this point, Giuliani seems to have decided to skip SC, so I’ll be
surprised if he comes in before we make our decision on Friday. The one
candidate I’m MOST concerned with getting in here before Friday, then,
is Romney. I must have talked to four different people in his camp
yesterday (some more than once), reiterating our invitation.

For Romney (and, if a miracle happens, for Giuliani), we will sweep
all other work aside to make time. And BECAUSE we’re trying to keep
these last few hours open for them, I’m not going to bug Thompson any more (I asked again yesterday when Mr. Thompson was here);
nor am I going to extend a last-minute invitation to Dr. Paul. If he
had asked before this week to come in (as Thompson did, as recently as
the last couple of weeks, although he offered no times, which is why I
gave them another chance yesterday), he would have been welcomed.

That’s what I know as of now.

It’s now-or-never time for our endorsement decisions

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
ON TUESDAY, New Hampshire votes. On Wednesday, presidential candidates will descend on South Carolina in such numbers as we’ve never seen, and stay for the duration — the Republicans until the 19th of this month, the Democrats through the 26th.
    Time for us to get busy on The State’s editorial board. Not that we’ve been slacking off, but our pace starting this week is likely to make the past year look like a nice, long nap.
    Watch for more columns than usual from me on this page or the facing one. And between columns, keep an eye on my blog. But the main work of the next two weeks will be interviewing the remaining viable candidates and writing our endorsements. Our plan, from which we will deviate only under the most extreme circumstances, is to endorse in the GOP primary a week from today, Jan. 13, and to state our choice in the Democratic contest Jan. 20.
    But, asked regular gadfly Doug Ross on my blog last week, our endorsements have “already been written,” right? And as another writer, who goes by the pseudonym “weldon VII,” asked, “Why would Romney waste his time coming to see you, Brad?”
    Such are the pitfalls of blogging. Some folks mistake my passing observations for final conclusions and (an even greater mistake) my opinions for those of the whole editorial board.
    Right now — since I have not once asked any of my colleagues whom they currently prefer in the two primaries (I want that discussion to happen after the last interview — it makes for a more intense debate, but a much better-informed one), and since they haven’t hinted aloud or in print, I don’t know how near or far we are from our eventual consensus. (Ask me next week this time.)
    As for “weldon’s” comment — well, let’s be frank: He’s thinking of my oft-stated respect for John McCain. You don’t have to read the blog to know about that; it’s been stated here often enough.
    But I’ll say two things about that: First, I had good things to say about Mike Huckabee, too, after I met him for the first time on Sept. 20. He made a stronger impression than expected; he’s made a similar impression on a lot of other people since then.
    Secondly, I was a big admirer of Sen. McCain back in 2000, too — but we ended up endorsing George W. Bush.
    Let me tell you about that — and also answer another question Doug asked: Who breaks a tie on the editorial board?
    It generally doesn’t come to a tie, because we work really hard for a consensus. Some of us change our minds during the discussion, while others concede to a second choice, seeing that their first isn’t going to carry the day. It’s complicated.
    I can think of only two times when we had a “tie” to break, and one of them was in February 2000. Gov. Bush came in at 8 a.m. on the Wednesday before our endorsement; Sen. McCain joined us Thursday afternoon. (Alan Keyes had been in the previous week.) The moment Sen. McCain left, we began our final discussion.
    The previous weekend, I had written and e-mailed to my boss, the publisher, a 4,000-word memo explaining why I believed we should endorse Sen. McCain. I did so knowing that he (this was two publishers ago, I should add) was just as firmly for Gov. Bush. But he was leaving the question open until after the interviews.
    We went into those meetings with most of the group leaning toward McCain (based on comments volunteered to me). It’s amazing what a good meeting can do for a candidate, or what a bad one can do to a candidate. That Wednesday, George W. Bush had the most “on” hour of his life. I have never seen the man, before or since, present himself so well, or so articulately. (Maybe it was the time of day; maybe it was the two cups of coffee we watched him drink; most likely it was his firm knowledge that this was a make-or-break moment.)
    John McCain was in a funk on Thursday. I’ve never seen him so “off” as he was that day. In a downcast voice, he spoke of a young boy who’d come up to him that day and told him the senator had been his hero, but not any more, after what a caller had told the boy over the phone. (Neither he nor we fully appreciated yet the devastating impact that smear campaign would have.)
    The publisher had come prepared for our internal debate. He had a six-inch stack of documents he had gathered to support his position. When he was done, and I was done, we went around the table. Two people had changed their minds. It was a tie. And in a tie in which the publisher is on one side and the editorial page editor on the other, the publisher’s side wins.
    Do I make my decision solely on the basis of a single meeting? Of course not. But some of my colleagues don’t pay the kind of attention to these candidates that I do day after day; that’s not what they’re paid to do. They come in with relatively fresh perspectives.
    And while it doesn’t happen often, I’ve been known to change my mind in these meetings. I’m wary of this, and reluctant to give it too much weight. But if I don’t give it some weight, what indeed is the point of the interview?
    We’re working with the campaigns to firm up the appointments, but I’m hopeful that we’ll have spoken with Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson by the end of the day Thursday. Once those are out of the way, we hope to see Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — and John Edwards, if he’s still in it after Tuesday.
    I don’t know exactly how it’s going to go, but I know this is going to be interesting.

What do you want this blog to be for the next three weeks?

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You’ll notice that today’s column — which I mistakenly backdated to yesterday morning rather than this morning, but have now corrected — was an elaboration on a blog post. Watch for more of that; over the next three weeks — between now and the Jan. 26 Democratic primary here — I plan to write more columns than usual, and as often as not, the blog will be the place where the column ideas first take shape.

I also plan to post more than usual. I’m shoving as many of my other duties aside as possible to concentrate on covering (in my own way, which will differ from what you see in news) and writing about the primaries, both for the blog and the paper. (You would have seen more last night and this morning here, but my personal life has been rather full — and joyful — the last 26 hours or so.) I will not, of course, be as free as a reporter would — I’ve got to jam in time for as many as five candidate interviews in preparation for endorsements on the 13th (Republican) and 20th (Democratic). But those interviews should produce a lot of fodder for this venue as well.

I want to make the most of all this effort, and make what I’m doing as useful as possible. I won’t just be doing this to be busy; I’ve got granddaughters to rock, you know. So I’d like y’all’s suggestions as to what you would like to see here. More video? More accessible format? More links to news and other opinions? More pictures of grandchildren (sorry, that just slipped out)? Think particularly in terms of what the editorial page editor of South Carolina’s largest newspaper might contribute that you wouldn’t get elsewhere; there’s little use in my duplicating stuff you can get already.

One thing I want to get done this weekend is replace the Stephen Colbert video that’s at the top of my main page (that guy’s campaign just went nowhere) with some sort of quick-start daily briefing. Maybe links to latest news, latest posts of interest, latest issue-oriented posts, or something like that. Something that you would find useful and that’s doable without my dropping everything else to spend my days coding.

Anyway, I’m looking for ideas, so please pitch them my way.

Sacrifice and religion: More Sorensen video

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Following up today on stuff I didn’t have time to deal with adequately before Christmas, what with Mike being off and me doing the pages in his absence…

One ball I dropped was to follow through on my promise to deliver more video from my interview with Ted Sorensen on Dec. 20. Here’s a link to the much-better-than-mine video that Andrew Haworth of thestate.com posted that very night, covering the first part of the interview.

And here, from my dinky, low-res camera, are a couple of quick clips on other parts of the interview I found highly interesting. They are…

First, a clip covering the subject of my recent column challenging candidates today to challenge us the way JFK did. Since that was triggered by a JFK speech I had recently heard again, I thought it particularly apropos to talk with his speechwriter about the subject (The setup — my question — takes a while, but Mr. Sorensen’s reply is worth waiting through that to hear):

Second, we have Mr. Sorensen on the subject of another pair of speeches, both on religion and politics — Kennedy’s to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, and Mitt Romney’s to a sympathetic crowd at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library on Dec. 6, 2007:

Viewing that second clip myself today as I edited it, I realize that much of what was said was said by me (pretty much what I had said already on the blog). But Mr. Sorensen adds some nuggets of perspective that no one else could contribute, so I thought it worth putting this up anyway. Normally when I edit video, I cut myself out as much as possible — why bore my readers/viewers? This time, I didn’t see a good way to do that and keep the context. So, sorry about that.

Aesop updated: The Fable of Mitt and the ‘Sour Grapes’

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Romney_2008_wart

An interested party with a certain other campaign pointed out to me the irony in Mitt Romney having duly sought the endorsement of a certain newspaper — the Concord Monitor — only to scorn that endorsement as something he wouldn’t have wanted, after he didn’t get it. Here’s what Mr. Romney’s campaign had to say about the Monitor‘s endorsement of John McCain (who so far has received about every endorsement a candidate would want):

GOV. MITT ROMNEY: THE CHOICE OF CONSERVATIVES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
Liberal Press Disagrees With Real Conservatives’ Choice For President…

And so forth, yadda-yadda, with various quotations in the same vein. In an odd wording, the release claims that the Monitor‘s "Editorial Board Personally Attacked Gov. Romney." Golly, I hope he’s gonna be OK, don’t you? Anyway, you can see the entire release here.

It’s really sort of disturbing that a supposedly serious candidate for POTUS would engage in such mindless, vapid name-calling — saying "liberal" over and over, as thought that constituted an argument. It’s the sort of thing I usually see in the less-worthy candidates for the state Legislature — the sorts of candidates who are not plugged into their communities and their real concerns, the sort who are recruited and backed by out-of-state money that knows nothing and cares nothing about our state’s concerns. It’s just plain cheesy.

But there’s nothing remarkable about Mr. Romney acting as though he didn’t want the endorsement, after he sincerely went after it. We see this sort of Aesop’s Fable phenomenon quite frequently. We have several candidates who do that right here in S.C. in every election cycle. Right up until the day the endorsement editorial runs, they are as cloyingly ingratiating as an insurance salesman, and then (after they don’t get the endorsement they had wanted so badly), they act as though they wouldn’t have accepted the newspaper’s support at gunpoint. All of a sudden, it was the last thing they ever would have wanted. That’s another sort of cheesy behavior.

But campaigns do a lot of cheesy things. Here’s hoping that Mr. Romney rises above that level as he comes to South Carolina. I look forward to interviewing him for our endorsement. Like Messrs. Giuliani, Obama, Edwards and Mrs. Clinton, he has yet to set an appointment for that. And we need to get them set soon. We’ll only have about two good days to devote to the Republicans between the time they’re done in New Hampshire and the time we have to get the endorsement written and ready for publication.

We’re aiming for Sunday the 13th on that, by the way.

Caucus_countdown_wart2

JFK adviser Sorensen tells why he’s supporting Obama

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Sorensen_001

Oh, yeah, now I remember why I do this job — one of the reasons, anyway: Really, really interesting people come to see you and you get to ask them questions.

Today, I was honored to meet Ted Sorensen, chief adviser and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy. You know how I’ve written in the past about how how Barack Obama’s call to service echoes JFK’s? (And yes, I know I’m hardly the only one to mention it.) Well, Mr. Sorensen was here to confirm that as far as he’s concerned, Obama is indeed Camelot’s rightful heir (so forget what you may have heard about that Mordred guy; he’s not running anyway).

It’s been a long day, so I’ve just edited and posted one quick video clip (below), with Mr. Sorensen talking briefly about why he supports Sen. Obama. But more will be coming. For one thing, Andy Haworth of thestate.com shot video of the whole interview, with a much better camera than I use and lights and everything. I’ll give you a heads-up when he puts that up.

Also, I’ll go through the rest of my footage as soon as I can (probably this weekend at this point), and provide video on some of the other topics we covered, such as:

  • The Cold War, from a leading participant’s perspective.
  • Why Kennedy doesn’t deserve any blame for Vietnam escalation.
  • How Romney’s "religion" speech stacks up to his own — I mean, to JFK‘s.
  • What kind of speech he’d like to hear the eventually Democratic nominee give.
  • Which Republican he’d prefer, if we had to have a Republican.
  • Why he particularly prefers Obama to Joe Biden.

I’ll get to in when I can. I’m out of steam for today. In the meantime, here’s a clip with Mr. Sorensen talking about Obama:

   

Lieberman endorsement strikes a blow for the rest of us

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Joe_mccain2

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

    “In this critical election, no one should let party lines be a barrier to choosing the person we believe is best qualified to lead our nation forward. The problems that confront us are too great… for us to play partisan politics with the Presidency.
    “We desperately need our next President to break through the reflexive partisanship that is poisoning our politics and stopping us from getting things done.”
            — Sen. Joe Lieberman,
            endorsing John McCain

JOHN McCAIN got an early Christmas present up in New Hampshire Monday. So did the UnParty.
    The UnParty, I should explain, is a product of my wishful imagination, an anti-partisan alternative to the foolish, vicious Punch and Judy show that the two parties play out daily on 24/7 TV “news” channels. It has no infrastructure, no declared candidates, and exists mainly on my blog and in gratuitous mentions here that probably mystify more than inform.
    John McCain, however, is far more substantial. He is an actual U.S. senator who is seeking the Republican nomination for president of the United States. You may have heard of him, in spite of what sometimes looks like a conspiracy on the part of major media and poll respondents to make him seem a marginal figure.
    The Christmas present to which I refer was the endorsement of Joe Lieberman, late of the Democratic Party, who strode triumphant over the yammering partisans of his own former faction in last year’s elections and is now perhaps the only major political figure in this country who is really and truly free to endorse whomever he honestly believes is the best candidate. And out of the crowds of candidates seeking the office, he chooses to endorse his friend and colleague John McCain, and parties be damned.
    This is not the only big present Sen. McCain has received early this week. On Sunday, he was endorsed by three newspapers, two of them being The Des Moines Register and The Boston Globe. (The third was the less-well-known Portsmouth Herald in New Hampshire.) Between them, they eclipsed the earlier endorsement he had received from the storied New Hampshire Union Leader.
    (Santa wasn’t quite as generous to other boys and girls. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had to share the loot: Des Moines went for Sen. Clinton; Boston for Sen. Obama.)
    An excerpt from the Globe’s McCain endorsement:

    “Conventional wisdom among political handlers used to hold that a candidate needed to capture the political center. The last two presidential campaigns proved that wrong. The Republicans scraped out victories by pressing just enough buttons and mobilizing just enough voters. But such wins breed political polarization and deprive a president of the political capital needed to ask Americans to sacrifice in difficult times.
    “The antidote to such a toxic political approach is John McCain. The iconoclastic senator from Arizona has earned his reputation for straight talk by actually leveling with voters, even at significant political expense….
    “As a lawmaker and as a candidate, McCain has done more than his share to transcend partisanship and promote an honest discussion of the problems facing the United States….”

    You’ll note a certain resemblance to the quote above from Sen. Lieberman — the emphasis on getting outside the respective comfort zones of the partisans, and having the courage and conviction to make the hard choices that are necessary to further the good of the country. Echoing a John F. Kennedy speech I recently cited here, Sen. Lieberman said Sen. McCain can be trusted to do the right thing “not only when it is easy, but when it is hard.”
    That’s what appeals to me about the Lieberman endorsement. It’s not so much that he endorses McCain as the reasons he gives.
    At this point I should note that this column is not about boosting the candidacy of John McCain. I know better. The fact is, Sen. McCain’s biggest problem in the South Carolina primary may be the fact that he is not seen as “Republican enough” by some, and this endorsement hardly helps. He does work across the aisle — on campaign finance reform, on fighting corporate welfare and global warming, on promoting rational immigration policy. He does take stands on the basis of the greater good, with little regard for personal political consequences. And there are people who don’t like those facts.
    To the extent that there is electoral advantage to be derived, it’s in New Hampshire, where, as The Washington Post notes, the McCain campaign is once again “targeting independents more than it is establishment Republicans.” But even there, the benefit is debatable. It certainly doesn’t pull over any Democrats, to whom Mr. Lieberman is anathema.
    What is most exciting about this endorsement is less the hope it offers the McCain campaign, and more the hope it offers for American politics that something like this can even happen.
    Over here at the UnParty — where anything that confuses both partisan Democrats and partisan Republicans is welcome — the Lieberman endorsement is very encouraging news. Lord knows that these days, in the 16th year of the bloody Bush-Clinton Wars, we don’t get much of that.

Joe_mccain1

McCain endorsements today

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The fact remains that those who step back and consider the matter with dispassion and careful deliberation tend to favor John McCain for the GOP nomination. Today, Sen. McCain gained two major newspaper endorsements.

The Des Moines Register:

    Yet, for all their accomplishments on smaller stages, none can offer the tested leadership, in matters foreign and domestic, of Sen. John McCain of Arizona. McCain is most ready to lead America in a complex and dangerous world and to rebuild trust at home and abroad by inspiring confidence in his leadership….

The Boston Globe:

    CONVENTIONAL wisdom among political handlers used to hold that a candidate needed to capture the political center. The last two presidential campaigns proved that wrong. The Republicans scraped out victories by pressing just enough buttons and mobilizing just enough voters. But such wins breed political polarization and deprive a president of the political capital needed to ask Americans to sacrifice in difficult times.
    The antidote to such a toxic political approach is John McCain. The iconoclastic senator from Arizona has earned his reputation for straight talk by actually leveling with voters, even at significant political expense. The Globe endorses his bid in the New Hampshire Republican primary….

He also picked up the nod of the Portsmouth Herald:

    U.S. Sen. John McCain will tell you the truth, even if it costs him the election.
    He has a very clear-eyed view of the truth having spent his life fighting for our country and leading the U.S. Senate for the past 20 years on virtually every critical issue facing our nation.
    In our view, John McCain stands head and shoulders above the rest of the Republican field and deserves the support of those voting in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary Jan. 8….

Add those to the one he got two weeks ago from The New Hampshire Union Leader:

    We don’t agree with him on every issue. We disagree with him strongly on campaign finance reform. What is most compelling about McCain, however, is that his record, his character, and his courage show him to be the most trustworthy, competent, and conservative of all those seeking the nomination. Simply put, McCain can be trusted to make informed decisions based on the best interests of his country, come hell or high water.
    Competence, courage, and conviction are enormously important for our next President to possess. No one has a better understanding of U.S. interests and dangers right now than does McCain. He was right on the mistakes made by the Bush administration in prosecuting the Islamic terrorist war in Iraq and he is being proved right on the way forward both there and worldwide.

My handy, all-purpose endorsement of everybody (almost)

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    Yes, dear readers, you’ve read this one before — probably. I cannibalized a blog post to construct this column — almost word for word. You’ll probably see me doing that more than once before the holidays are over. That’s partly because I’ll be doing double- and triple-duty with folks out of the office. But it’s also in keeping with what I intended when I started this blog; I had always meant to use it as a lab for developing column ideas. I just usually forget to do that.

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
SINCE MY COLUMN advocating a “single-payer” national health plan ran in this space last week, I’ve received a good bit of feedback along these lines:

Dear Mr. Warthen,
    I think your article is right on target and has a very good insight of the realities of the inefficient American health system. However, it is my feeling that by mentioning that [Dennis] Kucinich is the only one talking about single payer, and in the same line that he is not viable and has seen a UFO you are delegitimizing him…. If you think that this country needs a health care reform, why not throw your support to Kucinich…?

Regards, Kethrin Johnson

    Then, my regular blog correspondent Doug Ross wrote:

    Again, I’ll ask you to put your proverbial money where your mouth is. If you think this is an important issue, don’t endorse candidates who don’t support single payer….

    I get this sort of thing a lot, and I think it’s worth pausing to address. Doug was literally right — I think a national health plan is “an important issue.” It’s not the important issue. If there were anything that I would designate as the important issue in a presidential race, it probably wouldn’t be a domestic one. And I’d rather not judge on the basis of any single issue in foreign affairs either, if I can avoid it. (We found ourselves unable to avoid it in 2004, which made for a most distasteful endorsement.)
    Health care is very important; so are other things. If I chose on the basis of one issue only, I would have to endorse everybody at least once. Just off the top of my head, it might go like this:

Health care — Dennis Kucinich in a walk.
Iraq (as a military operation) —John McCain, the only guy who stood up for the “surge,” which was based on the idea that he alone had been pushing for four years, which was that Donald Rumsfeld refused to send enough troops to get the job done.
Iraq (long-term strategy) — Joe Biden, who (along with erstwhile candidate Sam Brownback), has been pushing the federalist approach of transforming the nation into three semi-autonomous political regions with only a loose Baghdad government uniting them.
Immigration — Either Sen. McCain, who took all the heat on the recent failed comprehensive reform effort, or Hillary Clinton, who refused to demagogue on the driver’s license flap.
Afghanistan — Barack Obama, who had the nerve to say he’d go after the Taliban in Pakistan if necessary.
Pakistan — Sen. Biden, for articulating the fact that we needed a Pakistan strategy, not a Pervez Musharraf strategy.
Administrative ability — Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney or Bill Richardson, the only governors.
Most likely to be the UnParty nominee — Tough call, but I see three most able to lead us out of the vicious partisanship of the past 15 years: Mr. Huckabee, who seems to have governed Arkansas pretty effectively with a Democratic majority in the legislature; Sen. Obama, who has made his desire to be the president of all Americans a centerpiece of his campaign; or Sen. McCain, who, from confirming judges to campaign finance reform to immigration to fighting the use of torture, has demonstrated his willingness and ability to work with Democrats time and again. (See my blog for my UnParty Manifesto.)
Abortion — Either Mr. Huckabee or Sen. McCain. The Democrats walk in the door disqualifying themselves on this one (from my point of view; maybe someday a Democrat like Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania will have a shot), and none of the other leading Republicans can be trusted fully in this area.
Most likely to be the Energy Party nominee — Nobody. Sen. McCain has done some good stuff in the Senate (along with Joe Lieberman, who was my pick for the Democratic nomination four years ago), and I like some of the things Sen. Biden has said about a president’s role in leading on this critical strategic issue. But I don’t think anybody goes far enough. (You can also read about the “Energy Party” on the blog.)
Education — Ron Paul almost gets it by wanting to do away with the U.S. Department of Education; the federal government has no business trying to run our local schools. But then he blows it by wanting to give tax credits to pay people to attend private schools, which is none of the government’s business at any level.

    You get the idea. You may notice that I have no scenarios in which I endorse John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Dodd or Fred Thompson. That’s not to dismiss them completely. I suppose if I dug further into all their positions I’d find some single-issue excuse to endorse each.
    But that’s not how we endorse, and that’s not how voters vote (I hope). Since
we can only choose one candidate, practical reality demands that we accept some compromises. The candidate you end up favoring might get just “Bs” and “Cs” on your unique grading scale in most subjects, while someone you reject might be at the top of the class on one issue, but flunk everything else.
    On my own scale, for instance, Mr. Giuliani gets mostly Bs and Cs, with a couple of poor grades on personal deportment. He may not lead the class in anything that comes immediately to mind, but that doesn’t count him out entirely.
    One good thing about primaries is that they force people who might otherwise surrender their thinking to a party to understand that even within a party, there can be great diversity of thought. Such choices compel us to acknowledge the necessity to compromise on some things, unless we’re fooling ourselves. For any thinking voter to find a candidate with whom he agrees on everything would a minor miracle.
    Anyway, back to where we started: Rep. Kucinich gets an A-plus and a gold star on health care in my gradebook. But he flunks national security, which is a required subject.

McCain with the WSJ editorial board

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Here’s an account of what John McCain had to say to the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal the day before he came here to announce the endorsements of all the brass:

    Mr.
McCain is 71. But the tired, sluggish, former front-runner you may have
read about was nowhere in evidence when the senator came to the
Journal’s offices yesterday. In his place was a combative
and–yes–straight-talking candidate with no qualms about rising to a
challenge or speaking his mind. In short, he looks once again like the
spry 63-year-old who nearly knocked off front-runner George W. Bush
eight years ago….

He said some of the same things he said here, but of course the interview was more wide-ranging, more like the session we had with him back in August.

And over in the horse-race department, it’s interesting that he tells folks up on Wall Street how important South Carolina is to his chances:

The
senator says he doesn’t worry too much about the electoral tactics, but
he does know what lies ahead. "We’ve got to win New Hampshire," he
says, or at least exceed expectations there. "And then I think we can
do well in South Carolina. In South Carolina we’ve got the base this
time. The Attorney General, the Speaker of the House, Lindsay Graham,
most of the base."

Whether
that’s true or not, Mr. McCain still trails by 15 points on average in
South Carolina. But assuming he can do well there, "then I think we’re
obviously very much in the game. What happens to Huckabee, what happens
to Rudy, what happens to Romney–all this stuff is in such flux now
that it’s very difficult to predict and so we’re not paying a lot of
attention, obviously." Still, he’s paying some attention, apparently.

It’s interesting how, whenever anyone takes a careful, dispassionate look at McCain, he looks good. But for the immigration issue, he’d still be the nominee apparent. There is actually a significant number of Republicans who would decide who should lead this country on the basis of that, rather than the broad range of critical issues, is amazing to professional observers from The Economist to the Journal to little ol’ me.

Of course, that’s just a bonus for the immigration hotheads, because they tend to be folks who don’t like professional observers any more than they like illegal Mexicans.

If McCain doesn’t make it, I’ll be able to do what he’s doing on the surge now — saying "I told you so." But I’ll get a lot less satisfaction out of it. Back when he stepped out front in an effort actually to solve the immigration problem rather than demagogue on it, I asked him why — trying to lead on that issue would only earn the enmity of those who find any practical, sensible approach to be anathema.

Of course, his answer was what it always is when he steps out of everybody else’s comfort zone on an issue — he saw it as the right thing to do.

Your Huckabee video headquarters

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Back when we interviewed Mike Huckabee on Sept. 20, not all that many folks were interested in him. Now, it seems he’s the hottest thing going.

It occurs to me that some of y’all might be interested in seeing some of the video clips I posted from our interview way back when he was "HuckaWho?" If so, here you go.

We start with "Introducing Mike Huckabee," linked above, which sort of serves as the "Meet the Beatles" of this genre — get-acquainted stuff that speaks to his down-home appeal. He talks about his background, from his ability to get along with Democrats to the fact that he’s "a conservative that’s not mad at anybody over it."

Then there is the clip that pairs with my column, "Mike Huckabee on the obligation to govern." It was so refreshing to talk to a governor who still holds to the old-fashioned notion that government serves a useful purpose, and that it is the responsibility of the governor to play a constructive role in it. Here’s that one:

A few days after we met Mr. Huckabee was the 50th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock schools, so I edited this clip about that, about which he had some pertinent things to say:

Finally, a couple of weeks later, Cindi asked me to see if I had any footage with Mr. Huckabee sharing his views on health care, which I did. She remembered he’s said some stuff she thought sounded good, but her notes were incomplete. Cindi did a column that drew on the clip. Here’s the clip:

You’ll note that there’s no footage on what he thinks about evolution. or about homosexuals in the military. That’s because it would never occur to me to ask a presidential candidate about those things.

If I get time over the coming days, I’ll go through the rest of my footage to see if I can find anything else that might be of interest.

Here’s my handy-dandy, all-purpose endorsement of EVERYbody (almost)

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Since Sunday I’ve received a good bit of feedback along these lines:

Dear Mr. Warthen
    I think your article is right on target and has a very good insight of the realities of the inefficient American health system.
    However, it is my feeling that by mentioning that Kucinich is the only one talking about single payer, and in the same line that he is not viable and has seen a UFO you are delegitimazing him.
So he is not "viable" according to whom? You? The mainstream media? The Democrats?
    If we really want to start a debate about the issues that are important, I think is time to stop supporting candidates in terms of electability, but in terms of what they stand for. Why not vote for our values?
    If you think that this country needs a health care reform, why not throw your support to Kucinich, instead of observing how timid the other candidates are? After all he is the only one walking the talk.
    It’s sad to see the state of democracy in this country.

Regards,
Kethrin Johnson

You’ll note some puzzlement about how candidates get to be "viable," similar to that which I addressed to the Ron Paul folks back in this column.

Then, our regular Doug wrote this in the very first comment on my Sunday column:

Again, I’ll ask you to put your proverbial money where your mouth is.
If you think this is an important issue, don’t endorse candidates who
don’t support single payer.
Your man McCain doesn’t even come close to your thoughts on this issue
– and if I read you column correctly, it is because you think he’s
afraid to address it.

Well, Doug, you just said it — I think this is "an important issue." It’s not THE important issue. If there were anything that I would designate as THE important issue in a presidential race, it wouldn’t be a domestic one. And I’d rather not judge on the basis of any single issue in foreign affairs, if I can avoid it. (We found ourselves unable to avoid it in 2004, which means we made probably the most distasteful endorsement I can recall having made in a presidential race.)

Yes, health care is important. So are other things. If I were to vote on one issue only, I would have many different endorsements. Just off the top of my head, it would probably go like this. If the issue is:

Anyway, I think you get the idea. You may notice that I didn’t have any scenarios in which I endorsed John Edwards or Fred Thompson. I’m sure if I spent an hour or so perusing all their positions I’d find some reason to endorse each of them. I just did the things that came to mind first.

Video to go with Cindi’s health care column

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During the course of writing her column for today’s paper, Cindi asked me to comb back through my video from our editorial board meeting with Mike Huckabee, to help her reconstruct some quotes that she had not taken down completely in her notes.

Above you see what I put together for her. As it happens, I got almost every bit of what he said on health care, except for a view seconds when my camera automatically shut off recording (which it does after three minutes of video), and I had to restart it.

Look on it as a bit of show-and-tell to complement her column. The column itself is the third part of a three-part series. Here is part one, and here is part two.

Romney sales pitch reminds me of Bush’s

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Hal Stevenson, former supporter of Sam Brownback, is continuing his quest — which I wrote about in Sunday’s paper — for a new candidate to back. He and I continued our conversation about it after Rotary Monday. We talked for about half an hour, until I had to run to another meeting. We weren’t done by any means, and we made a loose commitment to continue over coffee or breakfast or something soon.

Hal had been speaking to someone else who urged him to go with Romney, as a CEO type to cure what ails the executive branch after eight years of Bush administration incompetence. I responded in two ways. First, I promised to send him a link to this WSJ piece — it was the Saturday interview feature on the op-ed page — discussing the idea of Romney as "Consultant in Chief," an image he seems to choose to project himself. The piece didn’t make the prospect sound very appealing to me, but maybe Hal will read it differently.

But I shared with him a second thought — one which may help account for my jaded response to the WSJ piece (that is, in addition to the fact that I have yet to be impressed by the performance in office of anyone who went in promising "to make government run like a business").

Back in 2000, we went through an agonizing process (agonizing for me, anyway) over whom to endorse in the GOP primary. I argued strenuously for John McCain, but my then-publisher was adamantly in favor of Gov. Bush. In the end, the publisher won over half the people in the room — and a half that includes the publisher has more weight than a half with the editorial page editor. To bring the rest of us into consensus, we ran an endorsement that said good things about McCain, too. You could almost have read it as a 51 percent Bush, 49 percent McCain endorsement. This caused us to be criticized for a "wishy-washy" endorsement, but that was where we had ended up as a board. Even though I had lost on the main point, I would have held my breath until I turned blue before running a piece that ran down McCain. (Here’s what we ran. Read it, and feel my pain at losing the one editorial argument I probably most regret losing.)

Anyway, there was a thread that ran through our lengthy discussions, and in a way it reflected the difference in the working styles of the publisher and me. Our publisher was an above-the-fray CEO type, who hired competent people to do the actual work and come up with policies. His job was to decide between the various competing proposals suggested by the professionals under him.

I have always been very different. When I was in a newsroom, I tried to master every skill there was, from photography through production. I was (and am) an editor who also writes, and composes pages, and does photography and video, etc. Very hands-on. Maybe it’s an insecurity and therefore a character flaw, but I’ve always preferred to manage in situations where I felt like I could do the same work as those I managed (preferably better).

The publisher believed, and presented evidence to support the position, that Bush would have been a sort of above-the-fray executive — a guy who didn’t claim to be the expert himself, but would decide among the ideas advanced by the experts he hired to work under him. McCain was seen as more the guy who embodied the policies he espouse, who dug into the grubby work of policymaking up to his elbows. He was more like me.

Seriously. There was a lot of talk at the time supporting that view of G.W. Bush. Here’s an example of it, from The Christian Science Monitor:

Some critics argue that Bush is a captive of his advisers, dependent on their analysis in making up his mind on complex issues. Bush insiders tell it another way: He is a typical CEO who delegates details to a team of trusted advisers, while focusing his attention on the bigger picture. Clay Johnson, a friend at Phillips Academy at Andover, roommate at Yale, and now Bush’s chief of staff, says the press has been too quick to label the governor a dim bulb.

His subsequent performance as an "above-the-fray" executive has been so often disastrous, largely due to the quality of "experts" he hired to make policy, as to make this hard to imagine. But that view won the day.

And so it is that while I doubt that Romney is as incompetent as Bush — he’s got a more impressive resume — I still greet anybody who claims they can govern effectively as a CEO with many, many grains of salt. Painful experience has made me dubious.

Soul-searching in the secular realm of politics

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Hal1

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
A reader recently told me she enjoys my columns because she likes to follow my “soul-searching” as I try to work through an issue. I suggested she keep reading — who knows; someday I might actually find something.
    But I knew what she meant, and took it kindly. That’s the kind of commentary I value, too. That’s why I called Hal Stevenson on Friday to talk about the upcoming presidential primaries.
    Hal is a political activist of the Christian conservative variety. He’s a board member and former chairman of the Palmetto Family Council, which has its offices in a building he owns on Gervais Street. He’s also one of the most soberly thoughtful and fair-minded people I know, which to the national media probably constitutes an oxymoron: The thoughtful Christian conservative.
    When last I saw Hal, he had brought Sen. Sam Brownback in for an editorial board interview regarding his quest for the GOP presidential nomination.
    Since then, several things have happened:

    Of all those, the nod I would have valued the most was that of Sen. Brownback — like me, a convert to Catholicism. When he spoke of the impact of faith on his approach to leadership, it actually seemed to have something to do with Judeo-Christian beliefs: He spoke of acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly.
    By contrast, Pat Robertson’s explanation as to why he was endorsing the one Republican least in tune with religious conservatives seemed to have little to do with spiritual matters, and everything to do with secular ideology and partisan strategy: He spoke of defeating terrorism, fiscal discipline and the selection of federal judges. The first two concerns are secular; the third seemed the least likely of reasons for him to back Mr. Giuliani.
    The ways in which “values voters” interact with the sin-stained realities of power politics have long mystified me, and I wondered: Does a guy like Pat Robertson, with all his baggage (wanting to whack Hugo Chavez, suggesting 9/11 happened because America had it coming), actually deliver more votes than he chases away?
    So I called Hal to help me sort it out. As of lunchtime Friday, when we spoke, he was up in the air about the presidential contest himself, now that his man Brownback was out of it. But he’s sorting through it, and has had face-to-face talks with the candidates he considers most likely.
    “My heart says Huckabee,” he said. “He’s much more like me, I suppose, than the other guys.” But that’s not his final answer. He said when he asked Sen. Brownback why he didn’t get behind Gov. Huckabee, he said “it’d be like endorsing himself, so he might as well stay in himself.” He was looking for someone who offered what he couldn’t, and chose McCain.
    As for Hal, “I did meet with McCain,” who is “certainly a real patriot,” but he’s trying to decide whether the Arizonan’s position on stem cell research — he charts a middle course — “is going to be a deal-killer for me.” (Brownback has told him that McCain says he wouldn’t make such research a high priority as president.)
    He hasn’t decided yet about Mitt Romney. He’s talked with him, and sees him as “a very capable executive… he’s proven that.” But he cites “Sam’s words” about the former Massachusetts governor: “He’s a technocrat, running as an ideologue.”
    While noting that “we don’t look to Bob Jones III for a lot of stuff,” there are “some very credible Christian activists out there supporting Romney.” He mentions state lawmakers Nathan Ballentine and Kevin Bryant, and cites his respect for U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint.
    He says he’s not bothered by Mr. Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion, since he “takes the right position now.” But he worries it could hurt him in the general election, when Democrats could use old video clips to great effect.
    “I am going through a methodical process,” he said, “and I have been impressed with McCain, Huckabee, Romney….”
    He has not, however, met with Fred Thompson, “and I probably wouldn’t waste Giuliani’s time.”
“I respect him for being straightforward and not trying to B.S. us,” he said of the former mayor, but he does not relish having to choose between two pro-choice candidates next November.
    As for the host of “The 700 Club,” “I really don’t much care what Pat Robertson does.”
    “Robertson lost credibility with most thinking evangelicals a long time ago.” Hal said he was turned off back during Mr. Robertson’s own run for the presidency in 1988: “It was all about acquiring political power in the Republican Party,” and that “wasn’t what many of us thought the Christian Coalition was about.”
    While Hal himself is still seeking the answer, “I’ve got good evangelical friends who are working for every campaign.”
    Every Republican campaign, that is. Nothing against Democrats per se, Hal says; it’s just that “A pro-life Democrat doesn’t have a chance in the Democratic primary,” and that is a deal-killer.
    Hal still doesn’t know which of the candidates that leaves please him the most, but in the end, that’s not the point: “The only person ultimately I’m trying to please is the Lord.”

Hal2

Video: What’s different about THIS referendum?

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One last word on the subject of the District 5 referendum. Now, on the eve of the vote, is a good time to revisit my video clip in which the unanimous board explains, in their words, what’s different about this bond proposal, as opposed to the ones in the past that divided the trustees.