Fiscal responsibility hasn’t been mentioned much in this year’s presidential campaign outside of discussion of the Bush tax cuts (which McCain voted against initially but has since supported). But it’s got to be one of the biggest issues that Republicans need to address if they want to retake Congress. The fact that they’ve been so weak on fiscal responsibility (i.e. lowering government spending and taxes) has allowed the Democrats to neutralise the traditional advantage Republicans have on the economy (and even overtake them in this regard in some polls) and has been a big part of the reason they retook Congress two years ago.

I think Romney should have gone after the Republican Congress harder on this – it would have been a nice stick to beat John McCain with since he’s been right there in the thick of it (though arguably not one of the worst culprits). But I think he was hamstrung in this and in other matters by the fact that he wanted to be supportive of President Bush, who hasn’t done the Republicans any favors in this department either aside from those tax cuts, never vetoing a single pork-laden spending bill during the entire time Republicans were in charge.

At this point McCain needs to make this a campaign issue, but the Republicans (planning to stay) in Congress also need to really take it on board and ensure they send a strong message on the issue to voters between now and November.

Ed Morrissey (erstwhile of Captain’s Quarters, now at Hot Air) has written several good pieces on this whole issue over the last few weeks which are all worth reading. The Republicans have had a mixed record even over that short period, but they really need to tighten up and close ranks on this issue. They also need to put some serious reformers in prominent committee positions to give them some clout to clean things up. At this point, it’s 50/50 at best as to whether they’ll make any headway on this point in time for this fall’s elections.

So Mike Huckabee’s finally out of the race, now that McCain appears to have crossed the 1191 delegate line. There’s a nice bit of revisionist history in the CNN piece covering this piece of news:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee bowed to “the inevitable” and dropped out of the Republican presidential race Tuesday night after an improbable run for a politician little known beyond his home state a year ago.

I think it’s been “inevitable” for some time at this point. Now it’s moved from being inevitable to being a cold hard fact. If he stayed in it at this point it would have been evidence of insanity, nothing more.

Huckabee went on to best former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, by then the GOP front-runner, in the Iowa caucuses January 3, placing him among the top tier of Republican hopefuls.

I don’t recall anyone from CNN (or any of the other main news organisations) calling Mitt Romney the GOP front-runner at the time. Helpful for them to concede this fact now.

He lagged behind Romney and McCain in the next round of contests, in New Hampshire and Michigan, and trailed McCain in South Carolina. However, his victories in West Virginia and the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and his native Arkansas in the February 5 Super Tuesday contests helped force Romney out of the race.

It’s those last few words that grate here. Romney wasn’t forced out of the race: he pulled out when it was clear that staying in was likely to be unproductive, but at the time he had more votes and significantly more delegates than Huckabee. Huckabee has now been forced out of the race by the sheer fact that McCain has won, but to suggest that Huckabee forced Romney out of the race is a gross overstatement. Huckabee did siphon away enough votes from Romney to make it hard for him to beat McCain, of course, but Romney wasn’t forced out any more than Huckabee was.

It then goes on in the next paragraph with this:

“Over the past few days, a lot of people have been trying to say that this is a two-man race,” Huckabee told supporters that night. “Well, you know what? It is, and we’re in it.”

Which suggests that Huckabee said this after Romney pulled out, and it therefore made logical sense at the time. Of course, he said this on a night when Romney was still way ahead of him and it was bravado at best and downright dishonesty at worst.

And the article finishes off with this:

“To have gone this far and outlasted so many others, I think is a remarkable story. Wish it would have ended differently, but it is what it is,” Huckabee said.

Huckabee’s exit leaves anti-war Texas congressman Ron Paul, a former Libertarian presidential candidate, as McCain’s sole active opponent.

If by “outlasted” Huckabee means “had the temerity to stay in even when he had no chance of winning despite urging from most of the party to pull out already” I guess that statement is accurate… The last paragraph is a doozy too – in what sense is Ron Paul an “active” opponent of McCain? Hasn’t he completely stopped campaigning? And isn’t the fact that he hasn’t officially conceded more about the fact that he’s stopped paying attention to the presidential race than about the fact that he’s still in it?

At any rate, glad Huckabee can add to 1191 and that he’s finally out of it and backing McCain. Wonder what’s next for him. He doesn’t seem to be considered by most of the commentators as a VP candidate, but a lot of Huckabee followers seem to think that’s the logical next step.

Obama is now plagued by two quasi-scandals: the Rezko case and the NAFTA case. But the irony with both is that the purported scandals themselves are pretty tame – what’s really getting him is the fact that he and his campaign have not been truthful or open about them. In fact, the latest evidence suggests Obama is trying to run as far away from them both as possible. There’s a good summary of how this has panned out in relation to the NAFTA story here. It’s as if Obama has been such a carefully stage-managed candidate that the only response his campaign has when things like this come up (as they do, inevitably, even with the most squeaky clean campaign) is to deny and run.

In some ways, the timing here is similar to the Times story about McCain – it may all come together just too late to make any difference in the primary election, but it has the potential to still be out there for the general election, with the Rezko trial in particular throwing up fodder for more stories on the Rezko-Obama relationship.

So, Hillary Clinton was on the Daily Show last night. And John Stewart opened the interview as follows:

John Stewart: Senator, let me get right into this. This election is about judgment. Tomorrow is perhaps one of the most important days of your life. And yet you have chosen to spend the night before talking to me. As a host, I’m grateful, but as a citizen I’m frightened. Your response?

Hillary: It is pretty pathetic…

Now both John Stewart’s line and hers got a good response from the audience. But aren’t both actually pretty close to the truth? Shouldn’t we be worried that this is how a candidate chooses to spend the last few hours before a major election? And isn’t it a bit pathetic that she does? At least with Leno (and possibly Letterman) you get tossed softballs. But Stewart’s whole point, as Hillary pointed out, is to “make fun of” his guests (same goes for Stephen Colbert). Is there any way you can win in that situation? Is there any way you actually get something positive out of that experience that helps you in your campaign?

There was at least a certain cool factor to Bill playing his saxophone on the late night circuit. But what does Hillary get out of this? And it’s not Hillary alone – anyone without a great on-the-spot comic brain and good one-liners well prepared and well delivered is going to flounder and come out second best on a show like this. The deck is stacked against the guest and in favor of the host just as much as tables in Vegas or Atlantic City. It really does say something about the candidates’ judgment (and desperation) when they’re willing to do it anyway.

CNN has really outdone itself this time. In the headline of the main story on the site (at least at time of writing) it describes Tuesday 4 March as “another make-or-break, do-or-die primary day”. Now, I believe this is a make-or-break, do-or-die day for both Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee, but how can it be another? Did either of them do well enough last time they held a make-or-break, do-or-die primary day that they could be considered to have made and done whatever was necessary to avoid breaking and dying? By definition, this can’t be “another” one of those days, at least for the candidates still in it. And calling it “critical Tuesday” is not even as amusing as calling the big primary day “Super-Duper Tuesday”. Is it just me, or is CNN trying just a little too hard to make this more exciting?

This is one of those times when my two worlds collide: technology (which is what I do for work) and politics (which is what I do for fun). Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has a blog entry up about a meeting he had last year with Barack Obama, and technology blog TechCrunch has an article about it.

Both articles / blog entries draw the same conclusion about this particular exchange:

We then asked, well, what about foreign policy — should we be concerned that you just don’t have much experience there?

He said, directly, two things.

First, he said, I’m on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where I serve with a number of Senators who are widely regarded as leading experts on foreign policy — and I can tell you that I know as much about foreign policy at this point as most of them.

Being a fan of blunt answers, I liked that one.

But then he made what I think is the really good point.

He said — and I’m going to paraphrase a little here: think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States. I’ll be fundamentally changing the world’s perception of what the United States is all about.

He’s got my vote.

The TechCrunch blogger (Erick Schonfeld) then goes on to add:

That last point is a pretty powerful rejoinder to the criticism that foreign policy is not Obama’s strong suit. His unique life history arguably puts him in a better position than any other candidate to change the anti-American attitudes rife in many other countries. What other candidate could do that simply by being elected?

This is the nub of the matter, isn’t it? That liberals (Democrats, whatever) think the goal of foreign policy is to get everyone outside the US to like us more, and therefore the key qualification here is being likable by non-Americans. Conservatives (Republicans, whatever) know that foreign policy is about securing the United States against foreign attackers and ensuring that the interests of the United States are protected.

The question about Obama’s foreign policy experience is entirely legitimate, because he has spent no time at all immersed in the real business of foreign policy, namely the art of diplomacy and the art of war (or “the continuation of diplomacy by other means,” as Clausewitz once said). He mistakenly believes that having spent time in foreign countries and having relatives there is the key thing (recall that George W Bush was criticised for not having spent enough time outside the US – whatever the failings of his foreign policy, they don’t have their roots in where he spent his vacations).

Obama’s arrogance on the topic of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is pretty breathtaking too. That committee is headed by Joe Biden and Dick Lugar, both of whom have several decades of foreign policy experience. For Obama to suggest that in the few months he spent in the Senate before running for President he amassed more knowledge than these two men or the others who serve on that committee is preposterous, and again suggests he is dangerously naive about the real meaning and importance of foreign policy experience.

A phenomenal set of charts showing public perceptions of progress in Iraq over the last two years, which illustrates fantastically the impact of the surge, not just on the reality over there but on people’s perceptions of progress. In every case, the light blue lines represent negative perceptions, while the dark blue represents positive perceptions.

These come from a set of Pew surveys published here, and there’s more interesting stuff where this came from.

Great to see the surge working, and being perceived to be working. I’ve been a believer in the surge from the beginning, although I was by no means sure it would work – I just believed that it was, as Churchill once said of democracy, the worst option except for all the others. This should also provide a good boost to McCain’s campaign and also damage Obama’s ability to make hay out of his consistent opposition to the war and desire to bring troops home. The latter is addressed by this chart, from the same source:

Occasionally I get behind on my reading / posting and that’s been happening again. The best thing to do is take the articles I wanted to write about and just post the links here:

• Health Questions for the Candidates, by Betsy McCaughey, in the WSJ
• Once You Take Away Barack Obama’s Likeability… What’s Left?, and Eternal Hero’s Return, by Jim Geraghty, National Review Online
• The NY Times’ Public Editor’s criticism of the paper’s McCain smear

Nice mature response here from Barack Obama to a legitimate criticism from John McCain. (From Jim Geraghty at The Campaign Spot on National Review Online.)

Obama apparently said the following in the Democratic debate Tuesday night:

As commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad.

John McCain rightly pointed out when asked about the comment later:

I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq. It’s called ‘al-Qaida in Iraq,’ [unless of course, you’re the New York Times, in which case Al-Qaida (or Al-Qaeda) is not in Iraq but in Mesopotamia, wherever that is…]

When presented with this snippet, Obama responded as follows:

I’ve got some news for John McCain, that is there was no such thing Al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade.

“I’ve got some news for John McCain. I’ve got some news for John McCain. He took us into a war, along with George Bush that should have never been authorized, never been waged. They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11 and that would be Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, that is stronger now than at any time since 2001. I’ve been paying attention John McCain!

“John McCain may like to say that he wants to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of Hell. But so far all he’s done is follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq that’s cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars and that I intend to bring to an end so that we can actually start going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and in the hills of Pakistan, like we should have been doing in the first place. That’s the news John McCain!

“I respect John McCain, but he’s tied to the politics of the past; we’re about the policies of the future. He’s the party of yesterday. We want to be the party of tomorrow. That’s why I’m running for President of the United States of America.”

This is kind of the 46-year-old politician’s version of the schoolchild’s “oh yeah? well, you suck!” It doesn’t address the question itself, but instead tries to change the subject and counter-attack with something completely different. But, thankfully, Obama “respects” John McCain – phew. That’s alright then.

Now, I think it’s inevitable that during a campaign as long and arduous as all these guys have to go through, they’re going to goof every once in a while, and when it’s a Republican who goofs, it gets blanket coverage (see Romney saying Osama instead of Obama compared with this Obama goof and Hillary’s “Medvedev – whatever” comment from the debate last night). But it sure would be nice if the candidates would just say, “you know what? I misspoke. I apologize. What I meant was….” I guess we can dream on with that one…

I note the Wall Street Journal has finally covered Barack Obama’s Patriot Employer Act, which I posted on a couple of weeks ago. It seems he’s been touting it on the campaign trail, too, so apparently he’s still keen on it and willing to admit that fact:

Recently in Janesville, Wis., he repeated his intention to make it a priority as President: “We will end the tax breaks for companies who ship our jobs overseas, and we will give those breaks to companies who create good jobs with decent wages right here in America.”

The paper does a nice job covering the several reasons why this would be awful. Let’s hope that message gets out to the population as a whole and not just the WSJ’s already-conservative readership.