What a year for Craig, Paul, Obama, Huck and more: The Swamp

Posted December 31, 2007 6:30 AM

by Mark Silva

First Sen. Larry Craig, the seasoned Republican from Idaho, walked into a Minneapolis airport men's room and tapped his foot a few too many times for his own good. The next thing Craig knew, he was resigning his seat in the Senate. The next thing we knew, he wasn't.

It's been that kind of year, here in the Swamp.

Then Ron Paul, the little-known Republican from Texas and Internet wonder of the presidential election campaign, was raising millions of dollars without even trying. The next thing we heard: Paul apparently couldn't get a seat at a Fox News forum for Republican candidates near the eve of the New Hampshire presidential primary elections.

It's been that kind of year, here.

Sen. Barack Obama started the year with an audacious speech before thousands filling a wintry Springfield, Ill., square, and spent much of the year as an also-ran among Democrats in the early polling for the presidential camapign. Now Obama stands a decent chance of winning his party's caucuses in the premier event of the presidential contest, this week's Iowa caucuses.

Been that kind of year.

And just the other day, nearly 250,000 "page views'' were recorded here at the Swamp during one day's traffic alone -- thanks largely to a posting about someone whom few outside of Arksansas had ever heard about before the start of this long year: Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, the Baptist minister who has made one desperate candidate of fellow Republican Mitt Romney lately.

It's been 47 years since a candidate such as Romney, who is a Mormon, felt compelled to explain his faith before an audience in Texas. John Kennedy last did it in 1960.

That kind of year.

It's been nearly a year since Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware threw his mouth in the ring of candidates for president, with some comments about Obama, the junior senator from Illinois.

Biden, while attemptng to tout his own foeign affairs experience during a press conference with reporters, found himself instead having to explain why he had described Obama, a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Biden made the comments to the New York Observer and said his use of the word "clean" to describe the African American politician was "taken totally out of context."

Obama initially told reporters that they would have to ask Biden what he was thinking when he made the comment: "I don't spend too much time worrying about what folks are talking about during a campaign season." But by day's end, the senator was taking a sharper tone, issuing a public rebuke to his more senior colleague. "I didn't take Sen. Biden's comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate," Obama said. "African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate."

That was early in the year.

The year opened with a new, Democratic-controlled Congress, one whose leaders vowed to draw a line in the sand against President Bush's military deployment in Iraq.

Yet Bush, who started the year's debate with his announcement of a "surge'' of military forces in Iraq, rather than a withdrawal, marched forward with a deployment of 21,500 added combat forces which no one in Congress could stop.

And when the Democrats attempted to tie a timeline for troop withdrawals to continuing funding for the war, Bush vetoed it. Bush, who had vetoed little but federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research before that confrontation, has finished the year with a flourish of budgetary vetoes, most of them sustained.

That kind of year.

It was a year of triumphs -- Former Vice President Al Gore shared the Nobel Prize for Peace for his advocacy of the cause of averting global warming. He even made a rendezvous in the Oval Office with the man whom he had defeated in the popular vote of the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush, and then slipped out a side door of the West Wing with a prize perhaps even greater than the presidency, world recognition of the need to confront a global crisis.

It was a year of tragedy -- played out nowhere as stunningly within the borders of this country as it was on the once-pastoral campus of Virginia Tech, where a disturbed young student with firearms murdered nearly three dozen fellow students and faculty in a rampage that established a new record for the all-too-common American phenomenon of the campus killing sprree.

Yet, day in and day out, similar -- and often worse -- casualties were taken in the sectarian strife that has torn Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 which has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 American servicemen and women and killed thousands of more Iraqis and others there.

At year's end, the Bush administration claims the "surge'' is working, finding proof in a tapering off of violence in Iraq -- accompanied by a tapering off of American interest in the issue as the presidential campaign of 2008 kicks into warp gear this week in Iowa.

This was the year that MoveOn.org pulled a full-page newspaper ad to describe Gen. David Petraeus, commander of multi-national forces in Iraq, as "Gen. Betray-us.'' With one ill-chosen headline, the anti-war movement may have suffered its single greatest defeat on the battlefield of public opinion.

This was the year that a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, let it be known -- in an interview with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune -- that he believes that homosexuality is immoral. More recently, we learned that Huckabee had called homosexuality simply a sin -- during his campaign for the Senate in 1994. Huckabee still thinks so, he said recently -- but here he is, one of the front-running candidates for president of the United States.

That kind of year.

This was the year of the $400 haircut -- the one that John Edwards, the fair-haired Democratic candidate for president, billed to his own campaign. Yet here he is, at year's end, one of the front-running candidates in his party's campaign for the Iowa caucuses.

This was the year that Congress came close to embracing an "immigration reform'' that would enable millions of undocumented workers -- "illegal aliens,'' in the parlance of those who view any sort of respite for millions of hard-working American residents as "amnnesty.''

The battle over immigration catapulted a long-simmering dispute in this nation to one of the most potent political factors of the presidential campaign now underway. Bush promised reform, as he first campaigned for president with a "compassionate conservative'' agenda, he pushed for it twice, and now he has retreated to watch it become perhaps the undoing of some of his own party's candidates for president.

"I'm deeply concerned about America losing its soul,’’ Bush said at one juncture during the debate, during a newspaper interview en route to delivering a speech about immigration reform in Georgia. “Immigration has been the lifeblood of a lot of our country's history," Bush told a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers. The president said: "I am worried that a backlash to newcomers would cause our country to lose its great capacity to assimilate newcomers."

Suddenly sounding a bit like Democrat Edwards, the president said: “There is an element of our society that is worried about two Americas. My argument to them is: We've had this debate in our country for years... And yet our ability to welcome newcomers and the system's capacity to assimilate them has been one of the great powerful traditions of America,’’ Bush said. “It works, and it will work this time. People shouldn't fear our capacity to uphold our motto: E Pluribus Unum."

A year indeed.

Here in the Swamp, we have posted nearly 6,000 entries since this online enterprise started two years ago, at the start of the coming new year.

But we also have recorded nearly 130,000 comments from readers like you, who sometimes pause to participate in the dialog of this newsblog, but more often move on without a word.

We are approaching one million "page-views" per month -- and, if 2007 was any sign of things to come, 2008 promises even more.

It's likely to be another one of those years, here in the Swamp.

Comments

RNC Bruce has convinced me of the error of my ways regarding his percieved lack of stories about Republicans.

So I join the cackling cacophony calling for more stories about Larry "Toe Tapper" Craig.

No, RNC Bruce, thank you!

Posted by: Doug Zook | December 31, 2007 7:50 AM

As an agent of Change, Obama has aleady had a positive effect and change on the political landscape as evidenced by the "nicer tone" of the campaign commericals and political discourse prevelent today, which heretofore has been dirty and ugly. This is due to Obama's stance not too take the low road. To stay positive and above the frey, preferring to take the high road, to focuss on the issues and his message of change. -- And then they followed.

We all know that experience matters -- but what matters more is Judgment, Wisdom, Honesty and Integrity. We have to remember and weigh its seriousness, that in the most important policy decision of our times, the Iraq War, which has helped to escalate the present situation, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards got it Wrong. Barack Obama got it Right.

Obama a man of Judgment; a man of Positive Change.

Posted by: Julie Mack | December 31, 2007 8:11 AM

Mike Huckabee is going to lose Iowa and Mitt Romney is doing a good job portraying him as soft on crime because of all his pardons.
What's worse he raised taxes in Arkansas and seems not to understand sodomy.
He has made too many dumb statements and America doesn't need one more President from Hope, Arkansas.
Now the numbers are tightening with Mitt ahead. Jerry White, Springfield, IL P.S. Romney is condemning Senator Clinton's socialized medicine one of her stupid mistakes but, then, she's stuck on stupid.

Posted by: Jerry White | December 31, 2007 8:31 AM

When I was in high school Paul Urlich(sp) wrote a book about the "poulation bomb" and how we would wake up one day in the years near 2000 and find no water, no food and no space to live in due to a huge increase in the world population-never happened! In the same way Global Warming as an issue brought on by man-simply is not so, and will be seen in the future for what it is-a way for a washed up politician to raise some more cash to continue their excessive lifestyle.

Homosexuality is immoral, and it's possible that our cultures tolerance of such deviant behaviour adds to a more vigorous resistance to it. Stop making it OK for people to live in sin without an uneasiness about it.

Immigration of illegals will cause violence until we will be forced by circumstances to deal with it-like we should be right now. If you are illegal-get out of our country...if you don't eventually you will experience the wrath of those of us who are. Come to America, wait in line, pay the due and you'll find Americans open and vigorous in our defence of your being here. In this way we can regain our soul. The law must be upheld in a society or the fabric or that society will ceease to have the appeal that brings people here from all over the world. The law!

Happy New Year

Posted by: Mark | December 31, 2007 8:47 AM

What a wonderful article!
2007 has been one of those
years.

Posted by: Susie Boggan | December 31, 2007 8:50 AM

A year ago The Swamp was a forum for reasonably intelligent well-read people to exchange ideas -- usually passionately; often with more than a hint of acrimony; but very often thoughfully.

Not today. Nearly all of those old regulars have left the Swamp. And today we have the sort of silly, childish bickering you'd find around a playground sandbox... or people adopting multiple post names and just talking to themselves in the same thread. (The correct word is "monologue", Mark, not "dialogue".)

It's been that kind of year.

It's likely to be another one of those years, here in the Swamp.

Posted by: Juanito | December 31, 2007 9:18 AM

Posted by: Mark | December 31, 2007 8:47 AM

1) Have you noticed the sprawl that is eating up our prime farmlands? Do you know how many wells are going dry in Lake County?

2) Just because you aren't homosexual doesn't mean that it's "immoral". It's a fact of nature and people shouldn't have to hide who they are.

3) Illegal aliens are in this country because there are Americans who employ them. (And you benefit everyday from it). Those employers are the ones who should be first in upholding the law.

Hope 2009 brings you some enlightenment and compassion for the planet and people around you.

Posted by: DD | December 31, 2007 10:11 AM

Yes Mark, homosexuality is immoral, the earth is flat, and the sun revolves around it.

Posted by: J. David Williams | December 31, 2007 10:22 AM

Sorry you're too good for us Juanito. It must make you sick to look down on us lowly people when you are perched on your pedestal. Please forgive us.

Posted by: sam | December 31, 2007 10:45 AM

And today we have the sort of silly, childish bickering you'd find around a playground sandbox...
Posted by: Juanito | December 31, 2007 9:18 AM

Pot calling kettle black? Passion and acrimony still welcome, if you care to contribute.

Posted by: DD | December 31, 2007 10:46 AM

That's the first time I've seen a 72-year-old referred to as a "Wunderkind"! Maybe it's because he's so popular with the youth.

This is the first time in 30 years that I'd vote in a primary, and -- darn! -- as an overseas citizen I can't.

Go Wunderkind!

Posted by: Uri DeYoung | December 31, 2007 10:55 AM

Return to constitutional separation of powers. Separation of corporation and state.
Ron Paul 2008.

Posted by: a1phageek | December 31, 2007 12:12 PM

point taken on wunderkind.
we'll stick with 'wonder.'
Thanks and Happy New Year.

Posted by: Mark Silva | December 31, 2007 1:52 PM

Indeed, it has been a year and it is my sincere hope that 2008 will show that the American People have not lost their ability to reason or to hope.

I personally look at the common sense characteristics of the candidates and the only one that stands out is Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is saying stop the madness of interventionism and few people understand just how mad such a policy really is until they begin to read our history. Then they find out that our government has been intervening in other countries, about 200 of them, for the last 109 years. We look at Iraq as a new problem, but the truth is that we have been intervening in the affairs of Iraq for 87 years.

If such a foriegn policy really worked, if it provided this country with security and benefits shouldn't we have seen it by now?

The only people that have benefited are the big military contractors, big corporations, big oil and big government. We are fooling ourselves if we really think that such intervention is in our country's best interests, or that it makes us secure...if that were the case then we would not be worried about security.

So, when you listen to the other candidates just remember that they are playing the same ole game with our country. They talk a good talk, but who actually pulls their purse strings, who actually has their ear?

Posted by: Republicae | December 31, 2007 2:19 PM

DD and Sam,

I for one really don't mind the acrimony if there happens to be something besides that -- like actual thinking; like substance instead of sloganeering.

Unfortunately, the dimwitted and tireless oafs have successfully chased away virtually everybody who had something worthwhile to say -- and they're proud of it, mind you. So I don't know if I'll bother coming back. (Not that it matters.)

PS to DD: I agree with your last post (December 31, 2007 10:11 AM) 100%. Well said!

Posted by: Juanito | December 31, 2007 2:24 PM

Country Before Party.

I Vote For Virtue; I Vote For Ron Paul.

All others will sell our children to financial slavery.

Posted by: Brad | December 31, 2007 3:11 PM

Hopefully, it will go down in history as the year that finally proved the inaccuracy and irrelevancy of "scientific" polling.

First, Huckabee went from 4% to the leader in a few weeks, but people still cling to the illusion that the polls represent solid opinions.

Putting aside all the inaccuracies (respondent selection, predicting likely voters, not polling cell phones, people with caller ID, etc.), the simple truth is that most people haven't really decided, so whatever they tell the pollster is meaningless anyway.

How else to explain that the candidate raising the most money in the fourth quarter, with the most volunteers, and drawing the biggest crowds, and owning the Internet, and winning the straw polls, is still ranked sixth?

January will finally wake people up.

Posted by: Doug D | December 31, 2007 4:03 PM

Why is Paul being left out.
Because he Represents the people. The middle class and poor. The corporate America doesn't like that because right now you are slaves. You work for them.
Paul would free us from the non-sense. Do away with the income tax, bring our troops home, and make sure we have money worth more than 2 cents on the buck.

Posted by: Flo | December 31, 2007 7:37 PM

Pastor Huckabee has smote his enemies wherever he goes. He dazzled Tim Russert and left him tongue-tied and throwing softball questions. He has the full support of Evangelicals the world over. He was anointed by the Leadership to take on Goliath. He will smite the Goliath Romney on election day. He will smite the wayward nations who refuse to listen to his powerful word. With his mighty arm he will crush the countries who refuse to yield and bring them to their knees. He will be one of the greatest Christian presidents - perhaps as great as Jimmy Carter. Onward soldiers and lead the way to bring Pastor Huckabee a great victory today! Let him smite his enemies with a mighty blow! Oh, how happy everyone will be when President Huckabee puts Christ back into Christmas!

Posted by: Dr Ward Ciac II | December 31, 2007 11:23 PM

I contend that media heads are grossly underestimating the scope of the grass-roots support Dr. Paul enjoys. Everywhere I go I see Ron Paul signs, only Ron Paul and mostly home made at that. He is the most talked about name I hear anymore.

My friend is a publisher for ROKON magazine in Seoul Korea, he tells me that he thought Paul was the only one running, and that the American soldiers were requesting articles about him.

I was playing an online video game with a gentleman in Pakistan last night. He was locked in his house because of the rioting outside his home.

He was asking me if I knew who Ron Paul was, in fat I did. He went on to tell me that he is the focus of many a conversation lately. They see Ron Paul as a humanitarian, and I think he's right.

Coming from a large military family, a US Army Veteran myself, I am only hearing two names, Hero John McCain and Patriot Ron Paul, and the conversations seem to favor Ron Paul.

From my work as a consulting Engineer, I travel frequently. In the technology sector, every single political conversation I have heard included Ron Paul.

Not that they all favored Dr. Paul, but more he was the gage against which all issues were debated. I would guess more teenagers know of Ron Paul, than George Washington. He has received donations from more individual voters, than all the other other republican candidates combined in Q4.

That's why I predict Ron Paul will place third or better in Iowa, and first place in New Hampshire.

Authentic, humble and honest, Dr. Paul stands out as an intellectual giant amongst his status-quo peers.

Ron Paul is now the Rock Star celebrity of American politics, do in part the the obvious bias against him in the media.

We American's love underdogs, and that will be weighing heavily in Dr. Paul's favor come election day.

It has become so popular to donate to Ron Paul, it's like he is putting on a rock concert, and the tickets are selling out, -Fast!

Consider if political campaigns were businesses making an IPO, Paul's campaign would be the darling of Wall Street.

His quarter over quarter revenue growth curve is unmatched, and with 225,000 separate donations coming in the last quarter alone, it's potential is off the charts!

Hedge your bets gentleman, expect the unexpected from Patriot Ron Paul, I certainly do.

Gregory Richards
Http://gregoryrichards.net

Posted by: Gregory Richards | January 1, 2008 12:49 AM