Did He Mention Us on MS-NBC?

The "he" being B4B's Mark Noonan, and the "MS-NBC" being yesterday's Connected: Coast to Coast with Monica Crowley and the Reagan family black sheep. Which, from that opening sentence alone, probably explains why I'd never get a similar invite, even if I enjoyed the benefit of being moderately well-connected in blogdom. Although by the same token I can probably talk about the issues of the day to the reflection in my bathroom mirror and draw a comparable audience - and I'd wager I would enjoy (and Mr. Noonan probably would have enjoyed) the company a lot better that way as well.

I must say he cuts a better TV image than I ever would, though. "Face for radio, voice for print," and all that.

In the mean time, about eleven hours before Mark got "Connected," he posted evidence of the efficacy of the old adage about looking at things from the mosquito's point of view: "If you sting someone in a tender spot, they're liable to stop for a moment to scratch."

In my opinion, when you get into permanent campaign mode you get bogged own in message crafting and poll reading rather than actually moving things forward.

Once again, I think he's confusing the template itself with Bill Clinton's self-serving application of it. How else does one "move things forward" but by campaigning for them? That's all Dick Morris was really saying.

Clinton went into permanent campaign mode after the Democrat's [sic] 1994 Congressional loss...

No, Clinton went into permanent self-promotion mode after 1994. There is a difference.

...and in the remaining 6 years of his Presidency, the only specifically Clintonite thing I can think of which was enacted was midnight basketball, or some such fluff.

Midnight basketball was part of the so-called "crime bill" that was passed in late summer 1994, actually.

Regardless, there wasn't much he could do to advance the same agenda that he did in his first biennium because his party didn't control Congress. But that didn't prevent him from doing a masterful job of defending the existing welfare state edifice against GOP efforts to whittle it down to size. And he didn't pull that off by sitting on his hands.

On the other hand, [Bush] was re-elected after all was said and done.

Yes, he was. And as I went on to say...

That GDub forged ahead after the GOP convention and eventually hung on at the wire - hell, that he wasn't blown out in the spring and summer, rendering the fall garbage time - was a function not of "right psychological moments," but the manifest awfulness of his opponent. If he'd been facing an adversary of any significant degree of savvy, quality, and discipline - i.e. Hillary Clinton - the son, as it were, would have followed in the father's one-term footsteps.

The reason why the GOP agenda is stalled pretty much across the board is primarily because Republicans still think that campaigning is something you have to do for a couple of months every other fall, while Democrats recognize that the campaign never ends. That is why a pencil-necked fool like Harry Reid has been able to run rings around poor old Bill Frist and why a party of verbally incontinent extremists in the minority on both sides of Capitol Hill by double-digit margins has succeeded in setting itself up to dictate terms to the re-elected President of the United States.

[T]he Presidency...shouldn't be getting down and dirty into nuts and bolts politics. In my view, a good leader is someone who can carefully read the lay of the political land and intervene only when, and with only as much force, as is absolutely necessary.

That's still a defensive mentality. Morris' - and my - argument is that the President should get, and stay, on the offensive.

Think about how the President's speech last Tuesday entire reworked the debate - for months the debate was about should we pull out or not, now we've got Democrats making asinine complaints about whether or not President Bush should have invoked 9/11. This is political mastery of a subtlety not often seen.

Think of where the war debate would be if he hadn't waited all those months for the other side to bulldoze public opinion (and Bush's approval numbers) downward to the point where he had to "intervene" just to stop the bleeding.

Mr. Noonan is harkening to a different political era. Dubya's biggest failing has been that he is too nice, too apolitical, and without ruthlessness, which is astounding given the boldness of the agenda he has put forward. And those weaknesses have allowed an opposition of such manifest indiscretion, lack of judgment,and absence of political acumen to grind his second term to a virtual halt.

The pre-Iraq Bush didn't get slapped around like this. Heck, he shoved two major tax cuts, a prescription drug bill, Homeland Security, No Child Left Behind, and the Iraq war resolution through Congresses with far narrower Republican majorities than he now enjoys.

What Dick Morris means by "every day is Election Day" is not that the President has to run around the country endlessly cawing "Look at me! Look at me!", but that he has to be seen bully-pulpiteering for the agenda that he was elected to champion.

We didn't give him a second term to pick his spots; we gave him a second term to swat flies with Buicks.