Michael Cohen: "I Fear That If He Loses The Election In 2020 There Will Never Be A Peaceful Transition Of Power"

On Saturday, while Bernie was kicking off his 2020 campaign with a speech of substance, hope and love in Brooklyn, Trump was delivering a hateful scorched-earth address to the far right radical fringe of American politics, "calling the Russia investigation 'bullshit,' adopting a southern accent to mock his former attorney general, and asserting that some members of Congress 'hate our country.'"

The rollicking two-hour-plus appearance at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland offered the president a brief respite from an otherwise miserable week in which his much-touted summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ended in failure and his former personal lawyer delivered explosive testimony to Congress.

A new HarrisX poll for The Hill showed mixed results regarding Michael Cohen's testimony to the House Oversight Committee last week. Survey registered voters, 39% of respondents had no opinion, 37% found his testimony credible and 25% said they did not find him credible. It doesn't matter that much that 58% of Democrats found him credible but that only 15% of Republicans did. What is important is that self-identified independent voters-- most of whom (48%) were unsure-- were significantly more likely to believe Cohen (35%) than to dismiss his testimony as not credible (just 18%).

Yesterday, the NY Times published an interesting piece of the evolving historical record, an OpEd by John Dean: I Testified Against Nixon. Here's My Advice For Michael Cohen. He noted that both Cohen and himself "found ourselves speaking before Congress, in multiple open and closed venues, about criminal conduct of a sitting president of the United States. This is not a pleasant place to be, particularly given the presidents involved.

Polls varied widely after my testimony. One said 50 percent of Americans believed me, 30 percent did not, and 20 percent were not sure. Another poll had 38 percent believing the president, who denied my statement, and 37 percent believing me. The instant polls on Mr. Cohen’s testimony vary by party affiliation, as was the case with my polls. But 35 percent found him credible. I believe that number will grow.

While my testimony was eventually corroborated by secret recordings of our conversations made by Mr. Nixon, before that it was other witnesses who made the difference. I was surprised by the number of people who surfaced to support my account. The same, I suspect, will happen for Michael Cohen. The Mafia’s code of omertà has no force in public service. I have heard no one other than Roger Stone say he will go to jail for Donald Trump.

Mr. Cohen should understand that if Mr. Trump is removed from office, or defeated in 2020, in part because of his testimony, he will be reminded of it for the rest of his life. He will be blamed by Republicans but appreciated by Democrats. If he achieves anything short of discovering the cure for cancer, he will always live in this pigeonhole. How do I know this? I am still dealing with it.

Just as Mr. Nixon had his admirers and apologists, so it is with Mr. Trump. Some of these people will forever be rewriting history, and they will try to rewrite it at Mr. Cohen’s expense. They will put words in his mouth that he never spoke. They will place him at events at which he wasn’t present and locations where he has never been. Some have tried rewriting my life, and they will rewrite his, too.

I am thinking of people like Mr. Stone, the longtime Trump associate who worked on the 1972 Nixon campaign and so admires the former president that he has a tattoo of the man’s likeness between his shoulder blades. Mr. Stone, whom I never met while at the White House, has been indicted as part of the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, on charges of lying to Congress about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign.

He prides himself as a political dirty trickster, and he has never met a conspiracy theory he did not believe. Mr. Cohen can be sure that Mr. Stone will promote new conspiracy theories to defend Mr. Trump and himself, even if it means rewriting history. Presidential scandals tend to attract a remarkable number of dishonest “historians.”

There is one overarching similarity that Mr. Cohen and I share. He came to understand and reject Mr. Trump as I did Mr. Nixon.



Mr. Nixon first called on me regarding Watergate some eight months after the arrests of his re-election committee operatives at the Watergate. We had 37 conversations, and when I felt I had his confidence, I tried but failed to get him to end the cover-up. The day I told Mr. Nixon there was a cancer on his presidency was the day I met the real Nixon. I knew I had to break rank.

Mr. Cohen has likewise come to see Mr. Trump for his true nature. At the very end of his testimony before the House Oversight Committee, he sought permission to read a closing statement.

He thanked the members, and again accepted responsibility for his bad behavior. He then told the legislators, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and this is why I agreed to appear before you today.” This was the most troubling-- actually, chilling-- thing he said in his five hours before the committee.

Since Mr. Cohen’s warning came in his closing words, there was no opportunity for committee members to ask follow-up questions. So I double-checked with his lawyer, Lanny Davis, if I had understood Mr. Cohen’s testimony correctly. Mr. Davis responded, “He was referring to Trump’s authoritarian mind-set, and lack of respect for democracy and democratic institutions.”

Indeed, what is most similar about my and Mr. Cohen’s testimony is that we both challenged authoritarian presidents of the United States by revealing their lies and abuses of power. Mr. Trump is the first authoritarian president since Mr. Nixon, and neither he nor his supporters will play fair. Mr. Cohen will be dealing with these people the rest of his life.

In fact, all Americans are affected by the growing authoritarianism that made Mr. Trump president. These people who facilitated his rise will remain long after Mr. Trump is gone. We need to pay more attention.

Don't Look To The Media To Save Us From Trumpism

I don’t want to presume that everyone remembers— or even ever knew— who John Dean is. He was Nixon’s White House lawyer and became a key witness in the Watergate trials. He’s an author (Blind Ambition, Conservatives Without Conscience, Worse Than Watergate, Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches), a columnist and a registered independent. Blind Ambition was made into a mini-series and Dean was played by Martin Sheen and Oliver Stone cast David Hyde Pierce in the Dean role in his 1995 film, Nixon. Last week, he published an OpEd in Newsweek, The Gutless Press Is Still Giving Trump A Free Pass, interesting to read in light of Trump’s whining yesterday about how the press doesn’t treat him with respect.

Dean’s point is very different from Sean Spicer’s. “The press,” he points out, “is standing by while Trump destroys the country so they can report the fall of America.” He writes that Trump’s media team— press secretary Spicer, communications directors Hope Hicks and Jason Miller, social media director Dan Scavino and “counselor” Kellyanne Con-man (a Mercer operative)— will oversee Trump banning the media from the White House, even though the media has enabled him and his campaign and played a crucial role in his win.

With a few exceptions, the news media has given him a pass on his failure to produce his tax returns and disclose the nature of his many businesses; he was given a pass on his self-confessed sexual assault of countless women; the press largely ignored his long-standing connections with well-known New York area drug dealers and organized crime figures and on and on and on.

In breaking with norm after norm that have sunk other presidential candidates, the news media has allowed Donald Trump to get away with criminally outrageous behavior, setting a new low for national leadership.

But my biggest complaint about the news coverage of Donald Trump, the politician, the presidential candidate, now the president-elect and soon to be the president of the United States, is his conspicuous and remarkable incompetence for the job.

The news media—less a few outspoken commentators and columnists—is pretending like anyone can be the president of the United States, no prior experience necessary.

News people seem to love his bellicose counterpunching, hurling attacks at anyone who pinches his thin skin. They excuse his ignorance, and when he doubles down to hide it, they are confident he is developing a new and carefully considered policy.

By any standard, the news media’s failure to address his utter lack of skills and knowledge to serve as president, the refusal to warn Americans and foreign nations that we are about to install a man who is totally unprepared for the job is breathtaking.

It was Leslie Moonves, executive chairman and CEO of CBS Television, who said of a potential Trump presidential campaign, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” But after he was elected, the mantra of the news business has not changed.

It appears Trump’s outrageous and democracy-threatening behavior is all about what is good for news organizations—and the end of democracy as we cherish it will be televised.

I really did believe that after he won the election the news business would get serious with Trump if he did not get serious about the business of governing this country, yet the news coverage of the transition of the most unqualified man ever elected to the White House is as weak and wishy-washy as it was at the outset of his campaign.

Given the license afforded the news business under the First Amendment, their collective conduct is approaching criminal negligence, standing by while Trump destroys the country so they can report the fall of America.

…While they are reporting on Trump, it is fluff stuff. It is information he wants reported. In the past, however, reporters were digging into who was doing what to get ready.

…News accounts, television reports and when they arrived blogs dug far deeper into past transitions than is now occurring with Trump.

My perusal of this material along with historical accounts after the fact reveal that pundits, historians and political reporters largely agreed that rookie presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama relied on their vice presidents (Walter Mondale, Al Gore and Joe Biden) most heavily at the outset, but after they devoted countless hours of study to learning about their new jobs, they relatively quickly came to understand the workings of the high office they held and became adept presidents.

Trump has made it clear he does not like briefing books, nor does he read history. This puts him alongside Reagan and Bush II, both of whom enjoyed the pomp of being heads of government, but they never stopped relying heavily on their vice presidents (George H. W. Bush and Dick Cheney) for the daily grind of being head of the executive branch of government.

Watching the formation of Donald Trump’s presidency, the press coverage is disappointingly weak and thin. As president, he is clearly going to govern much like Reagan and Bush II, where someone else does the heavy lifting. But this conspicuous fact is being totally ignored in the transition news coverage.

Who is doing that lifting now: Vice President-elect Mike Pence? Chief-of-staff-designate Stephen Bannon? Son-in-law Jared Kushner? Daughter Ivanka? Outsider Rebekah Mercer?

And why are reporters unable to learn what is really going on in the Trump Tower transition operation?

The answer to these questions is clear. Transition coverage has been much like Trump campaign coverage, and it does not bode well for coverage of the Trump White House. The news media is so fixated with Trump himself, along with his endless need to consume all the oxygen in any room where they are all together, that they are totally ignoring how he is preparing for his presidency. This is what sells.

In addition, much of the mainstream press is afraid of Trump, fearful he will cut them off from all access. In fact, I predict he will do just that. Nixon did it. He occasionally banned reporters from the White House. He went around the White House press corps to state and local news organizations.

It has been almost 150 days since Trump held a press conference. Nixon used to go as long as he could, and unlike Trump, he was good at press conferences because he studied for days for them.

Trump is not good at press conferences because he does not have good answers for the questions he will likely be asked, not to mention he is not inclined to study and prepare, so he knows he will likely embarrass himself. Just as during the campaign, Trump is conspicuously unprepared to answer questions.

Trump is going to be much harder on the press than Nixon. He has seen their weakness and knows his core followers are with him. If the press was not collectively gutless, they would be yelling that we are watching a train wreck, but the news media is pretending this is not happening. Rather they are pretending that this is a normal presidential transition. Which brings me to my second prediction. Second Prediction: Trump Will Breach His Oath of Office

It appears that at noon on January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump will take the oath of office: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

This will, of course, make him the president of the United States. I doubt, however, that Trump will honor his oath. My reason is rather simple, Donald Trump is far worse than Richard Nixon—a fact about which I will have more to say about in the future.

Newt's Revenge? "When Mitt Romney Came To Town"

Lèse-majesté is a definite no-no in the Romney camp

John Dean was once White House counsel for Richard Nixon. He, more than most, understands what it means when you call someone "Nixonian." And that's the adjective he applied to Mitt Romney in this timely tweet:


It was all about his Mitt Fits, something that happens when a mere mortal challenges a self-entitled CEO type who has come to be convinced his powers and privileges are the will of Quetzalcoatl (or whichever god or goddess he claims to derive his authority from). Sarah Jones reported that politicians like Romney now "actually expect reporters not to question them or call them out on what they see as inaccuracies." She used a now familiar CNN video to make her point.

The AP’s Glen Johnson named a lobbyist close to Romney, and the two tussled as Romney attempted to explain that while this lobbyist was an adviser, he was not running the campaign. The reporter wasn’t having that.

But the part that got my attention (as captured on what looks to be a cell phone by someone who appears to be a Ron Paul supporter based on the YouTube upload by Urban Warfare Channel that is tagged” We all know Romney is full of shit. RON PAUL 2012?") was after the q and a, when Romney’s Traveling Press Sec. Eric Fehrnstrom approached the reporter to tell him to not be so argumentative with the candidate.

In what world is it “professional” for the press to not ask sometimes-argumentative questions? It’s not as if he called him a name, for heaven’s sake. And let us not forget that Mitt Romney is running for President. He and his campaign manager may wish to familiarize themselves with the treatment our current President gets from the press, and if that doesn’t educate them, perhaps they should watch Fox News interview the president.

Yes, that’s a false equivalency as Fox News doesn’t argue facts or semantics, but rather their own reality – but the point remains the same. If the press’ job is to make the candidate look good in public, if that is the Romney campaign’s idea of their job, then we have larger problems than whether or not Romney has lobbyists “running” his campaign.

The press is there to ask the questions the people want to know the answers to, they are there to ask questions that inform us about who this candidate is and what they really stand for. They are not there to make any candidate or president look good.

If Romney can’t handle the heat of some push back on his convenient usage of semantics to cover the truth, how exactly would he handle being president? We will go back to the Bush-era tactics when the press was not allowed to ask certain questions?

These are but small reminders of what a Republican administration has in store for the people. But of course, you won’t know about it because the press won’t be reporting on it, just as they failed to report on the Bush era tactics lest they be kicked out of the pool.

Nixonian? I have a feeling that all of Willard's GOP rivals would agree with John Dean on that one. One of them, Newt Gingrich-- pissed off that Romney's SuperPac spent a not-so-small fortune smearing him in Iowa and destroying his campaign-- has been bragging that he's going to give Romney the same treatment that Romney and his shady allies have meted out to the other primary candidates. I don't exactly see Newt as a courageous figure willing to jeopardize his standing with the Republican Establishment, so I assumed he would grumble and hiss and, ultimately, pull his punches. Maybe I was wrong.

Watch the video:



It's part of a rollout Newt's Super PAC intends, they claim, to use to derail Willard's seemingly unstoppable campaign. They say the video above is part of a 30-minute attack film that depicts Romney exactly the way Democrats have been getting across all year: a greed-driven, selfish, sociopathic corporate raider whose business model was actually based on destroying jobs and destroying companies-- profitable for Willard and his partners, devastating for thousands of workers, investors, communities and society at large. (That's where the "sociopathic" comes in.)

Peter Boyer reported at the Daily Beast Friday: "The film was made by Jason Killian Meath, a former associate of Romney’s top strategists, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer. Meath had worked for the Romney campaign in 2008, creating much of the ad content for that failed effort." He knows what a scumbag Romney is from the inside. And his film reveals a lot.

“We’re going to release a short, 27-minute film that is well-documented, and tells the real story of Mitt Romney at Bain Capital-- and it’s not a pretty story,” says Rick Tyler, an adviser to the Gingrich-supporting PAC.

The video, called When Mitt Romney Came to Town, is a slick production focusing on Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital, a private investment firm.

The movie begins with a cinematic tableau of Americana, as the narrator intones, “Capitalism made America great. Free markets. Innovation. Hard work. The building blocks of the American dream. But in the wrong hands, some of those dreams can turn into nightmares.”

A shot of an American flag, waving in the breeze is replaced by gathering storm clouds, as the narrator continues: “Wall Street’s corporate raiders made billions of dollars. Their greed was matched only by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits … nothing spared. Nothing mattered but profits. This film is about one such raider and his firm.”

At that point, a black-and-white photograph of Romney appears on the screen, as the narrator alleges that “Romney took foreign seed money from Latin America” to exploit “dozens of American businesses” and the “thousands of employees that worked there.”

“A story of greed,” the narrator intones. “Playing the system for a quick buck. A group of corporate raiders, led by Mitt Romney. More ruthless than Wall Street. For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.”

According to four sources familiar with the project, the film was commissioned by Barry Bennett, a conservative activist who was once chief of staff for Ohio Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt. Bennett is now at the Alliance for America’s Future, a Virginia-based group whose principals include Mary Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town focuses on four case studies of Bain’s acquisitions—a Florida-based company called UniMac, which produced commercial laundry equipment; KayBee Toys; the electronics company DDI; and AmPad, an Indiana-based office-supply producer. The key result of these transactions, the film asserts, was “spectacular returns” for Bain through “stripping American businesses of assets, selling everything to the highest bidder, and often killing jobs for big financial rewards.”

Romney has defended the “creative destruction” dynamic of his Bain years as an essential component of a healthy economy-- when efficiencies are imposed upon legacy industries, jobs are often lost as new operating methods are introduced.

The film was made independently and offered around. Newt's Super PAC bought it-- saving the Democrats the trouble-- as a way of getting back at Romney for the sleaziest campaign of the GOP primary. I'm surprised Huntsman, Perry and Bachmann didn't all chip in to make sure it would be aired. I bet the Romney people are pissed off at the last minute $5 million contribution from sleazy Vegas gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson that allowed the purchase of the film.

How would you expect the lying liars of the Bush regime to respond to the charge that they (gasp) LIED? Why, naturally, with a new fusillade of lies!

C'mon, Scotty, smile! Rod Serling rarely managed a Twilight Zone scene as creepy as this sendoff Chimpy the Prez gave his longtime loyal lapdog. (Poor Scotty looks like he's praying to a different sci-fi icon -- to his Star Trek namesake, to be beamed up, or anywhere away from here.)

"McClellan's explosive new book, which alleges that the Bush administration waged a 'political propaganda campaign' in favor of the Iraq war and bungled the response to the storm that devastated the Gulf Coast, prompted a counterattack yesterday from some of his oldest political colleagues, who accused him of disloyalty and questioned his credibility."

--from Dan Eggen's front-page report in today's Washington Post

Howie has already noted the furious response by Bush regimists to news of former White House Press Secretary Scotty McClellan's new book. I'm more struck by the comic element of the fracas. As news of the book's innards tumbled out last night, I really didn't think all that much about it. I figured, well, this should cause the regime gang some temporary embarrassment -- you know, having such stuff said by such a deep-inside-the-regime insider.

But the revelations themselves? I mean, really now! Ooh, the bad regime boys (and girl, with Madame Condi's ritual denial duly noted) propaganda-blitzed the country into a war in Iraq. Blah blah blah. Shocking!

Yawn. Come on now! In May 2008, can there possibly be anyone to whom this is news? And so on with all the "revelations" in the book. Of course I haven't read the thing, but could there be anything in it that would surprise anyone who's been paying even the tiniest attention to the unfolding horror of the Bush regime?

Least of all the gang of conspirators within the regime, rising now in unison in such self-righteous dudgeon. And they all profess to be shocked, really shocked. The deck on Dan Eggen's Washington Post story captures (I suppose unwittingly) the hilarity of it:

"Former Bush Aide Stuns Many With Critical New Book"

Why, they're beyond shocked, they're stunned! All the way to the, er, top. We have it on the authority of no less than poor Scotty's most recent successor as White House manure-shoveler, Dana Perino, that the president "is puzzled, and he doesn't recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years." (Doesn't it seem possible, even likely, that if you put a pair of Groucho glasses on Mrs. Chimpy, Chimpy the Prez wouldn't recognize her either?)

Now we all know the brand of comedy that's being played out here, don't we? One hates to invoke yet again the utter shock of the corrupt police Captain Renault in Casablanca, as voiced so memorably by Claude Rains, at the discovery of gambling in Rick's Cafe Americain. But this wonderful moment has become a cliche precisely because in it the hypocrisy is so perfectly distilled.

Except to the brain-locked class of Beltway insiders, there's no imaginable mystery about "what happened" to poor Scotty. During his long lapdog-like service to George W. Bush, it obviously escaped everyone's attention that while he might have been every bit the schlub he appeared, he may not have been the doofus and moral cypher normally pressed into service for the moral sinkhole that would be the Bush regime.

Clearly there were glimmerings during his service as press secretary that the regime power brokers were lying to him, and sending him out to the briefing room to spread those lies to the press, and by extension to the American people. Clearly there were instances when he discovered he was being lied to bare-facedly, as with the manure that Karl Rove among others shoveled at him over Plamegate.

Maybe the book spells out the process by which poor Scotty came to understand how badly he had been used by a pack of liars he had foolishly trusted -- and, worse, came to understand that he had been made a cog in their machine for systematically lying to the American people. My guess is that the loyal sad sack started with an alarmingly high doubt threshhold, but that once it was breached, the real story came together increasingly easily.

By the time poor Scotty couldn't take any more and abandoned his liar's podium, it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that something terrible had happened to him. My gosh, who could forget that creepy scene where Chimpy the Prez bade farewell to his loyal retainer, who looked like he was about to walk off into an alien spaceship? It was like a scene out of The Twililght Zone.

But of course the Bush regimists weren't paying attention. Poor Scotty was just another lowly functionary who'd been used and now, when his time came, discarded. (Write if you get work!)

However far along poor Scotty was in his path to illumination at the time he left the White House, I'm guessing that the view from outside the Beltway did wonders to clarify and sharpen his vision. Why exactly he went public, especially knowing the kind of humiliation and character assassination that inevitably awaited him, only he himself could explain. If I had to guess, I'd say that there was a spark of decency in him that escaped the notice of the regimists who had been pulling his strings. (We'll speculate a bit more below.)

It's that same spark of decency that turned out to lodge somewhere inside some of the Nixon faithful as the Watergate scandal unfolded. John Dean, for one, who after all had tried to warn the president that there was a cancer on the presidency, at a time when he was still too naive to realize that the president he had served so loyally was the cancer on the presidency. Talk about a fish rotting from the head: All the filth and corruption of the Nixon regime traced back ultimately to the mind of the master.

So where, I keep asking, is the mystery in all of this?

Supposedly serious media types tell us, in all supposed seriousness, how mystified all of poor Scotty's former colleagues are by this shocking book. Where could poor Scotty have gotten those crazy ideas?

Now, it could be that some of the Bush loyalists, both within the regime and in the media, are genuinely stumped. Because Bush loyalists (again, both in the media and within the regime) come in two basic flavors: the people who drank the Kool-Aid and the people who served it.*

And it's entirely possible that the Kool-Aid drinkers are puzzled. For example, all those Bush regime law diplomates who got their "legal training" at Pat Robertson's Regent U. I can believe that many (most?) of them believe that shredding the damned document and lining bird cages with the resulting confetti really is how a president can best "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

But as for the others, the people who have made the Bush regime function, my gosh, if it weren't so pathetic, and also so semi-serious, it would be hilarious.

Here we have the bloated carcass of Karl Rove, a man who has never in his benighted life told the truth about anything unless he was playing some other-dimensionally devious angle, blithering bemusedly (on Fox Noise, where else?) about the perfidy and ignorance of poor Scotty. Okay, in fairness to our Karl, it's not as if treating poor Scotty like a schmuck and a patsy is something new, or something that he does only behind his back -- look how long he did it right to the dumb schmuck's face.

Thank goodness for Countdown, where we at least had Keith Olbermann pointing out that the regime's hastily assembled Get Scotty Posse was merely spewing -- what else? -- talking points! "Why, that doesn't even sound like our Scotty!"

Well, this may actually be true, because it's doubtful that their Scotty ever talked to them this way when he was shoveling their manure to the ever-eager-for-more White House press corps. Where they apparently went wrong was in assuming that he was just another member of the loyal Kool-Aid Brigade.

On Countdown last night there was much speculation as to what poor Scotty could hope to gain by writing a book that incriminates himself as much as anybody. Let me throw out a theory. Might this be the necessary first step toward redeeming his soul?

It can happen. The young John Dean paid a heavy price for his involvement in the swamp of Nixonian corruption. The older-and-wiser John Dean has emerged from his crucible as one of our more valuable public figures.

It's a start, Scotty.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
*Although it doesn't really concern us here, there is in fact a third category of Bush loyalist, especially prevalent among the crony capitalists who have been so well served by the regime -- like the war profiteers and other sleazy opportunists for whom each successive regime disaster, regime-made or otherwise, represented another potential bonanza. The cronies didn't need to drink the Kool-Aid because they didn't need to believe any of the regime's pathetic mock-patriotic cover stories. They understood how the game is played: You make the payoffs so you can cash in on the paydays.

#

DOES McCAIN EVEN HAVE A CHANCE IN NOVEMBER?

Paul Krugman hasn't been an advocate for Obama this year. In fact, he's tilted so far towards Hillary that I thought he might tumble off his rock-steady Rocinante. But this morning he's back being  an analyst and back being the brilliant and relevant Paul Krugman whose columns have become such a key part of the liberal conversation. And he's got a warning for Obama: don't squander a sure thing. A sure thing? The polls show a tight race between Obama and a third term for Bush, not a landslide.

Political scientists, by and large, believe that what happens on the campaign trail, while it gives talking heads something to talk about, is more or less irrelevant to what happens on Election Day. Instead, they place their faith in statistical analyses that identify three main determinants of presidential voting.

First, votes are affected by the state of the economy-- mainly economic performance in the year or so preceding the election.

Second, the approval rating of the current president strongly affects his party’s ability to hold power.
Third, the electorate seems to suffer from an eight-year itch: parties rarely manage to hold the White House for more than two terms in a row.

This year, all of these factors strongly favor the Democrats. Indeed, the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed this favorable a political environment since 1964. Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, tells me: “It would be difficult to find any serious indicator that does not point to a Democratic victory in 2008.”

What about polls that still seem to give John McCain a good chance of winning? Pay no attention, say the experts: general election polls this early tell you almost nothing about what will happen in November. Remember 1992: as late as June, Gallup put Ross Perot in first place, Bill Clinton in third.

Of course, no one expects McCain or his desperate corporate allies-- and that, obviously, includes the media-- to just raise the white flag. If you think Hillary fought like a mad dog for the nomination, just wait 'til you see what McCain will do to give himself the opportunity to make up for those lost years in the Hanoi Hilton. Today's Wall Street Journal reports he's been working hard, almost Madonna-like, in re-defining the latest incarnation of John McCain as "a reliable conservative but not a George W. Bush clone" and will soon start the process of smearing Barack Obama with a series of campaign ads (and the kind of Rovian innuendo once-upon-a-time used against McCain himself).

And yet, the national media still shies away from a serious analysis of McCain's actual voting record in the Senate-- not his rhetoric or how he nods and winks on the Daily Show but how he actually voted. True, he's been prone to not showing up for tough votes-- or for even scurrying out of his seat and hanging out where one would normally expect to see Larry Craig during contentious times but he still has a voting record and even if the corporate media refuses to look at it seriously, Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego just did. He concludes that although McCain has been slightly less right-wing than the average Republican senator for much of his career, once he decided to run for president, he tossed the "moderate" and "maverick" guises off as fast as he could and re-invented himself as an extremist nut-job. He votes the Bush-Cheney line-- both domestically and internationally-- 95% of the time. The only Republicans who have more extreme voting records are an assortment of far from the mainstream neo-Confederates like James Inhofe (OK), John Cornyn (TX), David Diapers Vitter (LA), Jeff Sessions (AL), Saxby Chambliss (GA), Jim DeMint (SC), Miss McConnell (KY), Tom Coburn (OK)... the real bottom of the barrel. For this current session of Congress, McCain consistently ranks among the 20 most far right extremists in the Senate-- across the board policy-wise. Anyone who wants another 4 years of what we've just gone through need only examine John McCain's voting record to know who their candidate must be. And one thing anyone who pays any attention will soon find-- McCain is a radical right rubber stamp, but he sure isn't the principled Goldwater conservative he fancies himself-- or once fancied himself.

John Dean, whose latest book, Pure Goldwater was co-authored by Barry Goldwater, Jr. has this to say about the comparisons McCain is always trying to drum up between Goldwater and himself: "By calling himself a Goldwater Republican or Goldwater conservative, John McCain invites the comparison, but that is an error on McCain's part, for closer examination shows that he is not in the mold of Goldwater, notwithstanding his claims (or wishes) to the contrary."

In reading [Matt] Welch's work, McCain: The Myth of A Maverick, I was impressed by the striking differences between these two men, as was Welch. In the following discussion, I have combined my personal knowledge regarding Goldwater with what I have learned from Welch's books to offer an overall assessment.

To begin, Welch reports that McCain seeks to use the federal government to generate greater patriotism and expand the nation's greatness, while Goldwater – knowing the folly of empire and excessively large government – sought to maximize individual liberty and local autonomy.

Welch notes, too, that McCain has no problem whatsoever being a nasty if not a devious s.o.b. when he sees doing so as necessary to serve or accomplish a greater cause. Goldwater, on the other hand, rejected all incivility and dishonesty in public service, and refused to take the low road; for him, the ends never justified any means. McCain, we learn from Welch's book, has wanted to be president since returning from Vietnam, while Goldwater was drafted to be the GOP standard-bearer. Stated a bit differently, McCain's oversized ego provides him strength, while Goldwater curtained his natural strengths by always acting with great humility.

No wonder, then, that when McCain sought to suck up to Goldwater, Goldwater declined to embrace this very different politician. Welch points out that "McCain has spent much ... time puzzling over Goldwater's lack of embrace." Indeed, McCain stated in his memoir Worth the Fighting For when discussing Goldwater, "I admired him to the point of reverence, and I wanted him to like me.... He was usually cordial, just never as affectionate as I would have liked."

This is no surprise to anyone who knew Goldwater. Welch sums it up accurately: "[T]he biggest differences between McCain and Goldwater were so obvious, [and] so destined to keep the two men out of each other's arms, that McCain's inability to identify them borders on self-denial and political tone-deafness." The gulf is wide, and the difference fundamental: Goldwater loved America and its people; McCain loves power, and what it can do for McCain.

Although Goldwater initially supported McCain's run for the Senate, Goldwater knew an opportunist when he saw one, and did not like any of them. We chose not to dwell on the McCain/Goldwater relationship in Pure Goldwater, but we did report how, after assisting McCain win his Senate seat, Goldwater was forced to pull McCain up short for using his good name for fundraising, when McCain had tarnished his own name because of his involvement with the Keating Five. We also included correspondence to shows that McCain is not very good at keeping his word.

To know Goldwater-- as we believe those who read his unpublished private journal will-- is to understand how different these men are, and to see that McCain is cut from very different cloth than Goldwater. Goldwater considered public service a high calling, not an ego trip or power play. McCain was fortunate that Goldwater never publicly exposed him, but Goldwater was too good a Republican to do that and he thought too highly of McCain's father to sink his successor in the Senate.

Had Goldwater publicized what I believe to be his true feelings about John McCain, I doubt McCain would be the presumptive nominee of the GOP in 2008. Goldwater's political perceptions of others have proven extraordinarily prescient, so his reaction toward McCain is telling.