— Worried in Weehawken

Dear Worried:

Movements like Americans Elect are just sad. These people have to know that our system has calcified in a way that prevents the birth of “third parties” — even the fact that we call them “third parties” out of habit is an indicator of this. A healthy political system could sustain multiple parties, not just two or three.

There are only two known ways a new national party can form and become powerful enough to win the presidency: 1) Replace an existing party, as happened in the 1850s when the Republicans replaced the Whigs, or 2) rise up like a brush fire out in the districts, a real grass-roots movement (to mix metaphors, sort of) that starts in local elections, rises up through the state legislatures, governorships and then into Congress. That’s a generational project that has never actually happened before.

Americans Elect and their ilk are seeking a messiah, a post-partisan George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Jesus all rolled into one who is capable of leading us into a promised land of world peace bipartisanship, where the parties govern without all this rancor and bickering. (This has also never actually happened before.)

But we’ve seen two examples of what happens when post-partisan pols get elected governor — Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both of those guys were elected by the independent voters in their states. But within months after being elected, both found themselves alternately stonewalled and steamrolled by the partisans in their legislatures. Why? Because neither of them had allies in the legislatures whose political fates were tied to the governors’ success.

The same dynamic would occur with a post-partisan president and two-party Congress, only on steroids. Yes, it would finally bring Republicans and Democrats together, but only in that they would form ad hoc coalitions to oppose the no-party president. We’d end up with even more gridlock and even more triangulation, and a president who would find himself or herself increasingly marginalized by Congress — a lame duck before the first term was half done.

The real problem with our politics today is that the “old” Republican Party should have died in the 1960s. It did die, in a sense, and was replaced, with a big assist by Richard Nixon, by the old Dixiecrat Party — Southern conservatives for whom the main issue is white supremacy. Under Nixon, the Dixiecrats just rebranded themselves as Republicans. They did not change their views or policy positions. In fact, the party of Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln simply adopted their white supremacist goals and objectives. It was a seamless, almost invisible transformation.

What led to this was a shift to the left by the Democratic Party, starting in the North and then culminating under FDR, Truman and JFK and, finally a Southerner, LBJ. The Southern Democrats hated this leftward shift, especially on race, which led to the formation of the Dixiecrats under Strom Thurmond in 1948. But “Dixiecrat” was never going to work as a national brand. It would be hard over time to build a base of Dixiecrats, even among true believers, in Idaho, Maine and Oregon, for example.

Nixon was motivated to bring Southern racists into the GOP because of the numbers. Republican voter registration was on a glide path to Whig-like obscurity. By welcoming in the Dixiecrats, he replenished the voter rolls with new blood.

Imagine the alternative: If Republicans had chosen not to allow the former Dixiecrats in, the white supremacist conservatives would have coalesced around George Wallace’s American Independent Party or some other innocuous-sounding brand. The AIP would have eventually come to control a bunch of state legislatures in the South, followed by governorships and then, who knows, with votes from a coalition with the more moderate GOP, the presidency.

But, in 1974, just two or three years after bringing the Dixiecrats in, Nixon resigned in order to avoid impeachment over his role in Watergate. By all rights he should have gone to prison. If he had, that likely would have been it for the GOP brand.

That didn’t happen, but it did lead to an insurgent outsider in the Democratic Party winning the presidency in the next election. Jimmy Carter is the closest we’ve come to having the sort of post-partisan president the moderate middle yearns for. He did not come up out of the national party apparatus — in fact, they hated him, as we saw when they ran Teddy Kennedy against him in 1980. He had never served in Congress and so had no strong allies or constituents there.

He was a brilliant, principled man with strong, beneficent moral convictions. But he did not go to Washington to play politics, and so he was voted out and replaced with evil incarnate.

Ronald Reagan re-energized the Dixiecrat wing of his party, starting by symbolically holding his first campaign event in Philadelphia, Miss., a random-seeming choice, except that it was the site of the murder of three Civil Rights workers in the early 1960s.

But he also courted a new configuration of the old Dixiecrats, who, in the wake of Nixon’s corruption, were calling themselves the Moral Majority — a take on Spiro Agnew’s reference to the Silent Majority of Americans who supposedly supported the war in Vietnam.

My assessment is that all of these groups: the old Southern Democrats, Dixiecrats, Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, Bush’s base and now the tea party are the same racist 20 percent of the country, who have tried repeatedly to foist their retrograde views onto the nation as a whole. What makes them so successful today is that they are bankrolled with unlimited funding by corporatist oligarchs like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch.

If our system weren’t calcified into this two-party system, the old Dixiecrats would have spun off into the AIP or similar to become a permanent minority, extreme-right party, which would have let the Republicans follow their natural course and become a permanent-minority radical centrist — fiscally conservative, socially moderate — party, which is what folks like Americans Elect want today.

That would have set up an actual third-party system in which the minority centrist GOP would be forced to form coalitions with either the majority Democratic Party or the minority AIP in order to succeed in passing laws and winning the White House.

Because of the Republicans’ zombie-like determination not to die, what we’re left with is the statistically tiny tea party in nominal control of the institutional Republican Party in Washington on one side and a burgeoning number of folks who are natural old school, fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republicans who hate liberals but are too embarrassed by the no-nothings who have taken over the GOP to think of themselves as Republicans, and so are politically homeless.

These “real” Republicans, now called “independents,” are left to swing from left to right from election to election, as they did in 2004, 2006 and 2010. It also allows clever strategists like Karl Rove, in 2004 and, let’s hope, David Plouffe in 2012, to deploy a 50+1 strategy for re-electing presidents who, by all other metrics, should not be re-elected. All they have to do is get their entire base, which is, say, 45 percent of the electorate, to vote for their candidate, as well as 6 percent of the swingsters, resulting in a 51 percent victory.

So what is the solution for the “independents” and American Elects of this world? One way is for the Republican brand to finally become so tarnished by scandal that it has to be put down forever. It didn’t happen under Nixon or George Bush, so that is unlikely. But if it did happen, it would allow formation of a new party for fiscal conservatives/social moderates in which the Dixiecrat-teavangelicals would not be welcome.

OR — wait for it! — we could ditch our musty old 18th-century Constitution, with its antiquated, unworkable three-branch federal system and its bicameral legislature, and replace it with a modern parliamentary system, with a unicameral national legislature and judicial branch, but no presidency and no Senate.

I don’t see any other way for a “third party” to succeed.

Dear Dr. Democrat:

Gobsmacked in Gainesville

Dear Gobsmacked:

I don’t mean to trivialize a good catch phrase but I promise you: It gets better. Or, more accurately, for the GOP, it’s gonna get worse, much worse.

Polling up to Election Day was the weirdest I’ve ever seen, no exaggeration. Huge percentages of swing voters were signaling that they planned to vote for Republicans even though they had a lower opinion of Republicans in Congress than of Dems in Congress. In the one poll I’ve seen since the election on this, these voters are not particularly happy with their results of their efforts. Approval of the GOP has spiked all the way to 38 percent.

So the GOP did not “earn” their win of the House. It was handed to them by swing voters out of petulance — they voted for Gops in their districts to show their displeasure over the economy. Never mind that it took 10 years to dig out of the Great Depression.

Boehner and McConnell are already screwing up big time. They are both truly hacks and they’ve got nothing new up their sleeves. Their strategy is to defeat Obama in 2012 and they’re going to keep at the “party of no” tactic to get it done. They will filibuster everything in the Senate and do a bunch of retrograde stuff in the House — repeal HCR, defund NPR, etc. It won’t take long for this to annoy swing voters. I predict that the GOP’s 38 percent approval will be the highest they will achieve over the next two years.

Boehner faces a new wild card, however — not sure if the tea baggers are going to vote in lockstep with him, and if they don’t, the “party of no” will crumble. Without that weapon, Boehner’s got nothing. The tea baggers will be his biggest challenge — and ironically their election to the House is a direct result of the “party of no” tactic. Now there are about 100 new Michele Bachmanns, Louis Gohmerts, Steve Kings and Virginia Foxxes. These new folks are really going to annoy moderates and energize liberals. I’ll bet half of them are defeated in ‘12, if not by Dems in the general by establishment Republicans in the primaries.

Shorter term, I expect we’ll see the GOP in Congress in utter disarray by summer and collapsing in the fall. If so, they won’t be able to do the bidding of the Koch brothers, et al, who handed them this opportunity, and those big funders will redeploy their donations from the tea bagger astroturf groups back to mainstream establishment GOP causes and candidates. That means Dick Armey will be defunded and Rove’s group and others like it will become the kingmakers.

As for Florida, I promise you: Rick Scott will go down in flames, and his undoing will come from his own party in the legislature. He has no constituency there and when he starts to screw up — and the right-wing self-funding amateurs and celebs always do, because, surprise, surprise, politics is like everything else: experience matters — the sharks in his party in the legislature will smell blood and go after him while the weenies in his party will see disaster looming and abandon ship. By this time next year, he will be a lonely, rejected pol with polling under 40 percent, maybe even under 30 percent. He is going to blow a giant hole in the Florida GOP. No way it won’t happen.

Save this letter. This is not a prediction. It’s a promise.

Yours truly,

Dr. D

- A. Hugh Patriot

Dear Hugh:

Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, one of the heroes of the Tea Party movement, called for a boycott of the Census last year. Now, as Obama prepares to send out 2010 Census forms, many true Tea Party patriots are considering protesting via non-participation.

Here are five reasons Tea Party activists might object to the Census, written in the style of the paranoid emails that our friends on the right send each other. Please feel free to email this list to every Tea Party patriot you know:

1. Obama and the entire Democrat Party support the Census, which is sufficient cause for suspicion among Tea Party activists on all other issues.

2. Many libertarians believe the Census should not be under government control, not just because it is bona fide socialism, but also because, unlike private industry, government is inept. Who knows what mistakes the government has made in censuses over the past two centuries? Libertarians believe the Census should be outsourced to a private company with experience collecting data, like Equifax, Experian or other credit reporting companies, which hardly ever make mistakes.

3. According to World Net Daily, the popular conservative news site, Obama seized control of the Census from the Commerce Department within weeks after he assumed the presidency. The fact that the 2010 Census will be taken under the direction of the Obama White House worries Rep. Bachmann, who has raised concerns that Americans’ personal data could end up in the hands of ACORN. What ACORN might do with it is anyone’s guess.

4. Bachmann also pointed out that the government has used Census information in the past to round up Americans and force them into concentration camps. She cited the example of the internment of thousands of patriotic Americans of Japanese descent by FDR’s Democrat socialist government during World War II.

5. The Obama administration has already put patriots on notice that it will fine anyone who refuses to submit to the Census. However, boycott supporters say that if the government can’t round up 20 million illegal aliens, how could it possibly find millions of real Americans who boycott the Census because they choose to exercise their rights to be free of government intrusion?

For these reasons, true Patriots believe it is crucial that their fellow activists boycott the 2010 Census — so that their voices will not be heard by the career politicians in Washington.

I can’t say I agree with them, but it is fine with me — and better for the country — if the tea party folks leave governing the United States to the smart people.

Butchie Yost

The answer to your first question, Butchie, is yes. And to to the second question: I will be happy to admit I was wrong.

Worried in Walla-Walla

Dear Worried:

If John McCain loses, in his post-campaign career he could be the next George Burns. Like Burns, he’ll probably live forever and could be wheeled out to do his schtick on important occasions.

What’s going here, of course, is two things and both are a bit remarkable because, for the first time since Karl Rove’s boy Steve Schmidt signed on, the campaign is pursuing strategies rather than short-lived tactics designed to win news cycles.

First, McCain is laying the groundwork for losing. If there is a landslide and if he does not rehabilitate his image before Nov. 4, his entire career before this campaign will be trashed by the choice of Sarah Palin and the ugliness that she has unleashed. By showing his inner George Burns at the Al Smith dinner and on Letterman last night, he’s reminding his friends in the media of his old self with the hope they’ll help him regain some of his dignity. (It’s a cinch that they will.)

I expect we’ll see very little of the snarling Grampy character and much more of amiable Mr. Moderate

The other, much more difficult strategy at play is to an attempt to reverse the polls and win the election. This strategy has two opposing parts: First, regain the high ground in his public performances and, second, simultaneously pursue nasty tactics under the radar, like the robocalls going on in Virginia and elsewhere that claim Obama had “close ties” to Ayers.

I expect we’ll see very little of the snarling Grampy character Schmidt and others created and much more of amiable Mr. Moderate, whom he reintroduced in New York last night.

To make this work, they will have to muzzle Palin — their only big draw — by making it increasingly difficult for the press to cover her. Expect to hear her stump speeches softened to pablum and to see her sent to increasingly remote venues. There were reports yesterday that campaign operatives are preventing reporters from interviewing ruffians in her audiences, which is an alarming development, and that they are even using the Secret Service to keep reporters at bay.

It’s hard to say what’s worse here — the fact that the campaign is restricting reporters’ access to crowds or that the reporters are such cattle that they allow themselves to be restrained

The problem with bringing back Mr. Moderate now is that it is probably too late. McCain’s campaign has had the extreme right-wing base sewn up since Palin made her Gidget-at-the-Reichstag speech in St. Paul. Just about every tactic they’ve deployed since then has alienated moderates and driven them to Obama — where, frankly, most of them don’t want to go. There are still plenty of undecideds and squishy lean-Obamas in Florida and Ohio who could change this thing at the last minute. All McCain has to do is give them a rationale to come back to him.

So what we should expect for the next 14 days or so is much more of Mr. Moderate (and less and less of Reichstag Barbie) on the stump, and a simultaneous surge in nastiness underground like the robocalls in red states where Obama is doing well. We probably won’t know the full extent of the dirty tricks until after the election.

It may well work. But if McCain is elected, he’s going to have a problem few presidents other than Bush in his second term have had: He will enter office with the absolute loathing of at least half the citizenry. Worse for him than Bush is the fact that he’ll face a solidly Democratic Congress (although if he wins, there won’t be super-majorities in either house).

There will be no honeymoon for President McCain.

Befuddled in Biloxi

Dear Befuddled:

The coffee can idea is probably not a great long-term solution due to the risk of forgetting where you buried the cans.

The “root cause” of the problem we’re facing is not monetary policy. It’s the fact that we’ve outsourced our manufacturing to Japan, China and the Third World. We don’t make anything. We just reassemble debt into portfolios and provide services to each other.

The solution to this is a gubmint incentivized program to make the U.S. the world’s leader in green technologies. This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. I call it the “Los Angeles” project, which refers to the Manhattan project, the program rushed into existence during World War II to create the nuclear bomb. The objective is not to solve all the energy problems at once but to pick one or two major components — say, cruise ships, trains or airlines — and put $1 billion or whatever into finding a new energy source for that large-scale fossil fuel consumer. A part of the deal with taxpayers for funding the research would be that every component in the new technology would have to be manufactured in the U.S. for set period of time.

The cause of the present crisis is deregulation of banks that allowed them to make unsecured housing loans and then sell that “toxic paper” over and over. We were a good loan bet when we bought our condo in 1999, and our mortgage was sold five times in the first five years. In that same period, our condo doubled in value, even though we have not fixed a single broken tile or done anything other than repair leaky faucets.

There is no upside to letting the U.S. banking system fail. Personally, as a “regulatory capitalist,” I believe that markets that misbehave need to be spanked. It’s time for the mortgage industry to go to the woodshed. And when we’re done with that whuppin’, we should haul the health insurance industry in while the paddle is still warm.

Republicans have gamed the system, as usual, by calling any effort to regulate “socialism.” They don’t mind socialized fire-rescue, law enforcement, education, libraries and military. But regulating financial services and health care is the first step to communism. Right.

What we as a society should learn from this, as Barack Obama said, is that trickle-down economics does not work. (This is a lesson we learned already, at the end of the first Bush administration.) What works is balanced regulatory capitalism.

Mystified in Micanopy

Dear Mystified:

They’re carpet bombing Obama with lies in order to a) keep him and the media distracted as they scurry around refuting lie after lie, and b) shredding Obama’s biggest asset, his charisma. Carpet bombing with lies is how Swiftboating works. John Kerry decided not to engage in the scurrying around, and it lost him the election. It’s also what Rove did to McCain in South Carolina in 2000. It always works.

Republicans have gamed our imperfect system. They have thoroughly discredited the media (often with the media’s help), so that when the MSM debunks one of their lies, GOP voters discount it out of hand. They also carefully craft the lies so that they’re not easily disproven, a la “I never had sex with that woman.”

A currrent McCain-Palin lie is, “Obama requested $1 billion in earmarks this year.” This year, he requested $0. In the four years he’s been in the Senate he has requested about $1 billion, but unlike the other senators he made his request amounts public. Oh, and Palin has requested $495 million in earmarks in her 21 months as governor. None of this really matters on the political stage, however, because the average voter starts snoring after the “B” in billion.

Even the best strategy that doesn’t involve lying and skullduggery has little chance against the dirty politics being played by McCain and Palin.

The best news I saw last week was that Obama had lunch with Bill Clinton. With all his faults and recent missteps, Clinton is better at political strategy than Rove. But even the best strategy that doesn’t involve lying and skullduggery has little chance against the dirty politics being played by McCain and Palin.

The only way to win is to play offense on their sleazy turf — as I like to say, to cram the truth down their throats. Republicans absorb minor defeats. They don’t care if they get caught lying by the MSM or the Dems because they have created an alternative reality among their followers in which their accusers — the Dems and the MSM — have no crediblity. Obama has proved that he can nail them, but what needs to be done is a total annihilation, something that leaves McCain totally discredited.

I don’t know what that is — maybe a zinger a la “You’re no Jack Kennedy” in the debates. Otherwise, this is, as it always has been, John McCain’s contest to lose. The best we can hope for today is that Obama can take all the states Kerry took plus Ohio. That is possible, mainly because the GOP in Ohio is in disarray from scandal, but even there, those scandals are now two years old and fading in voters’ memories.

If the situation were reversed, the GOP would have no compunction about going after our guy’s war record and POW status. In the way of Rove, you attack your opponent’s strength. None of us watched it, but McCain’s intro at the GOP convention was a video about his POW years that was preceded by a video of 9/11 that showed previously banned footage of people jumping out of the upper floors of the World Trade Center. I believe those two pieces of video, in addition to Palin’s personality and the fortuitous fact that the hurricane prevented Bush and Cheney from speaking live, flipped the election.

Another solution that’s being bandied about is to replace Biden with Clinton. That would be an extreme move that the other side would portray as desperate.

Also, Arianna Huffington had some good advice last week on Left, Right and Center. She said that when we focus on Palin, it helps McCain. When we focus on McCain, especially when he is tied to Bush, it hurts him. Still, Palin’s charisma should be more easy to shred than Obama’s — they made a pretty good start on Saturday Night Live, if you’ve seen the clips.

History provides some hope. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro’s highest polling was in the first two weeks after she was nominated. And in 2000, about 30 percent of Republicans said they were so mad about what Rove had done to McCain in S.C. that they would not vote for Bush in November. I don’t have the exact figure in front of me but, if memory serves, when the votes were counted the number of Republicans who voted for Gore or Nader was minniscule, like under 5 percent.

And sometimes fate provides a game changer. The banking crisis today puts the ball in Obama’s court. Conversely, Bush is going all out to have Osama bin Laden captured by November 4, which would probably seal the election for McCain.

Hoping for Hillary

Dear Hoping:

I think Hillary hit it out of the park last night. She certainly won me over. I’m prouder now of the vote I cast in February than any primary vote since 1976. I can’t resist indulging in momentary regret that she (or Biden or anyone with a record of playing hardball) is not the nominee, but I’m eager to do whatever I can to get Obama elected — or, more to the point, to see that McCain is soundly defeated.

The old line that Hillary wouldn’t have gotten this far if she hadn’t been Bill’s wife is a utter fiction. Bill Clinton would be the first to agree that he would have never been elected president without Hillary, so she has as much right to benefit from that success as anyone.

She got into Yale law without Bill Clinton, and Sen. Sam Ervin hired her to be on the Democrat’s Watergate legal team without Bill. She was seriously reluctant to go with Bill back to Arkansas, but once there went to work in corporate law to pay the bills while he sought very low-paying jobs as Arkansas’ attorney general for one term and governor (which paid about $35k per year, if memory serves). While he was gov, she really did reform Arkansas’ educational system and became a popular first lady in an environment that was generally toxic for Dems.

She endured lacerating criticism when they entered the national stage in ‘92 that she was micromanaging his campaigns — an allegation that was fictionalized by Joe Klein in the book and movie “Primary Colors.” If even half of it is true, she did what testosterone-equipped leading lights like Bob Shrum, John Kerry and Al Gore could not do: she beat the Republicans in national elections twice, and did it dancing backwards and in a pantsuit and flats. So to have that accomplishment taken away from her now is just anti-factual.

She then took heat for being the first first lady to move her office into the West Wing, and she took an active role in the government, albeit behind the scenes because the GOP was hounding her day in and day out. She withstood their baseless, politically motivated persecution on Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, You-name-it-gate and the suicide of her friend Vince Foster, as well as her husband’s public humiliation of her, without ever crying or even showing emotion in public, which I can say hands down I could not have done.

Rightwingers like to say she wouldn’t have been elected to the Senate if Bill hadn’t been impeached for lying about Monica. I was paying close attention to that first Senate campaign and she beat Rick Lazario like a drum, and she did it by hard work, going into the Republican enclaves in upstate New York and winning over blue-collar voters. If her previous job had been astronaut, city council member or housewife, what difference would it have made? I think just as credible a hypothetical could be made that if Bill hadn’t been needlessly impeached, she’d be the nominee in the race to replace President Gore right now.

If Hillary can bring home 90 percent of her disgruntled fans — who say what they object to now is constant trashing of Hillary, not by Obama, but by his supporters (a whine that Maddow aptly labeled as “post-rational”) — she can bump up Obama’s numbers by at least a point or two. And since McCain was GAINING in the Gallup daily tracking poll as of yesterday, which is unheard-of when the other party’s convention is underway, Obama could use all the help he can get.

Queasy in Quincy

Dear Queasy:

I share your growing sense of unease.

Obama’s performance at Saddleback is getting a big thumbs down in the media. If you watch it on YouTube, you can probably see their point. He was both thoughtful AND nuanced. Sheesh! I’m convinced that McCain cheated and that “Pastor Rick” was complicit. But now the cheating story is being played as whining from our side, which is seen as evidence that we know our guy lost big time. There is truth in this.

This is similar to the mysterious bulge in the back of Bush’s suit jacket during the Kerry debates. The media is determined to avoid real investigation into the cheating allegations at Saddleback, just as they deliberately turned a blind eye to whatever device Bush was wearing.

Yesterday at the VFW convention McCain repeated his charge that Obama is treasonously bent on “losing” in Iraq in order to win the presidency. He’s getting slimier and more evil by the day. Too bad it is working so well. The polls are still roughly even in aggregate but McCain is advancing into double digits on key issues like energy and among white men, etc.

Can this campaign be saved? My honest assessment is — absent a macaca moment from McCain — we are in serious shit. There’s yet another spate of headlines out there about how Obama’s fixin’ to get ready to get started thinking about really walloping McCain. Any day now. I swear.

The Obama campaign got in “rope-a-dope” mode with Hillary where they went round after round without taking each other down. The Obamas are still in that mode, and I think what stops them from executing a coup de grace against Grampy is the reticence of the candidate to do the ugly deeds that must be done. What saved them in the primaries was a combination of Obama’s charisma — they’d send him into a state, where he would charm the liberal electorate and get them out to vote — along with the countervailing bitter taste of hardball Clinton politics.

If the campaign stays near 50-50 through October, McCain will win it on terror politics, with a classic Rovian 50+1 gambit.

The problem now is that there aren’t any more liberals for Obama to woo, while there is a simultaneous drip, drip, drip of security-conscious (read: terror-addicted) independents moving away from Obama to McCain. If rope-a-dope continues and the campaign stays near 50-50 through October, McCain will win it on terror politics, with a classic Rovian 50+1 gambit. Plus, as long as the vote is close, the Republicans can finagle the ballots in key districts, as they’ve done in the past.

The next big event will be the VP pick. Conventional wisdom has settled on Joe Biden, and the atmospherics seems to be right for him. However, if the warning bells are going off at Obama HQ, as I hope they are, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a big surprise, and, yes, I mean Hillary. Why? Because what I suspected from the outset is true: Obama can’t/won’t do the slash and burn that is required to win. The attack role traditionally falls to the VP, and obviously, Hillary can do the job.

To recap: In the early primary days, I was for anybody but Hillary and settled for Richardson until he screwed up the gay question (Is being gay a choice?) and then I drifted to Biden and eventually voted for Hillary. My prediction in February was that Hillary could beat McCain by a point or two, but Obama would lose to McCain by a point or two. I am queasily standing by this prediction as of today, but hopeful that things will change.

If Obama’s internals show him losing independents as badly as I think he is, he’d have nothing lose by putting Hillary on the ticket and would gain in solidifying the base among, shall we say, Scots-Irish Dems.

That being said, I suspect the conventional wisdom is right and Obama will choose Biden. The challenge presented by Biden is that he talks too damn much, which contributes to his status as one of the most gaffe-prone pols on the scene.

On the other hand, Biden has good foreign policy creds and solid liberal bona fides, so he’s acceptable to a wide range of folks along the lefty spectrum. He’s as good as anyone I can think of to sit in the “heartbeat away” spot.

After naming the VP comes the convention. I believe Obama approved the roll call for Hillary because a) that’s how it’s been done since the 19th century — but not in the last few cycles because the vote was not close; the last Dem roll call was Jerry Brown against Clinton in 1992; the last time a candidate was picked in a roll call was Ford in ‘76), and 2) Obama has made a deal with Hillary that she will spend the fall bringing her supporters in line. I believe she will be the point person on exposing McCain’s stand on choice.

I keep hearing references in the conservative media about Barack Obama’s alleged use of drugs, but I read his book, “Dreams of My Father,” and though it seemed his friends were getting caught up in drugs, he went another way, though he did admit to drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. What’s the truth? Is Obama just another black drug addict?

Scared Straight

Dear Scared:

Smells like swiftboating to me. I watch C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” every morning to get a sense of what’s burbling on right-wing radio without having to sully my ears by listening to it.

If the right-wing callers to C-SPAN this morning are a gauge, the new meme is Obama’s drug use. One caller read a passage from one of Obama’s books (supposedly) it which Obama said he was going to try heroin, but the hand of the junkie who was going to hit him up was shaking so bad he didn’t do it. Another caller asked if we shouldn’t be concerned that Obama was still addicted to coke. A few calls later, someone seconded the question about addiction. Another caller said she’d heard from a missionary in Africa that Obama was sending U.S. campaign donations to his cousin’s “tribe” in Kenya.

One indicator that it is a concerted effort (that this is a new theme being pounded by Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz and/or Sean Hannity) is that these callers were off topic. The topic was free speech, ironically, but in the “rules” of the show, you’re supposed to stick to the topic or the host will hang up on you, unless it’s an “open phones” segment, which is usually in the last half-hour.

A Democratic caller finally came on and presented a lot of what is known about Bush’s coke problem toward the end of the half-hour.

I haven’t read Obama’s books but two colleagues in my practice have, and neither of them remember a reference to heroin.

Just as John Kerry really did lead operations under fire and saved the life of one of his men, Al Gore never said he invented the Internet and the Clintons lost $100,000 on Whitewater at a time when Bill’s annual salary as governor was $35,000, reality is irrelevant to the racists, feeble-minded rednecks and Christian nationalists for whom the lies about Obama’s drug use and cousins in Kenya are directed.

There’s very little we can do about that. The damage is done at the margins, and only works in a tight race.

McCain is teetering on becoming Bob Dole Jr. But until we see signs that a landslide similar to ‘96 — Clinton 49/Dole 41 — is in the offing, we have to assume the GOP will take all the red states Bush took in 2004. (My oft-stated theory is, where there are large concentrations of Republicans, you’ll find large concentrations of racists.)

People who identify as Dems or Gops are probably paying close attention already. It’s them darned Independents who tend to wait and focus at the end. If these lies are allowed to take hold, they become “facts” that can turn public opinion in the fall.

Kerry’s biggest mistake was saying he voted for the war before he voted against it. His second mistake was not slamming back on the Swiftboat ads.

If I were Obama, I’d assemble a rapid response team to take these things down in a very timely fashion. He’d need someone with incredibly high credibility to do it.

One name comes to mind: Oprah.

Dr. D.