PostPartisan

How desperate are Republicans? If their political anxiety correlates with their shamelessness, very.

Last week, the House GOP released a web video that flashed images of President Obama associating with the King of Saudi Arabia and, yes, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus -- spliced between scenes of angry-looking foreigners burning American flags and a balaclava-clad insurgent firing a rocket propelled grenade. Yesterday, the Senate’s Republicans took their turn at alarmist political aspersioneering, releasing this web video on Obama’s plan to close the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay.

After showing the names and scary looking pictures of some of Gitmo’s most unsavory prisoners, the video cuts to a CNN anchor asking, “where are they going to go?” -- and then it flashes shots of detention facilities in military bases in the Lower 48. On screen, road signs tell us who’s really going to get creamed: Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia -- even Kansas! (What, did Lamar Alexander, who produced the ad, run out of swing states to scare?) “Terrorists,” the video warns in bold letters, “Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You.”

This isn't exactly new territory for the GOP (See Rove, Karl). And it's hard to imagine that the Republicans can squeeze much more political utility out of the Democrats-are-weaklings line -- or at least not enough to diminish Obama's sturdy popularity or distract from the all-consuming economic crisis. At the White House’s daily briefing this afternoon, anyway, Robert Gibbs, the president’s spokesman, didn’t give the impression that Obama or his attorney general are earnestly appealing to congressional Republicans to come around on Guantanamo.

Still, sadly, the threat of terrorists coming to a backyard near you has a bit of traction. More and more lawmakers are making noise about keeping Gitmo transplants out of their districts. And not just Republicans. David Obey (D-Wis.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is just one of the prominent Democrats saying that Obama won't get any money to move the prisoners until legislators get more information on the relocation process.

But just because some in Congress are acting worried doesn’t mean they should be. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure just what these ads are saying we have to fret about. A prison break? Though there are some prisoners at Gitmo who deserve to be let go -- something even the Bush administration admitted -- Obama isn’t going to release the worst-of-the-worst detainees the ad features onto American streets. Indeed, the GOP’s video even shows the heavy gates and high-security features of the facilities in which these prisoners would likely reside. Recently admitted al Qaeda agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri lived in a naval brig in South Carolina for nearly six years, and nearby Charleston is still intact. Colorado’s federal Supermax prison already holds Ramzi Yousef, the World Trade Center bomber, Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, and Richard Reed, the guy who tried to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb. The state’s no less safe for it. There’s a reason they call it Supermax.

Of course, the Republicans are trying -- poorly -- not just to stir up a little not-in-my-back-yard-ism, but also to imply that the nastiest of Gitmo’s denizens will eventually get released into your cul-de-sac instead of languishing in your local Supermax or military base. The rest of us should find the GOP’s latest video appeal a little insulting -- and Congress should cut back on the NIMBYist legislating, too.

The juxtaposition of Justice David Souter’s early (as these things go) retirement at age 69 and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter’s strategic party shift in hopes of winning a sixth term -- he’d be 86 and 11 months when it ends -- has gotten me thinking about the differences between those who crave power and those for whom it seems immaterial.

The man -- or woman -- who chooses to walk away from it all is not a typical Washington type. I don’t share Souter’s antipathy for this city, but it is unavoidably true that the capital is a place where worth, and too often self-worth, is measured by job description. There is something sad and grasping about calling up a lobbyist or think-tanker whose assistant has clearly been instructed to answer the phone, “Senator Smith’s office,” or “Ambassador Jones’s office.” If you have spent your entire life climbing the ranks to the chairmanship, giving it up voluntarily is nearly unimaginable.

So Souter’s decision to chuck it all at a relatively young age -- Justice John Paul Stevens is going strong at 89 -- comes as a shock, especially to those without the luxury of life tenure.

What moves history? Is it the power of ideas? Or is it the power of objective forces like money, for example, deployed behind ideas no more complex or sophisticated than simple self-interest? Jack Kemp, the former Republican congressman and vice presidential nominee who died of cancer over the weekend, is rightly praised -- by Michael Gerson in the Post, among others -- for believing in ideas. Gerson shrewdly observes that this helps to explain Kemp’s remarkable geniality. He was a leading illustration of the maxim that while the left is looking for heretics, the right is looking for converts. But he also was amiable by nature, which is why he made such a lousy vice presidential candidate.

As a rule, there are two ways to get a reputation in Washington for being “thoughtful,” neither of which requires having a lot of ideas rattling around in your head. In fact one method is to avoid, as much as possible, any ideas beyond a general desire for everyone to sit down in good faith and a cooperative spirit and reason things out.

Alternatively, you can simply be “unpredictable.” The more you can surprise people with your position on an issue, more thoughtful you are considered to be. This technique has served Arlen Specter, to choose a currently newsworthy example, well over the years.

Jack Kemp was not unpredictable, and he did not strike poses of moderation and statesmanship. He might be accused of a third device: Like Gary Hart on the Democratic side, he was deeply committed to the idea of ideas, as opposed to ideas themselves. And if he mentioned, say, Say’s Law (a famous principle of economics), he was likely to offer up the author’s full name -- Jean-Baptiste Say -- as a way to establish his bona fides.

But Kemp did have one idea that he was introduced to in the mid-1970s, stuck with, and saw triumph.

It seemed as if Jack Kemp was capable of only one speed: enthusiasm. He was as sunny and ebullient a politician as we have produced. Before anyone was talking much about compassionate conservatism, Kemp insisted that conservatives not only needed to show that they cared about the poor, particularly African Americans. He believed, devoutly, that conservatives had to be engaged with the marginalized and the left-out as a matter of principle and obligation.

Politics in recent years has often been a breeding ground for hatred. Kemp was the opposite of a hater. He was all positive energy. If there was one thing he did hate, it was racism. Over and over, he tried to get his party to reach out to African Americans -- not simply the more affluent in their ranks, but the very poor whom he really did believe would benefit from policies geared toward enterprise, including supply side tax cuts, enterprise zones and tenant ownership of public housing. He was serious about this mission when he served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

I got to know Kemp when I covered his ill-fated 1988 presidential campaign. I couldn't help but appreciate a politician who really did believe what he said and thought politics should be about ideas -- and that it should be fun.

You know, the more I hear Republican National Committee Chairman Michael "That's How We Roll" Steele pepper his pronouncements with hip-hop parlance, the more I'm reminded of those ill-fated commercials for Chrysler starring the unlikely duo of former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca and rapper Snoop Dogg. It was part of the car company's strategy to reach out to potential urban customers. And look how well that worked out.

Here's Steele yesterday on "Morning Joe," with a metaphor about how northeastern Republicans wear their hats backwards "because that's how we roll."

Now, take a look at the Iacocca-Dogg commercial (after the jump).

Earlier today, I called Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), hoping to get her statement of contrition for her stunningly ignorant comments about the murder of Matthew Shepard.

While arguing against passage of the hate crimes bill yesterday, Foxx said:

I also would like to point out that there was a bill -- the hate crimes bill that's called the Matthew Shepard bill is named after a very unfortunate incident that happened where a young man was killed, but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of a robbery. It wasn't because he was gay. This -- the bill was named for him, hate crimes bill was named for him, but it's really a hoax that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills.

A hoax?

Mario Cuomo once observed that politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. That truth was on display at tonight’s prime-time press conference, in which a president renowned for his soaring rhetoric found himself instead mired in the prosaic. He instructed Americans to wash their hands, cover their mouths when they cough and keep their sick kids home from school. That assignment accomplished, President Obama moved on to the auto companies, asserting that “GM has a lot of good product there,” although, as he acknowledged toward the close of the hour, “I’m not an auto engineer. I don’t know how to create an affordable, well-designed, plug-in hybrid.”

Not exactly "we are the change that we seek” lyricism.

Running for president is about sketching a vision; being president is about executing -- not just the plans you and your advisers had in mind but, as George W. Bush learned the hard way, with Hurricane Katrina, also the tasks that fate throws your way. The past few weeks have reminded me of the old Monty Python line “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Floods in Fargo, piracy off the Somali coast, swine -- sorry, H1N1 -- flu; nobody prepared position papers on these during the campaign. Nor on the Spanish Inquisition, for that matter.

President Obama's words on torture at his "100 days" news conference were, to my ears, sharp and unequivocal. What he didn't tell us is what happens next.

He said bluntly, without leaving any wiggle room, that waterboarding is torture. While he didn't directly answer the question of whether the Bush administration had "sanctioned torture," his moral clarity left listeners with only one inference to draw. He was particularly aggressive in refuting the "Jack Bauer" argument -- that torture may be unpleasant, but it produces quick and vital results. Obama said that interrogators "could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that are consistent with our values, in ways that are consistent with who we are." He said he believes this just as strongly even after reading the intelligence memos that Dick Cheney says prove that the torture was justified. The president even cited Churchill, which politicians tend to do when they're in no mood to discern between shades of gray.

But now what?

A few things became clear quickly at President Obama's news conference tonight. First, the administration really is pushing hard to get his program labeled the "New Foundation." Obama used that magical phrase right off in his opening statement. It's a reach for history: First came the New Deal, then the Fair Deal, then the New Frontier, followed by the Great Society. Labels of this sort seem to be a Democratic thing (although Teddy Roosevelt may have kicked it all off with his Square Deal). Bill Clinton tried for a while to sell the idea of a New Covenant, but it didn't take off.

The New Foundation has a couple of things going for it, notably that it can have both an innovative edge and a conservative feel. It means real change, since it implies rebuilding from the bottom up -- changing the way we organize our financial system, provide health care, use energy and educate ourselves. But building a foundation is the most basic and cautious act of all. Architects rarely brag about the foundations of their buildings. Foundations aren't about glitter. They're about the essentials.

Still, I wonder if the New Foundation has the same crisp feel of the New Deal or the romance of the New Frontier. For one thing, it's a mouthful of syllables. It does sound a little bit like a reference to a basement. I'm still not convinced it will stick.

I've received a number of emails questioning why some pro-life Catholics oppose President Obama's invitation to give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree at Notre Dame when they didn't oppose George W. Bush's 2001 speech there, given Bush’s support of the death penalty, which the church mostly opposes.

It's a legitimate question with a complicated answer. First, a few qualifiers and disclaimers: I am not Catholic. I do not speak for Catholics. I am pro-life, but support legal protection of abortion, preferably with strict limitations. I am anti-death penalty. I oppose state power to take human life except in self-defense because one mistake is one too many.

What else? I'm against torture. And factory farming, baby-seal masscres and gratuitous violence in movies and real life. I will shoot to kill, however, if you enter my house with intent to do harm.

Now to the question, briefly.