Late last year, I spoke with a number of Republican Party activists about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. What would she need to do to have a chance in 2012? Could she be the conservative star that the media seemed to think?

The answers were more or less the same. She was a clear talent, they said, with a lot of drawing power. There was a lot of potential there. But she still had to prove herself as a candidate. In practice, that meant doing the hard work that she had never done before John McCain picked her as a running mate--what conservative activist Richard Viguerie called the "rubber-chicken circuit" of bad Lincoln Day GOP dinners in the primary states of Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire.

Eight months later, Sarah Palin may be taking their advice, or choosing to bow out of elected politics for good. In a hastily called news conference at her house in Wasilla Friday, Palin announced that she would resign the governorship in a few weeks to "take a stand and effect change." Just what that will mean she left unclear, though she left little doubt that she would try to continue in public service. "We know we can effect positive change outside of government at this point in time," she said, in a rambling, rapid-fire address, that included references to wounded soldiers, "political bloodsport," and her background as a high school basketball player.

She compared herself to a point guard who being picked away at by a "full court press" from "the national level." Palin explained how that metaphorical point guard should respond. "She drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her head up because she needs to keep her eye on the basket, and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win," Palin said. "And that is what I am doing, keeping her eye on the ball that represents sound priorities. Remember they include energy independence, and smaller government, and national security and freedom. And I know when it's time to pass the ball for victory."

(more...)

The constitution doesn't require much participation from the American people. It protects their rights -- free speech, to bear arms, a fair trial, etc – but it doesn't even make voting mandatory. The one action it does require is for citizens to stand up and get counted, which is why every 10 years the census bureau floods the postal system with millions of forms and deploys an army of counters.

However seemingly straight forward, the census has always been a political animal. Congressional districts live and die off of its results and control of the counting is a much guarded power – witness the concern when President Obama named Republican Senator Judd Gregg to head the Commerce Department, home of the Census Bureau. Still, lawmakers, servants of the constitution, are usually known to uphold its much revered instructions. Not this year.
(more...)

A dispatch from Swampland London correspondent Catherine Mayer:

Last night Richard LeBaron, America's Chargé d'Affaires ad interim in London, hosted the annual Independence Day shindig at Winfield House, the sumptuous ambassadorial residence that has stood empty since the departure in February of the last U.S. envoy to Britain, Robert Tuttle, a Bush appointee. As waiters plied guests with Champagne and canapés including miniature hamburgers and cornbread muffins, a few ingrates repaid LeBaron's hospitality by disparaging his incoming boss, Louis Susman. Brits have been less than enthusiastic about Obama's pick of former Citigroup banker and top election fundraiser Susman for the plum London job. They had expected Obama's much touted promises of change to include a change to the Bushian habit of rewarding money men with key postings, and also interpreted the nomination of the low-profile Susman as a snub to the special relationship.

According to today's front-page story in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, Brits are not alone in their disappointment. The article, headed THE DOLLAR DIPLOMAT – OBAMA WANTS TO RECOMPENSE FUNDRAISER WITH BERLIN POST, says that Obama intends to install Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs banker and Democratic Party national finance chairman, as U.S. ambassador to Germany. “If there is a world ranking of the most valued allies according to U.S. President Barack Obama, then France, Britain, Germany and Japan occupy the top slot,” the article begins, adding snarkily: “Valued in the sense that Obama wants to fill the ambassador posts in these countries with men who above all have distinguished themselves through their financial generosity and ability to raise funds during the election.”

The article claims that the State Department is critical of Obama's choices and adds that an announcement on Berlin has been delayed because Murphy “himself a multi-millionaire, has to agree to a painstaking examination of his finances and tax returns” because Obama has already lost too many nominees just before Senate confirmation after irregularities emerged. Murphy's finances are very complicated, says the paper, adding that this explanation for the delay comes from "sources around Hillary Cinton, and not without Schadenfreude."

The New York Times puts its story about the Washington Post controversy on Page One, with a headline that calls it a "Pay-for-Chat Plan;" the Washington Post puts its own version back in the Style Section (Page C1), and calls them "Corporate Dinners."

I know I'm a bit dim, but it sounds to me like the President confirmed my story about his church preference in a conversation today with a group of Catholic reporters.

We have attended services at Camp David every weekend that we're there. I will tell you, by the way, that it is a wonderful little congregation; the members of Camp David who are up there consistently have their families there, they've got a Sunday school. The young chaplain there, Chaplain Cash, is terrific--as good of a--delivers as powerful a sermon as I've heard in a while. I really think he's excellent.

So we will continue to go to services there. How we handle church when we're here in D.C. is something that we're still figuring out. And I think that in the second half of the year we will have made a decision. We may choose, rather than to join just one church, to rotate and attend a number of different churches.

So, the plan is for the First Family to continue going to services at Camp David and to figure out what to do on weekends they spend in D.C., although they're leaning toward not joining a local church but instead visiting a handful of different churches. They haven't yet arrived at a "formal" decision, the White House has been careful to note. But since Obama also spoke at length about the challenges involved with becoming regular members at a local church, it doesn't sound as if that's an option he's eager to pursue right now. "We are resigned now to the fact that we change the atmospherics wherever we go," he said. "It may be more sensible for us to get in and out on any given Sunday and not try to create blockades around places where we attend."

And where can you get in and out on any given Sunday? The chapel at Camp David. Just sayin'.

Hilary Hylton, our reporter in Austin, passes along the following:

Famous/infamous (depending on your point of view) Travis County DA
Ronnie Earle, now retired, has filed papers with the Texas Ethics
Commission as the first step to running for as a yet-to-be-announced
statewide office. Supporters have been urging him to run for the
Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2010. While most followers of
the political scene outside Texas remember him as the man who helped
bring down Tom DeLay (and those cases are still ongoing!), in Texas he
is remembered also for prosecuting then State Treasurer now US Senator
Kay Bailey Hutchison, who has suggested she may run for the Republican
nomination against incumbent Gov. Rick Perry. It is thought Hutchison
would attract moderates to the primary and perhaps some Democrats
anxious to defeat the conservative Perry . (No party affiliation
necessary to vote in Texas primaries.)

Earle's case against Hutchison fell apart, and he announced an
embarrassing courtroom withdrawal on the first day of trial that led
to an immediate acquittal and helped catapult Hutchison to the
Senate. But his entry could be payback, as Harvey Kronberg, editor of
the Quorum report, an Austin political newsletter, writes this
afternoon:

"If Earle does run for Governor, the prospect of Democrats and
independents crossing into the Republican primary diminishes by some
unknown order of magnitude...Sparks on the Democratic side probably
helps Perry. It would be one of life's great ironies if Earle did in
the Republican primary what he could not do in the court room – beat
Hutchison."

The prospect of Ronnie Earle on the ballot would supercharge
Republicans inside Texas and beyond with maybe Tom DeLay leading the
fundraising fight?

UPDATE: Commenter Yutsano wonders what this might mean for the prospects of Houston Mayor Bill White. Hilary replies: (more...)

Walter Shapiro, over at Politics Daily, clearly summarizes the political situation President Obama inhabits, now that the vertiginous economic collapse seems to have slowed, and the long period of economic agony has begun, with continued job losses projected for many months to come. The president still needs to buy himself time with a lot of that commodity he turned into a political brand: hope.

In politics, though, it is hard to get reelected on the slogan, "It Could Have Been So Much Worse." No president can face increasing jobless numbers and say cheerily, "The good news is that it's only a terrible recession – and someday we'll be over it." That is why the true test of Obama's electoral mandate is how successfully he weathers the economic doldrums that now seem likely to last until the 2010 congressional campaign season begins in earnest. How long will voters continue to believe that America is on the "right track"?

But hope (both in politics and in everyday life) is a quality that defies neat statistical analysis. In 1932, in the depths of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's campaign song was not the mournful "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" but the effervescent "Happy Days Are Here Again." There was nothing happy about bread lines – and the voters knew it. But part of the art of political leadership is the ability to buy yourself time. That will be the challenge facing Obama as the unemployment rate heads for regions unseen since the days of FDR.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has been struggling in the absence of ailing Chairman Ted Kennedy, has put out a full version of a health reform bill that solves many of the problems of its earlier versions and trial balloons. This amounts to enormous progress, largely creditable to Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, who has taken the helm of the committee in Kennedy's stead.

Where the earlier, incomplete version had been estimated to add $1 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, the new one has pared that cost to $611.4 billion. It also does a lot better job of covering the uninsured; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, combined with the Medicaid expansion expected under the bill that the Senate Finance Committee is working on, this legislation could assure that 97 percent* (Republicans dispute this figure; please see update.) of the U.S. population (excluding illegal immigrants) has coverage.

The full bill is here, and there's a summary in this letter to their colleagues from Kennedy and Dodd. Two components of the bill are worth a closer look: the play-or-pay provision that would require employers to provide health benefits to their workers, and the proposal for a government-run "public plan." (more...)

A statement just released from his would-have-been publisher:

Sentinel has agreed to release Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina from his contract to write a book about fiscal conservatism, which was to be called WITHIN OUR MEANS and was scheduled for publication in March 2010.   This is a mutual decision.   We wish Governor Sanford the best.

I have been a bit exhausted by most of this post-post-postmortem of the McCain campaign, relitigating old divisions that only really matter now on the off-off-off chance that Sarah Palin is the Republican standard bearer in three years. But I do find these old emails, published by CBS News, rather riveting.  The whole thing starts when Palin, fresh on the campaign trail, gets upset about the discussion over her husband Todd's past membership of a political party that advocates Alaskan secession. She writes an email to top staff:

"Pls get in front of that ridiculous issue that's cropped up all day today - two reporters, a protestor's sign, and many shout-outs all claiming Todd's involvement in an anti-American political party," Palin wrote. "It's bull, and I don't want to have to keep reacting to it ... Pls have statement given on this so it's put to bed."

Schmidt writes back within five minutes.

"Ignore it," he wrote. "He was a member of the aip? My understanding is yes. That is part of their platform. Do not engage the protestors. If a reporter asks say it is ridiculous. Todd loves america."

(more...)