Fred Thompson On Cuban Medical Care

At ABC radio networks, Fred Thompson writes, "The Myth of Cuban Health Care":

You might have read the stories about filmmaker Michael Moore taking ailing workers from Ground Zero in Manhattan to Cuba for free medical treatments. According to reports, he filmed the trip for a new movie that bashes America for not having government-provided health care.

Now, I have no expectation that Moore is going to tell the truth about Cuba or health care. I defend his right to do what he does, but Moore's talent for clever falsehoods has been too well documented. Simply calling his movies documentaries rather than works of fiction, I think, may be the biggest fiction of all.

While this PR stunt has obviously been successful -- here I am talking about it -- Moore's a piker compared to Fidel Castro and his regime. Moore just parrots the story they created -- one of the most successful public relations coups in history. This is the story of free, high quality Cuban health care.

The truth is that Cuban medical care has never recovered from Castro's takeover -- when the country’s health care ranked among the world's best. He won the support of the Cuban people by promising to replace Batista’s dictatorship with free elections, and to end corruption. Once in power, though, he made himself dictator and instituted Soviet-style Communism. Cubans not only failed to regain their democratic rights, their economy plunged into centrally planned poverty.

As many as half of Cuba's doctors fled almost immediately -- and defections continue to this day. Castro won't allow observers in to monitor his nation's true state, but defectors tell us that many Cubans live with permanent malnutrition and long waits for even basic medical services. Many treatments we take for granted aren't available at all -- except to the Communist elite or foreigners with dollars.

For them, Castro keeps "show" clinics equipped with the best medicines and technologies available. It was almost certainly one of these that Moore went to, if the stories in the NY Post and The Daily News are true.

Nothing about this story inspires doubt, though. Elements in Hollywood have been infatuated with the Cuban commander for years. It always leaves me shaking my head when I read about some big-time actor or director going to Cuba and gushing all over Castro. And, regular as rain, they bring up the health care myth when they come home.

What is it that leads people to value theoretically "free" health care, even when it's lousy or nonexistent, over a free society that actually delivers health care? You might have to deal with creditors after you go to the emergency ward in America, but no one is denied medical care here. I guarantee even the poorest Americans are getting far better medical services than many Cubans.

According to Forbes magazine, by the way, Castro is now personally worth approximately $900 million. So when he desperately needed medical treatment recently, he could afford to fly a Spanish surgeon, with equipment, on a chartered jet to Cuba. What does that say about free Cuban health care?

The other thing that irks me about Moore and his cohort in Hollywood is their complete lack of sympathy for fellow artists persecuted for opposing the Castro regime. Pro-democracy activists are routinely threatened and imprisoned, but Castro remains a hero to many here. According to human rights organizations, these prisoners of conscience are often beaten and denied medical treatment, sanitation or even adequate nutrition.

If Moore wants a subject for a real documentary, I would suggest looking into the life of Cuban painter and award-winning documentarian Nicolás Guillén Landrián. He was denied the right to practice his art for using the Beatles' song, "The Fool on the Hill," as background music behind footage of Castro climbing a mountain. Later, he was given plenty of free Cuban health care when he was confined for years in a "mental institution" and given devastating, repeated electroshock "treatments."

There are many other artists and activists who have enjoyed similar treatment. I suspect we'll see movies with sympathetic portrayals of terrorists held in Guantanamo before we ever hear about the torture of true Cuban heroes. Even Andy Garcia's brilliant fictionalized movie about the real Cuban experience, "The Lost City," was given the Hollywood silent treatment. My bet, though, is that we'll hear lots about how Michael Moore showed that Cuba's socialized medicine is better than ours.

So go ahead and start working on the Oscar speech, Michael.

Fred Thompson on K Street

At the Nation, Ari Berman writes:
David Sirota has a good post up about how the media is overlooking Fred Thompson's lucrative stint as a lobbyist. In a profile of the possible presidential candidate yesterday, the New York Times mentioned that during the eighteen year gap between working as a Congressional staffer and winning a Senate seat in 1994, Thompson "took on some lobbying clients." Who those clients were and what the work entailed, goes unmentioned. It's a mere throwaway in the larger narrative of the Reagan Republican returning to save the GOP.

In case you were curious, Thompson represented Westinghouse and General Electric in the deregulation of the savings and loan industry, which eventually led to the S&L crisis of the 1980s. After leaving the Senate in 2002, he was paid $760,000 to protect the British reinsurance company Equitas from asbestos claims. He registered to represent foreign clients such as deposed Haitian leader Jean Baptiste Aristide, Toyota and a German mining company.

Thompson's all-but-announced campaign has downplayed this history. "It being so far back, that's an awful undue pressure, burden for the senator to have to go dragging back through records," spokesman Mark Corallo (who recently worked for Karl Rove) told the Politico when asked to provide more information on Thompson's lobbying days. It may behoove his campaign to dust off those records. In 1994, Thompson's Democratic opponent, Congressman Jim Cooper, called him "a Gucci-wearing, Lincoln-driving, Perrier-drinking, Grey Poupon-spreading millionaire Washington special interest lobbyist." It's not hard to imagine a Republican rival saying nearly the same thing.

Joan Baez Disinvited To Perform At Walter Reed Medical Center

When rocker John Mellencamp performed for the recovering soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Friday night, a couple of things were missing. He squelched his typically blistering rhetoric against the war in Iraq. Also MIA, as it turned out, was folkie and antiwar activist Joan Baez, who says she was disinvited from the event by Army officials.

In a letter that appears today in The Washington Post, Baez says Mellencamp had wanted her to perform with him and that she had accepted his invitation.

The Washington Post reports:
"I have always been an advocate for nonviolence," she writes, "and I have stood as firmly against the Iraq war as I did the Vietnam War 40 years ago. . . . I realize now that I might have contributed to a better welcome home for those soldiers fresh from Vietnam. Maybe that's why I didn't hesitate to accept the invitation to sing for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"In the end, four days before the concert, I was not 'approved' by the Army to take part. Strange irony."

Reached by telephone yesterday at her home in Menlo Park, Calif., Baez, 66, said she wasn't told why she was given the boot, but speculated, "There might have been one, there might have been 50 [soldiers] that thought I was a traitor."

Baez, who said Mellencamp had asked her to sing two songs with him, has been an avowed anti-violence activist ever since she refused to participate in an air raid drill at her Southern California high school. In the '60s, her name became synonymous with the antiwar movement, though many of the protest songs she was famous for performing, such as "Blowin' in the Wind," were covers of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger songs. In 1964 she protested the Vietnam War by refusing to pay 60 percent of her income taxes. In 1968, she married activist David Harris -- the two met in jail following a protest -- and moved with him into his draft resistance commune.

Walter Reed officials did not respond to several requests for comment yesterday. But in an e-mailed statement published Monday on RollingStone.com, spokesman Steve Sanderson said the medical center received the requests for participation by Baez and broadcaster Dan Rather just two days before the concert. (Rather now works for HDNet, which broadcast the Mellencamp concert.)

"These additional requirements were not in the agreement/contract and would have required a modification," Sanderson told the magazine's Web site.

Not so, says Baez's manager, Mark Spector; Mellencamp's management invited Baez to perform in March with the understanding that things could take a while "because of the red tape of Army bureaucracy." Mellencamp's management handled all the arrangements, according to Spector. And up until April 23, when Baez was turned down, everything was "still inching forward," he said: "They'd booked her flight; they'd booked her hotel."

Mellencamp's manager, Randy Hoffman, did not return calls requesting comment, and Mellencamp was ill and unavailable yesterday, according to his publicist. But Mellencamp told RollingStone.com: "They didn't give me a reason why she couldn't come. We asked why and they said, 'She can't fit here, period.' "

"One of my more cynical friends said, 'They let the rats in, why not you?' " Baez said, laughing, referring to a recent exposé of living conditions at Walter Reed.

It wasn't the first time that a performer has been blocked from Walter Reed. In 2004, Oscar-winning actress Patty Duke was refused permission to tour the wards. She'd been scheduled to visit troops as part of an Arts Advocacy Day in Washington. USO officials later said they didn't have enough time to let the patients know that a celebrity would be visiting -- although Michael Jackson was spotted in the ward the same night that Duke would have popped in for a visit.

An HDNet spokeswoman said Rather had planned to interview Mellencamp at the hospital, but "schedule-wise we couldn't make it happen."

After the concert, Baez said, Mellencamp left her a message to say, "I hope you're not mad at me." Her response: " 'Of course not. It's an honor to be turned down by the Army.' . . . But I would have been happier getting in . . . I thought times had changed enough."

So what exactly happened?

The answer -- since Walter Reed's officials aren't talking -- is blowin' in the wind. (Sorry, we couldn't resist.)

Millions Of Chickens Fed Tainted Pet Food

At least 2.5 million broiler chickens from an Indiana producer were fed pet food scraps contaminated with the chemical melamine and subsequently sold for human consumption, federal health officials reported yesterday.

Hundreds of other producers may have similarly sold an unknown amount of contaminated poultry in recent months, they added, painting a picture of much broader consumption of contaminated feed and food than had previously been acknowledged in the widening pet food scandal.

The Washington Post reports:
Officials emphasized that they do not believe the tainted chickens -- or the smaller number of contaminated pigs that were reported to have entered the human food supply -- pose risks to people who ate them.

"We do not believe there is any significant threat of human illness from this," said David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration's chief medical officer. FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach named Acheson yesterday the agency's new "food czar" -- officially, assistant commissioner for food protection.

None of the farm animals is known to have become sick from the food, and very little of the contaminant is suspected of having accumulated in their tissue. Thus, no recall of any products that may still be on store shelves or in people's freezers is planned, officials said.

Nonetheless, 100,000 Indiana chickens that ate the melamine-laced food and are still alive have been quarantined and will be destroyed as a precautionary measure -- as will any other animals that turn up as the investigation continues to expand.

The revelations are the latest in a rapidly widening scandal that started out with reports of a few deaths of pets. It has mushroomed into a major debacle that, even if no human injuries emerge, has exposed significant gaps in the nation's food-safety system.

In the first volley of what Hill watchers expect to be a series of proposed fixes, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) yesterday introduced legislation that would give the FDA the power to order mandatory recalls of adulterated foods, establish an early warning and notification system for tainted human or pet food, and allow fines for companies that do not promptly report contaminated products.

Meanwhile, the FDA expanded the number of plant-based protein products from China on its "do not import" list, pending the completion of further tests on various kinds of glutens, protein concentrates and other products.

At the center of the problem are pet foods spiked with melamine, a mildly toxic chemical that can make food appear to have more protein than it does. Most of the food went to pets, but scraps were sold in February to the Indiana poultry producer, officials said. The contaminated material may have made up about 5 percent of the chickens' total food supply.

That small fraction, and the fact that people, unlike pets, do not eat the same thing day after day, suggests that consumers who ate contaminated pork or chicken would probably have ingested extremely small doses of melamine, well below the threshold for causing health effects, officials said. Experts conceded, however, that they know little about how the toxin interacts with other compounds in food.

Investigators are tracking streams of the contaminated food through several states.

"Our sense is that the investigation will lead to additional farms where contaminated feed may have been fed to either animals or poultry," said Kenneth Petersen of the Agriculture Department Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Officials said the FDA has received 17,000 reports of pets that owners believe were sickened or killed by contaminated food. About 8,000 reports, roughly half of them involving animals that died, have been formally entered into the FDA's tracking system for further analysis.

U.S. investigators have arrived in China, officials said, but inspections of production facilities there have been hampered by the start yesterday of a week-long national vacation.

"Essentially, all the officials are on holiday," said Walter Batts, part of the FDA's China team, adding that one Chinese official had stayed behind to help.

Excerpts From Ronald Reagan's Diary To Be Published

Ronald Reagan thought Alexander Haig was "utterly paranoid," considered former senator Lowell Weicker "a pompous, no good fathead" and was "surprised at how shy" Michael Jackson was. Reagan also refused to talk to his son after Ron Reagan hung up on him, felt that daughter Patti had "a kind of yo-yo family relationship" and was invariably "lonesome" when his wife, Nancy, was out of town.

The Washington Post reports:

A self-portrait of the 40th president -- determined, funny, wistful, at times clinging to his beliefs despite countervailing facts -- emerges from diaries that he faithfully kept from 1981 to 1989, his eight years in the White House. Historian Douglas Brinkley had exclusive access to the five hardback books bound in maroon leather, each page filled to the bottom with Reagan's neat handwriting. Vanity Fair magazine, in its June issue, is publishing excerpts of the book "The Reagan Diaries," edited by Brinkley and due out this month from publisher HarperCollins.

The earnest entries are marked by a spare writing style in which Reagan reduced complicated matters to their essence. In 1982, when he accepted Haig's resignation from the Cabinet and Haig said they had had disagreements over foreign policy, Reagan wrote: "Actually the only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the Sec. of State did."

A 1981 entry on Cuban leader Fidel Castro said: "Intelligence reports say he Castro is very worried about me. I'm very worried that we can't come up with something to justify his worrying."

The former actor was well aware of his public image, and tweaked the Fourth Estate after he deliberately reversed the order of the opening sentences of his welcome at the 1984 Olympics: "The press having a copy of the lines as written are gleefully tagging me with senility & inability to learn my lines."

When his former chief of staff, Donald Regan, disclosed that Nancy Reagan had consulted an astrologer for advice on her husband's travel schedule, the president remained in denial:

"The press have a new one thanks to Don Regan's book. We make decisions on the basis of going to Astrologers. The media are behaving like kids with a new toy -- never mind that there is no truth to it."

The diaries, which have been stored at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., cover the gamut of his presidency, from arms-control negotiations to the Challenger disaster to his meetings with Hollywood figures. Reagan drew on the diaries in writing his 1990 autobiography.

In the excerpts released yesterday, Reagan recounted his March 30, 1981, shooting by John Hinckley in a just-the-facts, "Dragnet" style: "I walked into the emergency room and was hoisted onto a cart where I was stripped of my clothes. It was then we learned I'd been shot and had a bullet in my lung.

"Getting shot hurts."

During the first-year negotiations over his tax cut plan, Reagan wrote that congressional Democrats had made a counterproposal: "They want to include a reduction of the inc. tax rate on unearned income from 70% to the 50% top rate on earned inc. We wanted that in the 1st place but were sure they'd attack us as favoring the rich. . . . I'll hail it as a great bipartisan solution. H--l! It's more than I thought we could get." Reagan never spelled out even mild curse words.

Reagan got his tax package. But when Democrats balked during budget negotiations the following year, Reagan wrote that if he couldn't get a deal, "then I take to the air [TV] and there will be blood on the floor." Two weeks later, he complained: "The Demos. are screaming and lying like bandits charging us with cutting Soc. Security--we aren't touching Soc. Security."

Reagan often took umbrage at media coverage. When The Washington Post's Bob Woodward published a hospital-bed interview with William Casey after the CIA director's death, Reagan wrote: "He's a liar & he lied about what Casey is supposed to have thought of me." And when Soviet authorities charged journalist Nicholas Daniloff with espionage, the president wrote: "The press is obsessed with the Daniloff affair & determined to paint all of us as caving in to the Soviets which they of course say is the worst way to deal with them. The simple truth is we've offered no deal and are playing hard ball all the way."

Emotion comes through strongly in some entries, with Reagan sometimes describing "a lump in my throat." Recounting an Oval Office meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Reagan wrote: "I let the F.M. know I was angry & that I resented their charges that Daniloff was a spy after I had personally given my word that he wasn't. . . . I enjoyed being angry."

After the 1981 assassination of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, whom Reagan had found to be "truly a great man," he directed his ire at Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi: "I'm trying not to feel hatred for those who did this foul deed but I can't make it. Qaddafi gloating on TV, his people jubilantly celebrating in the streets. He is beneath contempt."

By contrast, Reagan passively recorded his reaction to a 1986 staff meeting in which he was told that White House aide Oliver North, national security adviser John Poindexter and other officials were involved in a scheme to divert money from U.S. arms sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan rebels backed by the administration. "North didn't tell me about this. Worst of all John [Poindexter] found out about it & didn't tell me. This may call for resignations."

Even momentous decisions got terse treatment. Writing on the day he nominated Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, Reagan said: "Already the flack is starting & from my own supporters. Rite to Life people say she's pro-abortion. She declares abortion is personally repugnant to her. I think she'll make a good Justice."

Reagan enjoyed meeting the "most likable" Prince Charles in 1981, but tea proved a disaster because the royal visitor refused to drink it: "Horror of horrors they served it our way with a tea bag in the cup. . . . I didn't know what to do."

The meeting with Jackson -- "the sensation of the pop music world" -- came during a 1984 ceremony to honor the singer for contributing to a campaign against drunk driving. "He is totally opposed to Drugs & Alcohol & is using his popularity to influence young people against them," Reagan wrote.

Strains in Reagan's relationship with his children punctuate the diaries. He bristled at Ron's stubbornness:

"He wants to Sign off Secret Svc. for a month. S.S. knows he's a real target -- lives in a N.Y.C. area where the Puerto Rican terrorist group is active. In fact he's on a hit list. He thinks we're interfering with his privacy. I can't make him see that I can't be put in a position of one day facing a ransom demand. I'd have to refuse for reasons of the Nation's welfare."

In another entry, Reagan described how Ron and his wife had "arrived for a family pow-wow. He'd been rude to Nancy on a phone call and when I phoned him about it he said he thought we needed to clear the air. It wasn't the greatest meeting but still I think it opened the door to a closer relationship. He seemed to be carrying water for Patti who has a kind of yo yo family relationship. She's either warmly attentive or very distant & Nancy seems to bear the brunt of it."

Six months later, the problems with his son were continuing: "I don't know what it is with him. . . . I'm not talking to him until he apologizes for hanging up on me."

How did these diaries come to be? The Washington Post reports:

Ronald Reagan kept a diary -- handwritten, blue-inked reflections and observations of nearly every day of his eight years in the White House -- and now it will be published, executives of HarperCollins and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation announced yesterday.

The existence of the five leather-bound volumes embossed with a gold presidential seal was not a secret. Key entries were quoted in the press during the investigation into the Iran-contra arms sale controversy in the mid-1980s: "I agreed to sell TOWs to Iran" -- Jan. 17, 1986. Reagan drew on the diary for his 1990 memoir, "An American Life: The Autobiography," and certain scholars have had access to it over the years.

But very few people have seen most of it. And in an investigative era when written introspections have a way of becoming public -- President Bush recently told journalists that for that reason he declines to send e-mail, even to his daughters -- it may be the first and last contemporaneous daily glimpse of a presidency through the eyes of the president himself.

"We are not aware of any president in the modern presidency who has kept a detailed personal diary," said Fred Ryan, an assistant to the president in the Reagan White House and now chairman of the library foundation. "It literally begins the day he's sworn in as president and it ends with his flight back to California eight years later. . . . It has a very unique type of candor."

The only significant gap is the few weeks after John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Reagan in 1981, said Edmund Morris, one of the few scholars to have read the whole thing and who quoted bits in his 1999 book "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan."

"The diaries are amazingly dispassionate, clear and sequential," Morris said. "They show a man, a chief executive, with an extraordinary degree of objectivity. There's very little vanity and self-congratulation in the diaries."

Nor apparently is there much news.

"No bombshells at all," Morris said. "What you saw with Reagan was pretty much what you get with the diaries."

Still, scholars are greeting publication with anticipation: "We've known of these diaries for a long time, and it'll be interesting to see if they tell us anything that's new," said Lou Cannon, a former Washington Post reporter and author of several books about Reagan, including "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime," his biography. "One of the things all of us who write about Reagan know, no matter how much we thought we knew him, there's always something else to learn."

HarperCollins will publish the diaries next year, said Jane Friedman, president and chief executive. The precise format -- one volume with highlights of the hundreds of pages or multiple volumes containing every word -- has not been decided. The company has not even seen the entire work yet, having been shown only a portion during negotiations in recent weeks, when several publishing houses were vying for the prize.

A person with knowledge of the transaction said HarperCollins is paying "in the high seven figures," but Friedman declined to confirm that. Whatever the price, all the money will go to the nonprofit library foundation.

Ryan said none of the president's words -- possibly a half-million by Morris's estimate -- will be withheld from the HarperCollins editors, but the prose may be subject to a national security review for inadvertent mentions of classified information.

The story of the presidential diaries goes back to the end of Reagan's term as governor of California. "When we left Sacramento, we felt the time passed so quickly, we could hardly remember the eight years," Nancy Reagan said in a statement released by the library foundation. "When Ronnie became president, he wanted to write it all down so we could remember these special times."

He bought the bound journals from a local bookbinder -- Ryan forgets which -- and paid with his own money. By all accounts, he was a diligent diarist, setting aside time every day. The handwriting is wobbly when he is flying by helicopter to Camp David.

Reagan gave the diary to the foundation about a decade ago, with instructions to dispose of it as the foundation thought best. The decision to find a publisher now was not driven by Reagan's death last year. Nancy Reagan and the foundation board "concluded it's a valuable piece of history and this should be available to the public," Ryan said.

HarperCollins secured world publishing rights in the deal, perhaps counting on Reagan's comments on foreign leaders having particular appeal to different audiences. "We feel there will be a tremendous amount of world interest in this," Friedman said.

The first volume of the diary was put on display for the first time yesterday at the library in Simi Valley, Calif.

What does Reagan sound like when he's confiding to his diary? The library declined to release excerpts yesterday. But Morris included some snippets in "Dutch."

"The inauguration was an emotional experience," Reagan wrote at the beginning, according to Morris's book, "but then the very next day it was 'down to work.'

NBC's Pentagon Reporters Confirms Tenet's Account

In a speech before the annual Business Expo at the Rhode Island Convention Center, NBC's chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski confirmed the gist of former CIA director George Tenet's charge that Bush administration officials began talking of including Iraq in any retaliatory attack just hours after the 9/11 attacks, even though all indications pointed to Al Qaeda as being responsible.

The Providence Journal reports:
In his new book, At the Center of the Storm, Tenet says White House and Pentagon officials were determined to attack Iraq long before 9/11, and afterward spun intelligence information to build a case for war with Saddam Hussein.

Miklaszewski said that while the opening anecdote in Tenet's book is wrong - Tenet writes of having an exchange with military consultant Richard Perle at the White House a day after the attacks when, actually, Perle was in France then - the veteran television newsman says Tenet is right about the president's intentions.

"Some things are right on the mark, when he says the Bush administration appeared predisposed to attack Iraq.''

How does Miklaszewski - whom the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce paid $30,000 for his talk - know for sure?

His information, Miklaszewski told an audience of about 200 people, comes from some "off the record'' notes taken in the White House situation room in the hours after the attacks. Miklaszewski said someone gave him the notes two years ago. He did not say who nor explain why, if they were "off the record'' he was now sharing them with an audience.

However, the notes describe, Miklaszewski said, then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld vowing to avenge the terrorist attacks and voicing frustration that attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 and the attack on the Cole, in 2000, had gone unavenged.

Reading from his notes, Miklaszewski quoted Rumsfeld as saying five hours after the terrorist attacks: "My interest is to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time we go after al-Qaida.''

"We ought not to look only'' at Osama bin Laden, Rumsfeld allegedly said before holding a conference call with President Bush. During the conversation, "Rumsfeld says not to focus solely on al-Qaida, consider all those range of options. And the president's response was yes.''

Said Miklaszewski: "So there is no question that Tenet got the time wrong [with meeting Perle in the White House] but there is no question in my mind, and with subsequent conversations I had with officials in the Pentagon, that the Bush administration had their sights set on attacking Saddam Hussein and Iraq long before there was even an effort to gather any evidence … that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack. And all the evidence says quite the opposite.''

Miklaszewski, just the latest celebrity journalist to espouse a personal opinion before the annual business gathering, also shared some inside political analysis that even the most casual follower of the news would have considered stale. Among them: that former First Lady and Sen. Hillary Clinton is "one tough cookie'' who White House staffers feared and that North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is a "loser'' for trying to defend a $400 haircut.

Miklaszewski seemed more comfortable talking about what he knows best: the military and terrorism.

Quoting from a recent public-opinion poll, Miklaszewski said while 50 percent of people still think the Iraq war is a priority, only 18 percent mentioned terrorism as a concern.

"The American people have begun to forget about 9/11,'' he said. "This is a very patient enemy. They can certainly wait out America's attention span and that troubles me.''

The Shadow Candidates

At New York magazine, John Hellemann writes:
For hard-core political junkies, few pleasures compare to those afforded by the official release of presidential fund-raising numbers. Here we have an opportunity to indulge in an orgy of the picayune (How much does Hillary Clinton pay Mark Penn? How much has John McCain spent on flowers?) and also to speculate feverishly about what the buck-raking totals mean for the future of the race. And yet, last week, when the numbers came out, I found myself thinking less about their implications for the crop of announced aspirants than about what they might portend for a pair of current sideline-dwellers—two men whose much-mooted entry into the fray would, as they say, change everything.

The men in question, you might have guessed, are Fred Thompson and Al Gore, both Tennesseans whose political histories are intertwined. It was Gore’s elevation to the vice-presidency that opened up the Senate seat that Thompson claimed in 1994. And it was Thompson who later led the (largely futile) investigation of Clintonian campaign-fund-raising misdeeds, in which Gore, with his cash-trawling trip to a Buddhist temple, had an infamous part. Now, after restorative stints in private life—Thompson focusing on his work as a screen actor and Gore on his as a global-warming Jeremiah—both are hovering in the wings, being begged by advisers and acolytes to take center stage again.

The most fervent pleading appears to be directed at Thompson. Until early last month, his name was rarely mentioned as a conceivable candidate, but then he turned up on Fox News Sunday and declared that he was giving a run “serious consideration.” Suddenly, a Thompson boomlet was inflating faster than the body count in Iraq. In polls of Republican-primary voters, he vaulted instantly into third place; and by early April, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg survey put him in second, behind Rudy Giuliani but ahead of the foundering McCain. Meanwhile, Thompson has stoked the flames: meeting last week with dozens of House Republicans, heading to California next month to speak at a splashy GOP rah-rah dinner—and possibly to schmooze Jay Leno. (Stop the presses!)

Thompson’s rapid ascent in the polls owes much to his celebrity. For the past four years, he has played the hangdog, hard-line prosecutor Arthur Branch on Law & Order and any number of its offspring. His film résumé is long, if unvaried, studded with roles that are mostly variations on one theme: grave authority. (He has played a president, a White House chief of staff, a CIA director, an FBI director, and a wide array of military officers.) Before he began to dabble in acting, Thompson was a lawyer—he served as the minority counsel to the Senate Watergate committee—and his account of his movie and television career has always been charmingly self-deprecating. “When they needed some middle-aged guy who worked cheap, they’d call me,” he once told Sam Donaldson.

Thompson’s thespianism often earns him comparisons to Ronald Reagan—and, as anyone who witnessed up close his 1994 Senate race (as I did) knows, he’s a similarly gifted politician. In that campaign, Thompson’s challenger, Jim Cooper, was a popular conservative Democratic congressman who led the race by nearly twenty points in the early going. But Thompson came up with a genius gimmick: driving around the state in a red pickup truck, delivering speeches from the flatbed in which he assailed his opponent as an elitist who had “never seen the inside of a pickup.” Thompson ultimately won with a staggering 61 percent of the vote.

Critics point out that Thompson’s aw-shucks, shit-kicker populism is more than a little bit phony. That he spent eighteen years as a registered Washington lobbyist, doing the bidding of such high-powered clients as General Electric and Westinghouse, pushing for the passage of the deregulatory legislation that led to the savings-and-loan crisis of the eighties. They note that as a bachelor senator, Thompson developed a reputation for being lazy—for spending more time chasing skirts around the capital than crafting legislation. (“Really lovely women just seem to like Fred,” Senator Orrin Hatch remarked memorably years ago.)

Thompson’s friends say that his skirt-chasing days are behind him. (He’s married now to his second wife, who, according to columnist Robert Novak, is urging him to run.) And heaven knows that faux populism, convincingly executed, has never hurt anyone with the Republican-primary electorate. What matters instead to that electorate is that Thompson is a real-deal conservative. And while his record here isn’t quite spotless—his support of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, in particular, rankles the right—it’s pretty freaking close. He has declared himself to be ardently pro-life and adamantly anti–gun control, and he’s one of the louder proponents of the notion that George W. Bush should (must) pardon Scooter Libby.

More to the point, Thompson’s conservative credentials put to shame those of his putative rivals. Across the country, there’s a palpable sense of dismay on the right with the extant Republican menu: Giuliani is (correctly) viewed as an out-front social liberal; McCain is seen as a hypocrite, a phony, never to be trusted; and Romney is perceived as a patent flip-flopper, who has changed his views on subjects from abortion to gay rights more readily (and less convincingly) than other people change their socks. As for the genuine conservatives in the race, such as Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee, even the fringiest movement voters have (ahem) questions about their viability.

The lack of enthusiasm among Republicans for the current crop of candidates is more than anecdotal. A recent CBS/New York Times poll found that nearly six in ten GOP voters were unsatisfied with the options now before them. Thus does Thompson find himself staring at an opening as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Can anything similar be said of Gore? As recently as six months ago, countless Democrats would have answered yes. With their party still in the minority before last year’s congressional elections, and with Hillary Clinton—despite her muddled position on the war and worrying electability issues—apparently on track to march to the nomination anyway, there was, in many party circles, pining for Gore redux. And, no doubt, this sentiment hasn’t fully disappeared. Gore’s Oscar victory for his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, ratified his status as the leading voice in the emerging green-politics movement. His nomination for a Nobel Prize only further enhanced his stature. His forthcoming book, The Assault on Reason, and his LiveEarth concerts this summer are sure to keep him in the headlines.

Gore, of course, has consistently maintained that his global-warming crusade is not a precursor to a presidential run. As he told me last year, “This is a different kind of campaign—politics is behind me.” Yet Gore is hardly deaf to the entreaties of his fans. He knows that occupying the White House would put him in the most powerful position to advance his cause. And, according to whispers I’ve been hearing, he increasingly believes that a green platform would be a potent one in a presidential election.

Gore, however, is also a man who understands the art of the possible—which brings us back to those first-quarter numbers and their implications. By any standard, the sums raised by the Democratic candidates were astonishing: a grand total of $78 million, more than triple the amount ginned up in a similar span of time in any previous election season. And the totals racked up by Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards were beyond the expectations of anyone sensible, say, a year ago.

What the figures reinforce is the pervasive sense that Democrats, by and large, are happy with their field—and thus no longer craving a savior. Moreover, the success of Obama strikes me as being of particular consequence for Gore. Even more than his leadership on global warming, it was Gore’s prescient opposition to the Iraq war that provided a rationale for his late entry into the race. But now the Democrats possess a plausible candidate who occupied the same early antiwar position—and one who has demonstrated a capacity to go toe-to-toe with Clinton.

But if the results of the first round of the money primary represent a stop sign for Gore, for Thompson they’re a bright green light, flashing go-go-go. Among the three top-tier GOP candidates, only Romney’s $21 million fund-raising total was impressive in the least—and his obvious flaws as a candidate and his failure to catch fire with voters so far are impossible to overlook. (Indeed, whereas Romney once seemed to me likely to be the Pete Wilson of 2008, he now seems poised to become this year’s incarnation of Phil Gramm.) What the Republican first-quarter numbers reflect is a profoundly unsettled field—and a party in which many big-dollar donors are still holding back, perhaps in the hope that a new, fresh face will capture their attention.

Will Thompson try to do so? We’ll know soon enough—likely in the next few weeks. Just recently, though, Thompson returned to Fox News to announce that he had suffered from lymphoma, a condition that he’d kept secret for more than two years. (The cancer is now in remission.) Among insiders, the immediate conclusion was that the disclosure was the clearest indication yet that Thompson will jump in the race. The logic made sense: Why would Thompson go public now, if he planned to remain in private life? But this was still guesswork. Then, last week, his friend and adviser, former senator Bill Frist, told the Weekly Standard, “We thought we had to get it out early, in the sense that he’s going to be announcing.”

Just a slip of the tongue? You never know. But don’t be surprised if you soon start seeing that red pickup truck in Iowa.