This may be the nowiest winter on record (and seriously, how the hell are we getting more snow than Syracuse?), but on the bright side, Opening Day is less than seven weeks away.

Everyone seems to be assuming that Mike Huckabee is the presumptive nominee for Vice President, and that McCain needs to pick him to shore up his conservative base. It doesn’t seem so clear-cut to me, and putting Huckabee on the ticket is a pretty mixed bag:

1. Mike Huckabee isn’t ready for prime time. One can’t imagine him being president any more than one could imagine Dan Quayle or Jack Kemp being president. Advantage not-Huckabee.

2. Huckabee might — might — increase the Republican vote in must-win (for them) states like Missouri, Arkansas, and West Virginia, which may otherwise vote Democratic this cycle. Advantage Huckabee.

3. The rich people who run the GOP don’t really like Mike Huckabee. Then again, they don’t really like John McCain either, so their ability to control things this time around is much smaller than usual. Toss-up.

What McCain needs is someone who can reinforce his rapidly disappearing moderate credentials, and who shares his totally insane foreign policy views without sounding like Buck Turgidson. Fortunately for him, the man who best personifies these views on the national scene has already endorsed McCain — Joe Lieberman.

As an added bonus, he already has experience at running for vice-president, and at winning vice-presidential debates for the Republicans.

The decision to stop publishing a print version of the Capital Times, save for a free news and op-ed section every Wednesday and a free culture section every Thursday, seems to bode ill for the future of Madison’s news industry.

The Capital Times is a solid little newspaper, and I hope their online-only format allows them to succeed. But they’ve been trapped in a more vicious manifestation of the same feedback cycle that has decimated many other bigger and more prestigious newspapers. Declining circulation results in fewer resources, which means less muckraking and in-depth reporting. That makes it hard for them to provide news and information that can’t be found elsewhere, and so more people allow their subscriptions to elapse.

Technological changes have made it unnecessary for local newspapers to carry truncated wire reports of national and world news, and no one will miss those. But what can’t necessarily be found elsewhere is comprehensive coverage of state and local government, local sports, etc. The New York Times doesn’t care about the ups and downs of the UW’s football recruiting, or the details of a state smoking ban, or who’s bribing who in the state legislature.

Investigating those stories takes work. No one has yet discovered a business model that can pay for the reporters and the shoe leather and the time commitments necessary to demand transparency in the state house and on the city council, while giving away their content for free on a website.

That’s not to say it can’t be done, but in a business with tight margins and little room for error, a successful newspaper can no longer be a jack-of-all-trades. It will have to know its market, marshall its resources carefully, and stay focused on the things that make a local newspaper worth having.

When you lose the delegate count (845-836), the popular vote (50.2% - 49.8%), and the number of states (14-8), it’s preposterous to send your spokesmen out to claim “victory”.

On a broader level, when I hear Hillary Clinton speak for herself, answering question after question in town hall meetings with detail and precision and intelligence, I like her. When I hear Mark Penn, Terry McAuliffe, and the rest of her campaign staff, though, it just reminds me why I’m far more excited about the idea of an Obama presidency.

George Bush last week:

Just as we trust Americans with their own money, we need to earn their trust by spending their tax dollars wisely. Next week, I’ll send you a budget that terminates or substantially reduces 151 wasteful or bloated programs, totaling more than $18 billion. The budget that I will submit will keep America on track for a surplus in 2012. American families have to balance their budgets; so should their government.

George Bush this week (” Bush Unveils $3.1 Trillion Spending Plan “):

The Pentagon’s proposed budget, for instance, is $515.4 billion, meaning that military spending would be the highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II. And the White House’s plans for trimming Medicare and Medicaid have also been previewed. […]

Mr. Bush’s proposed budget, the first in the nation’s history to exceed $3 trillion, foresees near-record deficits just ahead - $410 billion in the current fiscal year, on spending of $2.9 trillion, and $407 billion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 […]

As a share of the economy, federal debt held by the public is expected to reach 39 percent of the gross domestic product in 2009, up from 33 percent in 2001.

The party of fiscal responsibility. They say so themselves.

Via the Thoughtful Conservative, it’s the Wisconsin version of Super Bowl trivia (no cheating!):

Which team won Super Bowl I?

Which team had the MVP in Super Bowl I?

Which team won Super Bowl II?

Which team had the MVP in Super Bowl II?

Which team won Super Bowl XXXI?

Which team had the MVP in Super Bowl XXXI?

John McCain usually does better than any other Republican in head-to-head match-ups against both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The polls have shown this repeatedly for many months, but I still have a hard time believing it. Is McCain really the GOP’s strongest general election candidate? To me he looks like the next Bob Dole, albeit with a devoted media cult determined to beatify him at every opportunity.

He’s a poor speaker whose greatest strength is his reputation for straight talk. He’s old and grumpy. He’s disliked by the base of his own party because of esoteric disagreements with conservative doctrine, but they are disagreements that don’t obviously appeal to independent voters, either (constitutionally dubious campaign finance reform is not among the great issues of the day). He has nothing at all to say about health care or the economy. His campaign consists of only one idea, namely that the war in Iraq is a great idea, and that the solution to its obvious pointlessness is to make it an even bigger war.

Romney, on the other hand, is a moderate, pragmatic businessman, who in a general election can credibly claim the heritage of respectable, sober, Midwestern Republicanism, while distancing himself from the craziness of Bush and the congressional GOP. He’s trapped in a time warp from a generation in which the GOP was comprised of doctors and small businessmen from Michigan and New York, who often had good relationships with organized labor, who believed in environmental protection, and whose support came from socially moderate folks in the middle and upper-middle class (George Bush has done his best to turn these voters into Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents).

All in all, a Romney candidacy would give the GOP an opportunity to avoid transforming themselves into a minority party whose support comes almost exclusively from really rich people and the far right. He would still lose the general election, I think, but he would lose in a way that offered a potential path out of the political wilderness into which George Bush and Newt Gingrich have led them.

Unfortunately for him, he misjudged his opening in the primary, and decided to run as a hard-right conservative with the zeal of someone who pretends to be converted. So now we get to see if the cult of Saint John McCain can withstand the scrutiny of an election campaign in which the senator actually has to do things, instead of just waiting for the other candidates to self-destruct one by one.

Aside from petulantly insisting that Congress “must” do things, he has absolutely nothing to say. At least his opportunities for inflicting his oratory on a country that long ago stopped listening are rapidly running out. He’ll have a speech at the GOP convention, and he’ll probably gin up an “important” announcement from the Oval Office at some point in the election cycle, but I figure we have, at most, two more of his speeches to endure. At none of the others, though, will Ted Kennedy get to sit there in rumpled, professorial disapproval.

One of the under-noticed results from Iowa was that all three Democratic candidates received more votes than Mike Huckabee, the Republican winner. Almost as many people voted for Barack Obama as voted for all the Republicans put together.

And today, after two weeks of terrible press, Obama more than doubled Clinton’s total, and won more votes in South Carolina than John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani combined.

Everyone agrees that cable news sucks, and that the political coverage from CNN, et al. is laughably bad. Usually, people blame this on the media’s overemphasis on horse race coverage. I don’t think that’s right.

At least, I don’t object to horse race coverage. I like it. And I imagine that a significant percentage of people who follow politics as a hobby enjoy it too.

Give me the details! Will the Nader vote in Dane County cost Gore Wisconsin? Have the precincts from Long Island reported yet? What do the exit polls from upstate Nevada say? How much support does Huckabee get from Catholic voters?

I remember watching some election results a few years back, and Michael Barone was analyzing the results from Indiana on a ward-by-ward level. It was incredibly interesting stuff, even if Barone’s politics have taken a recent turn towards crazy town. If political coverage was like this, I would watch it more often.

The problem with much of the media’s political coverage — especially on cable news — is not that there’s too much horse race coverage. It’s that the horse race coverage is bad.

It’s so superficial and banal that it’s not useful or interesting to anyone who follows politics (and since the analysis is directed at, e.g., people who follow primary results as they come in, it’s a pretty good bet that no one finds it useful or interesting). Cable news analysis consists of predicting the future by making straight line projections from the present; and it consists of commentators trying to influence people’s opinions (*).

When Chris Matthews calls Senator Clinton a “she devil” (!) and a “strip-teaser”, “witchy”, and “not a convincing mom” (!!), he’s not doing fair and balanced political analysis. When he calls her “Nurse Ratched” or “Madame Defarge”, and calls her “unacceptable to Midwest guys” (who only support her if they are “castratos in a eunuch chorus”), he’s abandoned all pretense of objectivity, and is simply trying to get other people to dislike Clinton as much as he does.

This sort of thing is completely different from horse racing, or talking too much about polls, or over-analyzing the latest gaffe from a candidate, all of which is fine.

While it would be great if there was more coverage of, for example, the details of the candidates’ health care plans and energy initiatives, those things obviously can’t drive political coverage. Unless you’re Mitt Romney, you don’t have a new health care plan every day.

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to talk about polls, and politics, and campaign strategies, and the unimportant details of the latest news cycle. And I suspect that there’s a sizable market here for a news organization that’s willing to fill it.

(*) I’m talking about the regular news media. Fox News is in a class by itself, inasmuch as it exists first as a Republican propaganda machine, and only second as a purveyor of news and information.

Yes.

I’m not really in the target market, but wow, that’s a good-looking commuter laptop. I’m continually impressed with Apple’s ability to hit a price-point a couple hundred dollars more than what one is looking to spend, but with quality and design good enough that, after a little deliberation, you buy the thing anyways. And you’re satisfied with your purchase, and happy about the indulgence.

Is it merely a coincidence that news anchors — Brian Williams tonight, Jim Lehrer or Gwen Ifill pretty much all the time — are vastly better at asking questions that are reasonably tangential to things people want to hear about, than are political journalists like Tim Russert and Chris Matthews?

For one, Russert et al. are too interested in the gotcha question (*). And second, they are apparently not content to spend every news cycle talking about horse race analysis — which is never actual analysis, but merely a collection of straight-line projections from the present — and they feel that making the candidates answer horse race questions during a debate is a useful and illuminating thing to do.

It’s not a conservative vs. liberal thing: the political moderators sucked during the GOP debates as well. But good grief. I’ve never seen a debate as incompetently moderated as the one tonight. Clinton and Obama did just fine. Tim Russert lost in a landslide.

(*) It would be one thing to ask detailed, thoughtful questions about a candidate’s proposed policies. If the candidate was unable to answer them, or revealed themselves to be ignorant of the details, they would be “got”. That’s useful.

But Tim Russert doesn’t ask questions that allow candidates to talk about their ideas. He asks questions which he thinks will be difficult or awkward to answer. It’s not useful to ask a question only because it might make a candidate look stupid (”You said X in 1997, and now you’re saying Y. Are you a liar?”) Politicians who are good enough at their jobs to be in a position to run for president aren’t going to fall for it, and in the meantime, no one finds out if, for example, Mike Huckabee has a clue about the details of his 30% national sales tax.

Heh. And you’ve gotta love the commenter who quips, “You know Mitt would sign anything! He�d even write ‘Go Yankees!’ on a Red Sox Jersey if you asked him to.”

I got to spend my lunch hour at the DMV today, renewing my driver license. It was news to me, but apparently the state rolled out a new driver license a couple years ago. It’s now almost certain that we have the ugliest and worst-designed driver license in the United States.

The good changes:

• The font of “WISCONSIN” across the top has been changed from a serif font to a bigger and bolder italic font similar to the one on the license plate. Sadly, some red candy stripes have been printed in the same place, giving the license that smudgy “been in the wallet too long” look.

The bad changes:

• A clip-art design of an American flag — and not just any American flag, but a wavy American flag — has been pasted into the upper left corner. There appears to be no reason for the addition. It’s ugly, and since our state is not named New Mexico, it’s not needed for potential low-IQ clarification about what country this is.

• The word “Wisconsin” has been written in tiny red letters four hundred and forty-two times across the top half of the license.
• The first letter of the ID hash has been underlined, for unknown reasons (the letter is always the first letter of one’s last name, is reproduced in seven other places on the card, and is not exactly difficult to read).
• A random serial number has been typed vertically along the edge of the photograph, half overlapping the photograph’s frame. Is that really necessary? There are already three other random serial numbers on the reverse side, along with two separate bar codes, and plenty of space for more alphanumeric strings.
• One’s name and birthday are printed in almost illegibly small blue letters across the top of the license.
• One’s date of birth is printed in a big red font, notwithstanding the fact that one is over 21.
• All of this has been crammed into the top three-quarters of the card, leaving a big expanse of white space on the bottom.

What a mess. But I suppose it’s difficult to forge. I’m so glad that the state has gone out of its way to spend a great deal of tax money in a pointless and misguided effort to prevent college sophomores from buying alcohol. We’re sure getting our money’s worth for that.

Andrew Sullivan quotes a reader’s email:

I’m starting to get the impression that the Clinton camp is trying to lure Obama into playing the race card. The obvious tactics of calling him kid and everything seem to me like a race-bait tactic. First, get Bill to belittle Obama in what can be seen by some (but not by white people) as a racial slight. Then, provoke Obama, who has not made race a factor at all in the campaign, to fall back on race as a defense against their attacks. This will then drive away many of those who have been attracted to Obama’s campaign in part BECAUSE he has not played the race card.

The Clintons are smart. Don’t play to them, though.

I think that’s right on the money. Roger Simon’s Show Time, which may be the best behind-the-scenes look at the Clinton and Dole campaigns in 1996, recounts the story of Clinton’s famous Sister Souljah moment in 1992.

The point of the Sister Souljah moment was not, as is commonly recollected, to trash the singer, whom most people had never heard of, and about whom most people didn’t care.

The point was to trick Jesse Jackson into getting involved, so that Clinton could trash Jesse Jackson, whom people had heard of and didn’t like (*). With the help of some private manipulation, Clinton got Jackson to believe Clinton’s comments were based on a misunderstanding. That prompted Jackson to attempt an explanation, which allowed Clinton to distance himself from Jackson (a much bigger force in the party then than now — he had made it all the way to the convention four years earlier).

What Hillary seems to be trying to do to Obama is different, of course, but the principle is the same. Goad your opponent into fighting on unfriendly territory, and thus drive up their own negatives. Obama, who’s a politician talented enough to go toe-to-toe with Clinton, was too smart to take the bait.

(*) This still appears to be the case, almost two decades later. Sullivan adds, unironically and without further explanation, that he “found Jesse Jackson [Jr.]’s TV appearance in defense of Obama troublesome.”

Sullivan, by the way, appears to have drunk deep from some bottomless well of animus towards the Clintons in the last few days, and has taken to publishing (over and over) implausibly unrepresentative emails from “lifelong Democrats” who support Obama, but will vote for John McCain and his hundred years’ war if Clinton gets the nomination.