From the WSJ Opinion Archives

Monday, November 20, 2006 2:00 P.M. EST

Best of the Web is off today while James Taranto serves jury duty. In its place we offer a free sample of Political Diary, the editorial page's daily, subscription e-mail newsletter on American politics (subscribe here).

In today's Political Diary:


Alcee Ya Later

Nancy Pelosi faces a new challenge. Fresh from the stinging rebuke that 63% of her fellow House Democrats handed her last week by voting against John Murtha, her hand-picked but ethically challenged candidate for Majority Leader, Ms. Pelosi is in danger of cementing a reputation for being willing to excuse almost anything in the name of political loyalty.

At issue is whether Ms. Pelosi, who controls committee assignments, will select Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings to become the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, a sensitive body that exercises oversight over all CIA and National Security Council budgets. The current ranking Democrat is Rep. Jane Harman of California, a respected moderate who has clashed with Ms. Pelosi in the past.

Ms. Pelosi is under strong pressure to anoint as the new chairman Mr. Hastings from the Congressional Black Caucus, which makes up almost one-fifth of the House Democratic caucus. But there is a real problem of both perception and policy. In 1988, Ms. Pelosi along with Steny Hoyer, the new House Majority Leader, and John Conyers, the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, voted to impeach Mr. Hastings, then a federal judge in Florida, who had been accused of conspiring to take a $150,000 bribe from a defendant in a case before him.

Mr. Conyers is now solidly behind Mr. Hastings, who has served in the House with him since 1993. He and other members of the Black Caucus point out that while Mr. Hastings was removed from office by the Senate, a Miami jury actually acquitted him of the bribery charge. But others say the evidence against Mr. Hastings was compelling and clear, regardless of what the jury found.

Having campaigned against what she called the GOP's "culture of corruption" for much of the last year, Ms. Pelosi is in an exquisite bind. She either alienates one of the most important parts of her political coalition or she gives the appearance of being indifferent to ethical concerns. My prediction is that she will choose Plan C, skipping over both Ms. Harman and Mr. Hastings and instead appointing Texas Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a former Border Patrol official, as chairman of House Intelligence. Not only does Mr. Reyes have a record of probity and discretion, but he would become the only Latino to chair a House committee in the next Congress.

But should Ms. Pelosi fail to take that escape hatch, many moderate Democrats are openly saying it will be hard evidence that she learned nothing from her humiliation in the Murtha disaster.

-- John Fund

Memo to Electorate: Bill Clinton Really, Really Likes You

Bill Clinton demonstrated again last Wednesday that he has become as revered by many Democrats as Ronald Reagan was by Republicans. The former president received two standing ovations as he briefly addressed an audience celebrating the 20th anniversary of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press at a gala dinner in New York.

 

Mr. Clinton was in fine spirits, understandable since his party had just captured control of both houses of Congress. "We have an electorate that is thinking again, so the press will have to think again," Mr. Clinton told his media-heavy audience. He said that the Democratic triumph "was a reaction against the politics of fear and demonization" and "the shorthand form of reality."

Bitterness about how the media treated him during his two terms as presidency was minimized, but Mr. Clinton did allow himself to vent about how his opponents had performed "reverse plastic surgery" on the health-care plan that he and his wife Hillary had tried to push through Congress. He indicated that America would revisit the issue of rising health-care costs by finding a way to provide universal coverage of the uninsured. Everyone left the dinner convinced they had just seen a warm-up act for countless more Clinton campaign appearances as the 2008 presidential season heats up.

-- John Fund

Meet Jim Black

Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris has been raining on the Democratic parade by saying the party's deep and bitter divisions, now that Democrats have achieved majority status, are likely to be even more paralyzing and harder to contain. As a cautionary tale, one need only look at how Democrats are in danger of fumbling control of the North Carolina General Assembly.

Republicans remain a minority in the lower house and actually lost seats in elections two weeks ago, but ethical clouds swirling around House Speaker Jim Black have forced Democrats into a bitter leadership fight. There's even talk of one faction forming a ruling coalition with Republicans in the chamber.

For more than a year Mr. Black has fought off allegations that he bribed a Republican lawmaker, Michael Decker, into coming across the aisle and breaking up a narrow GOP majority in 2002. Mr. Decker has pled guilty to accepting a bribe and, shortly before Election Day, named Mr. Black as a co-conspirator in open court. Result: Mr. Black's own apparent re-election two weeks ago is hanging by a thread. Though he won a narrow 29-vote victory, some 200 voters were given the wrong ballots on Election Day and state officials now have to decide whether to allow those voters to cast new ballots or even require an entirely new election. The decision should come next week.

In the meantime, Democrats in the General Assembly are tangled up in a five-way race for the speakership, with none of the candidates close to mustering enough votes. Ran Coble, who studies the legislature for the non-partisan North Carolina Center for Policy Research, says there is a distinct possibility of a group of renegade Democrats joining with the GOP to elect a Speaker. "Anything can happen," he warns, until the new legislature is seated in January.

-- Brendan Miniter

Quote of the Day

"Even seasoned Democrats are concerned about the Republicans' ability to tar the polished Hillary by attacking [Speaker-designate Nancy] Pelosi. If Nancy does poorly, that hurts Hillary. That's really unfair, but that's what everyone thinks. That's reality. To help Hillary, Nancy has to be perceived as an effective leader and she's had a terrible start. It was just an awful first week" -- Tony Coehlo, a former Democratic House whip who ran Vice President Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, speaking to Britain's Sunday Telegraph.

Boorat

It seems everyone is enjoying the bizarre humor of British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen in his new film chronicling the U.S. travels of Borat, an outrageously offensive journalist from Kazakhstan. But several people in Washington, D.C. who were victims of Mr. Cohen's form of "ambush" filmmaking are minimally amused.

It won't surprise anyone who's noticed how much liberals love to laugh at the humiliation of average Americans that all the Washington-related victims of Mr. Cohen's stunts appear to be conservative Republicans.

For his first victim, Mr. Cohen taped a speech by GOP Rep. Chip Pickering of Mississippi at an annual Pentecostal revival to illustrate the links between religion and politics in America. In his encounter with former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, Mr. Cohen's character Borat gushes over the fact that he has finally met "a genuine chocolate-face." But the most over-the-top of Borat's pranks on politicians is played on former Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, who admittedly often does appear to be humor impaired. In the movie, Borat offers Mr. Barr some cheese, only to inform him that it's actually made from the breast milk of one of his relatives. I suppose it's funny in a gross-out way, but I wonder how uproariously the audiences who are enjoying the Borat film in Manhattan and Hollywood would laugh if the victim were Mr. Barr's equal in the humor-deprived category, Senator John Kerry, the man most of them backed for president in 2004.

-- John Fund

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