When Mitt Romney first ran for the Senate in 1994, he was compelled to pose as something he was not in order to blend into the native political underbrush. Thus, he went out of his way to assert his pro-gay, pro-Roe v. Wade credentials, and even disclaim connections to Ronald Reagan. This posturing would have been unnecessary in even most "purple" states, but in Massachusetts, that bluest of blue states, he was not viable unless he denied he had a red corpuscle in his body.

This came back to haunt him fourteen years later, when in running for president he discovered that the conservative social agenda and the legacy of Reagan still carried enormous weight with the Republican base. Thus, he was forced to have suspiciously convenient "epiphanies." My own assessment is that Romney never was a Massachusetts liberal, but he was ambitious and cynical enough to pose as one. And that is justifiably disturbing to many people.

When Barack Obama first ran for the Illinois legislature in 1997 and for a South Chicago congressional seat in 2000, he, too, was compelled to pose as something he was not. As the son of a white mother who was raised in a white world and attended prestigious ivy league schools, he lacked credibility on the streets of Chicago.

After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments. The money this afternoon, the smart money seems to be where the smart analysis was all along, namely that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, not a collective one. The passage that threw so many off is that clause, "a well regulated militia," which many have taken to mean that individuals have no rights at all, but only ... the state?

Of course it flies in the face of the Bill of Rights to suggest that anything there protects the state. Against whom, one might ask? The entire thrust of the Bill of Rights is to protect the individual against the state. Clearly, that was the intent here.

We judge a man, the saying goes, by the company he keeps. We don't judge a man by the family he is born into. And if you are born into a crotchety annoying family, it is counted a virtue up to a point to be indulgent and tolerant of their crotchets. The same would be true of crotchety grandmothers, whom Obama unceremoniously threw into the equivalence pot with the now notorious Jeremiah Wright. But Wright is not his grandma. Nor, so far as we can tell, did she willfully and publicly stoke the fires of racial paranoia.

That is why Obama's repeated claim that Jeremiah Wright is "like an old uncle" to him so badly begs the question. Wright is not an uncle. He's a pastor who was selected from among many such pastors in predominantly African-American Chicago congregations. The vast majority of those congregations preach the gospel of Christ as Martin Luther King understood it. That is, that God is no respecter of persons and judges us not by the color of our skin but by the "content of our character."

In a move that caught most of his more fervent supporters completely off guard, Obama declared today that substantive issues will decide the primary battle with Hillary Clinton:

Democrat Barack Obama expressed frustration Wednesday that racial issues keep rising to the top of his presidential battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton, but he said the great majority of voters will base their decisions on substantive issues.

Coming from a man whose sole substantive contribution to political discourse over the past year has been to remind us over and over and over that the did not vote for the Iraq war, this presents something of a challenge. Aides are, I expect, scrambling to define a substantive component for his campaign. Meanwhile, I expect that those who have come to rely on the warm fuzzies they get from his soaring rhetoric probably have little to fear. It will not be too difficult to work a little substance in amongst the "yes we can" chants and recitations of the Gettysburg address and the Declaration of Independence.

Ruth Marcus wrote a odd piece in the WashPo today, hilariously mistaking Spitzer's downfall for a Greek tragedy. "The brave hero brought low by his own arrogance" she begins. First let's be clear -- Eliot Spitzer was never a brave hero. He was a clever opportunist who assumed a mantle of virtue because it proved to be a catchy look on the political catwalk.

The opportunist behind the mantle was obvious to everyone who paid critical attention to his performance in the last decade. His repeat offense on campaign finance laws -- laundering money from his dad to make it look like his own -- might qualify as one red flag. Make that two red flags, as he did it twice. His persistent grandstanding around flimsy cases against corporate heavyweights was also typically transparent.

The ever pithy BeldarBlog has a harsh assessment of a harsh assessment of the Bush presidency that just appeared in the Weekly Standard. For those keeping track at home, that's a double negative, which means Beldar thinks the Bush presidency was not that bad. Beldar also points us to several other assessments of the assessment, from Powerline and others.

For those on the left, the judgment of history on the Bush presidency was forged in iron before the last chad was dimpled in Florida in 2000. Not that Iraq helped, but that was just icing on the cake. For those on the right, it's time for a reassessment, finally freed from the need to support the team.

Beldar's take is that Jeffrey Bell's takedown is long-winded and unduly focused on minutia that will be forgotten 20 years from now, while giving short shrift to truly noteworthy accomplishments. His Supreme Court appointments, for example, are remarkable in their caliber and their principled judicial philosophy, in sharp contrast to the Souters, Kennedys and O'Connors from earlier Republican administrations. [But, as my brother points out, the near-disaster Harriet Myers nomination -- unqualified and unknown -- was only saved by collective wretching from the right, so he only gets partial credit.]

I've had my beefs with John McCain. I've reluctantly come into line behind him, only by considering the alternative in Iraq and the War on Terror. But now I'm seeing another redeeming virtue: a willingness to stand up for free trade.

Free trade is one place where I have drawn a line in the sand since I was very young. There is only one correct answer, and everyone who knows anything knows what it is. NAFTA was, without a doubt, the crowning achievement of the Clinton years, and it's sad how many pols are willing to pander on trade restrictions to secure the votes of the ignorant and fearful, instead of helping educate them.

McCain's problem is that at 72 his vice president matters mightily. In 1988 George Bush could survive the Dan Quayle fiasco because no one seriously expected Quayle to spend any time in the Oval Office. The same cannot be said of McCain.

Fred Barnes analyzes the choices today in the Weekly Standard, checking them off one by one. Lieberman, he notes, has a certain attraction, and the possibility to hardening support at the center. But that would likely come at the price of further turning off the Right, since Lieberman for all of his charm and foreign policy hawkishness is a full-blooded liberal domestically.

There are several governors who are on the list, but each one of them is very young, untested and has not been vetted in the fire of a national campaign.

One year ago, if you had told me that the focus of the anti-war critics would be the dollar cost of the war in Iraq, I would have answered that we had won. And in fact, that is where we are. The ABC headline today trumpets the cost of the war over the next year as being projected at $12 billion per month. That is, no doubt, a lot of money.

The subtext of the report is not especially subtle. It boils down to this: we are winning this war -- a war that the MSM and the American left have committed to lose -- and if we don't do something quick, this thing will get out of control and the history books will lack the moral clarity [Bush Evil!] that they are all counting on.

Apparently, the question is this: did you have a conversation with John Kerry about being his VP in 2004? One reporter who doggedly kept pushing this question got McCain's hackles raised. Something that, we understand, is not that difficult.

Several weeks ago, before McCain secured the nomination, this was a very dicey question indeed. It cuts to the heart of what it means to represent a political party, to carry its banner into an election and into the White House. It also undercuts McCain's solidarity with Bush in Iraq, since by the time he had this conversation with Kerry his flip against the Iraq war was already clear.