Either Karl Rove has joined the Clinton campaign as their advisor, or somebody over there has learned a lot from his standard campaign playbook. Because they're successfully using Rove's signature (and quite bizarrely effective) political tactic: attack your opponent not on his weak points, but on your weak points. This throws your opponent on defense, when he should be strongly playing offense.

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Salon's article is amusing, but never gives credit where credit is due for the idea itself, which is a shame. If you haven't read the story, get a copy from the library (it's conveniently in a collection of short stories also titled The Man Who Sold The Moon), it's worth it. Or buy one, read it, and when you're done, send a copy to Salon. Maybe they'll get it right next time.

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To me, this seems an obvious answer to an unprecedented problem -- what is a former president going to do as First Husband? You can bet he'll be eager to help out in any fashion Hillary allows him to, and his wealth of experience and knowledge would be an asset to pretty much anything he does to help his wife. He's still popular within the party, and he's going to have an influence on his wife's administration whether he's in an official position or not. So what to do with him?

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I apologize in advance for the disjointed nature of this week's column. There are a lot of odds and ends to cover, including tomorrow's primary picks, a cartoon, and the usual awards and talking points.

But the first of these ends is definitely odd: is it just my imagination, or did Charles Krauthammer (of all people) read my earlier column before writing his own? You be the judge.

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Think about it -- the issue is that King needed Johnson's help in getting a law passed. Well, why did he need this help? Why couldn't King's "dream" become a "reality" without Johnson's help? Because in the 1960s there is no possibility whatsoever that a black man could have been president. Again, think about it -- if King had been president himself, he sure wouldn't have needed LBJ's help.

This is historical fact. We've come a long way since those days. But nobody is pointing out that it is now 2008, and not 1964. The big difference (as it relates to this argument) between then and now is that now we have a black man who has a very good chance at actually becoming president on his own.

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Now, you may think me delusional for suggesting this, but perhaps Hillary Clinton's advisers are fans of this column. Maybe she herself was browsing Huffington Post last Friday. You be the judge. The following is the advice I offered Hillary in last week's column:

The whole inevitability thing didn't work out the way it was supposed to. Likewise the electability thing. "Change" may gain ground, now that it's the official buzzword of '08, but the change Clinton really needs to make is in her style. The campaign is now about emotion, and Hillary needs to get back to the point where she was earlier in the contest, when she was actually showing a decent amount of emotion and connecting with her crowds on a personal level. The wonky "I'll be ready on day one," and reciting lists of reasons why she should be nominated needs to change to actually connecting with people emotionally in the final stretch.

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Now, normally I do my fair share of condemning the mainstream media for their stupefyingly obtuse and superficial behavior (to be honest, they make it really easy for me to do so). But on this one, I've got to take the heat with the rest of them. I, too, blew it. I saw the polls, and (while not believing in any single one of them) I did believe in the trend. I thought Barack Obama had it sewn up. Until the results started coming in. As Mark Twain (or maybe it was Disraeli) once said: "There are three types of lie: a lie, a damned lie, and statistics."

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Sorry for the short column today, but since New Hampshire is the center of the political universe today, nobody's really paying attention to anything else anyway. If you want something fun to do while watching the returns come in tonight, head over to the McClatchy news site, where they're having a cartoon caption contest.

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Tomorrow's Iowa caucuses are certainly reaping a bumper crop of blather in the news. Pundits everywhere are weighing in on every aspect of both the Democratic and Republican race to the nomination. But I've noticed something -- in all the verbiage spewed about what is or is not going to happen tomorrow, there are very few willing to actually call the results of the race. Language is hedged, scenarios are spun out as "what if" speculation, but not a whole lot of people are willing to stand up and say "this is how I think it'll turn out."

Which is a shame. If political writers (both professional and amateur) aren't willing to run the risk of being wrong (and looking foolish), then what are they in the prognostication business for anyway? After all, every two-bit local news sportscaster is willing to tell you his picks for the outcome of each week's football games, why shouldn't our national political press be just as willing to do the same?

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OK, here we go with Part 2 of my annual McLaughlin Awards. Last week's column covered the first half of these awards.

Unfortunately (as of this writing) the transcript for last week's McLaughlin Group is not yet available on their website, so you'll have to check it later to compare how I did with the actual McLaughlin Group themselves.

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