Shortly after the November election, Newt Gingrich disputed the notion that Sarah Palin had emerged from her losing campaign as the new face of the Republican Party, declaring that "she's going to be one of 20 or 30 significant players. She's not going to be the de facto leader."

A few months later, the former House Speaker seems to have had a change of heart. Discussing the 2012 G.O.P. race at breakfast meeting on Monday, he called the Alaska governor "very formidable" and noted that she'd have "a substantial advantage in Iowa."

Of course, Mr. Gingrich himself seems interested in the '12 race, so he could have his own motives for saying this. But the seeming shift in his attitude also speaks to a post-election reality that could be denied in November but not now: Mrs. Palin actually is the de facto leader of what's left of the national Republican Party.

The latest bit of evidence came on Monday - two days after Mrs. Palin once again worked her way into national political headlines by jetting across the country to attend the annual Alfalfa Club dinner, a marquee event on the D.C. social calendar where the attendees included President Barack Obama - with the release of a Rasmussen Poll that found Republicans, by a better than two-to-one margin, want their party to be like Mrs. Palin and not her old running-mate, John McCain.

To brand Mrs. Palin the front-runner for the '12 nomination, as opposed to calling her one of several top-tier contenders, isn't a stretch at all. But don't be fooled: this status has nothing to do with anything Mrs. Palin's done since November and everything to do with what the Republican Party has become. Her improving odds of winning the next G.O.P. nomination are a symptom of the party's rapidly shrinking base - not of an expanding appetite for Mrs. Palin among the general public.

Ever since Barry Goldwater's forces beat out Nelson Rockefeller and his Eastern Establishment backers for the 1964 G.O.P. nomination, the core of the Republican electorate has been defined by its conservatism. But, as Goldwater's horrific showing in the '64 general election established, a party must be inclusive and expansive enough to welcome voters who aren't so ideologically rigorous.

Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the G.O.P. managed this imperative impressively, pacifying its base with talk of school prayer and abortion bans that infrequently translated into action. This sent a message to less strident voters that the G.O.P. and its leaders (whether Reagan or George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush) were simply saying what they had to say to keep the base happy and didn't really mean any of it. It was the kind of balancing act that, for instance, allowed the elder Mr. Bush to carry socially liberal New Jersey in 1988 by almost the same margin by which he won conservative North Carolina.

But that uneasy marriage between the hard-core base and middle-of-the-road voters, is over, mainly because the Bush era convinced voters, many of them self-identifying Republicans, that the party's leaders actually were serious about the sweet nothings they'd whisper to base voters. This has sapped the G.O.P. of its "soft" supporters - non-ideologues who identified with the party despite some misgivings and whose support made the difference between a Goldwater debacle and a Reagan victory.

The proof of this can be found in the U.S. House, where the Republican ranks have been devastated by the 2006 and 2008 elections. The party's conference is now overwhelmingly comprised of members from deeply conservative districts - the sort that would have voted for Goldwater in '64. It can also be seen in a stunning analysis released last week by the Gallup organization, which found that the Republican Party now enjoys a statistically significant voter identification advantage in just five states. For Democrats, the number is 34 (or 35, counting the District of Columbia).

It is the shrinking size and appeal of the G.O.P. that accounts for Mrs. Palin's strong position within the party.

The old tradition among Republicans is to hand the next open presidential nomination to the runner-up for the last one. By that logic, Mitt Romney would be the favorite heading into '12. Mr. Romney, whose cynical transformation from outspoken moderate to avowed conservative mirrors that of George H.W. Bush years ago, fits the old model of G.O.P. nominee - willing and eager to pander to the base, but equally ready to wink to "soft" Republicans and the party's non-ideological establishment.

But the soft voters are gone, leaving a rabidly conservative base that now is the party's establishment. These are the voters who adore Mrs. Palin, mostly because she doesn't even pretend to be interested in what non-conservatives have to say. With soft Republicans vanishing, the influence of the base is growing by the day. This is the perfect recipe for Sarah Palin to win the Republican nomination in 2012 - and for the party to suffer a thorough defeat in the fall.  

It's easy to take shots at George W. Bush and it's pointless to wish that he'd perform some public act of contrition for his presidency, or merely offer a simple acknowledgement that he screwed up.

Still, there was an infuriating quality his speech to a "Welcome Home" rally in Midland on Tuesday afternoon.

Hours before, Bush had performed his last official duty as president: attending the installation of his successor. Sitting on the dais only a few feet from Barack Obama, he had an unobstructed view of a national Mall populated by nearly two million citizens, a staggering number, and one that easily dwarfs the excitement generated by any speech Bush ever gave.

When Obama, as custom dictates, offered thanks to Bush for his service, the throng was painfully quiet - muted applause mixed with open boos and taunts. When the ceremony was over and the helicopter charged with carrying Bush from Washington for good had lifted off the ground, the masses looked up and waved in a manner that said "good riddance," not "farewell."

You'd think an experience like this might prompt some introspection on the flight back to Texas: How did it end up like this? Why was my departure greeted like a national holiday? Where did it go wrong?

You'd think similar thoughts might have crossed Bush's mind during Obama's inaugural address itself. Whether intentional or not, the speech offered a brutal indictment not so much of Bush's policies but of the intellectual bankruptcy and false simplicity behind them.

For eight years, Bush treated every economic question he faced as a choice between the free market and socialism; and he always sided with the market, because that was the American way, dummy - it's what Ronald Reagan would have done. End of discussion. (Well, this was his posture until the economy collapsed, thanks in no small part to years of lax regulation.)

In two sentences on Tuesday, Obama claimed the vast middle ground that Bush ignored for two terms. The question, he said as Bush listened, isn't "whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."

For more than seven years, Bush framed every national security question - whether it involved wiretaps, due process or outright torture - as a choice between fighting terrorism and "evil-doers" or showing weakness and coddling them. And what a surprise, he always sided with safety, America's prestige (to say nothing of the civil liberties of its citizens) be damned. He told himself and his countrymen that he was showing resolve - just like Churchill and Reagan!

Here again, Obama claimed the middle ground that Bush neglected: "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

Bush was never the oblivious idiot many of his enemies took him for. He has a quick mind and obvious intellectual capacity. His presidency didn't fail because of a low I.Q. It failed because he took pride in refusing to activate his intellect; refusing to explore the nuances of complex issues, refusing to learn the cautionary lessons of history before sending hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight in Iraq. He played from the gut, he liked to say, as if a well-honed intellect wouldn't strengthen his instincts.

Who knows - maybe doubt actually did haunt Bush as he made his way back to Texas on Tuesday. If it did, though, it was short-lived, as the hometown crowd exonerated him. As Bush spoke to the Midland rally, you could see his confidence lifting as he fed off the friendly crowd, which abetted every one of his rationalizations with cheers.

"Character and confidence are as sturdy as our oaks," he declared. "History will be the judge of our decisions, but when I walked out of the Oval Office this morning, I left with the same values that I took to Washington eight years ago. And when I get home tonight to look in the mirror, I'm not going to regret what I see."

Like his presidency, it was immediately clear, Bush's post-presidency will be defined by an aversion to self-examination. Those two million people who packed the Mall in Washington? A bunch of radical liberals. Obama's eloquent inaugural? Just a bunch of fancy speechifying from an Ivy League elitist. None of it meant anything. But that room full of Texans? Now there's some real Americans.

Apparently, both President Bushes, George W. and George H. W., had never been interviewed together before Sunday—when they agreed to take a series of polite and decidedly non-penetrating questions from Fox News' Brit Hume.

For nearly the entire second Bush presidency, a popular theory has held that the first President Bush is, at least in the seclusion of his Kennebunkport and Houston homes, deeply distressed by his son's stewardship, especially his decision to invade Iraq (a choice that Bush 41 pointedly refused to make during the 1991 Gulf War).

Whenever he's been asked, George H. W. Bush has, not surprisingly, scoffed at this theorizing and expressed full faith and confidence in his son and the direction he chose for the country. But every now and then, clues have supposedly emerged that have betrayed the elder Bush's actual state of mind. Like the now-famous Wall Street Journal op-ed from the summer of 2004 in which Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41's confidant and foreign policy soul mate (not to mention the co-author of his memoirs) warned against an invasion of Iraq. Or the moment two years ago, when Bush 41 broke down while paying tribute to his son Jeb—evidence, some suggested, of an old man heartbroken that the wrong son had made it to the White House.

There's a certain allure to this kind of thinking. Between his academic shortcomings, his spotty military record, his business failures and his heavy drinking, it's easy to paint Bush 43's presidency as merely the latest in a lifelong string of failures to live up to the example set by his father. And it's just as easy to imagine the elder Bush haunted by the painful irony that the wisdom of his own most questioned decision as president—to stay out of Baghdad—has been vindicated by the tragedy of his son's "preemptive" war.

With his interview, Hume had an opportunity to delve, however delicately, into some of these questions. Sure, it would be futile to come out and ask Bush 43 if he thinks the Iraq war was a mistake or if his son has been a screw-up as president. Not only would Bush have provided his customary "of course not" response, he also would have clammed up for the rest of the interview, maybe even walked out.

But there are ways to get into it, and Hume seemingly had a perfect opportunity toward the end of the interview, when, seated in the Oval Office with both Bushes (each of them, presumably, relaxed by the anodyne queries Hume had been soft-balling their way), he innocuously asked Bush 41 for his "most vivid memory of your time in this office—something that happened in this very room."

The former president brought up the end of the Gulf War.

"Well, I can't think of many," he said, "but I remember Colin Powell reaching under this desk and pulling out the telephone to call (General Norman) Schwarzkopf to see if the mission had been accomplished. After that—they said it's time to shut down this war."

He continued: "One hundred hours, we'd done what we said we wanted to do, and he called up—and that one sticks in my mind as a dramatic moment."

Given all of the speculation about his opinion of his son's presidency, it's rather amazing that Bush would have brought up the end of the Gulf War—the very moment when he ruled out expanding the mission from a simple liberation of Kuwait into a full-blown invasion of Iraq.

If ever a follow-up, however innocuous, were called for, this was the moment—some effort to coax the former president into elaborating on the thought he'd just expressed. Why was that so dramatic? What thoughts were going through your mind? What kinds of decisions did you face that day?

Instead, Hume changed the subject, asking both Bushes to recall a private conversation they'd had on the day of Bush 43's 2001 inaugural, and the moment was lost. In the course of the interview, Hume also covered the following topic: Whether Bush 41 wishes his son were moving to Houston after his presidency; whether the cane he now uses will be permanent; whether it's true that he insisted all men wear jackets and ties in the Oval office; and whether Bush 43 wants his father to do any more skydiving.

It's certainly reasonable that the first-ever extended interview with a father-son team of presidents would contain its share of human interest questions. It's also not surprising in the least that a Fox News interview with a pair of Republican presidents would opt for fluff over the kind of tough questioning it used when Bill Clinton was a guest. The prospect of that kind of grilling is probably the chief reason why there has never been a Bush-Bush interview with any other outlet.

Had he been inclined to take advantage of the moment, Hume could have used the fact that the first Bush brought up the end of the Gulf War to prod some kind of meaningful statement out of the second one.

Instead, when the interview ended, we knew as much as we did before. It's still tempting to believe that George H. W. Bush is privately devastated by his son's choices. But there's still not a shred of meaningful proof that he actually is.

In the new issue of Rolling Stone, National Magazine Award winner and onetime Observer 'Power Punk' Matt Taibbi offers a little bit of George W. Bush fan fiction in the form of a fake interview headlined Bush Apologizes: The Farewell Interview We Wish He'd Give.

Subheadlined "W. comes clean—on his dad, Condi's farts and the time Dick waterboarded the house boy," the piece is the sort of prankish, juvenile, utterly bogus Q&A that works better in a magazine like Vice (see this month's hilarious—and patently fake—interview with two guys called The Porn Rangers) than an earnest publication like Rolling Stone, which takes its own interviews so seriously—be they with Brad Pitt, David Letterman or John McCain—they lard them with institutional weight by calling them "The Rolling Stone Interview."

Here's Mr. Taibbi pretending to grill the man his magazine once enlisted historian Sean Wilentz to condemn as The Worst President in History, about an important matter that touches on all aspects of his eight years in the White House, from ignoring the August 6, 2001 briefing that read Bin Ladin Determined To Strike Inside US to the invasion of Iraq, the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, "Mission Accomplished," torture, warrant-less wiretaps, the economy, and his massaging of German Chancellor Angela Merkel:

Investigative journalist Russ Baker, who has written an explosive new volume on the Bush dynasty called Family of Secrets, did not need to convince anyone at his book party at SoHo House on Monday night that he wasn’t a crazy conspiracy nut. Dressed in a suit and tie and standing before a microphone at the front of the dimly lit dining room that had been rented out for the occasion, Mr. Baker was the image of trustworthiness as he read excerpts from his book and took questions from the audience.

One person asked to hear more on what Mr. Baker had learned about George H. W. Bush’s connection to the Kennedy assassination. Another asked how Mr. Baker’s book might be used to teach young people about journalism.

Then someone brought up the million dollar question: Namely, how is Mr. Baker planning to convince the mainstream media that the startling discoveries he’d made about the Bush family—discoveries that Bloomsbury Press, Mr. Baker’s publisher, has advertised as revelatory and paradigm-shifting—were worth paying attention to?

“I don’t know!” Mr. Baker said at first. “I mean, my entire career I have done stories that people said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is just going to go everywhere!’ But the reality is the bigger the story, the [harder it is]—and I have many, many friends who work for major news organizations—several of them are here today—and they tell me it’s very difficult to get this stuff out there. Because it’s explosive, and it questions some of the underlying structural values of our country.”

He said corporate interests at mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, CBS and ABC—which are “still run on a bottom-line basis”—prevented reporters there from addressing sensational information of the sort he had uncovered during his research.

Some promising glimmers had already shone through, though, Mr. Baker said. Time magazine had reviewed the book, for one, and word was that The Washington Post was planning to also. “We’re getting things like Huffington Post and those types of places,” he said. “We’re hoping everybody will spread the word.”

Judith Regan, the former publisher who last year accused Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes of conspiring to defame her in order to advance the presidential ambitions of Rudy Giuliani, sat in the back of the room wearing a dark brown fur coat and a large golden necklace. Mr. Baker was going on her radio show the next day, she said. 

Pub Crawl asked Ms. Regan how, if you're sitting on some volatile piece of information that no one else has really documented before, do you convince people not to dismiss you as a lunatic?

“It’s impossible,” Ms. Regan said. “The forces of the corporate-owned media are so powerful that a voice like this is hard to be heard because all they do is marginalize you and demonize you and defame you. The truth is, these are the few people left who do real reporting. It’s very hard to find people who do real investigative reporting anymore, and it’s these lone guys who don’t have any ax to grind, they’re not serving any corporate agenda, they’re not serving anything but their own reporting. They’re very brave and they’re very courageous and they’re very uncelebrated, because the mainstream media will not listen to them. People who are responsible have to help him. They do.”

She added: “The other problem is the big corporations hire people to sit in little rooms in Brooklyn and blog and to interfere with people like Russ. I’m quite familiar with this process. If you’re one little person, it’s you against the world, it’s David and Goliath, and it’s hard.”

Ms. Regan excused herself, explaining that she had to go home and read Mr. Baker’s book in advance of their interview the next day.

Dan Rather, meanwhile, whose controversial 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush’s military service record Mr. Baker’s book all but ratifies, was telling a group of people that even if Mr. Baker’s book got a bad review in The Washington Post, it was better than getting nothing.

“It’s a good book and he’s a nice guy,” Mr. Rather said, turning to Mr. Baker’s agent Andrew Stuart. “But it’s a proverbial third rail.”

Asked a moment later how a reporter like Mr. Baker should go about establishing his credibility among people who might dismiss him out of hand as no more reliable than a 9/11 truther, Mr. Rather said it was a difficult thing.

“Journalism is filled with a lot of decent-intending, wanting-to-do-the-right-thing people,” he said. “You just have to keep constantly asking a version of ‘please read the book.’... You know, fear runs rampant in journalism—I do not except myself in that criticism—and with a subject like this, the fear is if you touch it, you’re gonna get burned, and you may get burned to a crisp.”

The editor Peter Ginna, who acquired Mr. Baker’s book for Bloomsbury, said that what won him over were Mr. Baker’s extensive footnotes and rigorous sourcing.

“I didn’t just take it on faith,” he said. “When [Andrew] brought him to meet with prospective publishers, I spent a fair amount of time grilling him about what the sources were, what he could tell us how about he’d done the research and so forth. I worked at Oxford University Press for 10 years and published several Pulitzer Prize–winning historians, and I have not published any book that was more extensively documented and more impeccably footnoted than this one.”

Mr. Baker, for his part, during a post-reading interview, did not seem overly concerned with his reception.

“My response is, I’m the last guy in the world that anybody could label a conspiracy theorist,” he said. “You know, I have two decades of doing fact-filled stories that have never been contested. Knock on wood, no corrections or lawsuits. My stuff is pretty good! It’s pretty accurate.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

This advisory for Michael Bloomberg’s New Year’s Eve seems to fit with Wayne Barrett’s theory that the mayor is very publicly and deliberately putting his Republican phase behind him.

Barrett, speaking on Fred Dicker’s radio show, elaborated on the point, saying that the mayor “has to blur his own national partisan history.”

The last president Michael Bloomberg supported was George W. Bush, says Barrett.

In considering what role Joe Biden will play in the Obama White House, the most important question hasn’t yet been answered: Does Biden, a veteran of two unsuccessful presidential bids, still want to serve as president someday? The answer to this question will shape every facet of his vice presidency profoundly.

In modern times, the main appeal of the vice presidency, an office with little official responsibility beyond presiding over the Senate and occupying the first spot in the presidential line of succession, has been its stepping-stone potential.

True, most vice presidents since World War II have not actually gone on to become president (the three who have are Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush), but the high visibility and instant access to powerful party leaders in every corner of the country that come with the office give its occupant a powerful leg up that he would otherwise never enjoy. Without their stints as vice president, Al Gore, Walter Mondale, and Hubert Humphrey would all probably never have secured the Democratic presidential nomination. In all, six of the 11 post-war vice presidents have at least gone on to win their party’s presidential nominations.

With the last two administrations, we have learned just how dramatic the differences can be between vice presidents who have presidential designs and those who don’t.

In 1992, Al Gore was elected as Bill Clinton’s partner, a fellow Southern baby-boomer who would bring fresh energy and new ideas to Washington. Gore had already sought the presidency once (making a splash in the South in the 1988 Democratic primaries, but failing to catch on anywhere else), and at 44, it was obvious that he’d be running again someday. Clinton understood this and, as his presidency evolved, he embraced Gore’s ambition as a part of his legacy; Gore’s election in 2000, he concluded, would be interpreted by historians as a yearning by Americans for a third Clinton term.

Gore was given high-profile, image-enhancing assignments. In Clinton’s first term, he showed up on David Letterman’s show to skewer various wasteful government programs and initiatives – part of his “reinventing government” agenda. When the Nafta debate took center-stage in the fall of 1993, Gore was dispatched to debate Ross Perot on CNN. The program generated record ratings, and Gore’s performance was so powerful that Perot’s political career, in ascent since his strong Election Day showing in 1992, was essentially squashed on the spot. At the 1996 Democratic convention, Clinton created a new tradition to boost Gore, allowing him to deliver his acceptance speech on the convention’s third night – a departure from past custom, which called for the V.P. and presidential nominees to speak back-to-back on the final night, and a clear effort to raise Gore’s profile.

The eight-year strategy paid off in some ways. Only one Democrat, Bill Bradley, dared to challenge Gore in the 2000 primaries (during which Clinton conveniently scheduled his State of the Union address for a few nights before the New Hampshire primary, meaning that virtually every New Hampshire voter saw Gore right behind the president as Clinton delivered a forceful and upbeat speech extolling his various achievements) and Gore beat Bradley in every single primary and caucus. The general election, of course, was a different story, but the Gore model still stands as testament to the potential of the vice presidency for ambitious politicians. Without it, he might still be in the Senate today.

Gore’s successor, Dick Cheney, has created a different model. Once in his life, he’d craved the presidency. Upon stepping down as Defense Secretary after George H.W. Bush’s ‘92 defeat, Cheney readied himself for bid for the ’96 G.O.P nomination. But he abandoned it in 1995 (daughter Mary’s sexuality, then not public knowledge, was supposedly a concern) and then spent the next five years making a fortune at Halliburton.

When he emerged, at age 59, from the private sector to serve as George W. Bush’s running-mate in 2000, Cheney’s White House aspirations were nonexistent. He told associates of an “understanding” he’d reached with Bush, hinting that he’d have far more power and influence than most vice presidents. This, obviously, has been the case. Cheney never seriously considered trying to succeed Bush, satisfied instead to exercise unprecedented authority within the White House. In a way, he realized, he could have the power of the top job without having to run for it.

So, on the spectrum between Gore and Cheney, where does Biden fall?

Unless something has changed in the last few months, it’s likely that he still wants to be president. He began positioning himself for the office 25 years ago, when he nearly plunged into the 1984 Democratic race (he backed off Christmas week in 1983). In 1987, he jumped all the way in, and watched his stock rise thanks to impressive early fund-raising and a series of inspiring speeches. Scandal forced him out in September ’87. But Biden wasn’t done. In the summer of 2000, as Gore was about to be nominated in Los Angeles, Biden declared himself once again interested in the White House – and ready to run the next time the nomination was open. He toyed with a 2004 campaign, again dawdling and backing out at the last minute, months after John Kerry’s defeat made it clear that he’d be a candidate in 2008.

Biden’s failed primary bid this year illustrated the deleterious effect that long service in Washington can have on presidential ambitions. His debate performances were widely praised, but voters instinctively dismissed him as stale and outdated. There was no way to break through.

The vice presidency, at least in theory, would give him a chance to overcome all of that in 2016. Given Obama’s star power, Biden may not be as visible as past vice presidents, but eight years on the job could still do wonders for his profile – just as it would give him plenty of chances to rack up favors and IOU’s with party leaders and activists.

But even if he does still want the presidency, there’s the matter of age. Biden was born in December 1942, meaning that he’d be 73 years old during the 2016 campaign and would turn 74 between the November election and Inauguration Day. This would make him the oldest president ever inaugurated (a few months older than Ronald Reagan when he was sworn in for the second time), but as a septuagenarian presidential nominee, he’d have plenty of recent company: John McCain was 72 this year, Bob Dole was 73 in 1996, Reagan was 73 in 1984 (and 69 in 1980), and George H.W. Bush was 68 in 1992 (not literally a septuagenarian, but close enough).

Age isn’t the limitation it once was. Back in 1952, Vice President Alben Barkley, age 74, badly wanted to succeed Harry Truman as president. But party leaders told him no, that he was simply too old to attract widespread support, and his candidacy ended two weeks after it began. (Barkley ended up dying in 1956, before his presidential term would have expired.) What is ‘too old’ today, though? If Biden remains vibrant and healthy, age alone probably wouldn’t rule him out as a 2016 candidate.

It’s clear that Obama-Biden is not the second coming of Clinton-Gore. But that doesn’t automatically mean that Biden will be Obama’s Cheney. There’s plenty of room between the Gore and Cheney models – enough, at least theoretically, for Biden to build the foundation for a credible presidential campaign in 2016.

To understand the philosophy of government that Dick Cheney brought to Washington over the past seven years, it is most instructive to see Frost/Nixon, with Frank Langella's remarkable reanimation of Tricky Dick for a generation that never knew him. In Nixon's famous conversation with David Frost, there came a moment when the old reprobate uttered the truth—a truth that Cheney still prefers to obscure when he talks about illegal surveillance, torture and other violations of the Bill of Rights, as he did in his exit appearance this week on Fox News.

The crucial moment of candor arrives not when Nixon briefly pretends to feel deep remorse over his actions (a pose he later abandoned in his memoir).  Instead it is when he offers his perspective on the powers of the president, and unintentionally reveals the full extent of his lawlessness.

Asked by Frost to explain how he could justify illegal wiretapping, black-bag jobs and other gross violations of law in collecting intelligence on the movement against the Vietnam War, he replies in a blandly sinister tone: "Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal."

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace put a similar question to Cheney concerning the dubious conduct of the Bush administration: "If the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?" The vice president's response was long-winded and obfuscatory, but the same in essence as Nixon's. "In general proposition, I'd say yes," he began, and then went on to claim that because the president can launch a nuclear strike without consulting Congress, he can do pretty much anything that he claims is in defense of the nation during wartime.

To buttress his novel theory—which of course contradicted the very essence of the constitutional balance of powers—Nixon cited historical parallels that were echoed by Cheney last Sunday, more than 30 years later. 

Defending actions that clearly violated the Constitution and the law, Nixon alluded to Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and compared the threat to the nation by internal dissension in the '60s to the Civil War a century earlier. "Lincoln said, and I think I can remember the quote almost exactly, he said, ‘Actions which would otherwise be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation.'... This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president."

In his interview with Chris Wallace on Fox, Cheney specifically referred to Lincoln (and threw in Franklin Roosevelt for good measure). As always, he lapsed into euphemism, but the meaning is unmistakable. Living in the aftermath of 9/11, he said, "we find ourselves in a situation where I believe you need strong executive leadership. What we did in this administration is to exert that kind of authority. … If you think about what Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, what F.D.R. did during World War II, they went far beyond anything we've done in a global war on terror. But we have exercised, I think, the legitimate authority of the president under Article II of the Constitution as commander in chief in order to put in place policies and programs that have successfully defended the nation."

In retrospect, however, the late president appears much more forthright than the current vice president. Unlike Mr. Cheney, who continues to make extravagant claims for the power of the president that have been explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court, Nixon at least acknowledged the thinness of his case. During the actual Frost-Nixon interview, the British talk show host, evidently stunned by his guest's claim of monarchical authority, questioned whether there was "anything in the Constitution … that suggests the president is … that far above the law."

Replied Nixon, "No, there isn't. There's nothing specific that the Constitution contemplates in that respect."

The founding document that every federal official swears to uphold is replete with limitations on the executive power. George Washington warned against those who would seek to expand that power by usurpation, and we have seen that come to pass. Among the most urgent tasks of the new president—as he and his vice president seem to realize—will be repairing the damage done to law and justice by Nixon's unrepentant heirs.

Councilman Charles Barron is taking umbrage with President Bush for today's declaration that it's "time for Robert Mugabe to go."

Bush's denunciation wouldn't exactly constitute a controversial stand in most of the developed world these days, what with the food shortages, cholera, dictatorial press crackdowns and subversion of democracy that have taken place in Zimbabwe under Mugabe's rule.

But Barron, who hosted Mugabe at an event in City Hall several years ago, said, “Bush is a hypocrite. He can’t talk about human rights violations when he violated the human rights of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans.”

Barron went on to say, “He just needs to sail off into the sunset” -- referring to Bush -- and “I’m hoping Obama is open to talking to Robert Mugabe as he said he is with talking to the leaders of Iran. I hope he is as open with Mugabe as he is as open with leaders of other countries we don’t see eye-to-eye with.”

Barron said Mugabe was accepted as a legitimate world leader, including by the United States, up until “he took land from white farmers. The minute he tried to take the land back that was stolen from his people, he was vilified.”

Nearly every current poll shows that most Americans oppose federal assistance to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, which must be worrying news for members of Congress as they ponder whether to support the proposed $15 billion emergency loan package. Political analysts warn of the consequences for lawmakers who support the “bailout everyone loves to hate.”

Like any survey that asks people to answer simply yes or no, however, the polling on the auto bailout reveals little or nothing about the information (or misinformation) behind the negative response. As they prepare to vote, the legislators should also consider how voters will feel when the nation suffers the full consequences of a cratering auto industry—and find out that the facts were not quite what they seemed to be.

Media coverage of the auto crisis has been powerfully biased against assistance to the industry, in part because reporters, editors and TV producers—not to mention the corporate owners—have yet to shed the outdated free-market fundamentalism that has shaped American journalism for so many years. The worst example in recent weeks has been the constant repetition of skewed statistics on auto worker compensation, which was said to exceed $70 per hour.

Such stories were meant to emphasize the supposed greed of the unionized workforce. Yet that $70-plus figure, which actually includes pensions and health benefits to retirees, grossly distorted what Detroit’s assembly mechanics receive in their weekly paychecks. And it most certainly stoked hostility to those workers and the industry among Americans who listened to the crude propaganda.

Then there was the incessantly repeated story of the stupid auto executives who flew to Washington for Congressional hearings on their private jets. That was true and deplorable, of course, but scarcely of great relevance to the issue of whether America should preserve its manufacturing base and a million jobs in auto and related industries.

What Americans may not know about the problems of the automotive business seems at least as pertinent as what they have been told so far. The chances are that voters outraged over those mythical $70-an-hour wages have no idea how heavily the livelihood of auto workers in competing countries is subsidized by their governments—starting with health care and moving on to child care, pensions and a host of other benefits that American workers have not begun to imagine.

Such comparisons tend to be absent from most mainstream analysis of the auto crisis. Equally relevant and usually missing, too, is the news that competitor nations are preparing to provide many billions in aid to their car companies. Right now, the European Union is considering a loan package to the continent’s auto industries that may exceed $50 billion.

Washington’s first $15 billion loan to the Big Three will likewise come from a Department of Energy program to encourage new green technology. So what is the difference? In Europe, there is far less controversy over preserving critical jobs and the industrial base. And in Europe, there is broad recognition of a basic fact: The precipitous drop in sales confronted by the automakers has been caused by economic conditions beyond the control of those companies. As credit dried up, so did car sales.

None of this is meant to suggest that the management of GM. Ford and Chrysler—or the United Auto Workers, for that matter—shouldn’t pay a high price for their failure to restructure in years past and their resistance to modernizing their products and processes. Taxpayers must be protected, just as they were when the government loaned billions to Chrysler.

But it is ironic to think that the Bush administration and Congress would swiftly appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars to save the same firms whose stupidity and criminality drove the economy down—while begrudging a far smaller amount to a major industry brought to ruin by the financial crash.

As each Wall Street bailout receives approval, with or without appropriate conditions, we are assured that the risks of bankruptcy are simply unacceptable. If American International or Citigroup went down, who knew what hell might break loose? There was some merit in that argument. The truth is that we are just as ignorant of what destruction will ensue in the broad economy should government allow auto to go broke. If and when that happens, the opinion polls will shift overnight. But it will be too late.

jconason@observer.com