In a Newsweek exclusive three week ago, former Justice Department official Thomas Tamm revealed his role in helping the New York Times make public President Bush's program of illegal domestic surveillance. Now Salon's Glenn Greenwald has details on the DOJ's efforts to punish the whistleblower. And as it turns out (and as I suggested back in 2007), the Bush administration's ultimate target may be the New York Times itself.

As Greenwald spells out today, the Justice Department investigation is not pursuing the White House cabal behind the violation of FISA's prohibitions on warrantless eavesdropping of American citizens, but instead those who revealed it. Tamm, whose life has been turned upside-down since the FBI raided his home in August 2007, will likely be subpoenaed to testify what he knows about James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, the Times reporters who broke the story in December 2005.

That's the message in a letter sent to Tamm's attorney Paul Kemp by Steve Tyrrell of the DOJ's fraud section. As Greenwald described it:

The letter begins by announcing that the DOJ and FBI are "presently investigating the unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding the Presidentially-authorized NSA program…(hereinafter, 'The Terrorist Surveillance Program')." It then references the Newsweek article and "ask[s] whether [Tamm] is willing to reconsider his prior refusal to speak with agents of the FBI and/or to testify before the Grand Jury regarding his knowledge of and/or participation in the disclosure of TSP-related information to [James] Risen, Mr. Lichtblau and others." It demands an answer from Tamm by January 9 -- 11 days before Obama is to be inaugurated -- and then threateningly warns: "if I do not hear from you by that date, I will assume that Mr. Tamm is not interested in submitting to a voluntary interview or testifying before the Grand Jury": an obvious threat that he may be subpoenaed and compelled to do so.

The implication - that Lichtblau and Risen are in the Justice Department's crosshairs - would represent a conservative dream come true. Many in the Bush administration and its amen corner have been clamoring for the prosecution of the New York Times ever since the President's lawbreaking came to light. (For more background, Perrspectives has the details.)

10 days ago, the Obama transition team notified about 90 of the Pentagon's 250 Bush political appointees that their services would no longer be needed after Inauguration Day. But despite DoD spokesman Geoff Morrell's declaration that holdover Republican Defense Secretary Robert Gates was "absolutely satisfied" with way the transition was being handled, one loyal Bushie at the Pentagon was anything but. Jim O'Beirne - the same Jim O'Beirne who famously populated the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad with Republican campaign hacks and Bush bath-water drinkers - is crying foul.

On Tuesday, O'Beirne emailed the Bush loyalists who had learned of their looming dismissals from Scott Gration, a senior official on Obama’s transition team. In his seething missive, O'Beirne, the outgoing special assistant to the secretary of defense for White House liaisons, accused Team Obama of playing politics. As The Hill reported:

In the email, O'Beirne tried to assure the soon-to-be displaced employees that the decisions were based on "policy change in the Obama administration" and not based on performance.

However, he said, if employees "harbor residual doubts" then they can "content yourself with the likelihood that it was your outstanding performance as a Bush appointee that drew the opposition's attention to you."

"In that regard, you may take justifiable satisfaction that you were among the first to be chosen," O'Beirne wrote.

Of course, when it comes to evaluating the qualifications of Bush appointees, Jim O'Beirne knows best.

As Rajiv Chandrasekaran detailed in his shocking 2006 account of the bungled American occupation of Iraq (Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone), O'Beirne was the gatekeeper on personnel assigned to Baghdad. And to be sure, the GOP loyalist and husband of crypto-conservative columnist Kate O'Beirne used the crudest of political litmus tests.

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During April 2007 Senate testimony about his role in the purge of U.S. attorneys, Alberto Gonzales famously explained, "that I don't recall remembering." Now comes word that the former Attorney General is writing a tell-nothing memoir designed to salvage his irreparably damaged reputation. Judging from his interview today in the Wall Street Journal, Gonzales has rediscovered his memory, if not the truth.

Gonzales' self-serving historical revisionism when it comes to rubber-stamping President Bush's illegal NSA domestic surveillance, authorizing the torture of terror detainees and sacking of prosecutors for political purposes begins in jaw-dropping fashion. Complaining to the Journal about the scorn and derision heaped upon him, Gonzales whined:

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?"

"For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

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In January, George W. Bush famously predicted he would broker a Middle East peace by the end of his presidency. Now with Israel's launch this morning of airstrikes in Gaza -- which so far have left 155 dead -- Bush's pledge of a two-state solution is just the latest failure of his disastrous tenure in the White House.

Tensions between Israeli and Hamas forces have been escalating since the expiration last week of a six-month truce negotiated by Egypt. The retaliatory tit-for-tat has included Israeli strikes against militants in Gaza, and Hamas firing rockets and mortars into Israel. And while Israel reopened border crossings Friday for deliveries of food, supplies and humanitarian aid, the AP reported that the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "wrapped up preparations for a broad offensive."

On Thursday, the scandal-plagued outgoing Prime Minister issued a warning to Palestinians in Gaza. As Reuters recounted:

"I didn't come here to declare war," Mr. Olmert told Al Arabiya, an Arab broadcaster widely watched in Gaza. "But Hamas must be stopped - that is the way it is going to be."

He issued what amounted to a public call to Gazans to overthrow Hamas, the Islamic group that controls the territory. "I'm telling them now," he said. "It may be the last minute. There will be more blood there. Who wants it? We don't want it."

That kind of rhetoric hardly suggests any imminent breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian relations during the 25 days remaining in the Bush presidency -- especially given this morning's airstrikes. Which is exactly what President Bush promised 11 months ago.

After years of malign neglect regarding the simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, President Bush launched his renewed peace effort at the November 2007 Annapolis conference. During a subsequent meeting on January 11, 2008 with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Bush made his pledge of a signed agreement during his presidency:

"I believe it's going to happen, that there will be a signed peace treaty by the time I leave office...I'm on a timetable. I've got 12 months."

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When President Bush issued holiday pardons for 19 miscreants past and present on Tuesday, former Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby wasn't among them. But with the two year campaign by right-wing pundits, GOP politicos and even Republican White House hopefuls now reaching a crescendo, Libby may yet get his slate wiped clean by the outgoing President. And to be sure, nothing in George W. Bush's past statements would suggest the Plamegate felon won't get the same Weinberger treatment the President's father offered the Iran-Contra crowd this week 16 years ago.

The drumbeat to save Scooter started anew on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. While Libby was convicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation into the retaliatory outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, the Journal portrayed the criminal as martyr and the President's July 2007 commutation of Libby's sentence as a "half measure." Bush, the WSJ argued, should undo the "injustice inflicted" on Libby:

The judgment by a Washington, D.C. jury was more a verdict on the Bush Administration than it was about the confusing facts of Mr. Libby's alleged deceit. The Plame affair was a proxy for the larger political dispute over Iraq, and Mr. Libby became the Beltway sacrifice. By trumpeting his guilt, critics were able to impugn Mr. Bush's policies by insisting the President had "lied us into war"...

...In this dark episode, an honest man became the fall guy in a larger political war over the war. Mr. Libby deserved better -- and Mr. Bush owes it to Mr. Libby, and to future occupants of the White House, to give him a full pardon.

Writing in U.S. News, reliable Republican mouthpiece Michael Barone regurgitated the Journal's dishonest plea to rehabilitate Libby from the taint of his own law-breaking.

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Coming in the wake of Russian warships passing through the Panama Canal and visiting Cuba, conflicting reports that Moscow intends to sell an advanced anti-aircraft missile system to Iran are ratcheting up tensions with the United States. But more worrisome still is the heightened prospect of a preemptive Israeli air strike against Tehran's nuclear infrastructure before the S-300 system would become operational.

On Sunday, Iranian official Esmail Kosari seemingly confirmed earlier rumors of the purchase, telling Tehran's IRNA news agency, "After a few years of talks with Russia, now the S-300 system is being delivered." But the next day, the Russian agency responsible for monitoring international defense cooperation denied plans for imminent deliveries of the S-300 to Iran, claiming the Iranian's revelation "does not correspond to reality." Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry, also said a senior Russian official had "told Israel that the new report about delivery of the S-300 was false."

As the AP reported Tuesday, despite the Russian assurances American officials believe the sale of the SA-10 (as it is known in the West) is going forward. While protesting that the sophisticated anti-aircraft system would pose a threat to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington's bigger concern is the prospect of dramatically improved air defense for the Iranian nuclear program. As the Washington Post detailed:

Israel and the United States fear that, were Iran to possess S-300 missiles, it would use them to protect its nuclear facilities, including the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz or the country's first atomic power plant now under construction at Bushehr by Russian contractors. That would make any potential military strike on the Iranian facilities much more difficult.

Make that much more difficult.

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Three years after the New York Times first revealed the Bush administration's program of illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA, whistleblower Thomas Tamm has acknowledged his role in making public the President's lawbreaking. In its expose Sunday, Newsweek details how the former Justice Department official came to discover the White House's violations of the FISA law and reluctantly decided to turn to the Times. Whether or not Tamm is ultimately arrested for his revelations, the same voices in President Bush's amen corner that rallied to the defense of Scooter Libby will renew their call for the prosecution of both Tamm and the New York Times.

Tamm's public admission comes 18 months after the FBI first raided his home, confiscating personal files and computers. At the very moment the Democratic Congress in August 2007 was voting to codify President Bush's years-long criminal surveillance of American citizens, the net was closing around the man who helped bring it to the nation's attention.

While at the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), Tamm stumbled upon the existence of Bush's program of warrantless eavesdropping on the international phone calls and emails of Americans which began just after the 9/11 attacks. The administration was not merely circumventing the legal requirement for approval by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts, but subsequently laundering the intelligence gathered to "get legitimate FISA warrants - giving the cases a judicial stamp of approval."

In the spring of 2004, a frustrated Tamm finally took action:

When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within the office) was "probably illegal."

Tamm agonized over what to do. He tried to raise the issue with a former colleague working for the Senate Judiciary Committee. But the friend, wary of discussing what sounded like government secrets, shut down their conversation. For weeks, Tamm couldn't sleep. The idea of lawlessness at the Justice Department angered him. Finally, one day during his lunch hour, Tamm ducked into a subway station near the U.S. District Courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue. He headed for a pair of adjoining pay phones partially concealed by large, illuminated Metro maps. Tamm had been eyeing the phone booths on his way to work in the morning. Now, as he slipped through the parade of midday subway riders, his heart was pounding, his body trembling. Tamm felt like a spy. After looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he picked up a phone and called The New York Times.

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News this morning that U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has indicted Democratic Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich predictably brought cheers from the conservative chattering classes. Blagojevich's arrest over the "pay for play" Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama and myriad other jaw-dropping corruption schemes Fitzgerald simply deemed "staggering" led the right-wing Hot Air blog among others to proclaim "Fitzmas arrives early this year." Of course, when the crime was obstruction and perjury over the outing covert CIA operative Valerie Plame as political payback by the Bush administration, the mouthpieces of the right slandered the Republican Fitzgerald as "politically motivated", "disgusting", "a lunatic" - and worse.

A walk down memory lane provides a rich history of the vitriol directed at Fitzgerald by conservatives circling the wagons around Karl Rove, Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby and the Bush White House. In December 2003, Deputy Attorney General James Comey (who later ran afoul of Bush loyalists over the President's illegal NSA domestic surveillance program) described his Plamegate Special Counsel appointee Fitzgerald as "an absolutely apolitical career prosecutor" with a "sterling reputation for integrity and impartiality." But as the noose began to tighten around Libby's neck during Fitzgerald's investigation into the outing of Plame by Robert Novak, the Republican amen corner went after the messenger.

In the fall of 2005, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison rushed to Libby's defense in the wake of his indictment by Fitzgerald. As the opening salvo of the tried and true "criminalization of politics" defense, Hutchison sneered at what she derided as Fitzgerald's "perjury technicality":

"That if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."

In the ensuing conservative war on Fitzgerald, former MSNBC host Tucker Carlson was among the first goose-stepping soldiers to volunteer. On October 24, 2005, Carlson regretted that the Bush White House hadn't started smearing Fitz much earlier. Carlson applauded Hutchison's line and said of President Bush, "He should have done that a long time ago," adding:

"I think politically [the Bush administration] did very much the wrong thing by saying nice things about Patrick Fitzgerald some months ago - 'he's a man of integrity,' 'he's a good guy,' 'we have complete confidence he's going do the right thing,' etc., etc. - making it now almost impossible for the White House, even on background, to attack the guy."

By February 2007 and with Libby's commutation still months away, Carlson was frothing at the mouth when it came to the topic of Patrick Fitzgerald. Carlson, who once had glowingly approved Ken Starr's inquisition of Bill Clinton, said of Libby's prosecutor:

"You shouldn't have these freelancers, like the lunatic Fitzgerald, running around destroying people's lives for no good reason. I hate this trial."

As it turns out, Tucker Carlson's fury towards Fitz was genetic.

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Even as Barack Obama was introducing his national security team to the nation Monday, Americans learned of a chilling new report detailing the scope of the global threat of weapons of mass destruction. Dramatically titled "World at Risk," the study led by former Senators Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jim Talent (R-MO) predicted a better than even chance that the world would experience a WMD attack within the next five years. As if President-Elect Obama didn't already have enough to worry about, the report eerily echoed the dire - and hauntingly accurate - February 2001 warnings by the Hart-Rudman Commission about the growing terrorism threat to the United States.

The nine-member Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (web site here) offered its grim assessment (PDF here) that the United States and its allies must act quickly to avert the disaster of an attack carried out with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world. The six month study, mandated by Congress to address a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, opens with both a dark forecast and a call to action:

The Commission believes that unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.

While the Graham panel concluded "terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon," nuclear weapons programs in countries such as Iran and North Korea and the growing risk poorly secured biological pathogens suggest, as the New York Times put it, "unconventional threats are fast outpacing the defenses arrayed to confront them." And at the very time "America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing," the panel warned, an increasingly unstable Pakistan will be at the center of Obama administration policymakers' nightmares:

Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan. It has nuclear weapons and a history of unstable governments, and parts of its territory are currently a safe haven for al Qaeda and other terrorists. Moreover, given Pakistan's tense relationship with India, its buildup of nuclear weapons is exacerbating the prospect of a dangerous nuclear arms race in South Asia that could lead to a nuclear conflict...

...Pakistan is an ally, but there is a grave danger it could also be an unwitting source of a terrorist attack on the United States - possibly with weapons of mass destruction.

If this grim alarm to an incoming administration sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2001, the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century led by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman offered the new President George W. Bush a similarly frightening assessment of the looming terrorism threat.

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It's official. According to a statement from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the United States has been in a recession since December 2007. But while that conclusion from the non-governmental NEBR differs from the traditional definition of two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction, by any accounting the Bush recession will be well underway by the end of this year. And by either measure, the conservative talking point of a Clinton recession "inherited by George W. Bush" remains a myth.

The NEBR declaration is just the latest confirmation of the severe Bush downturn. Last week, the Commerce Department revised its third quarter (July through October) gross domestic product decline to 0.5% from 0.3%, while two recent forecasts predicted a Q4 drop-off of at least 3%. Two weeks ago, the quarterly Survey of Professional Forecasters by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia concluded that the United States already entered a recession in April. Today, the NEBR's analysis, which includes a broader range of factors beyond GDP, concluded that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007. As CNN reported:

The NBER said that the deterioration in the labor market throughout 2008 was one key reason why it decided to state that the recession began last year.

Employers have trimmed payrolls by 1.2 million jobs in the first 10 months of this year. On Friday, economists are predicting the government will report a loss of another 325,000 jobs for November.

The NBER also looks at real personal income, industrial production as well as wholesale and retail sales. All those measures reached a peak between November 2007 and June 2008, the NBER said.

Facing the avalanche of grim news Monday, the White House still refuses to use the term "recession" to describe the economic calamity that Barack Obama will inherit from George W. Bush. Two months after press secretary Dana Perino claimed, "I don’t think anybody could tell you right now if we’re in a recession or not" and one month after he himself rejected a question as to whether the U.S. was in a recession as "irrelevant," Bush spokesman Tony Fratto today said of the slowdown, "What's important is what is being done about it."

Of course, back in 2001 the new Bush administration and its amen corner in the right-wing media weren't shy at all when it came to blaming a sluggish economy on Bill Clinton.

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As the American economy plunges deeper into crisis, the conservative chattering classes are hoping for a replay of their 2001 blame game. Having successfully perpetuated the myth that President Bush "inherited a recession" from Bill Clinton, right-wing mouthpieces from Rush Limbaugh to Fred Barnes began blaming Barack Obama for the Bush recession literally within hours of his election. But as a quick glance at the data shows, across virtually economic indicator from GDP, unemployment and consumer confidence to home prices, foreclosures and manufacturing output, ownership for this mushrooming economic calamity squarely belongs to George W. Bush.

Gross Domestic Product. U.S. GDP shrank by 0.3% in the third quarter (July through September), a decline which followed the downward revision of the Q2 number from 3.3% to 2.8%. But while "recession" is traditionally defined as two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction (which is almost certain to occur), the quarterly Survey of Professional Forecasters by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia concluded that the United States entered a recession in April.

Recession at the State and Local Level. While there is debate as to whether or not the United States has technically slipped into a recession, at the state and local level there is no doubt at all. According to Moody's Economy, by the end of September 30 states were in recession, up from just five in March. 19 more states were deemed "at risk." (Only Sarah Palin's petro-state of Alaska was forecast to experience economic growth.) 276 of 380 metropolitan areas measured by Moody's had also sunk into recession. Combined with the downward spiral of home prices, these regional economic contractions are having a devastating impact on state and local tax revenue - and government services.

Unemployment. In October, the American economy shed 240,000 jobs, catapulting the losses for the year to 1.2 million. At 6.5%, the unemployment rate hit a 14-year high. The percentage of the adult population now working dropped to 61.8%, its lowest level in 15 years. The Philadelphia Fed survey forecast 222,000 more lost jobs per month through the end of the year. With some analysts now predicting unemployment will hit 8% by the middle of 2009, President Bush's reversal on extending jobless benefits could not come a moment too soon.

Jobless Claims. Of course, the corollary to skyrocketing unemployment is an explosion of new jobless claims. The Labor Department today released figures showing new unemployment claims jumped to 542,000 last week, a 16-year high. First-time jobless claims have now remained above the 400,000 for 17 straight weeks.

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In this the season of their discontent, Republican leaders are pointing the finger of blame, all the while positioning themselves to take over their battered and bruised party in 2012. So it is with Mike Huckabee. In his new book, the former Arkansas Governor, Baptist minister and Fox News host skewers presidential rival Mitt Romney and castigates leaders of the religious right who cast their lot with someone else. But while Huckabee looks forward to the future battle for the soul of the Republican Party in his latest book, it is worth remembering the culture war he advocated in past ones. And apparently, he will have soon have company in author Sarah Palin.

As Time describes, Huckabee's tome (Do The Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America) is part political memoir, part policy prescription - and part payback. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, his rival in courting the GOP's religious right base during the primaries, is mocked as "anything but conservative until he changed the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for president." Aggravating matters still, Huckabee "took as a sign of total disrespect" Mitt's refusal to call and congratulate him on his victory in the Iowa caucus which ultimately derailed Romney's campaign.

According to Time, much of Huckabee's venom is directed at his ersatz Christian conservative allies who backed other candidates during the Republican primaries. He blasts Pat Robertson and Bob Jones for backing Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, respectively. Huckabee pans Gary Bauer for his "ever-changing reason to deny me his support." Lamenting "that so many people of faith had moved from being prophetic voices," Governor Huckabee unleashed his fury at the End Times Pastor John Hagee who ultimately backed McCain:

"I asked if he had prayed about this and believed this was what the Lord wanted him to do," Huckabee writes of his conversation with Hagee. "I didn't get a straight answer."

Huckabee's evident feelings of betrayal towards his fellow culture warriors on display in this new book are understandable. After all, among the first of his six books was everything they could have asked for.

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Overlooked perhaps in the historic vote that made Barack Obama the nation's first African-American president is something that didn't happen. With the defeat of the McCain/Palin ticket and its extremist anti-abortion platform, Americans voted against an abrogation of women's reproductive rights that might have taken a generation to undo. And by rejecting draconian ballot measures in Colorado, South Dakota and California, voters protected a woman's right to choose - at least for now.

To be sure, Obama's victory prevented the emergence of conservative Supreme Court supermajority committed to sweeping away Roe v. Wade. With the potential retirement of Justices Stevens (88) and Ginsburg (83), Obama may the opportunity to make at least two nominations to the Court. (There may be 14 openings on the nation's appellate courts, all but one which currently has a Republican majority.) Given Justice Kennedy's condescending and paternalistic opinion in the 5-4 Gonzales v. Carhart case upholding the so-called federal partial birth abortion ban, the direction of the Court and the fate of Roe surely hung in the balance last Tuesday.

On that point, John McCain, Sarah Palin and the Republican Party were quite clear. McCain not only supported judicial appointees in the mold of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, he reversed course to support overturning Roe v. Wade. And to be sure, the 2008 Republican platform incorporated Palin's extremist views on abortion, banning the procedure even in cases of rape and incest:

"We support a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children."

In Colorado, anti-abortion activists tried – and failed - to enshrine the GOP plank's logical extreme in the state constitution.

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Back in May, I argued that with the American electorate's across-the-board preference for Democratic policies and a historically unpopular Republican president, John McCain's campaign would turn the November election into a "character war." In September, campaign chairman Rick Davis confirmed the GOP would follow its tried and true strategy from 2000 and 2004 when he announced "this election is not about issues" but instead about "a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." On Tuesday night, Americans will learn not only whether Barack Obama won the election, but whether voters literally thought he was a better man.

Heading into Election Day, Senator Obama looks like to outperform his recent Democratic predecessors across a range of policy and demographic measures. An October Rasmussen survey showed that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans across each of the 10 issues tracked. The party of Obama enjoys double-digit leads on the economy (by 13%), Social Security (12%), health care (20%)and education (by 19 points).

That issue advantage, compounded by John McCain's feeble response to the economic crisis and the GOP's increasingly xenophobic line towards immigrants, is helping fuel Obama's strong performance among critical voting blocks. As I detailed last week, media myths notwithstanding, Barack Obama will approach traditional levels of Democratic support among Jewish voters and outpoll Al Gore and John Kerry among Hispanics. And with his backing among white voters reaching 44% in the final CBS News/New York Times survey, the African-American Obama may surpass the levels achieved by Gore (42%), Kerry (41%) and even Bill Clinton (43%). Four years ago, John Kerry lost among white men by a 25 point margin (62% to 37%); according to a Fox News poll, Obama now trails John McCain by only 5 points among the same group.

But from the moment John McCain secured the Republican nomination, his fall strategy rested on creating a "character gap" between himself and Obama. As in 2000 and 2004, I argued, the Republicans would try to turn the race into a presidential personality contest:

And to win it, they need to manufacture a "character gap" between John McCain and Barack Obama...The data is clear. If the election is about the economy, health care and Iraq, John McCain cannot become the 44th president. Only if the GOP succeeds once again in transforming the race into a media medley about lapel pins, angry ministers and Muslim-sounding middle names can the Republicans hope to maintain their hold on the White House.

Sadly, we've been here before. The 2000 and 2004 exit polls clearly show the Republican Party succeeded both in portraying the presidential contest as being about character and in defining the accepted media narrative for candidates Bush, Gore and Kerry.

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As Election Day nears, John McCain continues to deploy Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher as a human shield against Barack Obama and his plan for middle class tax cuts. But while Wurzelbacher himself admitted he would fare better under Obama, another of McCain's representative Americans is set to receive a massive windfall if the Arizona Senator is elected. No doubt about it, Mrs. McCain - Cindy the Beer Heiress - would pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to her husband.

That the McCains are fabulously well off - as the $100 million beer distribution fortune, the 11 homes, 13 cars and a private jet attest - goes without saying. And as she reported in her two-page IRS summaries, Cindy McCain earned $6.1 million in 2006 and another $4.2 million in 2007. (Most came courtesy of her late father's Hensley & Company, Arizona's leading distributor of Anheuser-Busch products including Budweiser.)

But while as many as 100 million Americans would receive no benefit from President McCain's tax proposals, his wife would be awash in new-found cash. As the Center for American Progress detailed in June, the McCains would reap a $373,000 bonanza should he win the White House:

McCain favors making the Bush tax laws permanent, and also plans to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, double the dependent exemption and offer tax breaks on business income...Had McCain's tax proposal been in place in 2006, [they] would have done incredibly well - saving even more than they did under the existing Bush plan. John and Cindy McCain would have walked away with $373,429 in their pocket.

Of course, given that McCain's tax plan is radically more regressive than even that of President Bush - it delivers 58% of its benefits to the wealthiest 1% of American taxpayers - it's no surprise Cindy the Beer Queen can expect a jaw-dropping payout.

But Cindy's winnings don't end there.

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