Andanh.com

Barack Obama is getting painfully close to tying himself in knots with all his explanations of the conditions under which he would unconditionally talk with America's foes, such as Iran. One clarification was that there is a difference between "preparations" and "preconditions" for negotiations with bad guys. Such hairsplitting word games do not inspire confidence.

The fact is, Obama was right to say that he would talk with any foe, if it would advance U.S. interests. The Bush team negotiated with Libya to give up its nuclear program, even after Libya had accepted responsibility for blowing up Americans on Pan Am Flight 103. Those negotiations succeeded, though, not because President Bush was better "prepared" but because at the time, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Bush had leverage. Iraq had yet to fall apart.

Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America, so no matter who we have to talk with, the advantage will be on our side. That's what matters.

Bush was also right: Talking with Iran today would be tantamount to appeasement -- but that's because the Bush team has so squandered U.S. power and credibility in the Middle East, and has failed to put in place any effective energy policy, that negotiating with Iran could only end up with us on the short end. We don't have the leverage -- the allies, the alternative energy, the unity at home, the credible threat of force -- to advance our interests diplomatically today.

When you have leverage, talk. When you don't have leverage, get some. Then talk.

A self-identified African-American caller to a Washington, D.C., radio station characterized the recent anti-Hillary Clinton outburst by white liberal Chicago priest Michael Pfleger as a "minstrel show."

Pfleger denounced Clinton for her effrontery and sense of "entitlement" in trying to take the Democratic presidential nomination from a black man, one Barack Obama. Pfleger, who is pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church, donated $1,500 to the Obama campaign between 1995 and 2001 and is indebted to Obama because when Obama was in the Illinois Legislature, he, according to the Chicago Tribune, "announced $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs." Three months after the grant was announced, Pfleger donated another $200 to Obama.

Obama denounced Pfleger's comments far more quickly than he separated himself from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but one is known by one's preferred associations. Obama's friends and associates have a long history of far-left political and theological positions with which Obama has appeared perfectly comfortable. It makes one wonder if Obama's denunciations are sincere or if he's had a politically convenient "conversion." On Saturday, in what might be considered spiritual and political damage control, Obama announced he has resigned his membership in Trinity United Church of Christ.

We have seen conservative preachers and other self-anointed spokesmen for God make fools of themselves by overindulging in politics and other trivialities, and now the theological left is getting its chance to rush in where even angels fear to tread for their equal time and deserved mockery.

Politicians shouldn't do religion and preachers should stay out of partisan politics. If preachers want to do politics, they should resign their ordination and become politicians. And if politicians want to do religion, they should stop running for positions in the lower kingdom, enroll in seminary and become ministers in the Higher Kingdom.

"This doesn't sound like Scott -- not the Scott McClellan I've known for a long time," Karl Rove said last week, referring to his former colleague's new book from inside the Bush administration. "It sounds like a left-wing blogger."

And that's exactly the point. Nothing in McClellan's book is surprising or new. Its power lies in the fact that its author, a former White House press secretary who had worked loyally for George W. Bush since his days in Texas, does indeed confirm what the president's harshest critics have said about him and his administration.

(That includes the public take on Rove, by the way. McClellan calls the former White House adviser "an operative who places political gain ahead of national interest," which is a damning indictment of anyone who serves in a high position in the White House.)

As McClellan now concedes, the invasion of Iraq was poorly thought out and an act of gut instinct on the part of Bush, who believed that only wartime presidents were ever remembered as great. The invasion was sold to the American people as something it was not, McClellan says, because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East."

But part of the blame, McClellan says, falls on a national media that served as "complicit enablers" of the Bush strategy.

It took Christopher Columbus about 70 days to get to the New World -- a bit less than half as long as it took us to get through the 2008 primary calendar. But we have finally reached our destination, and people in the Barack Obama and John McCain camps are feeling good about themselves.

Neither campaign is planning a major pivot for the fall. Both are confident they have a strategy for victory.

So my role today is Dr. Doom -- to break through unmerited confidence and raise the anxiety level in both camps.

Though voters now prefer Democratic policy positions on most major issues by between 11 and 25 percentage points, Obama has only a 0.7 percent lead over McCain in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. His favorability rating among independents has dropped from 63 to 49 percent since late February.

Furthermore, Obama has spent the past several months rolling up his sleeves and furiously courting working-class votes. It doesn't seem to be working. Ron Brownstein of the National Journal calculates that Obama did no better among those voters in a late state like Pennsylvania than he did for 26 out of 29 earlier primary states where he lost the working class.

The following are reader comments from our blog, blogs.kansas.com/weblog, about former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole calling former White House spokesman Scott McClellan a "miserable creature" for waiting to express his disagreements with the Bush administration:

Right on the bull's-eye, Sen. Dole.

The only thing negative I can say about McClellan and his book is that he should have been man enough to speak out about the Bush administration crimes while serving for the White House.

Bob, step away from the Viagra.

He can attack McClellan all he wants, and maybe it is deserved, but I see that the Republicans aren't saying anything in the book is a lie.

That the University of Colorado is raising $9 million to endow a professorship of conservative studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It smacks of affirmative action and casts conservatism in the syntax of departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, gay studies, African-American studies and so on.

Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. These other groups may be oppressed, but conservatives run whole wars, black-site prisons, sprawling multinational corporations. In fact, if these other groups are oppressed, conservatives are the oppressors, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.

But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative, I think a "professor of conservative thought and policy" in Colorado, or anywhere else, is not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. At the University of Colorado, for instance, one professor found that of 800 or so on the faculty, only 32 were registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or physical education.

I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backward to sympathetically teach texts I hate; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Karl Marx -- both of whom I regard as totalitarians -- compelling. But when I get to the end of "The Communist Manifesto," I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?"

I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as, or in the same way as, a professor who found them plausible. And that's fine. What I'm trying to point out is that even as I try to be neutral, my personal opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.