Future GOP candidates shaking off dust from Obama landslide

The 2012 tea leaf reading is well underway for Republicans.

Several pundits see significance in Mike Huckabee - the former Arkansas governor turned presidential candidate turned talk show host - starting his book tour in Iowa, where the first nomination contest will take place in January 2012.

Many expect vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin to run for the top job, despite harsh criticism from outside and inside John McCain's campaign. Palin said yesterday that she would speak Thursday at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami, another high-profile appearance.

On Fox News channel last night, Palin said she can't predict what will happen by 2012 and will rely on God to show her the open doors in her life. "If there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door," she said.

Meanwhile, Charley Manning, a longtime adviser to Mitt Romney, poured some cold water on the former Massachusetts governor's ambitions.

"I'd be surprised if Mitt ever ran again for president. . . . I sure don't think it was the best experience of his life," Manning said on WTKK radio in Boston, citing anti-Mormon bias in the Republican primaries. "There are other things he can do."

On the other hand, Romney has been piling up political chits - both from his articulate and steadfast support as one of McCain's top surrogates and from his raising money for congressional Republicans.

FOON RHEE

WASHINGTON - The Project for a New American Century, the nonprofit foundation that gained an almost mythic reputation - and a highly exaggerated one, defenders insist - for being the intellectual incubator for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has reemerged on the Internet, sparking Beltway chatter that neoconservatives may soon have their old perch back to criticize President-elect Barack Obama's foreign policy.

The group's website was relaunched last month after a year in hibernation, though there is no evidence that its founders have big plans for the self-described "educational organization."

But Gary Schmitt, one of the founders and now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, does not rule out a resurrection of sorts to provide a vehicle for new commentary on US global leadership. "We're not bringing the bandwagon out of the barn yet," he told the Globe.

The group, when it first emerged in 1997, included among its members now Vice President Dick Cheney, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, ex-Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz, former Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and others who advocated a muscular US foreign policy, including preemptive war.

The group published, among other documents, a letter to President Clinton in 1998 that called for "implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." That would not happen until many of the signatories joined the Bush administration. The group has not published anything since 2006.

"The only reason it makes sense to bring it back is to criticize Obama's foreign policy decisions," said Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the liberal New America Foundation.

BRYAN BENDER

Of the two awkward attempts at humor during President-elect Barack Obama's first press conference, his reference to not talking to dead presidents is the one that has received most of the attention.

"I didn't want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about, you know, doing any seances," Obama said Friday. Within hours, he called the former first lady to apologize for what his spokeswoman called a "careless and off-handed remark."

But comments have appeared in the blogosphere on the other joke. Talking about choosing a puppy for his daughters, he said "our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but, obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me."

During the campaign, Obama celebrated his biracial heritage as the son of a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya - and many biracial Americans celebrated with him.

But now on message boards and blogs, some are saying they were offended.

One of the most thought-out is from a woman who runs a blog for mothers of Korean-American children. "I've heard mixed-race people use that term to describe themselves before, usually in the same ha-ha way Obama did. I've also heard it thrown around as an insult, a pejorative, a slur. I've felt the slap of that word across my face" she wrote. "My fear, however, is that Obama, as the first mixed-race president, will shape the way most Americans view people of mixed race for at least a generation. And will Obama calling himself a 'mutt' - with humor, as if the word is nothing, nothing at all - make it socially acceptable for people to start calling me a mutt? My kids?"

FOON RHEE