Gavel bangs on Miers mission
Sometimes, even treadmill diplomacy isn't good enough.
Over the past month, Senator John Cornyn of Texas made it his personal mission to persuade fellow Republicans to support Harriet E. Miers, President Bush's embattled Supreme Court nominee.
The former state attorney general took his case to colleagues on the Senate floor, inside the cloakroom, and -- in the early morning hours -- to the Senate gym, where he found that standing over the sink, hip-to-hip, the sound of razor blades scratching cheeks, he could nab a ''teachable moment."
''I wasn't preachy or dogmatic, I just wanted them to keep an open mind," Cornyn said.
Cornyn isn't a natural salesman. But as the lone former judge on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he carried constitutional gravitas. (Cornyn's prematurely white hair added an aura of maturity to the 53-year old.) His own name has turned up on lists of potential Bush Supreme Court nominees.
Cornyn took on the task of building Senate support for Miers, whom he had known for 15 years, expecting to pursue Democrats. Instead, he was stuck trying to persuade members of his own party, a chore that soon became akin to pushing a stalled cement mixer down Pennsylvania Avenue.
At least in a courtroom, ''I'm used to an impartial tribunal," the onetime Texas Supreme Court justice wryly noted in a reference to the stonewall resistance Miers faced.
By Wednesday, Cornyn was feeling the strain. ''The calls for her to withdraw are spooking people," he told us.
Early the next morning, Cornyn got on an e-mail alert that Miers had pulled out, and put in a call to the White House to confirm the news. ''While I think it's a shame, this is quite a tough process," Cornyn said.
Bipartisan fever is contagious
After nearly an hour railing against the Bush administration's foreign policy in general and the Iraq war in particular, former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright proclaimed to a breakfast gathering of reporters, ''I don't like all this partisan bickering."
There was reason for the diplomat's sudden shift in tone. Albright wanted to slip into the conversation a reference to her about-to-debut partnership with the very conservative Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas.
The pair have crossed the wide political aisle that separates them before, joining efforts on Sudan, the war-torn African nation where people are being slaughtered and raped by Arab nomads and the United Nations estimates that some 180,000 have died of famine and disease in the past two years.
A couple of months ago, their relationship deepened when Albright interviewed the Christian conservative as part of her research for a new book about the influence of religion on foreign policy. During the conversation, it occurred to both that the left and religious right have much in common on foreign policy -- particularly humanitarian concerns such as genocide, human trafficking, and refugees.
They concluded they should spread the bipartisan fever. And so on Tuesday, this unlikely duo is hosting a conference bringing together the far reaches of the political spectrum to find common cause on global humanitarian concerns.
Will Albright be offering Brownback any advice on his expected 2008 presidential run? ''I don't think so," she said.
Like father, like son
Governor Mitt Romney, in Iowa yesterday to ''energize the party for the upcoming competitive" governor's race in that state, according to his spokeswoman, isn't the only '08 presidential prospect shaking hands in a key electoral state this weekend. US Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, is waving his ''red state" credentials in New Hampshire, hoping to prove he can help his party appeal to America's non-blue heartland.
Bayh secured an invitation to this weekend's Jefferson Jackson Dinner, sponsored by the New Hampshire Democratic Party. In case the significance is lost on anyone: Senator John F. Kerry spoke at this same dinner in 2001, followed in 2002 by the senator who would become the other half of his presidential ticket.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's staff told the dinner's organizers that she wasn't interested in receiving an invitation to speak; she's (wink, wink) focused on her own state of New York, where she faces reelection next year.
Like Romney, Bayh is following in the footsteps of a famous political father. Birch E. Bayh, who held the same Senate seat as Evan, ran for the 1976 Democratic nomination against Jimmy Carter.
Energy is on her mind
While other Democratic leaders, including potential '08 rival John Kerry, spoke out on Iraq and homeland security last week, Hillary Clinton gave what her aides billed as a ''major energy address."
Asserting that US dependence on oil ''threatens our economy and hamstrings our national security," Clinton proposed a Strategic Energy Fund -- financed by fees on excess oil profits -- to subsidize high heating bills for middle-class families and to promote clean energy and conservation technologies.
''We have to do what America has always done when faced with a big challenge -- roll up our sleeves," Clinton told a forum of clean energy entrepreneurs.
