Sunday Reading

- Running Against The Clinton Administration: Ryan Lizza takes a look at one of the hurdles Hillary Clinton has to overcome in her race for the White House.

Though Bill is a more loquacious politician and a more vigorous campaigner than Hillary, her aides have decided that his popularity among Democrats outweighs the considerable risk that he will overshadow her. He has become suddenly ubiquitous, especially in New Hampshire, which is set to hold the season’s first Presidential primary, in January, and where Clinton nostalgia is a potent force. (Clinton’s surprise second-place showing in 1992, behind Paul Tsongas, propelled him toward his party’s nomination.) When he’s not introducing his wife at rallies or sitting down for interviews with Oprah and Larry King, as he did last week, he is wooing old friends on her behalf. In June, Clinton met with ten Democratic activists whose endorsement Hillary covets. Kathy Sullivan, the former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair, who hosted the gathering, told me that after the meeting Clinton had just one question for her: “Do you think I helped Hillary?”

Although Hillary Clinton’s candidacy insures that her husband’s eight years as President will be central to the 2008 campaign, he also hovered over the two previous primary seasons, in each of which the field narrowed to a Clinton candidate and an anti-Clinton candidate. In 2000, Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, characterized the Clinton Presidency as timid and accommodationist, while Vice-President Al Gore ran on Clinton’s record. In 2004, Howard Dean ran on an antiwar message, but he tried to rally Democrats who believed that Clintonism was fundamentally unprincipled; John Kerry recruited people from the Clinton White House and associated himself with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Hillary’s advisers argue that the obvious lesson of those two campaigns is that invoking Democratic resentment about Clinton’s ideological and personal failings does not work. But his prominence this time makes the strategy irresistible. “The whole race is going to end up there,” a spokesman for one of Hillary’s rivals told me. “It has to, because that’s what she’s running on. She’s running on Bill Clinton. If she were running on her Senate record or some new ideas for the future, rather than the nineties, it would be different. But her biggest strength is Bill Clinton, so the only way to attack her is to take that head on.”

- Who Really Wins? Helene Cooper looks at how the president's stand on Iraq may actually be beneficial to the Democrats.

The consensus here is that President Bush was the winner this week in the battle with the Democrats over reducing the number of American troops in Iraq.

But Mr. Bush’s tactical victory in holding off pressure from Congressional Democrats and the Democratic party’s presidential candidates to begin withdrawing from Iraq left open the question of which party would benefit most politically from the outcome heading into the 2008 election.

Mr. Bush stared down the troop-withdrawal crowd that populates the Democratic field these days. In his own prime time speech to the nation, following two days of testimony from Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the president managed to paint an optimistic enough picture of the state of play in Iraq to stem a feared stampede of Congressional Republicans joining Democrats trying to head for the exit doors.

Congressional Democrats, visibly disappointed, now talk of looking for ways to attach conditions to coming Pentagon spending requests. But they have been reluctant to limit money for the war unilaterally, because of fears that they will be painted as weak on national security and that such moves could leave American servicemen without proper equipment and support in Iraq.

So many political observers believe that funding requests for troops in Iraq will go through, and Mr. Bush will continue to steer the wheel on Iraq policy. A political victory for Republicans, right?

Wrong, says Christopher Gelpi, a political science professor at Duke University.

“This sets the stage for really bad Republican losses in 2008,” Mr. Gelpi said. “It’s bad for the Republicans who are running for president. It’s bad for the Republicans who are running for the Senate. It’s bad for the Republicans who are running for the House.”

- Frank Rich: If the Democrats can take advantage of the country's feelings about the war, they have a funny way of showing it.

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

It's also past time for the Democratic presidential candidates to stop getting bogged down in bickering about who has the faster timeline for withdrawal or the more enforceable deadline. Every one of these plans is academic anyway as long as Mr. Bush has a veto pen. The security of America is more important — dare one say it? — than trying to outpander one another in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate need all the unity and focus they can muster to move this story forward, and that starts with the two marquee draws, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It's essential to turn up the heat full time in Washington for any and every legislative roadblock to administration policy that they and their peers can induce principled or frightened Republicans to endorse.

They should summon the new chief of central command (and General Petraeus's boss), Adm. William Fallon, for tough questioning; he is reportedly concerned about our lapsed military readiness should trouble strike beyond Iraq. And why not grill the Joint Chiefs and those half-dozen or so generals who turned down the White House post of "war czar" last fall? The war should be front and center in Congress every day.

Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night, is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality. We can't afford to punt until Inauguration Day in a war that each day drains America of resources and will. Our national security can't be held hostage indefinitely to a president's narcissistic need to compound his errors rather than admit them.

Read the rest here.

- On This Date:

• 1400 - Owain Glyndŵr declared Prince of Wales by his followers.
• 1630 - The Massachusetts village of Shawmut changed its name to Boston.
• 1887 - The first game of softball was played in Chicago, Illinois
• 1908 - General Motors is founded.
• 1949 - First Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote episode - The Fast and the Furry-ous - is aired.
• 1952 - I was born in Dallas, Texas. (Thanks, Melissa!)

- Doonesbury: The closest she ever came to justice.

- Opus: The flying penguin.