Jay Reding.com

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow is now undergoing treatment for a recurrence of cancer after treating colon cancer in 2005. Doctors have said that the growth removed from Snow’s abdomen was malignant and that the cancer has spread to his liver.

It’s not a good diagnosis, but Snow has said that he intends to beat cancer again. Here’s hoping that he does.

Noted Constitutional Law scholar Michael Stokes Paulson is leaving the University of Minnesota to join the faculty of the University of St. Thomas. Paulson is a scholar of the first order, an excellent lecturer, and a very strong addition to the already excellent St. Thomas faculty. As a student at St. Thomas, I’m glad to see that the school is attracting first-rate talent like Professor Paulson, and look forward to having him as a professor some time in the future.

Kathryn Jean Lopez notes that a USA Today poll shows Fred Thompson stealing some thunder from Rudy Giuliani.

That doesn’t particularly surprise me, since both Giuliani and Thompson are attracting the “leadership vote” — voters who are looking for a President who exudes the kind of personal leadership that the current Administration seems to lack these days. Giuliani’s inspirational performance during the aftermath of September 11 gives him that cachet. Likewise, Fred Thompson not only plays a natural leader on TV, but he was the real thing long before he got started in acting.

Thompson has a lot less baggage than does Giuliani, which is why he’s probably the biggest threat to the Rudy candidacy right now. Conservatives who are hungry for a determined leader in the Oval Office but are turned off by Giuliani’s social liberalism and personal history have a natural alternative with Thompson. The question is whether Thompson really wants to run (which would probably entail a salary cut as well the usual public proctal examination), and whether if he does he could raise enough funds to truly be competitive. The window for him to do so isn’t closed, but he’s going to have to decide fairly soon or bank on the collapse of one of the other major campaigns for him to have a realistic shot at building enough momentum to make it into the primary season.

Still, Rudy’s got a real challenger in Thompson, who’s already in the double digits despite not being officially in the running. While Rudy still has a commanding lead, this is a very period in which anything can (and probably will) happen. It’s a rare thing in an open race for the front-runner to stay that way for long, and all it takes is one major gaffe on the part of a candidate to take a soaring campaign and crash it back down to Earth.

Robert Novak has an interesting article on the isolation of the Bush Administration in its waning days:

“Gonzales never has developed a base of support for himself up here,” a House Republican leader told me. But this is less a Gonzales problem than a Bush problem. With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress — not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.

I think that analysis is dead on — the Bush Administration is politically dead. They have no chance of setting an agenda and have retreated into a kind of bunker mentality. The problem is that when you’re under fire from all directions, that’s simply not a tenable position. The Administration has made mistake after mistake after mistake since their reelection in 2004 — Harriet Miers alienated Bush’s conservative base, the Dubai Ports issue was horrendously mishandled, and the firings of the US Attorneys was also done in a way that virtually guaranteed political problems down the road.

Despite the image created by the liberal media, Bush has never been a political gunslinger. His tenure as Governor of Texas was all about generating political comity with his opposition and trying to charm them into meeting him halfway. One gets the impression that Bush, the object of absolute hatred by many of his opponents, is unused to being in a position where the opposition has no intention of meeting him halfway on anything.

Even when Bush is right — on Iraq, on national security, he’s unable to articulate a coherent message. The President is both Commander in Chief and the leader of his party, and his inability to lead is hurting the efforts of our troops abroad and allowing the anti-war side to dominate the field of popular opinion. Yes, the media is almost reflexively anti-American, but that doesn’t excuse a seeming lack of message discipline from the Administration.

Politically, there’s little question that Bush is adrift. The Republican Party is already looking towards 2008 for leadership, and there’s a reason why someone like Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson is looking so attractive — they exude a sense of leadership that Bush now lacks.

The decline of the Bush Administration may involve many factors, but ultimately President Bush is responsible for his own political fortunes. He now stands as a man alone — few are willing to defend him openly as the political price is often high. The President has shown great leadership and resolve over the past few years, especially in the tumultuous period after the September 11 attacks. However, the measure of a leader is not how they lead in times of comity, but how they unite people in times of strife. President Bush seems to be a leader who knows how to work well in times of comity, but hasn’t had that luxury for most of his Presidency — and certainly doesn’t enjoy it now. If Bush is to be anything other than a lame duck, he’s going to have to reorganize the way he does business and develop a more effective and forward-looking political machine.

Bush is right to put the war above politics, but the problem is that politics is part of this war, whether the President likes it or not. This isn’t the Second World War, and Bush is no Churchill. In the end, if his Presidency becomes an anchor which drags the war down, he’ll end up defeating the very thing that he cares the most strongly about — and it will not merely be his own political legacy that would suffer.

2008… you mean I’m going to have to wait until fracking 2008 to see where they go with this?!