How serious a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination is Fred Thompson?

Apparently quite serious indeed. Last week GOP insider pundit Robert Novak assured readers that Thompson isn’t just toying with running—he will declare his candidacy early next month. This rumor has generated outsized buzz, including a highly negative column by George Will. But a great many conservatives, dissatisfied with a field in which none of the three leading contenders is a down-the-line conservative, seem to be fans.

The former Senator’s most salient attribute is his persona. He has a large, comforting, commanding presence that Hollywood directors have seen fit to cast as an admiral, the director of the CIA, and even the President. His slow drawl, big eyes, and wrinkles make him the very image of the respected Southern lawyer. He is an excellent communicator, sympathetic, easy to watch, and never grating (which is not true of, say, Rudy). Some go so far as to call his qualities “Reaganesque.”

But what about substance?

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Three disturbing news reports crossed my desk recently, which, taken together, reveal anew the hostility of radical Islam toward the rights of women and children. The first was the widely reported story of two adult, male terrorists in Baghdad who drove through a checkpoint in a car with two young children in the back seat. Because of the children, they were waved through. Once on the other side, the two men got out of the car—leaving the boys inside—ran some distance away, and hit the detonator. They children were killed, along with one bystander.

According to the Washington Times, this use of children as camouflage or cat’s-paws has become routine. Al Qaeda in Iraq uses kidnapped children to pick up dropped weapons from battlefields because they know that U.S. soldiers won’t shoot at them. (Last year there was a period when using children with Down syndrome was the fashion.) I suppose we are not surprised by this sort of barbarity anymore. But we should be: Islam is not, by history or nature, a suicide cult. It is important to consider that people willing to do this to their own flesh and blood—for pretty meager tactical payoffs in terms of enemy dead—are not people who can co-exist with civilized society.

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Two weeks ago the New York City Board of Education announced that it would be establishing a new magnet high school to teach Arabic culture and language. A week later, the BOE revealed plans to place the school within an existing elementary school; the resulting hue and cry from concerned parents put an end to that. But the city is set to go ahead with the project as soon as it finds a physical space.

One goal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (for such is the school’s name) is to recruit enough native Arabic speakers to comprise 50 percent of the student body. It seems perverse to take immigrant students, who most need immersion in the language, culture, and values of the United States, and teach them more about the culture from which they came. As leading education historian Diane Ravitch told the New York Sun, “It is not the job of public schools to teach each ethnic group about its history.”

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I have always laughed at the old joke about how Reform Judaism is “the Democratic party with holidays.” But at the moment, watching the spiritual leaders of the Reform movement repackage left-wing anti-war boilerplate language in the trappings of Judaism, it isn’t so funny.

To see why, pay a quick visit to the Union of Reform Judaism’s website and read the statement that the movement’s leadership wishes to have ratified today at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the URJ’s board of trustees.

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Though Hillary Clinton’s delivery of a speech in a broad southern dialect at an Alabama church was perhaps the most entertaining moment of last weekend’s political follies, Barack Obama delivered the best speech so far in the 2008 primaries. Kudos to whoever wrote it.

His remarks, delivered at a church in Selma, Alabama, circled around the central idea that he, the 45-year-old son of an African man and a white American woman, whose “blackness” has been questioned by black political leaders, is a modern “Joshua.” Senator Obama cited a letter he received from a well-known preacher that said, “if there’s some folks out there who are questioning whether or not you should run, just tell them to look at the story of Joshua, because you are part of the Joshua generation.”

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Someone had to do it—and we can all thank David Geffen for being the first. The Hollywood mogul, formerly a major Clinton donor, expounded at length to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd about his support for Barack Obama. Here’s Geffen on the Clintons: “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease it’s troubling.” And on Hillary’s chances: “I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is—and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?—can bring the country together.”

Hillary’s reaction to Geffen’s words opened the floodgates. By the weekend, a host of critics on the Left had moved into place. (As Daniel Casse noted yesterday, the Democrats have an institutional tendency to pile on early front-runners.)

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Polemicists being what they are, it’s no surprise that many have used the death of celebrity centerfold Anna Nicole Smith to suggest that our society is overly sexualized, that girls need better role models, that the relentless seeking of celebrity leads to pathetic endings.

Much stranger, and far more perverse, was the Sunday New York Times op-ed by Stephanie Coontz, a scholar of the family who has long argued that traditional family structure is a locus of evil, and that efforts to strengthen marriage or the family are exercises in unjustified nostalgia. She made the case that the five-month-old daughter Smith left behind was in better shape than she likely would have been if the U.S. had failed in the late 1970’s to do away with all legal demarcations between legitimacy and illegitimacy as conditions for inheritance.

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Europe’s democracies have changed dramatically in recent years in response to Islamic population growth, growth fueled by immigration and birth rates substantially higher than local norms. Great Britain, France, Italy, and other nations have been forced to accommodate the needs and preferences of their Islamic citizens, often at the expense of the global conflict with radical Islam.

Can it happen here? Suppose that the writer Mark Steyn is right to argue that “demographics are destiny.” What number of Muslims, agitating for their self-defined interests and agendas, would constitute a critical mass in the U.S.? At what point would American politicians feel compelled to take up their cause?

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) all worked overtime this past election cycle to create the impression that, in American politics, Muslims are now a force to be reckoned with. They were especially emphatic about the country’s growing Muslim population—some 8 million souls, in their oft-repeated estimates.

So it comes as a useful corrective to read Patrick Poole’s “Numbers Don’t Lie” in this week’s Front Page Magazine. Poole cites two recent pieces (in IBD and the New York Sun) criticizing the methodology of the survey that produced the 8 million figure and citing new estimates drawn from survey work done at CUNY and the University of Chicago—estimates suggesting that there are, in fact, not 8 million Muslims in the U.S. but well under 3 million. Moreover, of these, only a minuscule 4,761 are dues-paying members of CAIR, which presents itself as the community’s authoritative voice.

Whether CAIR or any of the others truly represents the sentiments of American Muslims is a question that political strategists might consider before pandering to their radical demands or overlooking their questionable (or worse) political associations, all amply documented over the years by observers like Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson. But why be fooled by numbers? The readiness to inflate the size of their alleged constituency is only another tactic in a campaign of intimidation to which too many have already succumbed.

Is Hillary inevitable? Another day, another answer: Robert Novak says no. Her fundraising is slipping a little, due in equal parts to Barack Obama’s fresh face and to the distaste many Democrats feel about her prospective coronation. And, of course, the anti-war Democratic primary base in New Hampshire really, really hates that she voted for the war and won’t repudiate her vote. This raises the interesting question for Hillary-hating war supporters on the Right: who to root for should it turn out that she really is the farthest rightward Democratic candidate in an election in which Democrats are presumed by many strategists to have the advantage.

Meanwhile, Noemie Emery, a Weekly Standard writer who has an amazing ability to put her finger on the political pulse, has a piece in the current issue making the argument that in this election cycle, the GOP is evolving in a significant way, with its urban/ethnic/non-”country” candidates John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney:

None hails from the South, none looks or sounds country, none is conspicuous for traditional piety, and none is linked closely to social conservatives. At the same time, none is exactly at odds with social conservatives either. None is a moderate, in the sense of being a centrist on anything or wary of conservatives; rather, each is a strong conservative on many key issues, while having a dissident streak on a few.

Upshot? These candidates have the potential to override the current locked-in-place map of red vs. blue states. (Which is why Rudy was in California this past weekend . . .)

The New York Times ran a front-page story Thursday on how Mitt Romney’s being a Mormon may damage his chances as he seeks the GOP nomination. Of special concern, according to the story, are Southern evangelical Christians in early primary states who mistrust Mormonism. “Mr. Romney’s advisers,” wrote the Times, “acknowledge that . . . questions about whether Mormons are beholden to their church’s leader’s on public policy could give his opponents ammunition in the wide-open fight among Republicans to become the consensus candidate of social conservatives.”

Well, evangelicals may or may not mistrust Mormonism as a religion. But when it comes to public policy, those Mormon “church leaders” stand hard against abortion, gay marriage, gambling, and alcohol consumption—views that handily comport with those of evangelicals. The Times, in other words, has it backwards. The real concern of many social conservatives—and of the Romney campaign—is not that Romney is a tool of his socially conservative church but that as a politician he has had too liberal a record to get through the primaries.

True, as governor, Romney fought (and pretty much lost) a long, tough battle against court-imposed gay marriage in the Bay State. But as a politician, for better or worse, he has always been more of a businessman/technocrat than a red-meat guy. True again, on the issue of abortion, he claims to have had an epiphany that has made him pro-life. One of his favorites lines is that “even Reagan didn’t always hold Reaganite views on abortion.” Still, he ran for (and won) the Massachusetts governorship as a pro-choice candidate, with support from Planned Parenthood.

Romney is working hard, with some notable recent success, to win the support of evangelical leaders who cannot bring themselves to back Rudy Giuliani (pro-choice) or John McCain (whose pro-life views are widely mistrusted). But why does the New York Times not want to tell its readers that the ex-governor has, until recently, had a solidly liberal record on abortion, a record entirely at odds with the Mormon church and, incidentally, to the left of Democratic Senator Harry Reid, a fellow Mormon who is pro-life? Could it be because this information might kindle friendly interest among potential moderate voters who will believe he is really one of their own? In a perverse way, the Romney campaign could regard the Times story as a sign of success.

Rudy Giuliani was, for him, uncharacteristically coy about his presidential intentions until just the past few weeks. During last fall’s election campaign he stuck to the Nixon playbook, raising money for and campaigning on behalf of Republican candidates all over the country. This had the obvious merits of leaving many elected officials in his debt, and of introducing himself to GOP voters without asking them to vote for him.

Lo and behold, the strategy has been working. Without actively campaigning, Rudy has risen to the top of the polls of GOP candidates. What is most interesting is that he has done this despite the fact that he has not yet significantly trimmed his well known and fairly liberal views on social issues, especially abortion and gay marriage (though on the latter he has endorsed only civil unions). Since Reagan and the rise of the social right, it has been considered an iron law of politics that GOP primary voters are disproportionately conservative, and anyone who isn’t staunchly pro-life can’t get through a primary.

So what has happened?

My guess is Hillary. Senator Clinton has what looks like a lock on the Democratic nomination. Two years out, it has finally hit home that the GOP has a weak bench, and that the former front-runner John McCain, at seventy, may not have the fire in the belly to best her.

Giuliani’s strength is nothing if not sheer force of will. His virtues include making a city previously thought ungovernable orderly and livable. And then he kept that city functioning and staunch after the attacks of 9/11. In the years since, he has made it his business to learn what a leader needs to know about national security, Islamofascism, terrorism, and the war in Iraq. GOP voters may have noticed that he doesn’t trim there, either. Those are real and formidable accomplishments for a candidate running in a time of war.

After the election there was a spate of think pieces on the subject, “Is Conservatism Finished?” I’d agree with Wilfred McClay’s piece in Commentary, which answered “no.” But it may be that we are entering a moment less dominated by purist ideology. The national-security stakes are so high for 2008, and anti-war sentiment so broad, that even the most socially conservative voters may be willing to vote early and often for the lesser of evils.

Unlike most of the men and women who populate the higher reaches of American politics, James Webb, the new Democratic Senator from Virginia, is a genuinely interesting person—and one who thinks and feels with some passion. Rare among U.S. Senators, he appears to have made decisions not solely directed toward maintaining his “political viability.” In his youth, he followed family tradition and joined the Marines. As a junior officer he was wounded in combat in Vietnam. Back home he worked on Capitol Hill and wrote a series of novels centered around military life in the 1960’s and 70’s. An Annapolis grad, he served as Reagan’s last Secretary of the Navy.

In my own youth, I happened to work in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Warfare, which was set up in the aftermath of Vietnam to ensure that our forces would be ready for the next round of unconventional warfare. Early on an officer helpfully gave me a copy of the Marine commandant’s reading list, which I commend to anyone who wants to understand how the military thinks about itself. In addition to the expected Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Mao, I found Webb’s novels on the list. They were far more readable than most of the other books, so I read them all. (For the record, my colleagues preferred Pat Conroy.)

Notwithstanding former Senator George Allen’s attempt to discredit Webb by publishing some of his novels’ sex scenes, the books contained a lot of extremely astute observation about living and striving among the D.C. political class. His heroes were all acutely articulate about the betrayal of soldiers by politicians during Vietnam—a war that Webb insisted was winnable well up until the end, had we wanted to do what it took. Indeed, he took the perspective of the eternal junior officer, brave and honorable, up against the perfidies of cynical and jaded politicians and generals who were no better than pols.

His real-life actions had the same impassioned cast: he resigned with great righteousness as Secretary of the Navy over a fairly minor cut in the planned “600-ship Navy.” As if the lower number challenged his honor. He appears to have left the GOP in similar pique.

It was a clever choice by the Democratic leadership to have the newly elected Senator Webb give the Democratic response to the State of the Union address. He is a solid orator with an impressively deep voice and the ability to formulate standard Democratic ideas in less clichéd language. Predictably he advocated the same economic populism that got him elected two months ago. On the higher-stakes matter of Iraq, the Senator carefully listed all of the members of his family who have served in the armed forces, announced that he had warned in advance that the war was a mistake, and demanded an immediate pullout of a large number of troops. His emotions were barely restrained. But neither feelings nor honorable military service and sacrifice are the ultimate arbiters of the rightness of a military policy, or the virtue of a hasty retreat.

Now that he is a powerful United States Senator it is past time for James Webb to stop thinking of himself as the only honest man in the room. Junior officers lead platoons. There are reasons that they don’t make the big decisions—and lacking the ability to think dispassionately is one of them.

For once, the mainstream media’s incessant badmouthing of George W. Bush worked for him. In the day-long lead-up to his State of the Union address, news-readers previewed the speech in tones usually reserved for a crashing market or a dying patient. “Bush’s popularity is at an all-time low.” “Bush’s approval ratings are as low as Gerald Ford’s.” “[They’re] approaching Nixonian levels.”

But at the crucial moment, in a hostile chamber, the President delivered a crisp speech in a strong voice, with no fumbling or smirking in sight. Instead of the traditional laundry list of departmental initiatives, Bush limited his domestic policy projects to a solid, attainable few. He knows that the electorate and the new Democratic majority want more action in the domestic arena. Balancing the budget, cutting earmarks, cleaning up entitlements, moving toward energy independence—all of these ideas are non-controversial. His health-care proposals will be going nowhere soon (too much opposition from organized labor, which stands to lose from his plan to tax especially generous health benefits). But immigration, on which the President called for a discussion “without animosity or amnesty,” is a good bet for quick action. Now that he will be working with a Democratic majority that shares many of his views on the issue, GOP support will depend on details.

But the Bush legacy does not depend on the details of health-care policy. It will live or die by our success or failure in Iraq and in the war on terror and Islamofascism. Last night’s speech smartly separated these two struggles, and did an excellent job of mapping out the many, various threats from different branches of Islam.

Discussing Iraq, the President listed the successes of 2005, and acknowledged our enemy’s response in 2006. He memorably said, “Whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure.” Still, when he spoke of turning our efforts “toward victory,” the Democrats (and a few Republicans) neither applauded nor rose.

George W. Bush knows that the struggle he is waging is not a popularity contest. It is a contest of will, force, and American credibility as the world’s leader. Last night’s speech signaled that he is again in fighting form.

So, after sixteen years on the national stage, Hillary Rodham Clinton has finally declared that she is a candidate for President of the United States. After years of denying this transparent ambition, it must be a relief to get it out there in the open.

No such relief was evident in the announcement video on her website, where she looked uncomfortable and sounded as stilted as ever. “I’m in, and I’m in to win” is a line that takes some panache to deliver—even a grin. But Hillary’s repertoire of dramatic tones is limited, ranging from prim high-mindedness (verging on the self-righteous) to faux regular-gal camaraderie. So when she talks about opening a “national conversation” and says, “let’s chat,” there is nothing authentic or inviting about it. It is, of course, an attempt to sound casual and open. But Hillary isn’t casual or open, so the effort falls flat.

Despite her iron discipline about refusing to indulge in self-revelation, her conviction that she is meant to wield power, and to edify the rest of us, nonetheless shines through. Though a feminist by belief and training, she owes most of her political success to her husband’s skills and successes. That particular opportunism galls in 2007, when plenty of women hold high office by their own efforts.

Hillary has behaved ruthlessly toward anyone who stood in her way, and in her campaigns she has trimmed endlessly on policy matters to hide her leftist views. Still, one might ask what those views mean given her willingness to trade them for power. In the Senate, her votes have been calibrated to give her cover as a responsible centrist. Now, especially on Iraq, she can say that she has had enough—and thus get the votes she needs from her party’s anti-war base.

Like many students of Hillary, I veer between thinking that this is as far as she can go politically and fearing that she will be our next President almost by default. The weak field of candidates for 2008, Democrat and Republican alike, offers little reassurance that she won’t be.

It should be an interesting race.

Barack Obama has formed a presidential exploratory committee, and is expected to announce his candidacy formally on February 10.

There’s a surprise.

Who doesn’t have an exploratory committee? Even Christopher Dodd has one. This is a very rich country, and it seems to behoove many people to give money to politicians for any semi-plausible reason. For the politicians themselves there is virtually no downside: running, becoming a national figure, losing and learning from your mistakes is excellent practice for—next time. Besides, it is so much more fun than being a serious Senator, engaged in the dull business of making policy choices and then making them again when the first set fail in unanticipated ways.

Some might find it offensively arrogant for a neophyte, with two years in the Senate, no experience running anything, and a thin resume to seek the nation’s highest office. But it’s hard to argue with the reception Obama has gotten. At a moment when national politics increasingly resembles a reality-TV show, his breezy, confident manner, good looks, and natural speaking talent all add up to a version of plausibility.

“Running for the Presidency is a profound decision, a decision no one should make on the basis of media hype or personal ambition alone,” he announced with a straight face on Wednesday. I must have missed the part of the announcement where he revealed the substantive rationale for his candidacy.

Obama is the perfect fresh face, the new “it girl,” on whom the left end of a very disenchanted electorate can project their hopes and dreams for . . . something different. He’s black, but not militant, not Al Sharpton. White mom, absent African dad: almost like Tiger Woods.

But then there’s the Clinton factor. The media are playing Obama’s candidacy as a big “diss” to Hillary on the part of Democratic primary voters who may regard her nomination as inevitable but are not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect. And she seems to be obliging them, by looking worried. But at the end of the day? I’d bet on Clintonian discipline and ruthlessness.

In fact, Obama is a pretty good foil for Hillary. He makes her look experienced, reasonable, mature, serious. And did I mention mature?