P.M. Carpenter

Reading newspapers, tea leaves and body languages for signs of what actions the Obama administration will ultimately take in its reassessment of an Afghanistan strategy can be a fruitless enterprise. Deciding the sources and motivations of leaks, interpreting the ground commander's seeming insubordination in London, balancing Gen. Petraeus' reported endorsement and then non- or iffy endorsement of Gen. McChrystal's plan -- all have afforded tentative conclusions, at best.

The same probably holds true for reading too much into Gen. Jim Jones' appearance on CNN's "State of the Union" yesterday, but there's always hope, especially in the sense that the national security adviser seemed rather hopeless.

Try not to laugh, although I find this a trifle preposterous myself and I'm the one advancing the speculation -- but, don't be surprised if John McCain takes another whack at the White House.

I thought I'd just get that out there, rather than creeping up on it. And why not? Republican politics and its politicians can't get any weirder than they already are.

I first detected a possible -- not probable, maybe, but quite possible -- McCain re-rerun fairly early in the year, when he seemed to be taking to the Senate floor with rather excessive anti-earmark zeal. Here he had just been thrashed to within an inch of his superannuated political life, and his partisan compadres were still shaken and traumatized and darn near comatose, but there was Senator McCain, yearning for the camera's red light and bellyaching about some piddling hundred-thousand-dollar project in the frantic midst of a $30-trillion economic collapse.

In the Wall Street Journal's parallel universe of the editorial boardroom, the brooding over Afghanistan's imminent "loss" to an undefeated Taliban shifted yesterday, 1949-style, to what you might call the Pakistan Lobby.

That nation's foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, "minced no words," the editors gloomily related from a recent interview, in portraying "a U.S. withdrawal" -- as though that extreme lies seriously on the table -- as "disastrous" not so much for Pakistan or even Afghanistan, but for the craven withdrawers themselves. "You will lose credibility," warned the foreign minister. "Who is going to trust you again?" he persisted.

Oh, I don't know. The South Vietnamese did, after we gave away China to the Chinese; and you guys did, Mr. Foreign Minister, after we lost Vietnam to the Vietnamese.

On Tuesday Max first boasted that he "can count," which is, sure enough, a resplendent qualification for any Senate committee chairman. But he then revealed, with more than a touch of Beltwayitis, that his arithmetical skills only work in reverse.

"No one has been able to show me how we can count up to 60 votes with a public option," Sen. Baucus continued, having already smothered the poor thing in its cradle. He concluded, simply, "I want a bill that can become law."

But so did four other committee chairmen -- three of whom, admittedly, weren't quite as propelled to apoplexy over the realistic fate of their bills in the U.S. Senate, but all of whom started from the commendable point of writing a commonsensical bill. From there, as the inexorable dilutions of Congressional procedure would have it, the Gang of 535 would be welcome to whack away.

Notwithstanding the postmortem, rah, rah, siss-boom-bah appearances on cable news by Senators Jay Rockefeller and Chuck Schumer, it should be noted that yesterday, just to frame the immensely conspicuous in the gentlest terms, was not a good day for the public option. A child could deduce that. Yet there they were, God love 'em, bursting with all manner of pasted-on pride and yapping unabashedly like Churchill after Gallipoli.

And it was children, I guess -- either that or Tom Cruiselike Navy defense lawyers -- whom they thought they were speaking to: those they believed couldn't handle the truth. So they blew more smoke, more hope, prattling about 15 to 8 and 13 to 10 losses being such splendid signs of progress.

Indeed, Schumer's spokesman had entered the eerily metaphysical even before the votes: "Just bringing up this issue in the Finance Committee has helped to revitalize the overall push for it. Its chances only get better from here." Well, I suppose that's true in the sense that they can't get any worse.

The other day, while half-listening to some cable news show, my ears perked up at hearing the NY Times' John Harwood confess to a lifelong torment of ambivalence: wondering whether the American electorate is reasonably astute, or hopelessly befuddled.

I, too, go back and forth on this question, as you likely do, as well. After all, the vast body politic that elected Franklin D. Roosevelt as president on no less than four occasions also, a generation later, twice elected Richard M. Nixon, and yet another generation down -- and I do mean down -- the road, did the same (sort of) for George W. Bush.

Compress the eras and geography and it's like Alabama declaring by acclamation Michael Dukakis as its governor for life, or Vermont recalling Bernie Sanders and replacing him with John Ensign.

One wonders, in short, if all that many are actually paying attention; or do public opinion and public persuasions merely take on insubstantial lives of their own, largely insulated from the tangible material that swirls around them.

President Obama would seem to have no better friend on the foreign-policy front than Iran's President Ahmadinejad, whose excitable eccentricities are the perfect foil to what Gordon Goldstein, an international-relations scholar, outlined to the Times' Frank Rich as Obama's "greatest qualities as president": "his quality of mind and his quality of judgment -- his dispassionate ability to analyze a situation."

Although Goldstein made his remarks within the context of a shifting Afghanistan strategy, they applied equally well last week to Iran. There, the pertinent "situation" was Obama's deftly dispassionate handling of what in many respects was merely a 36-hour news story -- but timed and then staged, it would seem, to politically enhance Obama's freedom of action in Afghanistan.

I suppose it's only through force of habit that we still use the phrase, "right-wing Republicans," which, like "unsolved mystery" or "free gift," is a tautological offense against our mother tongue -- a distinctive distinction without a different difference. I mean, when was the last time you heard someone refer to a "left-wing socialist"?

Once upon a time, the "right-wing" portion of "right-wing Republicans" did have a necessary adjectival meaning. It identified right-wing Republicans, as well as right-wing Republicans, in the unmistakable sense that those chaps were indeed but one wing of the party, and they were to the right of the internal others.

That was a time when we occasionally spoke of liberal Republicans, or, with far more frequency, of moderate Republicans. But those species, as you know, are long since virtually extinct; they went the way of the hula hoop and the shiny metallic grille and the single-blade safety razor. They suffered a sustained assault of brutal ideological cleansing; they are, pretty much, no more. There are only the right wingers, which, as competitive slaughter would have it, means they're no "wing" at all. Republicans are just righties, radically rotten to the core.

More and more, it's looking as though the other shoe is about to drop with a resounding thud. It's too early to say with certainty, of course, since the Congressional permutations of health-care reform have permed and muted many times over since that august body launched its elected quest for the perfect boodle, but, according to the Politico, matters appear to be taking a rather nasty turn in the House.

The arithmetic is simple enough: Speaker Pelosi has 255 partisan friends, of sorts, of whom she requires 218 to vote yea. But among her total 256 are 50+ conservatives, who, when not whining about the intolerable specter of millionaires paying mildly higher taxes, are whimpering about the ghastly prospect of a government-run plan paying government rates. (And here Uncle Joe Stalin thought he was iron-fisted -- the piker; he knew not of the 21st century's socialist madness run amok.)

Plus, after the speaker "put her rank and file on notice Wednesday" -- telling her fair-weather friends to prepare for a vote on "a combined House health care bill by the end of next week" -- an even broader rash of neurotic over-the-shoulder glancing broke out.

I love polls, and I'm glad I love them, because if I hated them I wouldn't read them, and I just love 'em. (Thank you, Clarence Darrow). The latest poll to emerge, however -- the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey -- isn't all that lovable, since it tends to confirm that once again we're lapsing into a wizened polarization; that the unifying optimism and confidence of November 2008 are largely gone.

President Obama's job approval rating? A seemingly stabilized 51 percent, with a narrow plurality expressing doubt "that Obama has the right goals ... for the country" and only four out of ten Americans confident that "he has the right policies to improve the economy" (although, and this is just part of every observer's enduring frustration with public opinion polls, "the number saying they’re satisfied about the state of the economy has jumped 20 points since July").

But on the matter of health-care reform, surely after Obama's major, televised speech to Congress, the wild enthusiasm of his pro-reform rallies and his carpet-bombing of primetime media, surely there's been some significant uptick in general support. Right?