Of course, it didn’t work out that way. They should have learned from the experience.

But apparently they haven’t. Now it’s the left’s newest crusade against “media pollution” that the right can’t wait to join. For some time now, conservatives have watched as the left conducted mind experiments on American campuses, regulated speech and punished ideas that were politically incorrect.

Conservatives fought a rear-guard battle against these academic commissars, managing to achieve a modicum of success. Most of the speech codes were shredded, and the censors were forced to beat a partial retreat. But the political mind-set has remained and continues to rule the academic world.

As a result, no institution in American life is as intellectually monolithic as a university faculty. Not surprisingly academic “scholars” of the left have provided an elaborate structure of theory, and underpinned it with “scientific” research, to justify the resurgence of censorship in American life.

On the right, religious conservatives have been traditionally attracted to this seductive fix for sinful humanity. But now even the secular minds of the conservative intelligentsia are climbing on board.

It is true that even while they were being banished from American classrooms, a cadre of conservative intellectuals was already making the case for public censorship.

Arguing that artistic expressions were not covered by the Bill of Rights, they made government-funded pornographic art the first target of their complaint, but suggested that even non-government licentiousness was a proper government concern.

When liberals like Bill Clinton and Tipper Gore showed that a bluenose crusade against the entertainment industry might actually become a popular cause, these conservatives were eager to sign on.

Now both groups have come together behind an “Appeal to Hollywood,” complaining about the moral pollution of the popular culture. Mindful of Americans’ quaint attachment to their First Amendment privileges, the “appeal” only asks the entertainment industry to “take modest steps of self-restraint” to decrease the levels of sex and violence perceived in its products.

The “appeal” was signed by 67 prominent public figures, members of a new popular front that joins such unlikely couples as Bill Bennett and Mario Cuomo, Jimmy Carter and Lynne Cheney.

But the “Appeal to Hollywood” is only part of a growing and disturbing trend on both ends of the political spectrum whose efforts are weakening the bulwarks that protect our First Amendment freedoms.

The federal government and the Congress have already put the entertainment industry on the block and slated it for investigation and legislation (soon to be followed, if precedent is a guide, by class action lawsuits).

It is a consciously designed parallel to the assault on tobacco and gun manufacturers. If one focuses on the fact that entertainment products are ideas, images and fantasies, the mere linking of these three industries should send shivers up the national spine.

The steady advance of this juggernaut of repression, however, was apparently not fast enough for the editors of the Weekly Standard. The August 23 issue of the leading intellectual organ of neo-conservatism is devoted to “The Case For Censorship,” the title of a feature article by a political scientist named David Lowenthal.

The editors also invited four distinguished conservative intellectuals — Bill Bennett, Irving Kristol, Terry Eastland and Jeremy Rabkin - to contribute their wisdom.

Lowenthal’s manifesto turns out to be a screed on behalf of full-blown moral dictatorship by government guardians of what the public should see and hear, and what it should not. According to Lowenthal, Hollywood is so “enamored of its profits” no appeals to its conscience will work. On the other hand, without drastic measures to stop the current flow of cultural filth, the prospects for the nation are dire indeed.

“The mass media,” Lowenthal writes, have become “the prime educational force in the country,” and their “pernicious” influence already overwhelms that of “schools, synagogues and churches.” They have “immersed us” in violence as well as sexual depravity, “habituated us to the most extreme brutality” and “surrounded us by images of hateful human types so memorable as to cause a psychological insecurity that is dangerous.”

Nothing less than the future of civilization is at stake and no power short of the state is sufficient to save us:

“Government, and government alone, has a chance of blocking this descent into decadence … The choice is clear: either a rigorous censorship of the mass media … or an accelerating descent into barbarism and the destruction, sooner or later of free society itself.”

Even more distressing than this horrifying jeremiad is the failure of any of the conservative commentators assembled by the Standard to find it just that — horrifying.

“I agree with much in professor Lowenthal’s article,” writes Bill Bennett, while defining himself as a “First Amendment absolutist.” But how absolute is Bennett’s commitment to the First Amendment when he does not reject Lowenthal’s proposal on absolute grounds?

Instead of condemning it as the reflection of an anti-democratic mentality, he argues for its rejection on the grounds of its political imprudence. The “main problem for Lowenthal’s argument,” writes Bennett, “is democracy itself, specifically the current state of thinking among the American people: They do not want, to use Lowenthal’s words, ‘rigorous censorship.’” And if they did, that would be all right?

What Bennett proposes is an effort, using the authority of government, to bring the industry to heel by a combination of public humiliation and government threat: “Among other things, Congress ought to begin treating the entertainment industry the same way it treats the gun and tobacco industries: Invite the executives to testify in public, let them defend [themselves] … Is there anything you won’t sell? Why was this ugly, stupid, horrible scene put in this movie?”

So now congressman are going to be entertainment critics. I wonder if Bennett has tried to imagine the scene if Parliament had hauled Shakespeare before it in the time of Elizabeth to explain why both eyes of the 80-year-old Duke of Gloucester are plucked out on stage in King Lear, or a virginal Ophelia has such obscene fantasies in Hamlet or why eight people are killed in the last scene of the same play. “Mr. Shakespeare! Is this really necessary? Don’t you find eight corpses a little excessive? Have you no shame, sir?”

American Spectator publisher Terry Eastland, who is a lawyer as well, is even less restrained than Bennett. “Censor the mass media? In theory, I agree.” But he, too, concedes there are practical objections. There is the tricky matter, for example, of American law which “stands in the way” of the kind of censorship Lowenthal is proposing, particularly as it has been interpreted for the past 50 years.

Behind current interpretations of the law, moreover, there is still that unruly beast, the American people. “Persuading the public” to abandon its prejudice against censorship would be impractical as a result of the moral decline of the culture in recent decades. In providing a Bill of Rights that included the First Amendment, Eastland reminds us, the founders counted on “a certain degree of virtue in the people,” a condition that in his view it can no longer meet. He refers to this state of affairs as “the disabling of America.”

Then it is Irving Kristol’s turn. The éminence grise of American neo-conservatism could not be happier with Lowenthal’s authoritarian vision. “I want to welcome David Lowenthal to the Walter Berns-Robert Bork-Irving Kristol club,” he writes. “Each of us has, in the last three decades, argued in favor of censorship …”

(A recent conversation I had with Judge Bork, however, suggests that he is having second thoughts about his membership in this club because of the use that is being made of its arguments.) Like Bennett and Eastland, Kristol finds the otherwise worthy project of censorship unworkable owing to the sorry state of the American people who can’t be counted on to support it.

Bizarrely, Kristol attributes this resistance to the influence of the post-’60s culture and the left’s institutional dominance of the American Bar Association, the law schools and the media. These institutions, Kristol concludes, would crucify any nominee to the nation’s higher courts who indicated a pro-censorship bias.

Kristol is certainly right about liberal resistance to censorship when liberals are convinced the censor’s axe will fall on the artistic avant-garde and other left-wing communities they favor. On the other hand, the left has already shown that it wants to censor the offensive speech of its opponents and the violent imagery of the media.

Kristol fails to take into account the fact that leftists can disagree among themselves. They can also be adept at employing double standards that allow them to support the censorship of others while abhorring censorship of themselves. He seems unaware of how his position makes him a bedfellow of feminist harridans like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and moral busybodies like Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore.

Among the commentators assembled by the Standard, only government professor Jeremy Rabkin seems to appreciate that the censors who would implement Lowenthal’s proposal would inevitably be drawn from the class of political missionaries whose passion in life is to tell the rest of us how to live.

“The people prepared to take the job would be ideologues - mostly of the crazy left, perhaps also of the religious right, but certainly ideologues,” he writes. (perhaps also of the religious right?!) Censorship by such zealots, Rabkin does recognize, is “a recipe for a very nasty sort of politics and is sure to be self-defeating.” Once again, the strongest criticism that can be mustered against this proto-fascist agenda is that it is impractical.

What is going on here? What happened to the conservative attitude that government can’t tie its shoelaces without putting entire populations in danger? How is it that a government unable to hand out money to poor people without destroying families and communities in the process can be entrusted with the infinitely more complex task of deciding what is — and what is not — morally healthy for 270 million diverse people to hear and see? How could any self-respecting conservative not be repelled by a social prescription like Lowenthal’s that overlooks this little problem of social engineering?

For that matter, how could any conservative not be appalled by his analysis of the problem itself? Since when, for example, have the media become “the primary educational force in the country”? In educating the young, the primary force is and always has been the family. That’s almost the primary principle of conservative politics itself.

It’s also the only explanation for the fact that the same “violent” TV shows and movies are seen in America’s inner cities and middle class suburbs. Yet homicide is the number one killer of young males in the first and barely a factor in youth mortality statistics in the other.

Despite the claims of academic pseudoscience, normal individuals are not “desensitized” by fantasy acts of violence and transformed into homicidal maniacs. It is only sociopaths who confuse fantasy violence with reality. Are we now going to define the parameters of American freedom by the standard of the sociopaths among us? Now that is a truly liberal idea.

When all is said and done, the very image of Hollywood that governs the analyses of the would-be censors is itself a fantasy. Here’s Lowenthal:

Is fanning the flames of selfish and irresponsible lust, as obscenity does, not dangerous to our society? How can we expect the sexes to treat each other with decency and respect, the very young to forbear from sexual intercourse, and the family to remain stable in mutual devotion if sex detached from any sense of responsibility and even from love is touted daily in theaters and on television screens?

This is not only a false analysis of what we see and hear in theaters and on our television screens. It is ludicrous. Most prime-time television hours produced by the seven networks are filled with sitcoms, whose invariable themes are celebrations of love, family, friendship, tolerance, loyalty, respect and other timeless conservative virtues. (The PAX and Family networks are even exclusively devoted to family friendly programming.)

Outside the news shows, rare incidents on late-night law-and-order series and the occasional feature film, there is virtually no violence to speak of on network television.

On the other hand, there are more than a dozen cable channels that children could be put in front of all day and all night, every day and every night, and receive a decent, even quality education. As for feature films shown in theaters — do we really need to remind ourselves of this obvious fact? — these are seen only as the result of individual choices. A ticket purchase is required for entry. Do Americans really need censors to tell them what to choose?

Are there any films and shows at all that approximate Lowenthal’s fevered description? Well, I’m sure there are. But do they have the effect that Lowenthal imputes to them? Bill Bennett is the only contributor to the symposium who even bothers to mention anything so concrete as an actual offending artifact. He says that the Motion Picture Association has been criticized for using the threat of NC-17 ratings to censor “Eyes Wide Shut” and “South Park.” He believes that “far more” movies should be so threatened.

I haven’t seen “Eyes Wide Shut,” but I seriously doubt that — censored or uncensored — it would affect my ability to treat the opposite sex decently and with respect.

I have seen “South Park” and I found its anti-censorship message morally refreshing (it is beyond my ken that any conservative could find this film offensive on conservative grounds). What are the implications of Bennett’s argument, except that he considers it worth delivering our right to choose what we can see and know to the tender mercies of film censors in order to protect ourselves from the possibility that a cartoon would morally corrupt us? Get real, Bill.

There is a deeper and more troubling flaw in the social model that inspires these modern Savanarolas, however. It is a misconception that again contradicts a cornerstone of conservative thought. If the tobacco, gun and film industries are giant enterprises in a free market system, it means that vast numbers of people want the products they are offering. In a democracy, the people are sovereign. That’s the contract we’ve all signed onto.

If enough people find cigarettes, guns and bad Hollywood pictures morally repulsive, these products will cease to be produced. That’s the remedy the old-fashioned way. Conservatives, more than anyone else, should know (and believe) this. What is truly obscene is that a magazine calling itself conservative would even argue “The Case for Censorship.” Just because liberals do it doesn’t make it right.

Elites of all political persuasions may find democracy offensive to their own sensibilities and ideas. Sometimes, they may even make common cause with their ideological enemies to force on everybody else their ideas of what’s best. But, for the sake of our democracy and ourselves, the rest of us better not humor them.

But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.

Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.

For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.

NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)

The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.

In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.

The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.

This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.

But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.

The most important lesson of terrible premature presidential-campaign speculation is that nearly everyone who engages in it will be terribly, hilariously wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete buffoon, like Dick Morris, author of the 2007 classic “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race,” or someone fairly serious and “savvy,” like New York Times politics reporter Matt Bai, who posited current nobody Mark Warner as the future of the party in a 2006 Times magazine cover story now best (if barely) remembered for its altered and unflattering photo of the subject.

There will be events no one could’ve predicted — like “obvious” future Republican presidential contender George Allen using an obscure racial slur on camera, or John Edwards being generally John Edwards — that destroy promising careers in an instant.

And there is also the plain fact that the sort of politicians that Washington-based reporters and pundits and political operatives like, and the sort of politicians they think “voters” would like, are often people who have no appeal for anyone outside of their districts or the Beltway. (Like Evan Bayh. Jon Huntsman. And Mitch Daniels, probably.)

Some people turn out to be awful at campaigning: Like Wesley Clark, the general who was going to sweep a troop-worshiping country off its feet and away from George W. Bush, until it turned out that he did not blink like a human. Or Rick Perry, who, it turned out, seems too dumb to dress himself when asked simple questions on television.

There are times when this sort of long-range forecasting is easy until you overthink it: John McCain was the logical 2008 front-runner the moment he addressed the 2004 Republican convention, until you started daydreaming about Fred Thompson’s seductive drawl. Al Gore was pretty obviously going to be the Democratic nominee in 2000, and boredom with his inevitability might’ve had a hand in how the political press helped destroy him that year.

A hell of a lot will obviously depend on whether or not Barack Obama wins reelection. If he loses, Democrats might suddenly find white candidates from the West or the South more attractive. If he wins, we might have to take Joe Biden semi-seriously for a few unlikely news cycles. If Obama ends a second term as popular as Clinton, someone associated with his administration is certainly more likely to be nominated than if Obama’s 2015 numbers look more like Bush’s in 2007.

So let’s get to the predictions, shall we? According to Cillizza, the “number one seed” for 2016 is New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (Mark Warner is still on the shortlist, by the way. His time will come!)

Cuomo is the reasonably popular governor of a very populous state. He’s thus far managed to balance liberal base-pleasing deeds (gay marriage!) with “moderate” newspaper editorial-board pleasing things (going after the pensions of public employees!). But we’re still talking about a Northeast liberal (or “liberal”) — from New York! — who’s living with but not currently married to a celebrity television cook who makes awful-looking garbage food out of prepackaged garbage food. The Democratic Party might not want to chance another blatantly culturally urban candidate. (I mean urban in the literal sense, and not as weird racial code.) Plus he’s in the honeymoon portion of his governorship, and that job has utterly destroyed its last two holders.

Plus, Cuomo looks like he’s on pace to use up much of the goodwill he built up with liberals after signing gay marriage into law. (So far there’s been his apparent lack of interest in transit, signing awful gerrymandered legislative and congressional district lines, and his property tax cap.)

Joe Biden has run for president twice and never come remotely close to winning a single primary. He’ll be 74 in 2016. As Steve Kornacki already pointed out, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to nominate 70-somethings. He’s also a gaffe-prone goofball whose appeal is that he’s a ridiculous character. I would not put a lot of InTrade money on Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Hillary Clinton is a bit younger than Biden, and a lot more serious than Biden. But does she still want to be president? Who knows. (Anyone who says they know is lying.) And if she runs in 2016, does she hire the same asinine campaign team that lost her the nomination in 2008?

After those three, we’re already essentially in “who?” territory with the Democrats. Not to say that someone no one has heard of now won’t be the nominee — with Democrats, you may be more likely to get a relative unknown than with Republicans — but we can’t know which governors or senators will turn out to be Barack Obama (or even John Edwards) and which ones will turn out to be… well, Mark Warner.

And theoretically there would be more women vying for the nomination than just Hillary Clinton. Cillizza posits New York Sen. Kristen Gillibrand — a long shot, in my estimation — and senatorial hopeful Elizabeth Warren, who, if she loses her election, would surely be out of the running, and if she wins, would be … a liberal senator from Massachusetts. So, I dunno, Amy Klobuchar? Sadly, four of the current six female governors are Republicans. The two Democrats are North Carolina’s Bev Purdue, who is currently polling poorly enough that she’s announced that she won’t seek reelection, and Washington’s Christine Gregoire, who seems cool, so let’s just put her on the fantasy shortlist. (Oh, I guess the Times already did.)

But you see where we are, at this point: Randomly tossing out names. It’s like predicting the 2016 NFL Draft. Some of these kids are still in high school!

As for Republicans: If Mitt Romney wins the election, there’s the candidate, fun speculation time done. (Unless Newt and Ron Paul mount a primary challenge?!?) If he loses, the party likely learns the lesson it always learns and lurches to the right for a while, and your front-runner in that case (assuming he doesn’t blow up the party at the convention, I guess?) is Rick Santorum. I made this point already and Dave Weigel concurred. He’s a “true conservative” and he looks like he’ll “come in second” this year, which are both substantial advantages in the Republican race.

Maybe it’s Marco Rubio if Romney makes him the running mate, but the GOP does not often nominate losing running mates, because why would you?

Is Paul Ryan, who frantically introduces numbers-laden fake-serious budgets every year, the future of the party? I happen to think he’s basically a bland weenie who only excites people predisposed to thrill to rich-on-poor economic warefare, but a not insubstantial portion of the Republican Party “elite” seems to like that sort of thing. Mitch Daniels is somehow even less electrifying, but as a governor he has a better shot than Rep. Ryan. And Santorum still seems to have a massive advantage over them all.

(Oh, what about Chris Christie? Yes, well, he’d certainly be fun but he is pretty moderate for the national Republican Party, even if he masks it by being an obnoxious, belligerent bully. And he is woefully unprepared to protect us from CREEPING SHARIAH.)

One guy changes this calculus, obviously: Jeb Bush, because the Bush name exerts some sort of weird hypnotic power over the Republican Party, and they are often forced to do their bidding, even when, afterward, they all regret it. I like to imagine that the nation as a whole has decided that it’s done with Bushes forever, but that is pretty naive. I mean, Nixon got elected twice. Jeb Bush has not actually held office in a while — by 2016 he’ll have been a regular private citizen for nearly a decade — and it’s possible the family has decided to wait for George P. Bush to come of age before reasserting their claim over the White House (oh man, guys, he just turned 35).

The sick need to treat politics like it’s fantasy baseball ensures that there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to make people not wildly speculate as to what will happen years after an election that is still months away, so I just encourage you to be sensible and responsible about it. (Like, it won’t be Rand Paul.)

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.

Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country.

Because she’s not running for anything.

So Hillary Clinton should be president instead of Barack Obama, because Obama is too partisan and divisive. America needs a bipartisan plan to attack the deficit and also create jobs, and it is Obama’s fault that that is a vague, magical fairy tale. Hillary Clinton will make this fairy tale real, thanks to the fact that, as we all know, Republicans love cheerfully working with the Clintons for the good of the nation. When a Clinton’s in the White House, partisan politics are always put aside!

This is self-evidently dumb on about ten different levels — Clinton won’t run, President Clinton wouldn’t have any more success negotiating with Congressional Republicans than President Obama, Clinton’s popularity is a result of her not being a partisan candidate for office anymore, if there was such a thing as a “bipartisan” plan to reduce the deficit while also stimulating job growth (and protecting entitlements!) we’d presumably have already decided to act on this fantastical plan, everything resembling such a plan is explicitly supported by the White House and rejected by Republicans, Republicans would not endorse said plans if President Obama promised to go away because then they’d simply want to wait for a Republican to take over for him, and Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are not, as they claim to be, Democrats — but the Journal published this regardless, as they always do with fresh tripe from Schoen and Caddell.

Schoen — who works for hypothetical future independent presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, though that fact is never, ever disclosed — is a simple hack, precisely as dumb and unprincipled as you’d expect anyone who was once Mark Penn’s right-hand man to be. Caddell angrily left the Democratic party 20 years ago, which is seldom mentioned when he’s trotted out to trash the president on behalf of the right-wing media outlets that pay his rent. But the fact that they’re classic “Fox Democrats” matters much less than the fact that all of their editorials are predictable, wrong, and patently stupid.

As I said, printing their editorials is an implicit admission that you think your audience is credulous and moronic. The people in charge of the Wall Street Journal are savvy enough about politics to know that all of this is bilge and bullshit. They know both that this will never happen and that it’d be a stupid suggestion even if it were within the realm of possibility. They just don’t care. They don’t care that they’re printing garbage, because they figure garbage will get some traffic from those engaged in the same game.

If I were a conservative American I’d be less outraged at the specter of liberal elites hypothetically disrespecting me from their coastal enclaves and much more pissed off that the people on my side are constantly peddling this bullshit.

Clearly Clinton’s competence is an asset to the president, and her power and credibility reflects well on his ability to work with a former rival. And the Time piece, in particular, makes clear, while praising Clinton, that ultimately Obama makes most of his decisions with a small team of confidantes, and she is not among them. He’s the commander in chief.

And there’s fine reporting in the two pieces. Certainly Clinton deserves credit for using her role to leverage support and resources from other agencies, getting greater control of foreign aid funding and even Defense Department funds to bolster her agenda at State. Elevating the role of the State Department took particular work after George W. Bush ignored and degraded so many American alliances.

But neither piece apportions any share of blame for the downside of Clinton’s expansive diplomacy – her role in pushing a bigger continued U.S. presence in and around Iraq, for instance, flagged Monday by Glenn Greenwald. The continued Iraq presence will also use more of the sometimes lawless private contractors whose role she opposed during the presidential campaign. It also seems a little early to be declaring Libya a decisive victory for American interests, or the cause of human freedom, as the nature of the government that will emerge there remains unclear.

Still, at a time when Obama struggles to get the kind of credit he deserves on the foreign policy and domestic security front – for killing Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaida leaders, winding down the military role in Iraq and toppling Muammar Gaddhafi without losing a single American life – it strikes me as a little unseemly that when credit is given, so much of it goes to Clinton. For her part, at least publicly, Clinton works to turn the spotlight on her boss, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press 10 days ago that “President Obama has passed with flying colors every leadership challenge.” And while she insisted, not convincingly, “I’m out of politics, as you know, David, I don’t comment on it,” she quickly boosted her boss against his potential 2012 rivals.  “I think Americans are going to want to know that they have a steady, experienced, smart hand on the tiller of the ship of state, and there’s no doubt that that’s Barack Obama.”

It feels a little mean-spirited to be raising these questions about Clinton’s coverage on the day she lost her mother, Dorothy Rodham, at 92, but this is the week of the adoring press coverage. Again, I’m a strong Clinton admirer. But there’s something a little odd about the worshipful tone of these pieces. I still see a faint echo of Maureen Dowd’s analysis propping up Clinton and other female administration “hawks” in her continued effort to diminish Obama’s leadership and masculinity.   Dowd seems to be on vacation, or else we might see her to use these two profiles as another reason to pit Clinton against her boss.

I spoke with a close Clinton friend last week who insists the Secretary of State has no interest in either the role of vice president in 2012, or a presidential run in 2016, so I don’t think there’s any crusade for either job behind these admiring stories. Maybe her allies are just trying to make sure she gets credit for the great work she did, against all odds, for a man she was once accused of trying to destroy.