Giuliani's Latest Hire
The latest addition to the presidential campaign of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has raised eyebrows a little higher. Daniel Pipes is the new hand advising, joining the standing team that includes Norman Podhoretz and Martin Kramer. This news was noted by Ken Silverstein in  Harper's Magazine, who observed that Pipes is "further out ideologically" than any other of the already ideologues working with the Giuliani campaign. In an earlier piece, Silverstein cited Augustus Richard Norton, a Middle East scholar who had been an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, who said: "What I find fascinating, is how skewed this team seems to be in terms of the regional focus. ... There is no real expertise on Africa, Asia, Latin America, or much of Europe." This seems to beg the question of the criteria used by Giuliani in assembling his foreign policy advisors.

Newt Gingrich and Revisionist History
On September 10, 2007, Newt Gingrich gave an address at the American Enterprise Institute. Gingrich argued that a more productive approach to the attacks of September 11, 2001 would have been to confront Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria and their support for the "Irreconcilable Wing of Islam."  While noting that this group represents only a small fraction of all Muslims, Gingrich quotes William Buckley noting that "Those critics who insist that it is only a small war-party faction of the Islamists that we have to fear might have been asked a generation ago if it was not merely a small number of Germans and Russians we were properly exercised about. Sixty million people were dead after that misreckoning." This speech goes far to establish an intellectual foundation for a "Long War" against the "Irreconcilable Wing of Islam." If it were not based on faulty logic and factual inaccuracies, it would be quite convincing.

The Undersides of Campaigns
In the high pressure world of presidential politics, with the massive amounts of money and large staffs involved, it is not possible to oversee every aspect of the operation. This past week two campaigns had this reality come back to bite them. Yesterday, the campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton of New York announced that it was returning $850,000 in contributions made by Norman Hsu after federal authorities announced that Hsu had not only outstanding arrest warrants but that they were investigating him on a series of potential charges related to campaign and personal finance. On the other side of things former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's campaign was assailed by the campaign of former Senator Fred Thompson over the website PhonyFred.org. The Romney campaign denied any involvement with the website, which was linked to the lead Romney strategist in South Carolina, Warren Thompkins. Thompkins was the chief strategist for George W. Bush in 2000, when rumors spread in South Carolina about John McCain, including one that said McCain had fathered a black child. In 2007, as in 2000, both the campaign involved and Thompkins denied any association with dirty trick. These were not the first scandals nor will they be the last of the 2008 campaign, but they do illustrate the range and scope of the pitfalls of large staffs and big money.