From the Sunday Papers

A few articles of note from today's papers:
Maureen Dowd on Bush's "Stiletto Democracy." (See her column on USA Next from Thursday, a subject I've written about too).

Via the Washington Post, fifteen governors are considering bids for the White House in 2008! Will either party nominate a legislator ever again?

Matt Bai's New York Times Magazine essay tries to figure out Howard Dean in the context of a "Democratic Party whose ideology feels... muddled and incohesive."

Perhaps most interesting of all is David Kirkpatrick's New York Times piece on religion and American political history. Both evangelicals and secularists try to claim the founders for themselves and both should give it up. There are far better arguments in favor of a thoroughly secular nation than that one or another of the founders would have wanted it that way. (Of course, secularlists have a better reason to appeal to the authority of the founders. Since it is simply assumed that all great American leaders were devout Christians, noting the less than orthodox views of some of them would serve to remind people that one can be a strong leader, even a moral one, without believing in angels, Satan, the virgin birth or resurrection.)

And some British politics - voters in the UK appear tired of Tony Blair's "presidency" and some ministers are wondering whether he's now a liability for the party. One parallel and one lesson in this story for Democrats - Labour is currently losing ground among married women with children; and it is going to "refocus its efforts on bread-and-butter economic issues."