The Dish

Murray Waas has a useful tick-tock, with fresh reporting, of the leak wars between Cheney and the Congress that led up to the Plame affair. In so many ways, Cheney was hoist by his own anti-leak petard.

The Onion has the scoop.

They met – in 1957. She recalls it here:

More reflections on the repulsive over-class here and here.

A welcome development reported by Joe Klein:

At his very first Iowa town meeting, [Obama] showed the courage to tell his Democratic audience things it didn’t want to hear. Asked if he would cut the Pentagon budget, he said, "Actually, you’ll probably see an initial bump in military spending in an Obama Administration" in order to add troops and replace the equipment lost in Iraq. Then he told a teachers’ union member that he supported higher pay for teachers but also–the union’s anathema–greater accountability. The crowd was silent as he said these things. But there are different sorts of silence, and in this case, they were hanging on his every word.

He’s drawing huge crowds in South Carolina as well.

The perils of mastering a new technology:

Check out this morning’s transcript. See if you can keep up with the parsing and reparsing of positions designed to placate the base, while not treading on any national land-mines. In comparison, Hillary sounds almost humanoid.

Here’s my column today on the cultural underpinnings of the candidacies of Barack Obama and David Cameron, both seeking to lead their respective countries in looming elections. Money quote:

David Cameron and Barack Obama now occupy strangely parallel places in the political culture of Britain and America. They are both young, dynamic, loquacious and extremely well-packaged politicians. They are creatures of their respective parties, and yet distinguishable from them. Obama has done his time in the precincts of Chicago politics; Cameron has worked his way patiently up the Tory machinery.

But Obama’s reasoned tone and serene religious faith set him apart from the vices of the American left, just as Cameron’s easy-going empathy distances him from the detritus of the “nasty party” on the right.

The appeal of both, however, lies, I think, in the expressive nature of their candidacies for high office. By their very backgrounds they each represent to their respective countries the latest answer to an old question. In America, the oldest and densest issue is race; in Britain, the oldest and once insurmountable issue is class. Obama is the postracial candidate for America; Cameron, in turn, represents a candidacy that is, at root, postclass.

Whether both can navigate these somewhat treacherous waters is, of course, another matter.

(Photo: white hands hold up Obama signs by Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty.)

Kaunertal, Austria, 8 am.