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I'll take the leadership from the White House in 7 of 10 categories over the complete absense of leadership in whole from the Congress.

I will agree that the defensive actions and lack of effective communication management from the White House is disturbing. I think they were completely knocked off their 2004 strategy with the Dean fallout, the WMD report, and focus on lack of job growth. As of December 31, 2003, Saddam had just been caught, the economic growth was showing great numbers, and they were already shifting to the center for the election. They had no good defense prepared nor effective talking points on jobs, WMD, etc. Bad planning, indeed.

"Lack of effective communication management" is an understatement! After eight years of being able to study from the Clinton White House masters on how to effectively combat the opposition with effective communications (setting aside their message), the Republicans apparently learned nothing!

They have been totally inept on both the WMD and jobs issues these past three months, with no effective and ubiquitous rebuttals or on-message surrogates to deliver it. We kept waiting for someone to say, "hey, Democrats like Kennedy and Kerry had access to the same intelligence as the President, through the Senate's oversight authority, and they both said before the war that Saddam had WMD...." And waiting, and waiting.

And now today, with the 9.11 families supposed complaints about the Bush TV ads - where are the rebuttals beyond Karen Hughes saying "oh, golly, the ads are not bad at all"?
Where are the hard-nosed Republicans asking, "where were these 9.11 families when Wes Clark and other candidates were playing politics with 9.11 during the primaries." Where are the Vietnam vets accusing Kerry of playing politics with the deaths of 50,000 troops? Or Iraqi servicemen accusing Kerry of playing politics with the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq?

The Rove team is supposed to be a major league outfit. So far this political season they have been strictly...well, yes - bush league.