Rove & Company have narrowed the battlefield (or at least that’s what they’re saying for public consumption):

They have determined that control of Congress is likely to be settled in as few as six states and have decided to focus most of the party’s resources there, said Republican officials who did not want to be identified discussing internal deliberations. Those states will likely include Connecticut, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington, though officials said the battle lines could shift in coming weeks.

Israel out of Lebanon in 10-14 days?

TPM Reader MD responds to my post below:

In response to your question, “Which press outlets have agreed to those conditions?” I think there are actually a fair number that would take those terms if it meant an interview with Rove — or any number of good sources of information within the administration or in Congress. Granted, you need to be someone close to power — a special assistant to the President would qualify of course, but also any number of press secretaries for the more powerful members of Congress, because agreeing to those terms largely means you’re going to get a background interview with the person in question. Which can be worth it, if they have good enough information to share.

In many cases, it may make perfect sense for a reporter to have a conversation on background so that the person being interviewed will feel more at ease and won’t have to constantly be on guard. Speaking on the record is a pretty big pain in the ass actually, since one slip and you’ve said the phrase that will be the headline. So this allows the interviewer to actually get substantive information, and if there’s a great quote that he’d love to print — either attached to the actual person or sourced to an anonymous official — he can ask afterwards and will often get what he wants. So this technique serves to grease the wheels of the reporter-source transaction.

That said, in this case it’s obvious that this was too big of a demand since Rove was actually the SUBJECT of the story, rather than a press flack who can give some good background and maybe even serve up a juicy quote. I can see why the Times would refuse his demand, but it is interesting that it would call him out on this in the article: this is something that happens in DC; by devoting a whole paragraph to explaining their refusal, it serves to embarrass Rove. Maybe this says something about Rove’s weakening ability to intimidate journalists into agreeing to whatever set of demands he dictates to them?

I suppose I mostly agree with MD as to when such ground rules would be acceptable, but I took the White House claim to mean that those ground rules had been successfully applied before when Rove was the subject of the piece.

The story of Hillary Clinton possibly opting out of the 2008 presidential race in order to be Senate Majority Leader has made it from The Washington Note to the LA Times and now across the pond to London. There are so many ifs, ands, and buts to this story that you would think this was a non-election year and people were desperate for political stories.

Good point:

A Republican strategist privy to much of the polling conducted in House districts said that, at this point, it is not difficult to count enough vulnerable districts to show how Democrats can take control. But he offered a cautionary point: “I don’t know of a single target race,” he said, where the Republican candidate “has spent more than 20 percent of what they intend to spend. The battle is just beginning. That’s what people really forget.”

Walter Pincus looks into the alleged terrorism case against that hapless group in Miami.

New St. Louis Post-Dispatch poll shows incumbent Sen. Jim Talent neck and neck with Democrat Claire McCaskill:

The latest Research 2000 poll for the Post-Dispatch and KMOV-TV (Channel 4) found that Talent, R-Mo., has chipped away the edge held by his Democratic rival, state Auditor Claire McCaskill.

With a little more than two months left before Election Day, the two are in a statistical dead heat.

The Maryland-based firm’s latest poll of 800 likely voters, conducted Monday through Thursday, found that 47 percent backed McCaskill and 46 percent supported Talent. Two percent supported Libertarian Frank Gilmour, while the remaining 5 percent were undecided.

. . .

The firm’s last poll, in June, had shown McCaskill with a lead of 6 percentage points.

Talent closed the gap with a six-week TV ad blitz in which he outspent McCaskill by a ratio of 10:1.

Alert reader LI pointed me towards this fun little Jeb Bush smack-down from this past week.

The backstory here is that Gov. Bush is opposing an incumbent state senator in the Republican primary. The falling out between Bush and Sen. Alex Villalobos came over tuition vouchers and a school class-size amendment.

Given that history, Bush sent out a fund-raising letter for Villalobos’ opponent, writing that Villalobos “has abandoned our party’s principles and lost his way.”

That prompted a strong reaction from fellow Republican and Villalobos supporter Sen. Nancy Argenziano. The St. Pete Times takes it from there:

Argenziano: “The governor has a history reflecting accommodation of special interests as evidenced by the agencies’ contracts, and his flexible Republicanism is at odds with both America and actual Republican principles. In his heart of hearts, the governor prefers dictatorship to democracy.”

Carole Jean Jordan, Florida Republican Party chairwoman: “Personal attacks on the sitting governor of Florida questioning his character are far beyond the bounds of responsible dialogue. I sincerely hope that Senator Argenziano will reconsider her comments, especially in light of all that Governor Bush has done for the people of Florida and for the Republican Party.”

Argenziano: “Carole Jean Jordan can kiss my ass.”

If you listen carefully, you can hear the air hissing out of the GOP balloon.

My wife IMed to ask if I was at my desk: “Hold on. I’m calling.” I didn’t think anything of it until I heard her speak. But then I knew something was terribly wrong. Her voice was broken and distraught. She cried my name in a way I’d never heard before. But I could tell she was crying for my pain. My chest started to tighten. Is it my dad, I asked? He had a heart attack, she said. I allowed myself a moment of hope. A heart attack doesn’t mean he’s dead. If he were dead, she’d say so. Is he okay, I asked? “He didn’t make it.” I knew. But even then I didn’t quite know. There was still a split second trying to process what the words meant. But ‘process’ is too methodical and antiseptic – more like a moment of desperate tugging and tearing at the words to see if I could find any way out. Any way free.

Not long before, my father had finished teaching his morning classes at Irvine Valley College, south of Los Angeles. He was back in his office chatting with a fellow instructor when he started to feel flush, hot. He said he was feeling light-headed and his friend helped him lay down. Almost immediately, he lost consciousness. And he never woke up.

I assume, though I haven’t tried to learn the details, that medics tried all the frantic efforts to revive him, sent electric shocks surging through his chest. But nothing worked.

The news pinged from the school to my dad’s wife, to my sister (who tried but couldn’t get through to me), to my wife and then to me.

Perhaps because of my mother’s sudden death twenty-five years earlier or my father’s health problems, I had feared and dreaded this moment my whole adult life, like a bird flying over me as I made my way in life. I’d built a protective wall around myself trying simply not to be caught off guard again. But when it happened, it came out of nowhere like a bat swung into my forehead or dull knife ripped through my brain.

The first thing I could think of to do was to call my sister. Her voice quaked. I told her I already knew. A friend was driving her down to Irvine where my dad lived. I must have asked her what she was going down there to do. “I guess to say goodbye to dad.” I think that was the first moment I felt grief and sadness more than shock. I put down the phone and put my head in my hands. I looked around our office. It was quiet. Everyone was working. No different than it had been a few moments earlier before the phone rang.

In the two weeks since my dad died I’ve struggled to know how to describe him to those who didn’t know him. I can see him in my mind’s eye. I can feel who he was. I remember the texture of his skin and all his unique gestures. I felt his hand on my shoulder the day after he died. But like a fish who can’t describe the sea, because he was so central to my experience, I find it difficult to know how to explain who he was, how to decide which details to pick out of the panorama of my life with him. The qualities I remember are his curiosity and his integrity, his gentleness of spirit. The sounds and memories are of his laughter and wit, his lack of cant or pretense, the way he called me “my boy”. But these recollections each stemmed from those first three qualities.

He wasn’t a monk. He didn’t sell his possessions to help the poor. He was a man of appetites. He was unconventional; he had a ribald side. He had this thick beard all the time I knew him, often unruly, though trimmer as he aged. He loved The Band and Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin. In his middle years, though, and for the rest of his life he loved Willie Nelson, whose music was playing as his ashes were scattered into the sea. After my mother died, in the small apartment we still lived in for several years after her death, in a case near his bed, he slowly assembled a vast collection of Willie Nelson cassette tapes – it seemed like new ones were released every month, Willie with This Guy, Willie & So-and-So — which he used to wash away his grief over her death.

My father’s name was Alan Cohen. He was born in St. Louis in 1938. He was the first person in his family to go to college. He got a doctorate in Marine botany. In 1975 he moved to Southern California with his wife and young son, where he spent the last thirty-one years of his life. In 1977 he had a daughter. In 1981 his wife died in an auto-accident. He left the teaching profession for photography, then returned to teaching a decade later, and finally married again in 2003. He raised two children.

He was a biologist. And his specialty was the study of marine plants. But his fascination with living things went well beyond that discrete area of study. Some of my deepest memories of him, stretching far back into my childhood, are of times when he would pick up some plant or maybe some creature he’d spotted in a tide pool we were exploring together. He would hold it up with his thick fingers, push back a petal or a stem, and pointing with his other hand, explain some element of our quarry’s life and function. Most often he would be telling me how it had evolved and adapted to survive in some special niche. Fica … Cycad … Somethingadendron … He’d do that widening of his eyes – my cue to be as amazed as he was. There was nothing pedantic in the way he spoke. No tone of instruction, though he loved teaching. What I hear in his voice was his wonderment. Like a teenage boy who had found some amazing contraption with a fascinating secret that he couldn’t help sharing with me.

I could never quite match the awe my dad had for the architecture of life. My interests turned eventually to history and politics. But he infected me with his love of science, astronomy, space and space travel, and wonder about the future, which were the building blocks of my childhood.

My father enlisted in the Army after he graduated from college in 1960. And as a college graduate he’d had the opportunity to go to officers training school but chose not to. One day when I was a child I asked him why he hadn’t been an officer. His answer was that he didn’t want to. He wanted to be “one of the men,” he told me. He didn’t want to be above anyone else.

When he told me that he said it with an air of ‘wasn’t I silly when I was young’ or perhaps even one of missed opportunity. Part of me agreed or pretended to. But this little fact imbedded itself in me as an artifact of my dad’s identity, an object of pride and connection and knowledge.

His modesty was the root of his gentleness and empathy and, in a way I’m not sure I realized before he died, his curiosity. But it could also break my heart because sometimes I would look at it from another angle and see his insecurities and doubts.

I knew my father for close to forty years. In that time we lived in a quasi-ghetto in St. Louis, an anonymous apartment complex in Southern California’s endless surburbia, around scientists and artists. He spent the last dozen-odd years of his life teaching at a community college in Orange County where he moved in the middle 1990s. He never had any real wealth and never held a position of power. But at every stage of his life he was surrounded by this web of devoted friends who gravitated to him, like something that grew up around him wherever he went.

When I was child I couldn’t see this, or rather I didn’t understand it. When we’re young we treat everything we experience as a given. Only when we grow older and our horizons broaden do we see the range of alternative possibilities in life and start to understand who we and those around us really are. As I grew older and stopped seeing my dad as the all-knowing, all-powerful figure I saw through a child’s eyes, I saw him as a man. And I saw how people were drawn to him, loved him. I would come back home from the East Coast to see him in some new community or setting but with the same pattern always recreated. He would introduce me to the new people in his life. And they wanted to know me, in part I think because of what he’d told them about me, but more, I knew, because they thought I’d be some reflection of him.

One of the great heartbreaks of my life is that my dad did not live to see his first grandson who – God willing – will be born in November. But even in the midst of the grief that crashed over me I had the satisfaction of knowing that my father had lived long enough to see me make something of myself. And I knew he was proud of me. What I worried and grieved about after he died was whether I had made it clear enough while he was alive how proud I was of him, how much I loved him and how he’d been my anchor through my life. He meant so much to me that my fear of his death sometimes scared me away.

Because I was so close to my mother and because she died so young, I’ve spent many years struggling with and celebrating her imprint on my life. Since he died though I’ve realized how much he shaped me, perhaps much more, how the main guideposts of my life were ones he put in place. How much I was, in a word, his son. And that is, paradoxically, all the more precious to me since we shared not a drop of blood between us.

My biological parents were divorced soon after I was born. I don’t know just how old I was when my mother started dating Alan. But I know that he was there at my first birthday party. And I have no memory of anything before him.

Our love for each other transcended biology.

In the days after my dad died many friends came by our apartment to support me in my grief. One of them, who is not much younger than my dad was, told me how after his father died he’d always felt that he’d needed a few more years with him – that there was more to learn or too much left unsaid.

I turned this over in my mind many times. And I decided it wasn’t true for us. I wish that my dad had lived another ten years. But I think we understood each other. I remember last year at my wedding, after I broke the glass and kissed my new wife, turning to him and hugging him, holding and being held by him. And I think it was complete. In all the years I knew my father I don’t think there was any time I knew him happier or more content than in the final years of his life.

Two days after he died I wrote him a long letter that was with him when he was cremated. I told him how much I missed him and how much I loved him. I asked him to tell my mother I love her. And I told him I’d see them both again.

For reasons both mundane and deeply personal, I want to get back to the discussion of current events which is the normal subject matter of this site. First, though, I want to thank everyone who wrote in in response to my post about my father’s death. Your thoughts and sentiments strengthened me and helped me put my grief and my father and my life into a deeper context. And as much as that I want to thank everyone who took the time to read about him and who he was.

Writing, if you do enough of it, can become a way of living. And writing about my dad’s passing has helped me to begin to make some sense of it. But I mainly spent the time explaining what had happened because I wanted people who didn’t know him to know who he was. So thank you for letting me tell you about him.

Second, let me thank the people I work with. After the phone call I described in yesterday’s post, I sat at my desk for a bit, then looked out the window at the back of our office. Then I called Paul Kiel over to my desk, asked him to sit down and then told him, matter-of-factly because I couldn’t think of any other way to say it, that my dad had just died, that I was going to have to be away for a while and that I needed him to run things in my absence. I mentioned a few things he’d need to keep an eye on. And then I left and basically disappeared for two weeks.

To give you a sense of my state of mind, one of the things I didn’t mention or that didn’t occur to me was who would fill in for me at TPM. He suggested that maybe he should try to find a substitute. And I told him that would probably be a good idea.

Over the last year or two I’ve been trying to make TPM into more than just this site. And it was a source of pride to me that it continued chugging along and even making news in my absence. Equally, it was a great gift not to have to worry about this enterprise while I was away and to have confidence and trust in the people in whose hands I’d left it. It was a gift to be able to forget.

So let me thank Paul and Justin Rood and Greg Sargent and also the interns, who are a critical part of our operation, who helped run things over the last two weeks: Ben Craw, Rachel Weiner, Jeff Hughes, Eric Kleefeld and Will Menaker.

Finally, of course, to my wife, Millet, who held me together in my grief, as no one else could have.

I think I’ll write more about this. Because I don’t think I’m the same person I was on the 22nd. And I will try to reply personally to as many of your beautiful notes and letters as I am able to. (But please know that I have read every last one.) But for now, back to the usual fare.