Speaking just now from the White House's Rose Garden, President George W. Bush invoked the memory--and words--of Martin Luther King, Jr.--in describing Barack Obama's historic achievement. "It will be a stirring sight to see President Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their beautiful girls step through the doors of the White House," he said. "I know millions of Americans will be overcome with pride at this inspiring moment that so many have waited so long."

The current era of partisan comity will soon come to end, I'm sure. But that doesn't make it any less refreshing--or any less of an opportunity for Obama, should he choose to seize it. Here's hoping...

Via Jonathan Martin, I see that John McCain floated a rather curious criticism of Barack Obama this afternoon in Florida:

"Barack Obama's only answer is to double-down on the Bush Administration's legacy of out-of-control spending."

The attack on the president is predictable. Judging by McCain's scathing interview with the Washington Times this morning--"we just let things get completely out of hand"--the era of forced comity between the two former foes is officially over. But the thing that gets me is the pivot to Obama. It's like McCain suddenly linked Obama's incessant "More of the Same" refrain to Bush's sub-30 percent approval rating and decided, you know, what the hell. This is a game two can play.

Setting aside the mind-bending irony of the senator's argument--last time I checked it was McCain who had an R after his name and "voted with the President over 90% of the time"--I have to admit that I'm eager to see where he takes it next. Does Barack Obama plan, for example, to double-down on the Bush Administration's legacy of launching unilateral wars in the Middle East and predicting that "we will be welcomed as liberators"? How about the Bush Administration's legacy of cutting taxes for "the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief”? Then again, McCain could go in a different direction and start accusing Obama of being an "erratic" hothead who selected an unprepared neophyte as his running mate.

So much strategery, so little time.

UPDATE, Oct. 24: By the way, McCain is right to suggest that Obama's proposals would add to the federal deficit. The problem is that his would, too. Via the Los Angeles Times:

In a recent study, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget laid out how much the presidential candidates' spending and tax-cut proposals would add to the federal deficit in 2013. McCain's proposals for major new corporate tax cuts and other expenditures would add $211 billion to the $147-billion projected deficit, said Maya MacGuineas, president of the watchdog group.  Obama would raise the CBO's projected deficit by even more -- by $286 billion -- if the government adopted his program of middle-class tax cuts, a healthcare insurance program, and boosted energy and infrastructure funding.

Pot, meet kettle.

By Michael Isikoff 

The McCain team has hastily assembled a team of former Bush White House aides to tutor the vice-presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, on foreign-policy issues, to write her speeches and to begin preparing her for her all-important Oct. 2 debate against Sen. Joe Biden.

Steve Biegun, who once served as the No. 3 National Security Council official under Condoleezza Rice at the White House, has been hired as chief foreign-policy adviser to the Alaska governor, campaign officials told NEWSWEEK. After taking leave from his job as vice president for international affairs at Ford Motor Co. last Friday, Biegun flew to St. Paul and, together with McCain’s foreign-policy guru Randy Schuenemann, began briefings for Palin on national-security issues—an area where her resume is conspicuously thin.

Biegun is hardly the only Bushie to be tapped for Palin duty. Among others:

Matt Scully, a former Bush White House speechwriter who helped draft some of the major foreign-policy addresses during the president’s first term, is working on Palin’s acceptance speech to the convention Wednesday night.

Mark Wallace, a former lawyer for the Bush 2000 campaign who served in a variety of administration jobs including chief counsel at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and deputy ambassador to the United Nations, has been put in charge of “prep” for the debate against Biden.

Wallace’s wife, Nicolle Wallace, the former White House communications director, has taken over the same job for Palin.

Tucker Eskew, another senior Bush White House communications aide, is serving as senior counselor to Palin’s operation.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former chief economist at the Council of Economic Advisers who has been serving as top economics guru for the McCain campaign, has moved over to serve as Palin’s chief domestic-policy adviser.

The proliferation of former Bush White House aides in the Palin team may strike some as ironic—and could even provide some fodder for the Democrats—given the McCain camp’s efforts to distance itself from the unpopular president. (It has been widely noted, for example, that while the president is addressing the convention tonight by satellite, neither the president nor Vice President Cheney will be coming anywhere near St. Paul. And when Palin's selection was announced last week, McCain aides touted it as an example of the senator returning to his "reformer roots" and rebelling against the GOP establishment.)

One administration critic, Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, said today that while he personally liked Biegun and viewed him as “extremely competent,” his retention as Palin’s foreign-policy tutor could have unpleasant consequences. Describing Biegun—a Russia expert who once served as staff director for Sen. Jesse Helms at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—as a “big gun” in conservative foreign-policy circles, Clemens said “he will turn her into an advocate of Cheneyism and Cheney’s view of national-security issues.”

But another former colleague, Matthew Waxman, said that he saw Biegun as more of a pragmatist than ideologue when they worked together at the NSC under Rice. “Steven Biegun was one of the steadiest hands I worked with in government,” said Waxman. “He was kind of the chief of staff of the NSC. He was running day-to-day operations, and he did so extremely effectively.”

How effective he is in instructing Palin on the fine points of national-security and foreign-policy issues may now turn out to be one of the biggest questions of the campaign.
 

Suzanne Smalley and a handful of Washington Post colleagues cornered Karl Rove this afternoon to ask about today's announcement that 17-year-old Bristol Palin, the daughter of newly minted GOP veep pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, is five months pregnant--and find out what (if anything) that news has to do with the completely unproven (and completely ridiculous, in Stumper's humble opinion) Internet rumors that the Alaska governor faked an earlier pregnancy to cover for her teenage child. Excerpts:
 
REPORTERS: Can you comment on what you think of the way that this pregnancy story made its way from a left-wing blog to the national media? Does that trouble you?
Karl Rove: You know, I didn’t see the original left-wing blog.
 
But as you probably know, it questioned whether Governor Palin herself [faked her pregnancy to cover for her teenage daughter]?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw the Daily Kos [a blog that posted such rumors]. I see that as a separate track, that’s a separate beat than this [announcement that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant].
 
But isn’t that what ultimately prompted the campaign [to announce Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy today]?
No, I don’t think so. I think they had a plan to put this out. They have to. She’s five months pregnant, so by election time she’ll be seven months pregnant.
 
Do you think they wanted to do it at the beginning of the convention?
I don’t know when they wanted to do it. But today’s a reasonably good day to do it.
 
Because?
Lots of news. And they get a chance to have this ruminated over several days.
 
Before she takes the stage?
Right.
 
You said earlier she’s a risky pick?
What I said was that this was a gamble. And it was a deliberate gamble. They’re picking somebody who is not well known, who has not been on the national stage, so it carries with it risks and rewards. As does, you know, frankly, picking the guy who got less than 1 percent of the primary vote for president on the Democratic side and who has a reputation for being a little bit long-winded.
 
Did you call him [Biden] a blowhard doofus [as has been reported]?
Well, I’m gonna leave it at that.

Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

Answer: False. At least according to NEWSWEEK columnist Fareed Zakaria. A must-read excerpt from his contribution to this week's "Big Ideas" edition of the magazine:

America (and before it, Britain) has felt it was "at war" when the conflict threatened the country's basic security—not merely its interests or its allies abroad. This is the common-sense way in which we define a wartime leader, and by that definition the politicians in charge during World Wars I and II—Wilson, Lloyd George, Roosevelt, Churchill—are often described as such. It's not a perfect definition. The United States has been so far removed from most conflicts that even World War I's effects could be described as indirect (incorrectly in my view). But it conjures up the image of a threat to society as a whole, which then requires a national response.

By any of these criteria, we are not at war. At some level, we all know it. Life in America today is surprisingly normal for a country with troops in two battle zones. The country may be engaged in wars, but it is not at war. Consider as evidence the behavior of our "war president." Bush recently explained that for the last few years he has given up golf, because "to play the sport in a time of war" would send the wrong signal. Compare Bush's "sacrifice" to those made by Americans during World War II, when most able-bodied men were drafted, food was rationed and industries were commandeered to produce military equipment. For example, there were no civilian cars manufactured in the United States from 1941 to 1945.

Of course, there are people, including Bush, who would argue that we are at war even in this deeper sense. In its June 23 issue, Fortune magazine asked Sen. John McCain what the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy was. He took a while to answer—an 11-second pause, by Fortune's count—but then said, "Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence."

It is by now overwhelmingly clear that Al Qaeda and its philosophy are not the worldwide leviathan that they were once portrayed to be. Both have been losing support over the last seven years. The terrorist organization's ability to plan large-scale operations has crumbled, their funding streams are smaller and more closely tracked. Of course, small groups of people can still cause great havoc, but is this movement an "existential threat" to the United States or the Western world? No, because it is fundamentally weak. Al Qaeda and its ilk comprise a few thousand jihadists, with no country as a base, almost no territory and limited funds. Most crucially, they lack an ideology that has mass appeal. They are fighting not just America but the vast majority of the Muslim world. In fact, they are fighting modernity itself...

We are in a struggle against Islamic extremism, but it is more like the cold war than a hot war—a long, mostly peacetime challenge in which a leader must be willing to use military power but also know when not to do so. Perhaps the wisest American president during the cold war was Dwight Eisenhower, and his greatest virtues were those of balance, judgment and restraint. He knew we were in a contest with the Soviet Union, but—at a time when the rest of the country was vastly inflating the threat—he put it in considerable perspective. Eisenhower refused to follow the French into Vietnam or support the British at Suez. He turned down several requests for new weapons systems and missiles, and instead used defense dollars to build the interstate highway system and make other investments in improving America's economic competitiveness. Those are the kinds of challenges that the next president truly needs to address.

In a sense, the warriors are pessimists. In the old days they were scared that communists would destroy America. Today they rail that Al Qaeda and Iran threaten our way of life. In fact, America is an extremely powerful country, with a unique and extraordinary set of strengths. The only way that position can truly be eroded is by its own actions and overreactions—by unwise and imprudent leadership. A good way to start correcting the errors of the past would be to recognize that we are not at war.

READ THE REST HERE.
 

By Jake Sherman 

A packed room likely expecting fireworks during Scott McClellan’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee Friday got nothing but smoke.

When the former White House press secretary was asked whether crimes were committed in the Bush White House, he said he did not know. Was Vice President Dick Cheney involved in a cover up? No answer. How many television appearances has he made in support of his new book? He simply could not recall.

But when he did answer questions from the committee, the former Bush loyalist rarely veered from his 368-page memoir “What Happened,” his biting criticism of his time inside the Bush White House. McClellan, devoid of the American flag lapel pin he sported for most of his time as a staffer in the administration, called Bush a “decent man” but said he thought the president rushed into the Iraq War.

It was certainly one of the first, and likely one of the last, insights into the inner workings of the Bush White House. After pausing for more than an hour to debate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Congressmen took turns questioning motives, and prompting McClellan to mentally search for references inside his book.

Democrats generally applauded McClellan’s candor and Republicans lamented the book’s timing and ulterior motives, yet, perhaps surprisingly, the testimony rarely turned confrontational. But Washington theater did have its stage call. Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, asked McClellan if he could have “taken this to the grave with you and done your country a favor?”

Perhaps in the mold of the late “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, Rep. Ric Keller, a Florida Republican, asked if President George W. Bush had ever misled him, to which he responded yes. Keller showed a passage in McClellan’s book where he wrote that Bush had never misled him. Keller even questioned the motivation of citing Bush's drug use in his book, asking McClellan if he had used illicit drugs (he says he has). Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, asked if McClellan was upset about his departure from the White House. McClellan responded no, yet his book said otherwise.

Democrats, although generally laudatory of McClellan’s literary debut, pressed McClellan for nuggets of information, with Florida Democrat Robert Wexler telling the audience that the information uncovered warrants the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Five-and-a-half hours must not have been enough for Chairman John Conyers, the chairman of the committee. The record, he said, will be open for five more legislative days. Let the digging continue.
 

UPDATE, May 16: Today in South Dakota, Obama responded to Bush's remarks. Read my take here.

Yesterday, we chronicled Vice President Dick Cheney's first foray onto the 2008 campaign trail and its catastrophic conclusion: a loss in Mississippi's scarlet red First District for Republican Congressional wannabe Greg Davis... to a Democrat (shudder). Now Cheney's second-in-command, President George W. Bush, has injected himself into the race as well--and his debut is proving to be even more spectacularly disastrous than his not-so-better half's.

Dubya's first mistake? Choice of venue. Speaking earlier today before the Israeli parliament in honor of the country's 60th anniversary, Bush kicked off the festivities by acting more or less, you know, "presidential." He spoke of America's unwavering support for the Jewish State. He portrayed the future of the Middle East as a time of "tolerance and integration." He reiterated his belief that democracy would triumph over terrorism. Oh, and then he used the diplomatic forum to launch a veiled but stinging attack on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, breaking the unwritten rule of U.S. politics that partisan bickering stops at our water's edge. "Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals," he said in the Knesset, "as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along." The "some," White House aides privately confirmed to CNN, referred to Obama, who has said that as president he will engage in direct talks with the heads of hostile states--but has also made it abundantly clear that he will not sit down with "terrorists and radicals" like, say, Hamas. So much for seeming presidential.

And that was only the beginning. Turning up the heat, Bush went on to cast himself as Winston Churchill to Obama's Neville Chamberlain, implying that the Democratic senator favors "appeasing" terrorists much as some Western leaders sought to appease Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War II. "We have heard this foolish delusion before," said Bush. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history." Hyperbolic Nazi comparisons = never a political winner. Oy vey, indeed.

There is, of course, a valuable debate to be had over whether the U.S. president should agree to unconditional talks with, say, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. But by distorting Obama's stance beyond all recognition and using the charged context of the Knesset--along with a handful of inappropriate historical allusions*--to not-so-subtly raise further doubts about the Democratic candidate with Jewish Americans, Bush indicated that he's less interested in highlighting foreign-policy differences than in fear-mongering for political gain.

The point, it seems, was to boost John McCain. Unfortunately for Bush--and the GOP--the assault has proven to be pretty foolish politics. Like children with Christmas presents, the entire Democratic establishment immediately ripped into the president for his remarks. "It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence to launch a false political attack," said Obama in a statement. "It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel." Obama communications director Robert Gibbs called Bush's swipe an “astonishing” show of "cowboy diplomacy" and an “unprecedented political attack on foreign soil.” "Beneath the dignity of the office," said Nancy Pelosi; "Does the president have no shame?" asked Rahm Emanuel. DNC Chairman Howard Dean demanded that McCain "denounce these remarks in the strongest terms possible.” And Joe Biden summed up the situation in typically Bidenesque terms. "This is bulls**t," he said in a Senate hallway. "This is malarkey."

Whether or not Dubya's history lesson was, indeed, "malarkey," the Dems are smart to treat it like a big, shiny gift from Santa Claus. As the New Republic's Christopher Orr puts it, "Bush attacking Obama, and Obama counter-attacking Bush, while John McCain sits on the sidelines, is a disastrous dynamic for the GOP. The more Obama can frame this race as him vs. the most unpopular president in modern history, the easier a time he'll have in the fall." Before, Obama had to tie McCain to Bush to accomplish this task--and it was often a stretch, seeing as the Arizona senator has broken with the administration on issues like global warming and even Iraq strategy. But now that Bush has entered the ring himself, Obama can finally fight the opponent he's been itching to fight all along.

McCain, for his part, is left in an awkward position. After Bush's Knesset kvetching caught fire this morning in Washington, D.C., White House spokeswoman Dana Perino contradicted what aides had already told CNN and insisted that her boss wasn't referring to Obama. "There are many who have suggested these types of negotiations with people that the president, President Bush, thinks that we should not talk to," she informed reporters in Jerusalem. With that in mind, then, there are only two explanations for Bush's "who, me?" defense, and both align with the worst criticisms of his character: either he's too dumb to realize that the entire world would hear his comments as a swipe at Obama--highly unlikely--or he's being disingenuous. Hours later in Columbus, Ohio, McCain told the press that "he took the White House at its word"--a diplomatic response--and then pivoted to hit Obama himself. "This does bring up an issue that we will be discussing with the American people," he said, "and that is why does Barack Obama, Senator Obama, want to sit down with a state sponsor of terrorism?" Unlike Bush, McCain was honestly characterizing Obama's position and indicating an interest in substantive debate. But don't expect Biden, Pelosi, Dean, Emanuel--or Obama--to make that distinction for him in the fall. They'll simply say he embraced the radioactive president--implying that he must be either dumb or disingenuous himself.

In other words, "more of the same."

UPDATE, 5:17 p.m.:  Another negative effect on McCain: Bush's remarks stepped all over his major speech this morning, which "was billed by his campaign as one of his most important to date and a summary of sorts of the past two months of policy addresses and promises." Although the McCain camp probably doesn't mind Bush putting Obama on the defensive re: a touchy subject like Israel, that benefit doesn't outweigh the costs of 1) having the day's message, which was geared toward independents, completely drowned out and 2) being forced instead to play sidekick to the most unpopular president in modern history--a sure turn-off for the very independents that McCain was supposed to spend the day courting.

* UPDATE, 5:34 p.m.: Why is the Nazi comparison inappropriate in this context? Blogger Matt Eckel of Foreign Policy Watch sums it up nicely:

Any benefits of Munich as an instructive historical precedent are now far outweighed by the analogy's power as an intellectually lazy rhetorical cudgel that is too often used to bludgeon any diplomatic initiatives that are, well, diplomatic. Not every autocratic country is Nazi Germany. Not every foreign dictator we don't like is Hitler. Not every threatening situation is most appropriately handled by eschewing diplomacy in favor of a "firm stance." ... Iran is not Nazi Germany. Though the Iranian regime is anti-democratic, and espouses values that are indeed antithetical to those of the liberal West, the notion that Iranian armies and proxies are poised to make a genocidal sweep across the Middle East is absurd. Even the Iranian nuclear threat, though serious, shows every sign of being able to be contained with an intelligent deterrence policy (should things come to that). Iran does not have a particularly impressive industrial base. Its infrastructure is mediocre, its economy is sclerotic (propped up only by high oil prices), and its regime is unpopular. Even the outrageous statements about Israel made by President Ahmadinejad should be taken with a grain of salt, remembering that the Iranian President is not the head of state, and that he is acutally at odds with much of Iran's clerical leaders.
 

A famous aphorist with a fondness for drink (and also something of a statesmen, apparently), Winston Churchill* once said, "show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart; show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." Winnie's underlying assumption, of course, is that younger people tend to be lefties, and older people tend to be otherwise--a common enough observation. But it turns out the politics of age are considerably more complicated than Churchill suggested--and right now, they're conspiring against the Republican Party.

It's no secret that the GOP brand is on the decline. At 51 percent to 38 percent, the gap between Democratic and Republican party identification among voters is a full 10 points wider than it was in 2004 (47-44)--wider, in fact, than at any point since the peak of the Reagan Revolution, when Republicans enjoyed a double-digit advantage. And according to a new research report from the Pew Center for the People and the Press, it's young voters who are mostly responsible for Democrats' recent gains. In the under-30 cohort, Democrats trounce Republicans among women (63-28), men (52-38), Southerners (53-38), Midwesterners (61-32), moderates (62-28) and suburbanites (56-34)--often boasting much larger margins than what they're able to scrounge up among older voters in the same demographic. Overall, 58 percent of voters aged 18-29 (i.e., Millennials) call themselves Democrats, while only 33 percent call themselves Republicans. That gap--25 percent--has doubled since 2004. As the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder puts it, this is "the GOP['s] generational time bomb."

Subscribers to the canard of "young liberals and old conservatives" are probably unsurprised. But according to Pew, they should be. That's because history proves them wrong. (See chart above.) When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, for example, a plurality of voters under 30--47 percent--identified as Republicans. The reason: when they came of age. As the Pew people write: "Age differences in party affiliation are a result of a variety of influences, including... generational differences that reflect the political climate at the time when individuals were forming their political identity and loyalties." That's why the youngest voters in 1992, Generation Xers, were actually more Republican than their elders: "they had come of age politically during a time in which conservative ideas were ascendant and the presidency was held by a popular Republican, Ronald Reagan." Same goes for the second-youngest group--i.e., Generation Jonesers (like Barack Obama) then in their late 20s and early 30--who followed the troubled presidency of Jimmy Carter on TV as tots; they were also more Republican than average. Meanwhile, older Baby Boomers, who'd endured the turbulent Nixon years, were solidly Democratic. The point? When it comes to the Millennials, it's not their age alone that's making them Democrats--it's President George W. Bush.

The good news for the GOP?  Party loyalty isn't forever. Take Generations X and Jones, for example. Born between 1956 and 1976, they leaned Republican throughout the 1990s, and the party still clung to a slight edge among them--47 to 44--as recently as 2004. But the latest Pew polling shows a striking change of heart: currently, 51 percent of voters aged 32 to 52 affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, compared with 39 percent who describe themselves as Republicans or lean toward the GOP. Of course, that's bad news for Republicans in the short run. But it just goes to show: if the party manages, against all odds, to put a president in the White House this November, and he manages, against all odds, to overcome a likely Democratic Congress and make a positive lasting impression--well, then maybe some of these "defectors" will come running back to the right, and Republicans can begin to repair the damage that Bush has done.

Your move, Sen. McCain.

*A reader notes that there's some disagreement over whether Churchill actually said this. Damn Internets!
 

Gerald Herbert / AP

And yet we have no idea what they said.

Leaving the White House, Gore--whom Bush honored with a closed-door tete-a-tete in addition to the typical Nobel Prize prize photo-op--told a swarm of reporters that "of course, we talked about global warming" before adding that it was a "private meeting." "I’m not going to say anything about it other than that it was very nice, very cordial," he said. "He was very gracious in setting up the meeting, and it was a very good and very substantive conversation. That’s all.” Bush has been equally mum.

So we turn to you, dear readers. Take a close look at the photo above. Imagine what Gore is saying to Bush. Then leave your best caption in the comments below. It's as simple as that. At the end of the week, I'll consult with a team of NEWSWEEK reporters and editors and pick the smartest, funniest submission. Prize TBD. But count on a special Stumper post--at the very least.

Personally, I think Gore is asking Bush if those are EnergyStar-qualified compact fluorescent light bulbs...

You?

Jenna, light of my life, fire of my... Oh, wait. Sorry. Didn't see you there. Crying? Who? Me? What makes you think that? Oh, right--the salted tears streaming down my face and falling to the floor beneath my desk, where I lie in the fetal position, silent and still. Those. I guess you've got a point there. For the First Family, this has been a joyous day: 25-year-old daughter Jenna Welch Bush--the blonde one--is now engaged to Henry Hager, 29, son of the Honorable and Mrs. John H. Hager of Richmond, Virginia. But for us members of the American media, today has been as dark as each shot of Jagermeister that Jenna "Hager" will never do. "Devoted wife and mother" doesn't have quite the same ring, sadly, as "brash, boozy, barely legal twin." Nothing gold can stay.

When Jenna arrived at the White House in 2000, after eight earnest, awkward years of Chelsea Clinton, Washington welcomed her with open arms. And that was before the fun began. Within a month, the then 19-year-old UT-Austin student coerced a Secret Service agent into springing a buddy from a Texas slammer after he was arrested for public drunkenness. Then she landed on the cover of the National Enquirer, smoking a cigarette and falling to the floor atop a giggling gal-pal. Then she was cited, in Austin, for underage drinking. Then she tried to sweet-talk a bartender into serving her liquor and, when he refused, fled from her security detail down a back alley, yelling that her father would "have your ass." Then she was arrested after slipping another bartender a fake ID. Then she partied with Diddy. And Chris Cornell of Audioslave. And Ashton Kutcher, who claimed that he witnessed a friend "smoking [pot with] the Bush twins on his hookah." We all knew where such behavior would lead: a pantyless paparazzi picture, a shaved head, a sex tape, a stint in rehab, a Chihuahua. And we rejoiced.

Until today, when our world came crashing down. In truth, the warning signs first appeared long ago. After graduating from college, Jenna took a job in Washington as a public-school teacher. She's since interned with UNICEF in Panama and sold two books--one about her experiences in Latin America, the other a children's book co-authored with her mother--to Harper Collins. And false reports of an engagement to Hager have surfaced several times since the pair started dating in 2005. Yawn.

Then again, all may not be lost. Although Hager seems likes a respectable young Republican -- the son of a former tobacco executive and Assistant Secretary of Education who now runs the Virginia GOP, he graduated from Wake Forest before interning for Karl Rove and working at commerce -- you know what they always say: "Women marry their fathers." Which means we've still got a good 25 years of non-stop partying before Hager is elected leader of the free world. If not, there's always the bachelorette party.