What To Read: By Saturday I Learned A Thing Or Two...

Peggy Noonan once again pours out her frustration. The White House, she writes,

thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

Rich Lowry suggests that John McCain isn't "dead" yet -- if only because the rest of the Republican field is so flawed:

The tricky thing about political leadership is that it has to involve some followership, too. Mitt Romney would have no chance to lead the Republican party as a relatively moderate northeasterner, because that’s not where the Republican party is. Nor would Rudy Giuliani, which is why he has distanced himself from many of his positions as mayor (although in not as jarring a fashion as Romney).

Barack Obama's campaign was caught sending out information about the Clinton's personal financial disclosure forms.

These documents – with their bold type and grabby headlines, including one that referred to Mrs. Clinton as (D-Punjab) – are text-book examples of old-school opposition research practices. Second, the documents include what could be construed as attacks on Mr. Clinton, who is probably the most popular person among Democrats these days.

Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton, defended the documents, noting that they were simply a compilation of public quotations and information available to anyone with access to the Internet. “I don’t know why anybody would take umbrage with us putting out publicly available information.

Mr. Burton would not comment when asked why, if that were the case, the campaign would not simply distribute the information under its name

The D-Punjab thing makes Brendan Nyhan angry.

Fred Thompson (R-Inkblot) scored the endorsement of 15 members of the Florida House of Representatives.

The list of signers includes Jim Frishe, Pinellas Park; Don Brown, DeFuniak Springs; Larry Cretul, Ocala; Denise Grimsley, Lake Placid; Sandy Adams, Orlando; David Mealor, Lake Mary; Mitch Needelman, Melbourne; Mike Davis, Naples; Ralph Poppell, Vero Beach; Steve Precourt, Orlando; Bryan Nelson, Apopka; Clay Ford, Gulf Breeze; Doug Holder, Sarasota; Seth McKeel, R-Lakeland; and Dennis Ross, Lakeland.

The biggest trend in politics? it's the rise of the seculars, according to the Atlantic's Ross Douthat.

The argument, in short, is that just as the elite-level secularization of the 1960s and '70s (in the intelligentsia, the Courts, and the Democratic Party) produced backlash in the form of the religious right, so now that backlash has bred its own backlash, in the form of a mass secularism whose attitudes toward religion, politics, and church-state separation are more European than anything we've seen before in American political life. This, not the supposed right-wing religious revival that conservatives champion and liberals dread, is the newest new thing in American political life, and the trend that's likely to have the most impact on the culture wars over the next decade or so.