John LeBoutillier, Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell will analyze all things political - especially the latest on the debt ceiling - on CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL on Monday @ 11 AM ET - on www.live.FoxNews.com

Please note that this a new and better web address than the one previously given in this space.

Tune in online a few minutes before 11 AM ET and get your computer all set and the volume adjusted and then the show comes on at the top of the hour.

Enjoy!

He – and it will be a “he” not a “she” because female candidates have a much tougher time getting fellow women to vote for them (a dirty little non-PC secret of politics) – is looking at the news every hour and just shaking his head. Then he mutters to himself, “It is all just coming right to me – and I don’t have to do a thing!”

He is looking at the ongoing train wreck that is Washington DC and the debt ceiling fight – and all the political miscalculations on both sides: Obama last fallnot embracing the Simpson-Bowles Debt Reduction panel that he had appointed; the Congressional Democrats who focused too much on tax increases and their all-too-frequent class-warfare gambit; and the Tea Party Republicans who didn’t recognize when they had the optimum advantage and thus overplayed their hand when they refused to make the best deal possible.

He chuckled when he saw a group called Americans Elect do all the tough work to get ballot access in all 50 states – a task that before the advent of the Internet required the hyper-expensive task of hiring petition gatherers in many states. He knew that ace political consultant Doug Schoen was advising this group and thus it would be effective and efficient. “They’re doing it all – before they even have a candidate!”

“Money?” he asked aloud. No sweat. Joe Trippi, the architect of the ground-breaking Howard Dean campaign in 2004, had frequently been interviewed about the so-far untapped potential goldmine of online donations available for the “right candidate with the right message at the right time.”

In fact, when he read speculation of the potential one billion dollars that Team Obama expected to raise, he realized he could match it – all through small donations on the Internet. “If ten million people each give my campaign one hundred dollars, that’s one billion right there. No fundraising dinners…no long, boring lunches shmoozing lobbyists…no nothing! Just the message: Let’s Save America.”

He looked into his mirror and practiced again, “I am not running as a Republican.” He paused. James C. Humes, the long-time presidential speech-writer, had preached over and over to him, “Pause and speak slowly…much more slowly than you normally do. The slower you speak, the more gravitas your words will have.”

He tried it again. Slowly this time. “I am not running as a Republican.” Pause. “I am not running as a Democrat.” Yet another pause. “I am running as an American.”

Chills ran up his neck and he felt goose flesh on his arms. Since he first heard long-time political adviser and one-time boy genius of presidential politics, Pat Caddell, say these lines on Caddell and Doug Schoen’s unique Fox show, CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL, he just knew these were the very lines upon which he’d base his independent, third party presidential race in 2012.

Reading the latest polls he saw that President Obama was fading – even among his core supporters. The Jewish vote was going wobbly on him. One in five Obama voters from 2008 was now unhappy with him. And the GOP candidates were way, way off base, too. They were so far out of the mainstream that the crucial center was waiting for someone like him to come along and vacuum up millions of independent voters.

Yes, it was indeed “all coming to him.”

He smiled for a moment. Then he looked into the mirror and slowly began to practice again. “I am not running as a Republican. I am not running as a Democrat. I am running as an American.

John LeBoutillier, Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell will analyze all things political on CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL on Monday @ 11 AM ET - on www.FoxNews.com

Tune in online a few minutes before 11 AM ET and get your computer all set and the volume adjusted and then the show comes on at the top of the hour.

Enjoy!

Let’s be clear about something: the Democratic Left smells blood in the case of Rupert Murdoch and the English hacking scandal.

Why?

Because Murdoch and his American media entities – especially Fox News and the New York Post – have bedeviled the Left for years. These right-of-center news sources have gone into hard-left territory – TV news and the New York news market – and dominated not only in market share but also in setting the news agenda.

And they have made tons of dough – while the Left-leaning media are all losing money (declining ratings and readers and thus ad revenue) hand over fist in the recession.

So we are witnessing professional jealousy coupled with a brief moment of hope on the Left – hope that they can decapitate the leadership of the News Corporation. Indeed, if the Murdochs were no longer in charge of News Corporation, liberals would quickly permeate the entire organization, especially the politically vital Fox News Channel.

Fox News has become the base of the GOP, Tea Party and conservatism. Find me one right-of-center person in the USA who doesn’t look at it – at least a bit. Thus FNC is the rallying point for the Right; and the Left knows this. It drives them mad that CNN and MSNBC – both egregiously left-wing – have microscopic audiences and thus virtually no political clout whatsoever.

And the three broadcast networks – CBS, NBC and ABC – have declined in audience share, too, although they all remain left-of-center.

So the only avenue for Republican/Tea Party/conservative audiences to hear a non-leftist spin is talk radio – and Fox News. Period. That’s it.

No wonder the Left is salivating at Murdoch’s present troubles. If they take him out – and then get rid of Roger Ailes as the head of Fox News – and make no mistake about it: Roger is the man the Left really wants to get – then in their warped minds, they can again dominate the political agenda.

The “Fair and Balanced” slogan of Fox may not always be totally accurate; but it taps into something most news viewers have known for decades: prior to Fox, there was nothing fair or balanced about the so-called Mainstream Media. It was relentlessly liberal, unfair to conservatives, and warped to fit the left-wing political agenda that remains today way, way out of the American political mainstream.

So watch carefully in the next few days. If the FBI probe of News Corporation has legs – and if there is something there – then liberal Senators and Congressman are relentlessly going to savage Murdoch and Fox.

They see it as an opportunity to do what they have failed to do in the forum of public opinion and in most recent elections: win the hearts and minds of the American people.

They would prefer to rig the debate by depriving half of America of a voice for their views and opinions.

John LeBoutillier will be on CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL on Foxnews.com - live - at 11AM East Coast Time on Monday morning.

Just go to www.foxnews.com a few minutes before 11 AM, get your volume all set, grab something to drink and then watch the best half hour political show on TV. Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen and JLeB will analyze all things political.

And please let us know your thoughts about the show.

As we head toward crunch time in the all-important Debt Ceiling negotiation, the GOP’s Tea Party-inspired hard-line position has already yielded potentially game-changing concessions on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending from President Obama and the Democrats – all without giving up a thing!

The GOP has done this by maintaining a hard line on “no new net revenues.” Faced with this position, the Democrats have continually retreated and agreed to even more cuts in the above-mentioned entitlement programs.

As of today, it is being leaked by the White House that President Obama wants a $4 trillion deal – as opposed to the $2 trillion currently being discussed. The word “big” came out of the President’s mouth yesterday at his White House press availability.

Plus, there was a secret White House meeting last weekend with the Speaker.

Putting all of this together leads us to the following thoughts:

1. There will be a deal of some sort by the end of July; it may also not be a short-term can-kicker. Who wants this to be repeated next year in the middle of an election?

2. The GOP has performed magnificently up until now – with one big but: they have to come off their no-revenue-increase position at the last minute of the deal;

3. Politically it is crazy to be painted as the party that not only cut/eliminated/changed Medicare in the Ryan budget, but now dug in its heals on saving tax breaks and loopholes for uber-rich billionaires and corporations.

4. We on the Right want to be for lower taxes for the middle and working class - not for the super-rich or Big Corporations!

5. We need more populism – and less of this stuck-in-the-mud Grover Norquist tax pledge nonsense.

6. The GOP in the House and Senate helped create this massive National Debt with their ungodly spending spree with G.W. Bush in the 2001-2007 period: two unpaid-for-wars, an un-necessary tax cut, prescription drug entitlements and massive annual deficit spending. So their newfound fiscal conservatism is a joke.

Conclusion: if the GOP doesn’t come off this tax position, they will be painted as “in the tank for the rich,” which along with their previous Medicare vote, will make them untenable in the 2012 elections - especially among the crucial bloc of independent voters.

However, if they do make a deal with new revenues coming from closing loopholes and taxing the very-rich, there can be a real debt-reduction deal that helps revive our moribund economy.

That deal is up to the GOP and Tea Party: squeeze everything they can from the Democrats – and then give in a bit on taxing the rich.

That’s good economics – and great politics.