A fabulous question from See-Dub. How about it? Hope and Change and bold diplomatic moves to usher in a golden age of rapprochement simply can’t wait until January 2009. We need a take-charge, can-do peace avatar right now to buck the old taboo about not going over the president’s head and do a little strategic gladhanding of our enemies. Pelosi and Kerry have pretty well exploded that taboo already; he’d simply be pushing it a bit further, as she once thought of doing. Think too how it’ll embarrass cynical conservatives like me, who have come to regard so much of his “new brand of politics” as stunts dressed up as principles to be discarded the moment they no longer serve any electoral purpose. This would be the ultimate rebuke to that theory, and might even earn him a landslide in the process: We keep hearing how tired Americans are of Bush’s recalcitrance in not talking to terrorist states (or at least, not all of them) so he could surely leverage the visit into some sweet battleground victories. Exit question to sweeten the pot: If he goes to Tehran and does the grab ‘n grin with Khamenei or Ahmadinejad, we all agree to lay off him about not meeting with Petraeus, okay?