If you've ever dialed a telephone number and forgotten, just as the other party answered, who you were calling, you may understand how Republican presidential hopefuls felt as they made their first live TV connection to Michigan voters Tuesday...

In an eyeblink, Republican presidential candidates who'd come to Dearborn to court the GOP base -- the same hard-core conservatives who chose Dick DeVos as their party's gubernatorial standard-bearer in 2006 -- found themselves confronting a diverse primary audience that might also include liberal supporters of Obama and John Edwards, independents turned off by the reduced Democratic field and mischief makers determined to sow confusion in the Republican camp.

So who, exactly, were the candidates supposed to address when someone asked them a question about corporate taxes, universal health care or energy conservation?

Technically, they were supposed to address the moderator, the live audience and the American people via the TV cameras.  But that's not really what you're asking is it.  

There's an insidious implication in Dickerson's piece.  One that's sadly been well earned by "politicians" over the years.  "They" will tell you what you want to hear.  "They" will pander and oscillate and put "their" fingers to the wind.  It's a move that Bill Clinton made famous and it's al the rage in politics these days.

It's a lefty trend that several in the current GOP field are demolishing steadily, day by day, and thank goodness.

Dickerson's implication is that the candidates will pander and that they will change their approach based on the audience.  And history teaches us that some of them will.  But some of them won't.  Some of them will let their yes be yes and their no be no even if it makes a few folks unhappy.  And those are the candidates that deserve a second, third and fourth look.

As opposed, of course, to the Democrats running to become President of the United States in 2008.  Wait, correction, as opposed to the Democrats running to become President of 49 States.

They all told us yesterday that they don't even want a FIRST look.  The Detroit News editorializes:

But let's turn our attention to the cowards who are so fearful of upsetting Iowa and New Hampshire that they pulled their names from the ballot of a state that will be key to winning the general election next November.

Illinois U.S. Sen. Barack Obama claims to have a message for urban America. And yet he's shunning a state that's home to the poorest major city in America?

Former North Carolina U.S. Sen. John Edwards is building his campaign on a Two Americas theme. And yet he won't put forth his name in the most economically distressed state in the nation?

You can add one more to Edward's list there, too.  Don't forget his biggest supporters, big labor.  Today is D-Day for Chrysler's UAW workforce as they prepare to walk off the job a few short hours from now.  

The Associated Press reports:

The UAW set a deadline of 11 a.m. to reach a tentative agreement with Chrysler LLC or have thousands of workers walk off the job. The union represents about 49,000 workers at 24 U.S. manufacturing facilities and other sites.

In a memo to local union leaders, the UAW said it would stop extending its contract with Chrysler at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, but that deadline passed with no announcement from the UAW. The contract was supposed to expire Sept. 14 but has been extended since then.

...At factories and union halls across the Detroit area Tuesday, workers filled out paperwork for strike pay and signed up for picket duty.

Not that a second strike of Michigan's largest job producer in as many weeks is anything worth discussing on the national level.  I mean, we don't need a President who actually cares about those sorts of issues or about Michigan's problems.  

Just stick a "D" after their name and you'll have millions of blind acolytes lining up at the polls on election day and clogging web servers all across the state to come online and spew their hate rhetoric.  It's a good thing that the regressives don't need a candidate to actually give a rip about their home state... because their candidates don't.