As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That isn't to say that first impressions are necessarily immutable destiny in politics, since there are those who have bombed in their national debut and turned things around, and others who looked terrific at first but turned out to be something less. Bill Clinton gave a famously terrible speech at the 1988 Democratic convention, and Sarah Palin was dynamite in her speech at the GOP's 2008 gathering. Nevertheless, there are some things you just can't overcome, particularly if what caused them wasn't a bad night's sleep but the very core of your being.

A year or two ago, if you asked Republicans to list their next generation of star's Ted Cruz's name would inevitably have come up. Young (he's only 42), Latino (his father emigrated from Cuba), smart (Princeton, Harvard Law) and articulate (he was a champion debater), he looked like someone with an unlimited future. But then he got to Washington and started acting like the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy, and now, barely a month into his Senate career, we can say with a fair degree of certainty that Ted Cruz is not going to be the national superstar many predicted he'd be. If things go well, he might be the next Jim DeMint—the hard-line leader of the extremist Republicans in the Senate, someone who helps the Tea Party and aids some right-wing candidates win primaries over more mainstream Republicans. But I'm guessing that like DeMint, he won't ever write a single piece of meaningful legislation and he'll give the Republican party nothing but headaches as it struggles to look less like a party of haters and nutballs.

I want to expand on something I brought up yesterday on the utility, for the opposition party, of doing nothing more with your efforts than becoming the biggest pain in the president's ass you possibly can. As of now, Republicans have mounted an unprecedented filibuster against Chuck Hagel's nomination to be Secretary of Defense, the latest in a long line of cases in which they looked at a prevailing norm of doing business in Washington and realized that there was no reason they couldn't violate it. Sure, up until now we had an unspoken agreement that the president would get to appoint pretty much whoever he wants to his cabinet unless the nominee was a drunk, a criminal, or grossly unqualified. But Republicans feel perfectly free to cast that agreement aside. Why? Because screw you, Obama, that's why. In any case, it looks at the moment as though this filibuster will be temporary, and Hagel will eventually get confirmed.

So now, there are two ways to look at this. Having caused all this trouble, will the Republicans feel like they got it out of their system and calm themselves down a bit? Or will they be emboldened to find new and creative ways to throw monkey wrenches into the gears of government?

John McCain is no longer a substantively important figure in American politics. As a member of the minority party in the Senate, he chairs no committees. He is not a leader among his peers. Since losing in his second run for president, he continued his decades-long record of not bothering to engage in the legislating part of being a legislator (over a three-decade-long career, McCain has exactly one significant piece of legislation to his name, a law that was overturned by the Supreme Court). Yet he continues to be a politically important figure, appearing more often on the Sunday shows than anyone else and having his ideas and his opinions regularly reported on.

Which is why I simply must speak up now that the biggest myth about John McCain is cropping up again. It's the idea that, noble and modest as he is, McCain has always been terribly reluctant to discuss the fact that he was a POW in Vietnam.

In the last few days, a number of polls (see here and here have shown a dip in support for President Obama, and the reasons are not entirely clear. Is it the rise in gas prices? Maybe. But what about the positive signs on the economy? All well and good, but perhaps the administration is undermining itself by making too much of them. But there are still almost eight months until election day, so we'd all be well advised not to make too much of any one poll or any momentary fluctuation.

Because that's what these kind of tracking polls do. They fluctuate. Between now and election day, I promise you there will be polls that show Obama comfortably leading, polls that show Romney leading, and polls that show a tie. That was what happened four years ago, and what happens in nearly every election...

According to Texas Governor Rick Perry, he's running for president because "I want to make sure that every young man and woman who puts on the uniform of the United States respects highly the president of the United States." He later "clarified" by saying that “If you polled the military, the active duty and veterans, and said ‘would you rather have a president of the United States that never served a day in the military or someone who is a veteran?’ They’ve going to say, I would venture, that they would like to have a veteran."

It's with a heavy heart that we here at TAP say goodbye to Ann Friedman (quick, before you start crying, bookmark her new blog). Let me let you in on a little secret: Ann has hired every. single. person. you. read. on. this. site. That includes our boss, Mark Schmitt. She's a formidable editor, an insightful writer, and a true friend.

So, we're sending her off the best way we can: with a rundown of her greatest hits:

I often decry the cynicism of the press corps -- heck, I did it in my last post -- but allow me to make the case for some more cynicism in one particular case. Today, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, long a big fan of Sen. John McCain, washes his hands of the former presidential candidate, while still managing to fit in his column nearly all the tropes that made coverage of McCain so maddening for so many years. There's the gratuitous mention of McCain's POW past, lest we forget for a moment that what McCain endured 40 years ago makes him more honorable than the rest of us.