It's going to take some time for the situation in Pakistan to sort itself out after today's assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. That is the power struggle. There will be much violence in the coming days, maybe enough to teeter the government of President Pervez Musharraf.
While media reports will focus on the riots, the determining factor will be what takes place behind the scenes. Musharraf, out of political necessity, has had to a certain extent accomodate the Islamists. Will he now throw that out the window and go after them in earnest, or will he continue to pander to the extremists?
The odds on either strategy are about even. There will be heavy international pressure to bring the assassination ringleaders and their enablers to justice. Throw Bhutto supporters into that mix. However, Musarraf gains by the demise of Bhutto. Plus, his actions in the last few months made possible the conditions that led to her death.
If the Pakistani president does not go after the Islamists, their influence will grow tremendously. That's where you really have to worry, since we're talking about a nuclear-capable country.
You'll read in the coming days tributes to Bhutto that will make her out to be some sort of hero of democracy and the last best hope of the West for a stable and democratic Pakistan. In reality, she was neither. But her death is a tragedy, another great upset in a perpetually turbulent region.
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More poll watching, and it's not to Rudy Giuliani's benefit.
The former mayor of New York City has dropped about nine points nationally in the past couple of weeks and now leads second-place Mike Huckabee by 3.3 points, according to the RealClearPolitics.com tracker.
Giuliani is now FIFTH in Iowa with just 8.3 percent, though that's somewhat understandable with the evangelist Christian-heavy voting block in the GOP there. But in New Hampshire, with a more diverse demographic that should favor him in a state close to home, he's fallen well behind front-runners Mitt Romney and John McCain into third.
Okay, so take those first two primaries and their media-circus weirdness out of the mix. Next is Michigan, and Giuliani is running fourth. In South Carolina, about two weeks later, he's fifth again.
Even Florida, where Giuliani was going to make his first big splash, he's all but blown what was a 20-point lead in the polls in late-November. Now he leads Huckabee by just 2.2 points.
Get this. The candidate who currently LEADS the national GOP polls could be out of the race by the end of January. Admittedly, those polls from earlier in the year probably weren't terribly accurate, especially as the voting public slowly gets a feel for what the candidates are all about. But it's a surprising turnaround.
