My resolution is simple. I want to do a better job of seizing and enjoying the opportunities that God puts in front of me.

May He bless and keep each of you in the coming year.

Jim: Great, Marshall, take the high road. Now you’re making the rest of us look crass.

Actually, after a tumultuous year, filled with great joy and titanic life-altering changes, I want 2008 to go a bit differently. I’ve got a big new role - father - to go with the usual roles - employee, friend, brother, son, husband - and I’ve felt like I could use a 28 hour day for much of the past year. So my resolution in 2008 is to find balance, to find a way to do everything I want to do in those roles without any of the spinning plates crashing to the floor.

It would be easy to single out Governor Mike Huckabee for this distinction. Heck, I may be guilty of underrating him even today. Huckabee turned in magnificent performances in debates for months, he campaigned hard, and he carved out an interesting political niche — all with virtually no cash.

But picking Huckabee would be boring.

So I’m going to select former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Blair’s Labor Party basically ran their party’s leader out of town on a rail last summer so that they could hand the reins of government over to Gordon Brown.

Brown was supposedly young and energized, similar to Blair when he first came into office.

Blair had the courage of convictions, and was a rare statesman in modern politics. Calling him Churchillian may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not far off.

Brown, in contrast, seems rather ordinary. And his record since moving into #10 Downing Street has been pretty rough. Labor’s electoral fortunates have tanked. Brown’s policy agenda seems broadly thwarted. And Brown’s positive attributes don’t seem to have materialized.

So in retrospect, it turns out that Tony Blair was doing an awfully good job as Prime Minister. I wonder how many Labor MPs and party leaders would like the chance to reconsider their treatment of Mr. Blair in his final months?

Jim: I wonder if I can go with not quite a figure, but an event.

In my gut, I’m sympathetic to the Hollywood writers. I think if they’re not seeing any dough from work of theirs that is distributed over the Internet, they’re getting a raw deal, and the studios ought to give them their fair share. I’m not an accountant or an arbiter, I can’t tell you what a fair share is, but I figure it can’t be too far off from revenue percentages from other media.

But I think we’ll look back on the Writer’s Strike as An Event That Changed Hollywood and Pop Culture Forever.

As the strike has brought most television production to a standstill, we’ve seen networks getting ready to go all-reality, all the time. One of two things are going to happen as NBC becomes all-choir training and all-American Gladiators for the majority of their programming. Either there will be enough viewers to keep the networks in the black, or there won’t, and the networks will fold. If it’s the former, the networks may never feel a need to do more than a few scripted shows per year. If it’s the latter, once people find other entertainment options, I’m not sure they will come back.

The traditional audience for television is disappearing - going to the Internet, going to video game systems, going to On Demand, DVDs… perhaps even reading. One of the recurring themes here on On Tap is our collective irritation that television networks cancel shows we like like Firefly and keep crappy shows on the air because they’re cheap to produce. I watch a lot less television than I used to. With a baby in the house, I’m seeing fewer movies than I did a year ago.

In an effort to preserve their share of profits from new distribution systems, the striking writers and stubborn studios are hastening the destruction of the old distribution systems. It’s a truly colossal change, and nobody really knows what media world will be waiting for us when we get to the other side of this clash. The ramifications of this fight are, I submit, underrated in their importance.

For my money, there’s only one possibility for this award. It’s Ron Paul.

Paul has, without question, had a better year than anyone could ever have expected. He’s raised a bunch of money. He has a bunch of aggressive, well-organized supporters online.

And he’s not going to be a factor when actual votes are cast.

Even if he chooses to take his war chest and run as an Independent, he’ll be an asterisk in the fall campaign and won’t have any impact in the electoral college.

Bottom line: Ron Paul has been this year’s most interesting political sideshow, but as an actual candidate, he has had minimal impact. That makes him this year’s most overrated figure.

Jim: RONPAUL! RONPAUL! RONPAUL! (I just figured someone should say that on behalf of the blimp financiers.)

I’m going to name New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Cam and Marshall can categorize his nanny state initiatives in a list probably as long as War and Peace, but for the life of me I can’t quite get why Bloomberg is being treated - nay, the media is begging him to run for president.

He won both of his mayoral campaigns by outspending his rivals. In 2001, he spent $73 million — outspending his Democratic rival by 5 to 1! — and still only won by 2 percent. He won a blowout in 2005, but only after spending another $66 million. Of course, I can see why a campaign operative hoping to be hired by Bloomberg (COUGHedrollinsCOUGH) would hope for him to run.

He’s by no means a bad manager of the city, but he’s being touted as a greater reformer than Giuliani, which just doesn’t wash. It’s a hell of a lot easier to create the New York City of late 2007 from the 2001 than to create the city of 2001 from where it was in 1993. The heavy lifting had been done; crime had dropped dramatically, the subways were cleared of graffiti, the city had enjoyed a great deal of economic growth, and Al Sharpton had decided to take a break from encouraging arson to focus on national politics.

Mike Bloomberg is an extremely rich man, who can afford to be fairly blunt — see his comments about diet guru Robert Atkins’ death - who knows how to schmooze the media, and who has taken care of New York’s various power bases and political constituencies. As a result of this, he is one of the most relentlessly revered figures in U.S. politics, in a manner wildly disproportionate to his actual accomplishments.

Cam: I’m with Jim when it comes to Bloomberg, but I think I have to venture out into the world of pop culture for this one.

J.K. Rowling is the most overrated figure of the year. Having now read all seven of the Harry Potter books, they were good but not great. And the payoff for these years of reading is what? Harry had a neat adventure as a kid and grew up to be… a bureaucrat. Talk about a bummer of an ending.

Marshall: Runners-up include Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Mitchell, and Reggie Bush.

Maybe it’s an indication of how cynical I’ve become that I really haven’t been able to come up with anyone in this category.

Jim gave me a preview of his choice, and I can absolutely see where he’s coming from.

But as I look around, I don’t really see anyone who has stood up to deliver the tough message or taken responsibility for something gone wrong. I see a lot of opportunists: guys like Governor Romney, who simply cast aside years of themselves and their records to remake themselves into something new. And they get away with it, just as Romney has.

More and more, it all looks like a big game of pretend. “I’ll say what I need to, get the suckers to vote for me, and then do what I want.” That’s the prevailing wisdom amongst candidates these days. And it’s the reason that I haven’t been able to get behind any of the Republican candidates as yet.

So my selection for Most Honest Person, though it pains me greatly to do it: None of the above. And I’m hoping for a better pool of nominees in 2008.

Jim: My nomination is Fred Thompson, for his willingness to share unpleasant truths regarding entitlements. Oddly enough, this year hasn’t seen it turn into the third rail, or seen voters rebuking him because they buy into exhausted attacks that he wants to “destroy Social Security.” I think voters have largely ignored his entitlement reform plans. The other candidates haven’t really attacked him on it.

This praise is not to be construed as an endorsement. But it is a salute; I’ve wanted to see what happened if a candidate came out and addressed America’s huge and growing unfunded liabilities in Social Security, and coming generational warfare, in ruthlessly blunt talk. This year I got my answer: voters yawned. No good deed goes unpunished.

Cam: Most honest person of the year? Either my wife (for speaking the blunt truth about several of my faults) or James and Catherine, who are at the age where they can speak their minds without the ability to self-edit. Gotta love standing in line behind a rather girthy individual only to hear a tiny voice pop up with “Big bottom, daddy! Big bottom!”.

My selection for Turncoat of the Year is General Ricardo Sanchez.

In October, Sanchez blasted the Bush administration in a speech to a group of reporters.

Sanchez said, among things, that the administration ordered a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan.” Later, he added, “The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat.”

Uh-huh.

General Sanchez, of course, commanded U.S. forces in Iraq for nearly a year after U.S. troops entered the country. During that time, he presided over the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, and later retired from the army to avoid having to answer questions from Congress about that mess.

But one assumes that during his year in command, General Sanchez would have been able to impact the war effort in Iraq in some positive way. Certainly, he would have had a chance to persuade his commanders, the Secretary of Defense and the President himself if a change in direction were needed.

Indeed, in retrospect, it’s clear that the year that Sanchez spent in command of American forces in Iraq was the period of the most significant failing of leadership. During that year, it was crucial that Iraq be made secure, and that progress begin on restoration and rebuilding. Instead of progress, the situation in Iraq got worse.

So instead of pointing fingers at his superiors, perhaps General Sanchez ought to be looking in the mirror.

Jim: I’m wondering if “turncoat” has to be negative. Because while Joe Lieberman is loathed by liberal Democrats, I think his endorsement of John McCain is pretty extraordinary. Sure, Zell Miller came out and endorsed Bush in 2004, but Zell was definately further away from his party’s mainstream than Lieberman was, and he was on his way out of politics. Lieberman will be around for at least another four years, and seven years ago he was on his party’s ticket, 527 votes in Florida from being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Could we imagine if a Republican senator had endorsed one of the Democratic candidates? The one who flipped would be greeted with the glowing media coverage and hurrahs that greeted Jim Jeffords.

Cam: Well, I don’t think we’ve had any Red Sox players defect to the Yankees, so this will be a little tougher than usual. Not to mention the fact that I’m writing this on Christmas Eve, and thinking of turncoats isn’t high on my list of things to do. So I’m going to pass and come back to this one on Wednesday.

This one is always a tough one for me, as there are inevitably too many choices.

I was planning to select Ron Paul, but my wife said she didn’t want all of his wacko supporters picketing our house.

So instead, I’m naming former Durham County, North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong.

Nifong, you might recall, was the overzealous prosecutor who lead the witch hunt of three Duke University lacrosse players after a stripper falsely accused them of sexual assault.

Though most of the story happened last year, Nifong’s moment of humiliation finally came just last June. After an investigation, the North Carolina Bar expelled Nifong and revoked his license to practice law. Days before their ruling was announced, Nifong resigned in disgrace from his prosecutorial post.

Nifong is now facing civil lawsuits from all three of the students and has at last dropped largely out of the public eye.

Jim: I was very tempted to say Alberto Gonzales, because barring him getting indicted over some sort of wrongdoing at the Department of Justice, he will never be heard from again.

But I think I’m going to go with Scott McClellan, the most strikingly ineffective White House press secretary in recent memory. He has a book coming out next year, in which he says the statements he made regarding Rove and Libby were untrue. It will be one last hurrah, one last round of interviews, for an underwhelming guy, the most awkward pairing of an individual and a role since Bernie Kerik was nominated to head Homeland Security. (Google “Scott McClellan” and “deer in headlights” and you get 1,100 matches.)

Cam: Jeez, who hasn’t had their 15 minutes this year?

Okay, how about Kim Kardashian. I think that’s her name. I’ve seen her start to appear on the cover of tabloids, who I guess are in need of a new rich bimbo to talk about (because Paris is soooo last year). She is (I’m guessing), the daughter of Robert Kardashian, who (again, going on memory here) is a celebrity attorney in California.

So we have the daughter of a lawyer in California who has her own reality show about the awesomeness of being the daughter of a lawyer in California. Remind me again why I’m paying for my daughter to go to college?

My selection in this category is Michael Deaver.

I never found the words to honor Mike on this site when he passed away in August after a battle with cancer.

But I was privileged to call him a colleague at Edelman, and honored to have the chance to get to know him, if only a little.

In September, I attended Mike’s funeral. Originally planned for the small, Episcopal church near the White House where Mike and his family attended for years, the service had to be moved to the National Cathedral to accommodate the hundreds of Mike’s friends who wanted to pay their final respects.

Vice President Cheney, Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, and countless others of Mike’s professional colleagues attended. Former Secretary of State James Baker gave a wonderful and moving tribute to Mike.

But Henry Pierce, director of Clean and Sober Streets, provided the most breathtaking moment of the service, when he described Mike’s boundless commitment to his organization, and related how Mike personally intervened with scores of homeless and struggling men and women from across Washington. Mike served as Chairman of the Board of Clean and Sober Streets for 16 years, after getting involved with the organization while fighting his own alcoholism. We heard how Mike rarely went a few days without showing up and helping out. And we learned that on Christmas, Mike would serve dinner, play the piano, and lead Christmas carols.

Mike was a true gentleman, and one of the smartest and most caring people I’ve ever had the honor of knowing. But perhaps the most important thing I can say about Mike is that he touched and shaped lives, and he left the world a far better place than he found it. We are all lessened by his absence.

Jim: As soon as I saw this category, I figured Marshall would write about Mike Deaver, and I looked forward to it in a way.

I was lucky enough to not lose any loved ones this year, so I’m going to go in a very different direction. There’s something very ignoble about the way Joe Torre departed the Yankees this year. In a year full of bad news in sports, the fact that one of baseball’s most accomplished managers couldn’t depart amicably from the ballclub where he made his mark… We’re constantly reminded that our society seems cheaper, more cutthroat, more impatient, less classy, less respectful, less appreciative, pricklier and quicker to anger than a generation ago.

Cam: Most people have never heard of Dave Baskin, and that’s too bad. When a guy like Dave retires, he leaves a hole that’s hard to replace. Dave was NRA’s manager of the Disabled Shooting Sports program.

Under Dave’s direction, thousands of Americans with disabilities were able to take up or continue the shooting sports. He impacted literally tens of thousands of lives, including many disabled veterans who used the shootings sports as part of their rehabilitation.

I was lucky enough to interview Dave several times, and each time he always had an amazing story to tell. For a closer look at some of Dave’s accomplishments, you can check out this article. Dave’s retirement is well deserved but still a big loss. And I’m definitely sorry to see him go.

Cam: I’m beginning to think that my idea of taking the week before Christmas as vacation is the worst idea of 2007. I originally planned on going to Arkansas to help my mother move, but had to scuttle that idea hours before I was supposed to board a plane. Now I’ve been home all week, and I think it’s fair to say I’m going a little stir-crazy.

But surely there are worse ideas this year. Jamie-Lynn Spears thinking “Oh, he’ll pull out”, for instance. Hillary Clinton’s Christmas commercial. The mortgage bailout. Democrat leadership deciding to go after Rush Limbaugh for his “lack of support for the troops”. Alan Keyes getting an invite to the Iowa debate. The CNN debates in general. The Steinbrenners and their treatment of Joe Torre. Mike Gundy’s “I am a man! I’m 40!” comments. The list goes on and on.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, because it’s really hard to pick ONE bad idea. But how about Hollywood’s desire to make a successful anti-war film. We’ve seen the results. You could release a movie called “Bucky Takes a Dump” (featuring a talking cat and the wacky adventures with his litter box) and it would be more successful than Hollywood’s anti-war films have been this year. Yet we all know how well Hollywood listens to their audience, so I’m guessing 2008 will be filled with more of the same.

Jim: That’s an awesome nomination, Cam. Dang, it seems like there’s always more good nominees for the worst categories than the best categories. I think I’m going to go with the Earliest Primaries Ever and the Earliest-Starting Campaigns Ever. I’m with Karl Rove in his assessment.

Candidates start early because they think it will give them a leg up. I think we can now declare that the early bird does not always get the key worm endorsement. Ask Vilsack, Tommy Thompson, Jim Gilmore, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo… and Duncan Hunter, you’re overdue. Fred Thompson hasn’t run a fantastic campaign, but he’s more viable than quite a few other candidates who started a lot earlier. I salute his one-man struggle to return some semblence of order to this chaotic system.

The states have moved up their primaries in a Sisyphian effort to become more relevant, and have, in all likelihood, reinforced how important Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina are. Time to trash this system. Two options I prefer - start in the smallest states, and work your way up to the biggest - so that the race is interesting all the way until the end; or simply do what the PGA does and start in the good-weather states.

Marshall: Although the idea was born in 2006, it didn’t actually come to fruition until 2007, so I’m naming Senator George Mitchell’s investigation of steroid use in baseball.

Commission Bud Selig, who presided over the entirity of the steroid era, hatched this loser, and for that, he ought to lose his job.

The Mitchell report revealed next to nothing of any consequence about steroid use in baseball. The only real evidence it offered were from steroid dealers who had an incentive to exagerate. The players implicated were given no chance to respond. And the report and the information in it are an embarrassment to the game.

And what did the game get in return?

Nothing. No greater clarity on the steroid era. No closure. No concerns put to rest.

As one commentator said last week, it was like baseball had a big pile of manure in the living room, and decided to clean it up with a leaf blower. They got a little out the door, to be sure, but most of it ended up on the walls.

The Best Idea of 2007 is a tough one; I was particularly proud of my submission for last year, Worldwide Recognition of Talent Shortages.

So, not to steal anybody’s thunder, but I’m going to go through a few that I’d put as runner up. The Surge seems like an obvious choice, but I’m trying not to have every category be either SURGE/PETRAEUS or PETRAEUS/SURGE, and in retrospect, the idea of the surge wasn’t what made it such an amazing accomplishment; it was the execution.

So I think I’ll pick the tag-team effort of conservative bloggers and talk radio to scuttle the comprehensive immigration reform. I know Marshall sees the overall issue differently from the way that I do, but I think even he could recognize these two midyear rebukes as remarkable grassroots efforts that demonstrated that the old ways wouldn’t work on Capitol Hill - i.e., trying to straddle by “voting for closure, but against the bill.” Sam Brownback’s longshot presidential bid may never have recovered from voting for, then against the bill in the span of fifteen minutes. And has a grassroots effort ever taken down the Congressional phone system?

Cam: In early January, my wife called me at work and told me “We’re going to the beach in August. I’ve already put down the deposit.” Now, I am not a beach person. I am chubby, I am pasty, I do not like sand in my toes (or underneath my suit). I did not want to go to the beach. But my wife’s idea of a family vacation in North Carolina was easily the best idea of 2007.

From the moonlight walks with my beloved to seeing the twins interact with the ocean for the first time (not to mention Andrew’s first go-kart excursion and 16-year old Harrison learning to boogie board), it was a fantastic week. And I learned that not every beach is full of cold water and seaweed like the beaches of Maine and Massachusetts.

So forget the political for this category… getting away and relaxing with my family in a gorgeous setting was a great idea. Thanks babe… let’s do it again next year!

Marshall: For me, the best idea of 2007 had nothing to do with politics. A few years ago, a bunch of smart people predicted that the Segway would change the way we live. Whoah, boy, they were wrong.

The iPhone, on the other hand, already has.

I don’t have an iPhone, although it is on my wishlist. But even for a non-iPhone user like me, the iPhone is special. It, and other similar devices, are utterly changing how and when people interact with the Web and with each other. Thanks to the iPhone, mobile users no longer have to squint at a crappy mobile browser. They get the full treatment. And the iPhone provides great video, the music we’re used to from our iPods, and a bevy of very cool applications. The iPhone is also driving the consolidation of mobiile devices. No longer do I need a phone, blackberry and iPod. I’ve got all three in one pretty little package. Just a day after getting his iPhone, one friend described how he already felt as though is were part of him — an integral part of his existence, and one that made his life better and easier to live.

The laptop allowed us to carry our computers along with us. Wi-Fi allowed us to get online from almost anywhere. But the iPhone makes the web truly ubiquitious, which means we can all be interconnected, all of the time.

I’m not smart enough to understand the full implications of that yet. And I certainly don’t know if it’s a good thing. But is important. And that makes the iPhone the Best Idea of 2007.

In the buildup to the presidential elections, there are a ton of choices here. Hillary’s use of Barack Obama’s kindergarten writings is certainly up there for me, but since I’m on vacation and wanting to have a little fun, might I suggest the boldest political tactic of the year was the attempt by blogger Loretta Nall to protest Alabama’s ban on sex toys by encouraging readers to send some… uh… devices to the state’s Attorney General.

This is everything I love about grassroots politics: trying to change policies through humor and numbers. Plus, the thought of the postman saying “Got another load of dildoes for ya” cracks me up every time. I’m so juvenile.

Jim: Well… Kinda tough to top that choice. I wrote out the following pick BEFORE I knew it was going to be compared to expressing disapproval of a proposed policy through sex toys.

Last year we said that the Democrats retook the House and Senate with no unified theme, and thus their boldest move was to be not bold at all.

This hasn’t been the boldest or most inspiring of years in politics. I largely agree with Marshall’s expression of ennui and lack of enthusiasm here. We have a thoroughly lame-duck president, a Democratic leadership that acts like they’re trying to get me to hate them, Republican leaders who belong under a “HAVE YOU SEEN ME?” poster on a milk carton, and a crop of presidential candidates who range from the “wish he didn’t have that massive flaw” to the repulsive. There are a lot of political tactics going on, but not many that inspire.

So the boldest tactic that I can come up with is John McCain’s weekly conference calls with righty bloggers. You’ve probably read summaries them on my site or elsewhere. The reason this impressed me is that McCain kept doing them when his campaign went into a tailspin, his advisors were quitting left and right, etc. A conference call with MSM reporters probably would turn into fifty variations of, “since you’re doomed, why are you still in the race? When will you announce that you’re quitting the race? Are you quitting today? How about tomorrow? What about the next day?” But that week, he got one question from a blogger that was a horserace topic; the rest were meaty policy questions, mostly focused on foreign policy and Iraq. These calls usually last about a half an hour to an hour, and he tries to get in as many questions as he can. No other candidate does this kind of outreach, and I cannot understand why; on the whole, McCain’s gotten great coverage out of it. McCain, Mr. Campaign Finance Reform, started out as the candidate most loathed by bloggers, and bit by bit, the relationship is thawing.

Marshall: Jim’s and Cam’s choices are awesome. They’re virtually impossible to top, so I won’t try.

My selection was made during a train ride from Philly back to D.C. So I did what all good political pros do — I took a poll of my traveling companions, all of whom are colleagues at Edelman.

Milblogger extraordinaire Steve Field suggested Hillary Clinton’s spoof of the Sopranos finale early this year. Two thumbs up, Steve.

Tucker Warren was more foreign policy focused. He suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin allowing himself to be photographed shirtless while fishing. He also mentioned the Presidents of Venezuela and Pakistan trying maneuvers of dubious legality to retain their hold on their offices.

Fellow political blogger Gary Karr singled out Mike Huckabee’s campaign commercial featuring real life action hero Chuck Norris. “Huckabee’s ad goes against type,” Gary argued. “Also, Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.” Gary also points out that the ad put Huckabee in front of a huge audience of Republicans who were just tuning into the campaign.

Gary’s argument persuaded me. Huckabee’s ad with Norris started his move from also ran to first tier candidate. And it was risky. Very risky. It could have brought ridicule. But it was perfectly produced, and it demonstrated a clear sense of humor from a candidate that previously had a made a mark only as a good debater with no chance to win.

I’ve heaped some scorn on Governor Huckabee over the past few days, but for the Norris ad, I give him two thumbs up, and my selection as Boldest Political Tactic of 2007.

Jim: You know what? I take it back, this was a pretty good year for bold political tactics.