These are things that make me go, “Hmmm.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is being harangued by right-wingers for going to Syria and meeting with that country’s president without White House approval. By doing so, they complain, she’s undermining President Bush’s foreign policy.

On CNN, conservative commentator Glenn Beck blasted the California Democrat for engaging in “unauthorized negotiation with our enemies in Syria.”

And during a campaign stop in Iowa, Republican presidential wannabe Mitt Romney bashed Pelosi for having her picture taken with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and “for being seen in a headscarf” during her visit to the Muslim nation.

“I just don’t know what got into her head, to be completely honest with you,” the former Massachusetts governor said. “I think it was a huge, huge mistake.”

But three Republican congressmen who met with the Syrian leader a couple of days before Pelosi didn’t draw any fire from by Beck or Romney.

Maybe that’s because, as one of those GOP lawmakers, Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Pitts, told a local newspaper, it was OK for them to go to Syria because they’re Republicans.

“We made it very clear in our meetings (with Syrian officials) that we were the same party of the president and we support the administration,” Pitts told the paper. “Speaker Pelosi was coming as the opposition leader.”

Hmmm.

News of the money raised by Democratic presidential candidates in the first quarter of this year has a lot of pundits talking about how Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton are now neck-and-neck front-runners to become their party’s standard-bearer in 2008.

Clinton pulled in a whopping $26 million from some 50,000 donors, her campaign reported. Days later, Obama’s staff revealed that he raked in $25 million from 100,000 contributors. Far behind Clinton and Obama in the money chase was former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who took in just $14 million during this reporting period.

Edwards got lots of sympathetic media coverage last month when his wife, Elizabeth, announced a recurrence of her breast cancer, which has spread to her ribs. It’s incurable but treatable, she said.

Sympathy aside, Edwards is being treated like an also-ran in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

And frankly, that makes me go, “Hmmm.”

Why? Recent polls show that Edwards – not Clinton or Obama – is the front-runner among Democratic voters in Iowa and is a growing favorite in New Hampshire. Iowa will hold the nation’s first Democratic presidential caucus and New Hampshire will hold the party’s first primary.

According to a University of Iowa poll, Edwards is favored by 34.2 percent of likely voters in that state’s 2008 caucus. Clinton has the support of 28.5 percent of these voters and Obama is backed by just 19.3 percent.

And get this: When asked which of these three candidates is “electable,” 89 percent of the likely voters said they thought Edwards could win the presidency in 2008. Eighty-six percent said the same of Obama, and 76.5 percent named Clinton.

On the same day the Iowa poll results were announced, a CNN/WMUR-TV poll of New Hampshire voters showed Edwards gaining strength among Granite State Democrats.

Clinton still leads a long list of candidates, with backing from 27 percent of Democratic voters, but that number is down from 35 percent in February. Over this same time span, Obama’s support has dropped from 21 percent to 20 percent.

Support for Edwards, meanwhile, jumped from 16 percent in February to 21 percent in the recent poll.

Seventeen percent of New Hampshire’s Democrats said that of all of their party’s presidential candidates they like Clinton least. Four percent picked Obama and only 2 percent named Edwards.

Despite all of this, a lot of pundits look at the cash Clinton and Obama have amassed and think they’re running away from the rest of the primary field.

And that makes me want to say, “Hmmm.”