Now that the truth is coming out, now that we know how the Bush administration has sought to treat the U.S. Attorney’s Office as a political arm of the Republican National Committee, the various defenses offered by the key players seem ever more fascinating.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales tried virtually every classic stratagem during his Tuesday press conference; in my post late yesterday, I noted his use of the O.J. Simpson defense, along with his other attempts to employ what Richard Nixon used to call “the modified limited hangout route.”
But once we bring Karl Rove into the mix – which seems appropriate, given the new evidence of his involvement in this affair – we discover a few other categories of spin.
It first should be noted, however, that Rove is truly the Zelig of our era. Just like the fabled Woody Allen character that appears at every historical juncture during the 1920s, Rove seems to pop wherever the action is.
When the White House was working to discredit Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson, for instance, Rove turned out to be one of the players who leaked to the press about Wilson’s wife (despite the White House’s initial insistence that he had played no such role). And now, despite the White House’s initial insistence that Rove had no role in the firing of the eight prosecutors deemed to be insufficiently partisan, it turns out that he most certainly did. Last year, the federal prosecutor in Arkansas was fired to make room for ex-Rove aide Tim Griffin; as attorney general Gonzales’ chief of staff noted in an email, “getting him appointed was important to…Karl, etc.”
But Rove’s portfolio ranges far beyond Arkansas. Regarding New Mexico, we know already that federal prosecutor David Iglesias was fired last December, despite a strong performance rating, because he had rebuffed GOP pressure to speed an indictment against a local Democratic official and thus boost the party’s prospects in the 2006 congressional elections. This past weekend, the White House acknowledged that Rove had fielded complaints from New Mexico Republicans, and passed them along to the Justice Department and to the White House counsel’s office. (The Justice Department mission statement does not remotely suggest that U.S. attorneys are supposed to help the ruling party win elections; rather, the apolitical statement states: “Each United States Attorney exercises wide discretion in the use of his/her resources to further the priorities of the local jurisdictions and needs of their communities.”)
Which brings us to the Amnesia defense. Several days ago, a White House spokeswoman, after checking with Rove, said that Rove “doesn’t exactly recall, but he may have had a casual conversation with (Gonzales), to say he had passed those complaints to (White House counsel) Harriet Miers.” Which I suppose is meant to imply that, even though Rove is still routinely described by White House officials as a power behind the scenes, in this particular case he was just making “casual” chitchat that was too unimportant to remember.
Meanwhile, Rove himself has employed the Clinton Did It defense. (This should come as no surprise, because it’s a standard defense for Bush administration officials.) During a public appearance last week, Rove contended that the firing of the eight federal prosecutors was “normal and ordinary” because President Clinton had done much the same thing. Rove said: “Clinton, when he came in, replaced all 93 U.S. attorneys. When we came in, we ultimately replace most all 93 U.S. attorneys….Because every president comes in, appoints United States attorneys and then makes changes over the course of their time.”
First of all, of course Clinton replaced all 93 attorneys at the outset of his tenure, as all presidents do, so that’s beside the point. But he was also suggesting that Clinton sought to make changes over the course of his time. That is not accurate – as Gonzales’ chief of staff noted in a newly-released email, dated Jan. 9, 2006 (this is back when the firing scheme was first being developed). Kyle Sampson cautioned Harriet Miers with a bit of history: “In recent memory, during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, Presidents Reagan and Clinton did not seek to remove and replace U.S. Attorneys…but instead permitted such U.S. attorneys to serve indefinitely under the holdover provision.” The underline in the email was Sampson’s.
But just to show how dire the situation has become for the Bush White House, this morning we also discover the Gonzales Did It defense.
Even though it’s clear by this point that this White House sets the tone of governance, certain anonymous remarks floated today in The New York Times strongly suggest that the folks at the top are fitting their loyal subordinate for the noose. (Folks at the top routinely assail newspapers for running anonymous quotes, when those quotes prove embarrassing. But they have no problem with such quotes if they are the ones using anonymity to serve their own needs.)
Here’s the key passage: “(Gonzales’ press conference) underscored what two Republicans close to the Bush administration described as a growing rift between the White House and the attorney general…The two Republicans, who spoke anonymously so they could share private conversations with senior White House officials, said top aides to Mr. Bush, including Fred F. Fielding, the new White House counsel, were concerned that the controversy had so damaged Mr. Gonzales’s credibility that he would be unable to advance the White House agenda on national security matters, including terrorism prosecutions. ‘I really think there’s a serious estrangement between the White House and Alberto now,’ one of the Republicans said.”
So the White House seems to be telling Gonzales that his usefulness is over and that it’s time to fall on his sword for the throne. The problem, however, is that Congress – which is well aware that the prosecutor scandal is rooted in the Bush administration’s governing philosophy – will not be content with a partial shuffling of personnel. A modified, limited hangout route might have worked when the supine Republicans ran the Hill, but those days are over.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Heckuva job, Alberto: the attorney general plays defense
On occasion, I receive emails from Bush fans who complain that I have not been giving “equal time” to “Democrat scandals,” now that the Democrats have been in power on Capitol Hill for…oh… two whole months. I understand their concern. But here’s the problem: Every time I start to look across the aisle at the blue team, that wacky Bush team (which, after all, has dominated Washington for the past six years) comes up with yet another new way to embarrass itself.
Consider, for instance, the press conference hosted this afternoon by Alberto Gonzales, the veteran Bush crony who doubles as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. He’s in a bit of a pickle right now, because it turns out that his Justice Department has been outed as having lied repeatedly about the circumstances that led to the unprecedented firing of eight federal prosecutors. The shorthand is that Justice officials – and Gonzales personally – recently told Congress that these prosecutors were not replaced for partisan political reasons; indeed, Gonzales testified that his regime would “never, ever” do such a thing. But now it turns out, thanks to a Monday document dump, that these prosecutors were fired for partisan political reasons – and that the pressure for these firings originated in the White House, and were worked out in close consultation with Gonzales’ chief of staff.
One quick digression, for those of you who may not have been tracking this slow-burning scandal, or who may not be clear on its significance: Federal prosecutors are supposed to be insulated from partisan political pressures. They are virtually never forced out of their jobs; once appointed, they traditionally stay until a new president arrives to clean house. Indeed, the Congressional Research Service has found that, of 486 prosecutors appointed since 1981, only 3 have been forced out in midterm, apparently for egregious performance reasons. Yet now we have eight new firings all at once, in the middle of Bush’s second term, virtually none of them for performance reasons (even though Gonzales’ department did claim at first that the eight victims had earned poor job evaluations, but that argument has turned out to be a lie as well).
Anyway, Gonzales met the press today, took questions for roughly two minutes, then left the scene faster than a hit and run driver. Before departing, however, he exhibited all the symptoms of a cornered Washington pol. Which is to say, he employed all the classic defenses:
The Passive Voice defense. He confessed that “mistakes were made here,” the usual form of words that is meant to suggest that maybe the mistakes sort of happened by themselves, that no actual human being had specifically made them. Republicans might be well advised to remember that this was the same form of words used by Ted Kennedy right after Chappaquiddick.
The O.J. Simpson defense. This is generally employed by someone who insists he will boldly investigate wrongdoing, when in fact all he need do is look in the mirror. Accordingly, Gonzales said today that he will get out there and “ascertain what happened here,” and “assess the accountability.” He can actually start this task by simply reading what’s already in the public record and connecting the dots: Bush counsel Harriet Miers (the former Supreme Court nominee), who has been supremely loyal to her boss since the Texas days, wanted to fire all 93 prosecutors in midterm and replace them with people deemed more loyal to the Bush administration, so she sought out the chief aide to Gonzales, who in turn has been supremely loyal to his boss since the Texas days. That might help him ascertain.
The Richard Nixon defense. During Watergate, Nixon frequently said that he was “taking responsibility,” which was his way of saying that he wasn’t taking the blame. The person at the top of the flow chart manfully takes “responsibility,” but that’s very different from saying that he or she specifically did anything wrong. Hence, Gonzales: “I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice.”
The Busy Executive defense. This is also known as the “I’m so important, how was I supposed to know everything that was going on?” defense. Accordingly, Gonzales said today: “As we can all imagine, in an organization of 110,000 people, I am not aware of every bit of information that passes through the halls.” The phrasing “as we can all imagine” is a nice plea for understanding. The problem with this defense is that it paints Gonzales into a corner: either he is lying, since one doubts that an attorney general would consider the unprecedented firing of eight prosecutors to be on a par with the routine bits of information passing through the halls…or he really didn’t know what’s going on, didn’t have any idea what his chief of staff was cooking up with the White House – none of which speaks very well for his executive skills.
The Euphemism defense. This is employed by someone who wants to cushion the fact that he has uttered a blatant falsehood. Gonzales told Congress that he would “never, ever make a change (of prosecutors) for political reasons,” but now we know that it happened. (Especially in Arkansas, where a former Karl Rove aide was installed as a prosecutor. Gonzalez’ top guy even wrote an email, saying that “getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.” But Gonzales tried to spin his falsehood in the best light, so today he referred to his earlier claims as “incomplete information.” Actually, his exact words were that “incomplete information…may have been communicated to the Congress.” (See the Passive Voice defense.)
Finally, The Decider defense: Gonzales vowed not to resign, and signaled that only his longtime patron could make that decision: “I serve at the pleasure of the president.” Perhaps that’s his trump card. Judging by what we have previously seen in this administration, Gonzales may well be in line for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Consider, for instance, the press conference hosted this afternoon by Alberto Gonzales, the veteran Bush crony who doubles as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. He’s in a bit of a pickle right now, because it turns out that his Justice Department has been outed as having lied repeatedly about the circumstances that led to the unprecedented firing of eight federal prosecutors. The shorthand is that Justice officials – and Gonzales personally – recently told Congress that these prosecutors were not replaced for partisan political reasons; indeed, Gonzales testified that his regime would “never, ever” do such a thing. But now it turns out, thanks to a Monday document dump, that these prosecutors were fired for partisan political reasons – and that the pressure for these firings originated in the White House, and were worked out in close consultation with Gonzales’ chief of staff.
One quick digression, for those of you who may not have been tracking this slow-burning scandal, or who may not be clear on its significance: Federal prosecutors are supposed to be insulated from partisan political pressures. They are virtually never forced out of their jobs; once appointed, they traditionally stay until a new president arrives to clean house. Indeed, the Congressional Research Service has found that, of 486 prosecutors appointed since 1981, only 3 have been forced out in midterm, apparently for egregious performance reasons. Yet now we have eight new firings all at once, in the middle of Bush’s second term, virtually none of them for performance reasons (even though Gonzales’ department did claim at first that the eight victims had earned poor job evaluations, but that argument has turned out to be a lie as well).
Anyway, Gonzales met the press today, took questions for roughly two minutes, then left the scene faster than a hit and run driver. Before departing, however, he exhibited all the symptoms of a cornered Washington pol. Which is to say, he employed all the classic defenses:
The Passive Voice defense. He confessed that “mistakes were made here,” the usual form of words that is meant to suggest that maybe the mistakes sort of happened by themselves, that no actual human being had specifically made them. Republicans might be well advised to remember that this was the same form of words used by Ted Kennedy right after Chappaquiddick.
The O.J. Simpson defense. This is generally employed by someone who insists he will boldly investigate wrongdoing, when in fact all he need do is look in the mirror. Accordingly, Gonzales said today that he will get out there and “ascertain what happened here,” and “assess the accountability.” He can actually start this task by simply reading what’s already in the public record and connecting the dots: Bush counsel Harriet Miers (the former Supreme Court nominee), who has been supremely loyal to her boss since the Texas days, wanted to fire all 93 prosecutors in midterm and replace them with people deemed more loyal to the Bush administration, so she sought out the chief aide to Gonzales, who in turn has been supremely loyal to his boss since the Texas days. That might help him ascertain.
The Richard Nixon defense. During Watergate, Nixon frequently said that he was “taking responsibility,” which was his way of saying that he wasn’t taking the blame. The person at the top of the flow chart manfully takes “responsibility,” but that’s very different from saying that he or she specifically did anything wrong. Hence, Gonzales: “I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice.”
The Busy Executive defense. This is also known as the “I’m so important, how was I supposed to know everything that was going on?” defense. Accordingly, Gonzales said today: “As we can all imagine, in an organization of 110,000 people, I am not aware of every bit of information that passes through the halls.” The phrasing “as we can all imagine” is a nice plea for understanding. The problem with this defense is that it paints Gonzales into a corner: either he is lying, since one doubts that an attorney general would consider the unprecedented firing of eight prosecutors to be on a par with the routine bits of information passing through the halls…or he really didn’t know what’s going on, didn’t have any idea what his chief of staff was cooking up with the White House – none of which speaks very well for his executive skills.
The Euphemism defense. This is employed by someone who wants to cushion the fact that he has uttered a blatant falsehood. Gonzales told Congress that he would “never, ever make a change (of prosecutors) for political reasons,” but now we know that it happened. (Especially in Arkansas, where a former Karl Rove aide was installed as a prosecutor. Gonzalez’ top guy even wrote an email, saying that “getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.” But Gonzales tried to spin his falsehood in the best light, so today he referred to his earlier claims as “incomplete information.” Actually, his exact words were that “incomplete information…may have been communicated to the Congress.” (See the Passive Voice defense.)
Finally, The Decider defense: Gonzales vowed not to resign, and signaled that only his longtime patron could make that decision: “I serve at the pleasure of the president.” Perhaps that’s his trump card. Judging by what we have previously seen in this administration, Gonzales may well be in line for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Hagel plays Hamlet, Thompson plays Reagan
Chuck Hagel’s non-event yesterday was perhaps the worst case of bad hype since Geraldo Rivera found zip inside Al Capone’s vault.
You have to feel bad for Dana Bash. The CNN correspondent, obviously believing that the Republican senator from Nebraska was primed to announce the GOP’s first antiwar presidential candidacy, shlepped herself out to the Cornhusker State, got her crew to the University of Nebraska meeting room, set up the equipment to get Hagel on CNN streaming video, sat there while Hagel flattered her by saying how he hoped she had found a good steak the night before…whereupon he proceeded to announce that he wasn’t making any news.
He basically spent the past week ratcheting up interest for an important announcement, and that announcement turned out to be that he had nothing to announce, except maybe the news that he might decide to make news with a candidacy announcement at some future date. (If his behavior seems puzzling, just remember that this is the same senator who recently co-sponsored an anti-Surge resolution – and then proceeded to vote against allowing the full Senate to debate it.)
Anyway, Hagel punted for a number of reasons (he’d be starting from zero in the money chase, he has virtually no national name recognition despite his constant presence on the Sunday TV shows), but I’d bet he is most sensitive to the fact that a Republican running on an antiwar platform would probably be as popular in the ’08 GOP primaries as Dick Cheney at an ACLU convention.
There is still a limited market for a GOP candidate who opposes the Iraq war; the latest CBS-New York Times poll shows that grassroots Republicans – in contrast with the general American electorate – still support their president. Seventy five percent applaud George W. Bush’s performance, including his handling of Iraq.
Those numbers bear watching. If Hagel ultimately changes his mind and decides to take the plunge, you can assume that he has found evidence that disenchantment with the war has finally begun to ripple through the Republican rank and file. Indeed, one CBS-NYT statistic does suggest a possible future mood shift: 58 percent of likely GOP primary voters said they would prefer a candidate who exhibits some flexibility on when to withdraw U.S. troops – as opposed to a candidate who thinks we should stay in Iraq until we succeed. Only 39 percent said they would prefer the latter stance (which has been adopted by virtually all of the announced Republican candidates). Conceivably, that gap could widen, and overall support for Bush’s war performance could slide, if his troop escalation strategy fails to pay off. But this seems unlikely, which is why Hagel may well spend the rest of the year in Hamlet mode.
Most Republican primary voters would prefer to find a “real” conservative who meets all the litmus tests, including steadfastness on the war. (Hagel’s voting record is actually quite conservative, but his record is trumped by his high antiwar profile). And given the fact that most of the leading candidates have flunked those tests at one time or another – including Rudy Giuliani, who in 1989 declared “there must be public finding for abortions, for poor women” – these voters are still looking for the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan.
Which brings us to Fred Thompson, the actor/ex-senator who has played so many government authority figures in the movies - including a president - that a lot of Americans probably can’t tell which ones were real and which were fictional. (Actually, I liked his role as the air traffic control chief in Die Hard II: “Pack ‘em and stack ‘em!”) He’s flirting with a presidential bid, to fill that conservative niche, as he made clear on Fox News the other day, much to the delight of the conservative punditocracy. He would easily trump Hagel on name recognition, a key commodity these days, because the money chase and the front-loaded primary schedule dictate that only celebrities need apply. Esp[ecially those with Reaganesque communication skills. More importantly, he passed all the litmus tests that were thrown his way on Fox News.
Iraq? Check. (“I would do essentially what the president's doing.”)
Gay rights? Check. (“Marriage is between man and a woman,” and civil unions is “not a good idea.”)
The right to bear arms? Check. (“I’m against gun control generally. Check my record.”)
Abortion? Check. (“I think Roe versus Wade was bad law.”)
Pardoning Scooter Libby? Check. (“I’d do it now.” In fact, he’s a member of Scooter’s Defense Fund.)
He isn’t perfect; as a Tennessee senator during the ‘90s, he opposed conservative efforts to crack down on lawsuit damage awards, and he was deemed by conservatives to be insufficiently aggressive during his ’97 probe of Bill Clinton’s campaign finance practices, but Fox was kind enough not to question him about either. Yet the fact that he looks good to grassroots conservatives is evidence of their disenchantment with the rest of the GOP presidential field. Six in 10 Republicans tell the CBS-NYT pollsters that they still want more choices.
Whether swing-voting Americans are also hungry for a “real” conservative is another matter. Sticking with Bush on the war may be popular inside the GOP bubble, but it is not popular on the outside. Pardoning Libby might be popular on the inside, but it is not on the outside (in the latest CNN poll, 69 percent of Americans say they are opposed). The burgeoning Bush administration scandals, particularly at the Department of Justice and the FBI, have the potential of further taxing swing voters’ patience for Republican governance. Whoever ultimately snags the nomination will still need to somehow finesse the gap that separates the Republican base and the rest of America.
You have to feel bad for Dana Bash. The CNN correspondent, obviously believing that the Republican senator from Nebraska was primed to announce the GOP’s first antiwar presidential candidacy, shlepped herself out to the Cornhusker State, got her crew to the University of Nebraska meeting room, set up the equipment to get Hagel on CNN streaming video, sat there while Hagel flattered her by saying how he hoped she had found a good steak the night before…whereupon he proceeded to announce that he wasn’t making any news.
He basically spent the past week ratcheting up interest for an important announcement, and that announcement turned out to be that he had nothing to announce, except maybe the news that he might decide to make news with a candidacy announcement at some future date. (If his behavior seems puzzling, just remember that this is the same senator who recently co-sponsored an anti-Surge resolution – and then proceeded to vote against allowing the full Senate to debate it.)
Anyway, Hagel punted for a number of reasons (he’d be starting from zero in the money chase, he has virtually no national name recognition despite his constant presence on the Sunday TV shows), but I’d bet he is most sensitive to the fact that a Republican running on an antiwar platform would probably be as popular in the ’08 GOP primaries as Dick Cheney at an ACLU convention.
There is still a limited market for a GOP candidate who opposes the Iraq war; the latest CBS-New York Times poll shows that grassroots Republicans – in contrast with the general American electorate – still support their president. Seventy five percent applaud George W. Bush’s performance, including his handling of Iraq.
Those numbers bear watching. If Hagel ultimately changes his mind and decides to take the plunge, you can assume that he has found evidence that disenchantment with the war has finally begun to ripple through the Republican rank and file. Indeed, one CBS-NYT statistic does suggest a possible future mood shift: 58 percent of likely GOP primary voters said they would prefer a candidate who exhibits some flexibility on when to withdraw U.S. troops – as opposed to a candidate who thinks we should stay in Iraq until we succeed. Only 39 percent said they would prefer the latter stance (which has been adopted by virtually all of the announced Republican candidates). Conceivably, that gap could widen, and overall support for Bush’s war performance could slide, if his troop escalation strategy fails to pay off. But this seems unlikely, which is why Hagel may well spend the rest of the year in Hamlet mode.
Most Republican primary voters would prefer to find a “real” conservative who meets all the litmus tests, including steadfastness on the war. (Hagel’s voting record is actually quite conservative, but his record is trumped by his high antiwar profile). And given the fact that most of the leading candidates have flunked those tests at one time or another – including Rudy Giuliani, who in 1989 declared “there must be public finding for abortions, for poor women” – these voters are still looking for the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan.
Which brings us to Fred Thompson, the actor/ex-senator who has played so many government authority figures in the movies - including a president - that a lot of Americans probably can’t tell which ones were real and which were fictional. (Actually, I liked his role as the air traffic control chief in Die Hard II: “Pack ‘em and stack ‘em!”) He’s flirting with a presidential bid, to fill that conservative niche, as he made clear on Fox News the other day, much to the delight of the conservative punditocracy. He would easily trump Hagel on name recognition, a key commodity these days, because the money chase and the front-loaded primary schedule dictate that only celebrities need apply. Esp[ecially those with Reaganesque communication skills. More importantly, he passed all the litmus tests that were thrown his way on Fox News.
Iraq? Check. (“I would do essentially what the president's doing.”)
Gay rights? Check. (“Marriage is between man and a woman,” and civil unions is “not a good idea.”)
The right to bear arms? Check. (“I’m against gun control generally. Check my record.”)
Abortion? Check. (“I think Roe versus Wade was bad law.”)
Pardoning Scooter Libby? Check. (“I’d do it now.” In fact, he’s a member of Scooter’s Defense Fund.)
He isn’t perfect; as a Tennessee senator during the ‘90s, he opposed conservative efforts to crack down on lawsuit damage awards, and he was deemed by conservatives to be insufficiently aggressive during his ’97 probe of Bill Clinton’s campaign finance practices, but Fox was kind enough not to question him about either. Yet the fact that he looks good to grassroots conservatives is evidence of their disenchantment with the rest of the GOP presidential field. Six in 10 Republicans tell the CBS-NYT pollsters that they still want more choices.
Whether swing-voting Americans are also hungry for a “real” conservative is another matter. Sticking with Bush on the war may be popular inside the GOP bubble, but it is not popular on the outside. Pardoning Libby might be popular on the inside, but it is not on the outside (in the latest CNN poll, 69 percent of Americans say they are opposed). The burgeoning Bush administration scandals, particularly at the Department of Justice and the FBI, have the potential of further taxing swing voters’ patience for Republican governance. Whoever ultimately snags the nomination will still need to somehow finesse the gap that separates the Republican base and the rest of America.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Democratic politics: sly on Iraq, silly on Fox
In the wake of all the latest Bush administration crises – the Walter Reed embarrassment, the Scooter Libby conviction, the apparent firing of eight federal prosecutors for partisan political reasons, the FBI’s confessed abuse of the Patriot Act – it’s easy to overlook the fact that, late last week, the congressional Democrats actually found their voice on Iraq.
They coalesced around a pair of plans that essentially aim to withdraw U.S. combat troops by next year, redeploy some of them to support rules, and spend extra money on fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. The Democratic ideas are similar to those offered last autumn by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, before they were deep-sixed by the Decider. And he is no more interested now than he was then.
The Democrats’ prospects for actually achieving their goals are virtually nil, because Bush has already vowed to veto any such legislation, and the Democrats lack the requisite House and Senate votes to override him.
But they already know that. They will push their legislative measures anyway, beginning this week, because they figure that no matter what happens, they will gain the political advantage:
If a sufficient number of Republicans were to break with Bush, help override his veto, and hence force a major course correction in Iraq, then the Democrats calculate that they’d be greeted as liberators by the war-weary American majority. Indeed, the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reports that 63 percent oppose Bush’s troop escalation strategy, and the latest Gallup poll reports that 60 percent would like to see a 2008 pullout deadline. But that “Democrats force Bush to change course” scenario isn’t very plausible, at least not this year.
So consider this scenario, which is far more likely: If most Republicans stick with Bush and block all opposition efforts to change course in Iraq, and then the war continues to go badly, the majority Democrats calculate that, politically speaking, they will gain the upper hand anyway – because the Republicans, having just demonstrated that once again they were impervious to change, will be forced to compete in the ’08 race with the war as their albatross. If they vote No on all Democratic efforts to try something else, then they will truly “own” this war for the second straight election cycle.
There is another scenario, of course: The so-called Surge will turn the tide, the Sunnis and Shiites will dial down the mutual destruction, and the freedom-loving Iraqi citizenry will finally start throwing those flowers we heard so much about back in 2002. Conservatives have long been preparing us for that day; I recall a 2005 cover story in The National Review which began by saying “It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq.” And yes, if that happens, the Republicans will have a great year in 2008.
But the Democrats, rather than “rooting for defeat,” are simply recognizing empirical reality – that the victory-in-Iraq scenario is at best a long shot, and thus they can only benefit politically if Bush and his stalwart congressional allies continue to defy the wishes of the American majority.
-------
Speaking of Democratic decisions, however…
At the risk of riling the liberal netroots, I question the party's Friday decision to stiff Fox News by canceling its Fox-hosted presidential debate slated for August in Nevada.
The Nevada Democrats, led by home-state Senate leader Harry Reid, had originally agreed to let Fox News co-host and broadcast the event; they saw it as a way for the ’08 presidential candidates to reach out to red-state voters. Reid originally announced that he was “happy” to have Fox as a partner in the debate. But, over the past few weeks, liberal activists led by moveon.org mounted a petition drive to have Fox dumped, citing the network’s well-known conservative bent.
So, three days ago, the Democrats caved. They claimed that they were dumping Fox because network chairman Roger Ailes on Thursday night had supposedly uttered a joke equating Barack Obama with Osama bin Laden. Actually, the joke was primarily aimed at Bush: “It is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called (Pakistani president) Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’” I can envision Bill Maher delivering the same joke in his HBO monologue.
Anyway, the Democrats were clearly looking for an excuse to dump Fox, because they didn’t want to admit that they were caving to left-flank pressure. And here’s what bothers me about that pressure:
Flip the situation around. Imagine if National Public Radio and PBS were slated to host an ’08 Republican presidential debate, and suddenly the party’s right-flank – in the form of religious conservatives – started pressuring the GOP to dump those sponsors, on the grounds that they were biased lefties who would never give the candidates a fair shake. If that was the current situation, some of the same people who are celebrating the Fox cancellation would be outraged.
And even if one credibly argues that Fox is more biased than NPR, my answer is: so what? I have often argued in this space that Fox sometimes acts as the Bush administration network, but again my answer is: so what? I am well aware (according to one study last week) that Fox recently devoted far more air time to Anna Nicole Smith still being dead than to the Walter Reed scandal, but to that I again say: so what?
The bottom line: everybody should always be talking to everybody. Democrats should make their best pitch on Fox - just as Republicans should do the same on all the outlets they regularly assail for “liberal bias.” Liberals certainly expect Bush to take questions from hostile reporters such as Helen Thomas (who makes no bones about her hostility), so how can they argue that their own team should get a pass?
Whoever becomes president in 2009 will spend the next four or eight years dealing out of necessity with all kinds of disagreeable characters the world over, so why should Democrats wince about taking disagreeable questions from a Fox News commentator, or having their debate remarks aired in unfiltered form by Fox News?
But if the dumping of Fox is such a principled stance, then I certainly assume that no Democrats will henceforth agree to appear on Fox ever again, given the fact that Fox (in the words of moveon.org) is a “right-wing misinformation network.” But wait…who was that woman who appeared just 24 hours ago on Fox News Sunday?
It was Maxine Waters, one of the most liberal House Democrats, arguing for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, talking freely with the media enemy. Last week, Senator Carl Levin did the same. Next week, undoubtedly, there will be another Democrat.
If the Iraq Study Group is right to argue that we’d be better off talking to our enemies abroad, then why shouldn’t U.S. politicians talk openly with those whom they perceive to be their enemies at home?
They coalesced around a pair of plans that essentially aim to withdraw U.S. combat troops by next year, redeploy some of them to support rules, and spend extra money on fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. The Democratic ideas are similar to those offered last autumn by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, before they were deep-sixed by the Decider. And he is no more interested now than he was then.
The Democrats’ prospects for actually achieving their goals are virtually nil, because Bush has already vowed to veto any such legislation, and the Democrats lack the requisite House and Senate votes to override him.
But they already know that. They will push their legislative measures anyway, beginning this week, because they figure that no matter what happens, they will gain the political advantage:
If a sufficient number of Republicans were to break with Bush, help override his veto, and hence force a major course correction in Iraq, then the Democrats calculate that they’d be greeted as liberators by the war-weary American majority. Indeed, the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reports that 63 percent oppose Bush’s troop escalation strategy, and the latest Gallup poll reports that 60 percent would like to see a 2008 pullout deadline. But that “Democrats force Bush to change course” scenario isn’t very plausible, at least not this year.
So consider this scenario, which is far more likely: If most Republicans stick with Bush and block all opposition efforts to change course in Iraq, and then the war continues to go badly, the majority Democrats calculate that, politically speaking, they will gain the upper hand anyway – because the Republicans, having just demonstrated that once again they were impervious to change, will be forced to compete in the ’08 race with the war as their albatross. If they vote No on all Democratic efforts to try something else, then they will truly “own” this war for the second straight election cycle.
There is another scenario, of course: The so-called Surge will turn the tide, the Sunnis and Shiites will dial down the mutual destruction, and the freedom-loving Iraqi citizenry will finally start throwing those flowers we heard so much about back in 2002. Conservatives have long been preparing us for that day; I recall a 2005 cover story in The National Review which began by saying “It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq.” And yes, if that happens, the Republicans will have a great year in 2008.
But the Democrats, rather than “rooting for defeat,” are simply recognizing empirical reality – that the victory-in-Iraq scenario is at best a long shot, and thus they can only benefit politically if Bush and his stalwart congressional allies continue to defy the wishes of the American majority.
-------
Speaking of Democratic decisions, however…
At the risk of riling the liberal netroots, I question the party's Friday decision to stiff Fox News by canceling its Fox-hosted presidential debate slated for August in Nevada.
The Nevada Democrats, led by home-state Senate leader Harry Reid, had originally agreed to let Fox News co-host and broadcast the event; they saw it as a way for the ’08 presidential candidates to reach out to red-state voters. Reid originally announced that he was “happy” to have Fox as a partner in the debate. But, over the past few weeks, liberal activists led by moveon.org mounted a petition drive to have Fox dumped, citing the network’s well-known conservative bent.
So, three days ago, the Democrats caved. They claimed that they were dumping Fox because network chairman Roger Ailes on Thursday night had supposedly uttered a joke equating Barack Obama with Osama bin Laden. Actually, the joke was primarily aimed at Bush: “It is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called (Pakistani president) Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’” I can envision Bill Maher delivering the same joke in his HBO monologue.
Anyway, the Democrats were clearly looking for an excuse to dump Fox, because they didn’t want to admit that they were caving to left-flank pressure. And here’s what bothers me about that pressure:
Flip the situation around. Imagine if National Public Radio and PBS were slated to host an ’08 Republican presidential debate, and suddenly the party’s right-flank – in the form of religious conservatives – started pressuring the GOP to dump those sponsors, on the grounds that they were biased lefties who would never give the candidates a fair shake. If that was the current situation, some of the same people who are celebrating the Fox cancellation would be outraged.
And even if one credibly argues that Fox is more biased than NPR, my answer is: so what? I have often argued in this space that Fox sometimes acts as the Bush administration network, but again my answer is: so what? I am well aware (according to one study last week) that Fox recently devoted far more air time to Anna Nicole Smith still being dead than to the Walter Reed scandal, but to that I again say: so what?
The bottom line: everybody should always be talking to everybody. Democrats should make their best pitch on Fox - just as Republicans should do the same on all the outlets they regularly assail for “liberal bias.” Liberals certainly expect Bush to take questions from hostile reporters such as Helen Thomas (who makes no bones about her hostility), so how can they argue that their own team should get a pass?
Whoever becomes president in 2009 will spend the next four or eight years dealing out of necessity with all kinds of disagreeable characters the world over, so why should Democrats wince about taking disagreeable questions from a Fox News commentator, or having their debate remarks aired in unfiltered form by Fox News?
But if the dumping of Fox is such a principled stance, then I certainly assume that no Democrats will henceforth agree to appear on Fox ever again, given the fact that Fox (in the words of moveon.org) is a “right-wing misinformation network.” But wait…who was that woman who appeared just 24 hours ago on Fox News Sunday?
It was Maxine Waters, one of the most liberal House Democrats, arguing for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, talking freely with the media enemy. Last week, Senator Carl Levin did the same. Next week, undoubtedly, there will be another Democrat.
If the Iraq Study Group is right to argue that we’d be better off talking to our enemies abroad, then why shouldn’t U.S. politicians talk openly with those whom they perceive to be their enemies at home?
Friday, March 09, 2007
Newt asks forgiveness for his zipper problem
With so many conservatives still disillusioned about their choices in the 2008 Republican race (Rudy Giuliani’s liberal stances on social issues, John McCain’s past heresies, and Mitt Romney’s conveniently-timed flipflops), the door remains glaringly ajar for a true-believer. Or at least somebody who can be perceived that way.
Which is why Newt Gingrich is so busy these days trying to purge his personal past (which is a nice way of saying he needs to deal with the zipper issue), and polish his ideological credentials by airbrushing his track record. He’s clearly a believer in the Field of Dreams strategy – that if he builds himself, they will come.
Two fresh incidents have convinced me that Gingrich is seriously weighing a White House bid. Exhibit A is what Gingrich said to religious conservative leader James Dobson. Exhibit B is what Gingrich’s press secretary said to me.
Exhibit A: Dobson is the religious-right leader who doubles as a GOP political boss. There’s a long history of political bosses in politics, of course. Fifty years ago, aspiring Democrats would go to Chicago to kiss the ring of Mayor Daley; today, aspiring Republicans drop to their knees and pray with James Dobson. Gingrich is serious about a presidential bid because now he is praying with James Dobson.
In perhaps the most unsubtle pandering gesture since Hillary Clinton donned a Yankee cap, Gingrich went on Dobson’s radio show today, and sought to atone for his messy personal life and demonstrate his spiritual bona fides. He didn’t cover all the bases – he left out the part about serving divorce papers to his first wife as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from a cancer operation – but, with Dobson’s gentle prompting, he did confess to weaknesses of the flesh. Especially the part about assailing President Clinton during the Lewinsky affair while concurrently canoodling with a congressional aide, an affair that occurred while he was married to the wife who had replaced the wife from the hospital bed. (That second wife has since yielded to the aide, now his current wife.)
Dobson’s radio show reaches millions of listeners, people who tend to vote heavily in Republican primaries. Clearly, Gingrich can’t tout his conservative credentials to that audience without first seeking forgiveness for his three-wife life. (In a sense, he upped the ante for Giuliani, another three-wife lifer, who at some point might also feel the need to humble himself.) Hence, the decision to join Dobson on the air. (The whole interview is here, dated March 9, starting around minute 17:00). Gingrich spoke about his past in full humility mode:
“There are some elements I’m not proud of….There were times when I was praying, and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong, but I was still doing them. I look back at this as periods of weakness, periods not only that I’m not proud of, but I deeply urge my grandchildren not to follow in my footsteps.”
Dobson then asked Gingrich to verify the “rumors” that he, Gingrich, had been sleeping with the congressional aide while simultaneously passing judgment on Clinton. Gingrich has never spoken publicly about this. Yet it was clear, from the way Dobson framed the question, that Gingrich had already told Dobson – and that this interview was designed to help Gingrich ‘fess up with his own spiritual spin.
Dobson said to Gingrich, “I (recently) asked you if the rumors were true…”
Gingrich replied, “The honest answer is yes.” Then he launched into a lengthy argument about how he wasn’t as bad as Clinton, because Clinton had lied about sex under oath, and thus it had been his duty to assail that, because if everybody started lying under oath, America would resemble “a corrupt country like Nigeria.”
Dobson waited him out, then steered him back to his own behavior: “You and I have prayed together…Do you understand that word repentance?”
Gingrich replied (and, for the audience, this was the intended money quote): “Absolutely…I believe deeply that people fall short, that people have to recognize they have to turn to God for forgiveness…I don’t know how you could live with yourself…if you don’t deal with your own weaknesses and go to God about them.”
And, he just as well might have added, I don’t know how you can win a Republican presidential nomination unless you turn to the religious-right voters and ask for forgiveness.
Exhibit B: But atoning for personal failings is only one facet of the Gingrich political strategy. The other is to polish Gingrich’s conservative credentials to the point where all the tarnish is removed. After all, restive conservative voters are more likely to pine for Gingrich if they view him in an idealized form. These voters, however, are less likely to embrace the idealized Gingrich if he retains his true-life tarnish. Hence the need to rebut all those who would seek to resurrect the actual Gingrich history.
This is where I come in.
Three weeks ago, on Feb. 20, on this blog, I pointed out that Gingrich’s conservative credentials aren’t nearly as spotless as nostalgia would suggest. A long excerpt was reprinted in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and in a number of other newspapers as a guest column. One key paragraph: “People forget, for instance, that the House speaker was nearly overthrown in 1997, by conspirators that included Tom DeLay, in part because he was not deemed to be sufficiently conservative. They felt that Newt had caved to President Clinton on a number of key budget issues. They complained when Newt invited Jesse Jackson to join him on the House podium in January of ’97. They were angry when Newt refused to launch a frontal assault on affirmative action. They didn’t like it when he defended the National Endowment for the Arts and broke bread with liberal activist and actor Alec Baldwin.”
From the perspective of the Gingrich camp, such material clearly messes with the Gingrich strategy. Press secretary, Rick Tyler, promptly wrote a long letter to the editor, defending Gingrich’s track record. Let’s give him the floor. Here’s an excerpt: “After winning the majority for the Republicans in 1994, Newt Gingrich fulfilled all of the promises laid out in the Contract with America, including the first tax cut in 17 years, the first child tax credit, a capital gains tax cut, welfare reform (how could you forget that?), Congressional reforms including term limits for committee chairs, and making all laws passed by Congress applicable to the Congress itself. He led in passing the first increase in defense and intelligence spending since Reagan. And the Republican Congress under his leadership was re-elected for the first time since the 1920s. It was Newt who led the charge for a Constitutional Amendment to balance the Federal budget, when Congress failed to pass it, he committed to balancing it anyway….The fact is that no other political leader today can match Newt Gingrich’s conservative legislative accomplishments.”
It’s the job of a press secretary to make the boss look good, so I have no problem with Tyler recounting the heady days of 1995, when Gingrich was most effective. Nor would I disagree with the argument that Gingrich has more “legislative accomplishments” than any potential conservative rival. But nowhere does he address my main point – that Gingrich, as House Speaker, was widely viewed as insufficiently conservative by many of his conservative colleagues. Which is one big reason why they tried to overthrow him in 1997.
This is part of the historical record, notwithstanding Tyler’s assertion that I was “laughably” questioning Gingrich’s conservative credentials. Indeed, let’s return to that era, and see what certain people were saying at the time about Gingrich’s credentials.
Here’s an item, from June 30, 1997: “Gingrich’s men…are desperate for Gingrich to step down, the sooner the better…Christopher Cox of California, the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, has been grousing about Gingrich for months, insisting that he’s not a real conservative. (Rep. David) McIntosh says, ‘It was the decision to compromise (with Clinton) at the beginning of this term rather than push for our agenda’ that soured him on Gingrich….hat is unusual – and far more significant – is the deep distrust of the party leader by his closest colleagues in the leadership.”
That report was written by Fred Barnes, the reliably conservative commentator, in the reliably conservative Weekly Standard magazine.
Here’s another: “Newt appears beyond salvage. (His 1997 budget deal with Clinton) is a band-aid cure…The federal administrative behemoth will expand, a result that contradicts everything the Republican party and conservativism are supposed to embody…The budget deal will not save Republicans from their obligation to stand for something. It will not save them from their Gingrich trouble. It will not save Newt Gingrich from himself.”
That was the lead editorial in the Weekly Standard, dated July 28, 1997. And a week later came this editorial: “The House GOP now resembles a decadent royal court, with Newt Gingrich cast as Louis XIV at Versailles. He is a monarch at once all-important and ineffectual….(The House GOP) is a balloon that floats with the wind.”
I could go on; that summer, there was another reference in the magazine to Gingrich’s “frequent compromises, flip flops, and stumbles.” And today there are plenty of conservatives who don’t buy the idealized Gingrich – starting with columnist Robert Novak, who writes that Gingrich’s conservative record is “far from flawless,” and with David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, who wrote last month that Gingrich has “more baggage than a Grand Central red-cap.”
But if Gingrich can successfully atone for the zipper problem, and persuade an amnesiac electorate to play the nostalgia card, he might yet fill the niche that he is eying so assiduously...Unless somebody else - perhaps Fred Thompson, the politician/actor - comes along.
Which is why Newt Gingrich is so busy these days trying to purge his personal past (which is a nice way of saying he needs to deal with the zipper issue), and polish his ideological credentials by airbrushing his track record. He’s clearly a believer in the Field of Dreams strategy – that if he builds himself, they will come.
Two fresh incidents have convinced me that Gingrich is seriously weighing a White House bid. Exhibit A is what Gingrich said to religious conservative leader James Dobson. Exhibit B is what Gingrich’s press secretary said to me.
Exhibit A: Dobson is the religious-right leader who doubles as a GOP political boss. There’s a long history of political bosses in politics, of course. Fifty years ago, aspiring Democrats would go to Chicago to kiss the ring of Mayor Daley; today, aspiring Republicans drop to their knees and pray with James Dobson. Gingrich is serious about a presidential bid because now he is praying with James Dobson.
In perhaps the most unsubtle pandering gesture since Hillary Clinton donned a Yankee cap, Gingrich went on Dobson’s radio show today, and sought to atone for his messy personal life and demonstrate his spiritual bona fides. He didn’t cover all the bases – he left out the part about serving divorce papers to his first wife as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from a cancer operation – but, with Dobson’s gentle prompting, he did confess to weaknesses of the flesh. Especially the part about assailing President Clinton during the Lewinsky affair while concurrently canoodling with a congressional aide, an affair that occurred while he was married to the wife who had replaced the wife from the hospital bed. (That second wife has since yielded to the aide, now his current wife.)
Dobson’s radio show reaches millions of listeners, people who tend to vote heavily in Republican primaries. Clearly, Gingrich can’t tout his conservative credentials to that audience without first seeking forgiveness for his three-wife life. (In a sense, he upped the ante for Giuliani, another three-wife lifer, who at some point might also feel the need to humble himself.) Hence, the decision to join Dobson on the air. (The whole interview is here, dated March 9, starting around minute 17:00). Gingrich spoke about his past in full humility mode:
“There are some elements I’m not proud of….There were times when I was praying, and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong, but I was still doing them. I look back at this as periods of weakness, periods not only that I’m not proud of, but I deeply urge my grandchildren not to follow in my footsteps.”
Dobson then asked Gingrich to verify the “rumors” that he, Gingrich, had been sleeping with the congressional aide while simultaneously passing judgment on Clinton. Gingrich has never spoken publicly about this. Yet it was clear, from the way Dobson framed the question, that Gingrich had already told Dobson – and that this interview was designed to help Gingrich ‘fess up with his own spiritual spin.
Dobson said to Gingrich, “I (recently) asked you if the rumors were true…”
Gingrich replied, “The honest answer is yes.” Then he launched into a lengthy argument about how he wasn’t as bad as Clinton, because Clinton had lied about sex under oath, and thus it had been his duty to assail that, because if everybody started lying under oath, America would resemble “a corrupt country like Nigeria.”
Dobson waited him out, then steered him back to his own behavior: “You and I have prayed together…Do you understand that word repentance?”
Gingrich replied (and, for the audience, this was the intended money quote): “Absolutely…I believe deeply that people fall short, that people have to recognize they have to turn to God for forgiveness…I don’t know how you could live with yourself…if you don’t deal with your own weaknesses and go to God about them.”
And, he just as well might have added, I don’t know how you can win a Republican presidential nomination unless you turn to the religious-right voters and ask for forgiveness.
Exhibit B: But atoning for personal failings is only one facet of the Gingrich political strategy. The other is to polish Gingrich’s conservative credentials to the point where all the tarnish is removed. After all, restive conservative voters are more likely to pine for Gingrich if they view him in an idealized form. These voters, however, are less likely to embrace the idealized Gingrich if he retains his true-life tarnish. Hence the need to rebut all those who would seek to resurrect the actual Gingrich history.
This is where I come in.
Three weeks ago, on Feb. 20, on this blog, I pointed out that Gingrich’s conservative credentials aren’t nearly as spotless as nostalgia would suggest. A long excerpt was reprinted in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and in a number of other newspapers as a guest column. One key paragraph: “People forget, for instance, that the House speaker was nearly overthrown in 1997, by conspirators that included Tom DeLay, in part because he was not deemed to be sufficiently conservative. They felt that Newt had caved to President Clinton on a number of key budget issues. They complained when Newt invited Jesse Jackson to join him on the House podium in January of ’97. They were angry when Newt refused to launch a frontal assault on affirmative action. They didn’t like it when he defended the National Endowment for the Arts and broke bread with liberal activist and actor Alec Baldwin.”
From the perspective of the Gingrich camp, such material clearly messes with the Gingrich strategy. Press secretary, Rick Tyler, promptly wrote a long letter to the editor, defending Gingrich’s track record. Let’s give him the floor. Here’s an excerpt: “After winning the majority for the Republicans in 1994, Newt Gingrich fulfilled all of the promises laid out in the Contract with America, including the first tax cut in 17 years, the first child tax credit, a capital gains tax cut, welfare reform (how could you forget that?), Congressional reforms including term limits for committee chairs, and making all laws passed by Congress applicable to the Congress itself. He led in passing the first increase in defense and intelligence spending since Reagan. And the Republican Congress under his leadership was re-elected for the first time since the 1920s. It was Newt who led the charge for a Constitutional Amendment to balance the Federal budget, when Congress failed to pass it, he committed to balancing it anyway….The fact is that no other political leader today can match Newt Gingrich’s conservative legislative accomplishments.”
It’s the job of a press secretary to make the boss look good, so I have no problem with Tyler recounting the heady days of 1995, when Gingrich was most effective. Nor would I disagree with the argument that Gingrich has more “legislative accomplishments” than any potential conservative rival. But nowhere does he address my main point – that Gingrich, as House Speaker, was widely viewed as insufficiently conservative by many of his conservative colleagues. Which is one big reason why they tried to overthrow him in 1997.
This is part of the historical record, notwithstanding Tyler’s assertion that I was “laughably” questioning Gingrich’s conservative credentials. Indeed, let’s return to that era, and see what certain people were saying at the time about Gingrich’s credentials.
Here’s an item, from June 30, 1997: “Gingrich’s men…are desperate for Gingrich to step down, the sooner the better…Christopher Cox of California, the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, has been grousing about Gingrich for months, insisting that he’s not a real conservative. (Rep. David) McIntosh says, ‘It was the decision to compromise (with Clinton) at the beginning of this term rather than push for our agenda’ that soured him on Gingrich….hat is unusual – and far more significant – is the deep distrust of the party leader by his closest colleagues in the leadership.”
That report was written by Fred Barnes, the reliably conservative commentator, in the reliably conservative Weekly Standard magazine.
Here’s another: “Newt appears beyond salvage. (His 1997 budget deal with Clinton) is a band-aid cure…The federal administrative behemoth will expand, a result that contradicts everything the Republican party and conservativism are supposed to embody…The budget deal will not save Republicans from their obligation to stand for something. It will not save them from their Gingrich trouble. It will not save Newt Gingrich from himself.”
That was the lead editorial in the Weekly Standard, dated July 28, 1997. And a week later came this editorial: “The House GOP now resembles a decadent royal court, with Newt Gingrich cast as Louis XIV at Versailles. He is a monarch at once all-important and ineffectual….(The House GOP) is a balloon that floats with the wind.”
I could go on; that summer, there was another reference in the magazine to Gingrich’s “frequent compromises, flip flops, and stumbles.” And today there are plenty of conservatives who don’t buy the idealized Gingrich – starting with columnist Robert Novak, who writes that Gingrich’s conservative record is “far from flawless,” and with David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, who wrote last month that Gingrich has “more baggage than a Grand Central red-cap.”
But if Gingrich can successfully atone for the zipper problem, and persuade an amnesiac electorate to play the nostalgia card, he might yet fill the niche that he is eying so assiduously...Unless somebody else - perhaps Fred Thompson, the politician/actor - comes along.
Thursday, March 08, 2007
Why haven't elected Republican politicians called for the pardon of Scooter Libby? Take a guess
It would appear that the campaign to pardon Scooter Libby represents a broad swath of the conservative/Republican coalition.We read that personal friends of the convicted felon are pushing for President Bush to absolve him with the stroke of a pen; that the “editorial boards” at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and National Review all want Libby to be set free; that Libby’s “defense team” wants Bush to make things right; that prominent conservative lawyers, such as Victoria Toensing, want to see Cheney’s Cheney pardoned, on the grounds that he never should have been prosecuted in the first place.
But one faction is conspicuously AWOL: Elected Republican politicians.
To the best of my knowledge, not a single Republican on Capitol Hill has called for Bush to pardon Libby. Nor have any of the ’08 Republican presidential hopefuls leapt at the opportunity to urge absolution for the defendant who lied under oath, obstructed federal investigators, and worked with his boss to discredit a critic of the Bush administration’s bogus prewar WMD evidence.
Why all the thunderous silence? Here’s a wild guess: Unlike all the personal friends and editorial boards and defense lawyers and activists, the Republicans who have to face the voters in 2008 can’t afford to be blasé about the mood of the American electorate. And on virtually all matters relating to the war in Iraq, the mood does not bode well for Republican candidates. In the latest bipartisan poll sponsored by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, 69 percent of Americans say they are pessimistic about the war’s outcome; in the latest CBS-New York Times poll, Bush's approval rating on Iraq stands at 23 percent (that's no typo). But most relevant to the Libby affair are the longstanding numbers showing that a majority believe the Bush team deliberately misled us into war.
So why would any ’08 Republican candidate want to publicly endorse a Libby pardon – and thus, in the shorthand of politics, implicitly endorse the Bush administration deceptions that led to war? Why, at this point, should Republican candidates be eager to embrace a cause celebre that would merely underscore their Iraq war burden? Here’s how the Democrats would likely spin a GOP candidate’s call for a pardon: “By asking President Bush to pardon Libby, Republican X is refusing to hold the administration accountable for the prewar deceptions and the intimidation of those who questioned those deceptions. The American people demanded accountability in the 2006 elections, and they will demand it again in 2008.”
Or something like that. And unless the Republican candidate hails from a deeply-red state or district, the Democratic argument could do some damage.
Even John Podhoretz, one of the pro-pardon conservative commentators, argues nevertheless that Bush can’t absolve Libby at a time when Republicans are trying to run for office. As he wrote yesterday, “For political reasons, Bush can’t pardon Libby (right now). His responsibilities as head of the Republican party, heading into an election year, would preclude such action.”
So he’s calling for a pardon during Bush’s final days (which is the way Bill Clinton pardoned financier-felon Mark Rich, the senior George Bush pardoned the Iran-Contra defendants, and Ronald Reagan pardoned George Steinbrenner for his ’74 election law violations). Podhoretz thinks that Bush will have no choice:“(If he) fails to pardon Libby, he will implicitly be accepting the contention that Scooter Libby was part of a White House conspiracy at the highest levels to destroy the career of a CIA agent (Valerie Plame Wilson) whose husband (Joseph Wilson) had proved Bush & Co. had lied us into the Iraq War.”
Yet Republican politicians are currently silent about the pardon issue precisely because they know that a majority of Americans already believe that “Bush & Co,” lied them into war, and they won’t want to be seen as defending one of the key players – somebody who lied under oath, no less.
But at least one pardon supporter, GOP strategist Rich Galen, has a different take on the current political landscape. He thinks that the Republican candidates should embrace the pardon issue. Galen, in fact, was calling for a Libby pardon before the trial even began, and he’d like to see a pardon forthwith.
I exchanged emails with him this morning, and he offered several arguments (for instance, that there’s no political downside for Bush to issue a pardon, because Bush is not on the ballot in 2008; because he retains the loyalty of most conservatives, who would welcome the pardon anyway; and because his overall poll numbers can’t go much lower than they already are).
But with respect to the GOP candidates, he said this: “The election isn't until November 2008. It is impossible for me to believe that ANYone will remember the Scooter Libby pardon by then. In fact, I'd like to see some data that indicates anyone who lives more than five miles west of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor tracks knows or cares about the case….Similarly, GOP candidates for the House or Senate can use the pardon issue to their best advantage. In swing, or marginally GOP districts which we lost in '06, it might be a great opportunity to draw a distinction – between the GOP challenger (for the pardon) and the Democratic incumbent (tied to Nancy Pelosi's hemline in opposition to the pardon).”
I wonder whether that would work. By their silence, however, it appears that most elected Republicans, and those seeking elective office, view the Libby case as yet another treacherous undertow in an ocean of woe. Which is why they are all swimming elsewhere.
But one faction is conspicuously AWOL: Elected Republican politicians.
To the best of my knowledge, not a single Republican on Capitol Hill has called for Bush to pardon Libby. Nor have any of the ’08 Republican presidential hopefuls leapt at the opportunity to urge absolution for the defendant who lied under oath, obstructed federal investigators, and worked with his boss to discredit a critic of the Bush administration’s bogus prewar WMD evidence.
Why all the thunderous silence? Here’s a wild guess: Unlike all the personal friends and editorial boards and defense lawyers and activists, the Republicans who have to face the voters in 2008 can’t afford to be blasé about the mood of the American electorate. And on virtually all matters relating to the war in Iraq, the mood does not bode well for Republican candidates. In the latest bipartisan poll sponsored by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, 69 percent of Americans say they are pessimistic about the war’s outcome; in the latest CBS-New York Times poll, Bush's approval rating on Iraq stands at 23 percent (that's no typo). But most relevant to the Libby affair are the longstanding numbers showing that a majority believe the Bush team deliberately misled us into war.
So why would any ’08 Republican candidate want to publicly endorse a Libby pardon – and thus, in the shorthand of politics, implicitly endorse the Bush administration deceptions that led to war? Why, at this point, should Republican candidates be eager to embrace a cause celebre that would merely underscore their Iraq war burden? Here’s how the Democrats would likely spin a GOP candidate’s call for a pardon: “By asking President Bush to pardon Libby, Republican X is refusing to hold the administration accountable for the prewar deceptions and the intimidation of those who questioned those deceptions. The American people demanded accountability in the 2006 elections, and they will demand it again in 2008.”
Or something like that. And unless the Republican candidate hails from a deeply-red state or district, the Democratic argument could do some damage.
Even John Podhoretz, one of the pro-pardon conservative commentators, argues nevertheless that Bush can’t absolve Libby at a time when Republicans are trying to run for office. As he wrote yesterday, “For political reasons, Bush can’t pardon Libby (right now). His responsibilities as head of the Republican party, heading into an election year, would preclude such action.”
So he’s calling for a pardon during Bush’s final days (which is the way Bill Clinton pardoned financier-felon Mark Rich, the senior George Bush pardoned the Iran-Contra defendants, and Ronald Reagan pardoned George Steinbrenner for his ’74 election law violations). Podhoretz thinks that Bush will have no choice:“(If he) fails to pardon Libby, he will implicitly be accepting the contention that Scooter Libby was part of a White House conspiracy at the highest levels to destroy the career of a CIA agent (Valerie Plame Wilson) whose husband (Joseph Wilson) had proved Bush & Co. had lied us into the Iraq War.”
Yet Republican politicians are currently silent about the pardon issue precisely because they know that a majority of Americans already believe that “Bush & Co,” lied them into war, and they won’t want to be seen as defending one of the key players – somebody who lied under oath, no less.
But at least one pardon supporter, GOP strategist Rich Galen, has a different take on the current political landscape. He thinks that the Republican candidates should embrace the pardon issue. Galen, in fact, was calling for a Libby pardon before the trial even began, and he’d like to see a pardon forthwith.
I exchanged emails with him this morning, and he offered several arguments (for instance, that there’s no political downside for Bush to issue a pardon, because Bush is not on the ballot in 2008; because he retains the loyalty of most conservatives, who would welcome the pardon anyway; and because his overall poll numbers can’t go much lower than they already are).
But with respect to the GOP candidates, he said this: “The election isn't until November 2008. It is impossible for me to believe that ANYone will remember the Scooter Libby pardon by then. In fact, I'd like to see some data that indicates anyone who lives more than five miles west of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor tracks knows or cares about the case….Similarly, GOP candidates for the House or Senate can use the pardon issue to their best advantage. In swing, or marginally GOP districts which we lost in '06, it might be a great opportunity to draw a distinction – between the GOP challenger (for the pardon) and the Democratic incumbent (tied to Nancy Pelosi's hemline in opposition to the pardon).”
I wonder whether that would work. By their silence, however, it appears that most elected Republicans, and those seeking elective office, view the Libby case as yet another treacherous undertow in an ocean of woe. Which is why they are all swimming elsewhere.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
From inception to execution
I want to resurrect a phrase that I used here yesterday - it appears in the headline above this post – because it signals that the Scooter Libby trial and the Walter Reed scandal are inextricably linked, as manifestations of a war conceived in deception and prosecuted in bad faith.
It’s probably only a matter of time before some Bush administration apologist declares that the successful prosecution of Libby is an act that emboldens the terrorists; until that happens, Bush defenders will continue to argue that the case against Libby was basically (as Woody Allen put it in Bananas) “a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a sham,” that because Libby was merely convicted on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, it can thus be argued that no real crime had been committed.
Predictably, that’s how the always-reliable Fred Barnes interpreted the jury verdict. He said yesterday on Fox News: “I would stop short of calling it politically devastating (for the Bush administration), because no one was charged with an underlying crime here of actually having leaked the name of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press…So this is not quite as devastating as it could be if there was some underlying crime.”
The Bush spinners are conveniently omitting an important fact: When a criminal defendant lies and obstructs investigators, he is by definition making it more difficult for those investigators to determine whether an “underlying crime” has been committed. Which is exactly what prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said when the Libby indictment was announced in October 2005: “What we have, when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened, and somebody blocked (his) view.” Obstruction, said Fitzgerald, “prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.”
But even if Libby or an associate had been charged with an “underlying crime” – such as leaking covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity to the press, in violation of federal confidentiality statutes – that too would have been a very narrow reading of this affair. Because this case was ultimately about the inception of the Iraq war, about the false WMD evidence floated by top Bush lieutenants and their determination to lash out at anyone who questioned it.
Libby worked for Dick Cheney. Libby was widely known (in the words of GOP strategist Mary Matalin) as “Cheney’s Cheney.” After Valerie Wilson’s husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly refuted some of the bogus WMD evidence, Cheney scribbled instructions about how to discredit the guy. One strategy for punishing Wilson was to out his wife, expose her CIA status. Cheney told Libby about Valerie Wilson’s status; that came out at the trial. Cheney’s scribblings were also introduced during the trial. Libby acted on those orders, spinning against Wilson with selected journalists.
All told, as Republican strategist Scott Reed said to the New York Times this morning, this trial “has shown a lot of the inner workings of the White House. It peeled the bark right off the way they operate.”
I see Scooter Libby as the Bush team’s Frankie Pentangeli. You movie buffs might recognize the name. In Godfather II, Frankie Pentangeli was the loyal Corleone family soldier who, after being ensnared by the feds, was coaxed by Tom Hagen to sit in a bathtub and open his veins – to take one for the team, as it were. Which is what Libby is doing now, willingly bleeding to protect the superiors who were key players in the prewar sales effort and the subsequent attempts to muzzle critics. As juror Dennis Collins said after the verdict yesterday, “We had a lot of sympathy for Libby…and we kept asking ourselves, ‘Where’s Cheney? Where’s Rove?’”
By the way, it’s a bit jarring to hear Bush apologists contend that a four-count jury verdict on lying and obstruction is no big deal, especially in the absence of an “underlying crime.” I seem to vividly recall that, back when special counsel Ken Starr was ensnaring President Clinton, the conservative line was that Clinton’s lies under oath were sufficient grounds for throwing him out of office. The line back then was that perjury - for any reason - was a violation of the “rule of law.”
There was no “underlying crime” in the Lewinsky affair; Clinton’s behavior may have been odious (for instance, indulging Monica while discussing Bosnia on the phone), but the carnal relations were consensual, not illegal. So here’s what the Bush apologists are really saying: Lying under oath about sex is clearly worse than lying under oath about national security.
With 3,165 U.S. soldiers dead in a war that was launched in pursuit of nonexistent WMDs, let’s see whether that conservative argument holds up in the long run.
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As for the Walter Reed scandal, a fresh symbol of inept wartime execution, I wanted to briefly revisit the privatization scheme that has helped jeopardize outpatient veteran care at the famed facility:
It turns out that IAP Worldwide Services, the well-connected private company that last year was awarded a five-year contract to handle facility maintenance and health support services at Walter Reed, is the same company that played a big role in an ice-delivery fiasco during Hurricane Katrina. At the time that IAP got the Walter Reed contract, Pentagon investigators were fielding charges that the company had overcharged during Katrina.
Moreover, IAP is run by two former Halliburton executives, one of whom appeared at a congressional hearing in 2004…to defend Halliburton against charges that it had engaged in gas-price gouging in Iraq.
The writer Philip Roth once said that fiction cannot compete with the absurdities of contemporary life. He said that contemporary novelists constantly struggle “to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.”
Now I know what he means. Because, with regards to the IAP/Katrina/Halliburton actuality, there’s no way you could dream that one up.
It’s probably only a matter of time before some Bush administration apologist declares that the successful prosecution of Libby is an act that emboldens the terrorists; until that happens, Bush defenders will continue to argue that the case against Libby was basically (as Woody Allen put it in Bananas) “a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a sham,” that because Libby was merely convicted on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, it can thus be argued that no real crime had been committed.
Predictably, that’s how the always-reliable Fred Barnes interpreted the jury verdict. He said yesterday on Fox News: “I would stop short of calling it politically devastating (for the Bush administration), because no one was charged with an underlying crime here of actually having leaked the name of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press…So this is not quite as devastating as it could be if there was some underlying crime.”
The Bush spinners are conveniently omitting an important fact: When a criminal defendant lies and obstructs investigators, he is by definition making it more difficult for those investigators to determine whether an “underlying crime” has been committed. Which is exactly what prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said when the Libby indictment was announced in October 2005: “What we have, when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened, and somebody blocked (his) view.” Obstruction, said Fitzgerald, “prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.”
But even if Libby or an associate had been charged with an “underlying crime” – such as leaking covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity to the press, in violation of federal confidentiality statutes – that too would have been a very narrow reading of this affair. Because this case was ultimately about the inception of the Iraq war, about the false WMD evidence floated by top Bush lieutenants and their determination to lash out at anyone who questioned it.
Libby worked for Dick Cheney. Libby was widely known (in the words of GOP strategist Mary Matalin) as “Cheney’s Cheney.” After Valerie Wilson’s husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly refuted some of the bogus WMD evidence, Cheney scribbled instructions about how to discredit the guy. One strategy for punishing Wilson was to out his wife, expose her CIA status. Cheney told Libby about Valerie Wilson’s status; that came out at the trial. Cheney’s scribblings were also introduced during the trial. Libby acted on those orders, spinning against Wilson with selected journalists.
All told, as Republican strategist Scott Reed said to the New York Times this morning, this trial “has shown a lot of the inner workings of the White House. It peeled the bark right off the way they operate.”
I see Scooter Libby as the Bush team’s Frankie Pentangeli. You movie buffs might recognize the name. In Godfather II, Frankie Pentangeli was the loyal Corleone family soldier who, after being ensnared by the feds, was coaxed by Tom Hagen to sit in a bathtub and open his veins – to take one for the team, as it were. Which is what Libby is doing now, willingly bleeding to protect the superiors who were key players in the prewar sales effort and the subsequent attempts to muzzle critics. As juror Dennis Collins said after the verdict yesterday, “We had a lot of sympathy for Libby…and we kept asking ourselves, ‘Where’s Cheney? Where’s Rove?’”
By the way, it’s a bit jarring to hear Bush apologists contend that a four-count jury verdict on lying and obstruction is no big deal, especially in the absence of an “underlying crime.” I seem to vividly recall that, back when special counsel Ken Starr was ensnaring President Clinton, the conservative line was that Clinton’s lies under oath were sufficient grounds for throwing him out of office. The line back then was that perjury - for any reason - was a violation of the “rule of law.”
There was no “underlying crime” in the Lewinsky affair; Clinton’s behavior may have been odious (for instance, indulging Monica while discussing Bosnia on the phone), but the carnal relations were consensual, not illegal. So here’s what the Bush apologists are really saying: Lying under oath about sex is clearly worse than lying under oath about national security.
With 3,165 U.S. soldiers dead in a war that was launched in pursuit of nonexistent WMDs, let’s see whether that conservative argument holds up in the long run.
-------
As for the Walter Reed scandal, a fresh symbol of inept wartime execution, I wanted to briefly revisit the privatization scheme that has helped jeopardize outpatient veteran care at the famed facility:
It turns out that IAP Worldwide Services, the well-connected private company that last year was awarded a five-year contract to handle facility maintenance and health support services at Walter Reed, is the same company that played a big role in an ice-delivery fiasco during Hurricane Katrina. At the time that IAP got the Walter Reed contract, Pentagon investigators were fielding charges that the company had overcharged during Katrina.
Moreover, IAP is run by two former Halliburton executives, one of whom appeared at a congressional hearing in 2004…to defend Halliburton against charges that it had engaged in gas-price gouging in Iraq.
The writer Philip Roth once said that fiction cannot compete with the absurdities of contemporary life. He said that contemporary novelists constantly struggle “to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.”
Now I know what he means. Because, with regards to the IAP/Katrina/Halliburton actuality, there’s no way you could dream that one up.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
This has not been the Bush team's best news cycle
Given the potential of the Walter Reed scandal to wreak havoc with the GOP's pro-soldier image (see post below), the Bush administration was probably hoping today that some hot story would come along to dominate the news cycle. Something fresh for the cable news vultures to feast upon. Something to change the subject and distract the public.
Hey, how about this one: Dick Cheney's former top aide convicted on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.
That's probably not what the White House had in mind, so maybe there's something else out there...
OK, how about this one: Federal prosecutors fired by the Bush administration claim they were pushed out for partisan political reasons.
That's the other big one today, courtesy of congressional hearings. Again, not the ideal distraction, from the Bush team's point of view, but symptomatic of the president's woes at this point in his lame-duck tenure. Surely there must be a fresh angle in the Anna Nicole Smith saga.
The Scooter Libby perjury conviction, by itself, is not a major story to average Americans living their lives outside the Washington Beltway. I would bet that there aren't more than a relative handful of citizens who can recite exactly who Libby spoke to and when, and what it was that he conveniently misremembered. But the details don't matter. What counts is the shorthand: that the vice president's top guy got nailed in court for a scheme to discredit a critic of the unpopular Iraq war. What counts is the war, and, for a lot of Americans, this court conviction is merely further evidence of how - from inception to execution - it has gone wrong.
Next up: Will Bush pardon the guy? Some conservatives are already pushing for a pardon, but will elected Republicans nervous about 2008 join that particularly crusade?
Indeed, when you stack the Libby conviction with all the other headaches that have occurred since Bush's re-election - Katrina, Harriet Miers, the Dubai ports episode, and now Walter Reed and the rapidly growing federal prosecutors story - it's no wonder that Republicans are a tad anxious about the mood of swing voters in advance of the '08 elections.
But don't take it from me. Let conservative commentator Jim Geraghty pose the rhetorical question: "Even if you like this president, even if you’re pulling for him, even if you think his heart is in the right place...is there any way this presidency doesn't look pretty disastrous at this moment?"
Hey, how about this one: Dick Cheney's former top aide convicted on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.
That's probably not what the White House had in mind, so maybe there's something else out there...
OK, how about this one: Federal prosecutors fired by the Bush administration claim they were pushed out for partisan political reasons.
That's the other big one today, courtesy of congressional hearings. Again, not the ideal distraction, from the Bush team's point of view, but symptomatic of the president's woes at this point in his lame-duck tenure. Surely there must be a fresh angle in the Anna Nicole Smith saga.
The Scooter Libby perjury conviction, by itself, is not a major story to average Americans living their lives outside the Washington Beltway. I would bet that there aren't more than a relative handful of citizens who can recite exactly who Libby spoke to and when, and what it was that he conveniently misremembered. But the details don't matter. What counts is the shorthand: that the vice president's top guy got nailed in court for a scheme to discredit a critic of the unpopular Iraq war. What counts is the war, and, for a lot of Americans, this court conviction is merely further evidence of how - from inception to execution - it has gone wrong.
Next up: Will Bush pardon the guy? Some conservatives are already pushing for a pardon, but will elected Republicans nervous about 2008 join that particularly crusade?
Indeed, when you stack the Libby conviction with all the other headaches that have occurred since Bush's re-election - Katrina, Harriet Miers, the Dubai ports episode, and now Walter Reed and the rapidly growing federal prosecutors story - it's no wonder that Republicans are a tad anxious about the mood of swing voters in advance of the '08 elections.
But don't take it from me. Let conservative commentator Jim Geraghty pose the rhetorical question: "Even if you like this president, even if you’re pulling for him, even if you think his heart is in the right place...is there any way this presidency doesn't look pretty disastrous at this moment?"
"Support the troops" rhetoric: as flimsy as a yellow ribbon
After the Walter Reed scandal is thoroughly investigated – something that would not be happening, by the way, if the Republicans were still running Congress – it will be fascinating to see whether GOP rhetoricians continue to proclaim that they are the true protectors of our fighting men and women.
I would imagine that they will persist, if only because “support the troops” has long been such a durable party line and habits are hard to break. Just recently, for instance, they made it clear during the House debate over Iraq that those who disagreed with the Decider’s troop escalation plan were clearly not “supporting the troops.” Last autumn, when the verbally clumsy John Kerry botched an Iraq joke, he too was assailed for not “supporting the troops.”
The GOP message is that the Republicans, who have basically run Washington for the last six years, enjoy a monopoly on “supporting the troops,” and the message starts at the top, with the supporter-in-chief. As President Bush declared last December, during his most recent trip to Walter Reed, “We owe them all we can give them. Not only for when they're in harm's way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service.”
But now that leaders of the governing party have been outed for allowing ex-soldiers to live in squalor; for trying to do treatment on the cheap even while the Iraq caseload was expanding; for privatizing Walter Reed support services by awarding a contract to (surprise) a former Halliburton official, thus trimming the support personnel staff from 300 to 50…now that all this has happened, with more to come (such as a broader probe of Veterans Affairs secretary Jim Nicholson, an ex-Republican national chairman with no previous experience advocating for vets), it would appear that the GOP’s traditional “support the troops” rhetoric has proved to be about as flimsy as a yellow ribbon tied to a tree.
Some commentators have equated this scandal, which victimizes vets, with the Katrina debacle that victimized the poor of New Orleans. But that strikes me as a facile comparison – because, in some ways, the Walter Reed scandal is worse. Notwithstanding all the Bush administration incompetence that was exposed in the wake of Katrina (incompetence that was heavily documented by House Republican investigators, to their credit), a hurricane is still an act of nature. Whereas Walter Reed is an act of man – or, more accurately, it is the product of man’s inaction.
Problems at the army medical center have been surfacing in the press since 2003, long before the Washington Post blew the whistle in its February series, but there is scant evidence that anybody in charge took the reports seriously – not the congressional Republican overseers, not the president who repeatedly trekked to the place for photo ops, and not the Walter Reed director who was warned, in a memo last autumn signed by a high-ranking subordinate, that unless more federal workers were hired, “base operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”
And why was this subordinate, Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi, urging that more federal workers be hired? Because, as reported by the Army Times newspaper, he was concerned about the privatizing of services at the health facility. Thanks to cost-cutting measures initiated by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, coupled with Bush’s “competitive sourcing” program, private companies were being tapped to handle facilities management, patient care, and guard duty. As a result, many skilled government workers decided to leave. Yet, while all this was happening, the caseload expanded, courtesy of the wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq. (Garibaldi’s request for more workers was ignored, by the way.)
The congressional committees, one of which was meeting today, will have to determine whether the Walter Reed scandal is a product of simply human incompetence, or a conservative ideological hostility to governance, or a combination of both. (The same debate took place after Katrina.) A verdict may be delayed until the probes are exhausted, because even some of the Republicans, notably congressman Tom Davis of Virginia, are now saying that Walter Reed is merely "the tip of the iceberg." But they know that already; back in the spring of 2005, VA chief Nicholson, the ex-Republican chairman, admitted that the VA had underestimated the number of vets who were expected to seek treatment that year...by nearly 80,000, because somehow the agency hadn't taken the growing Iraq caseload into account.
Don’t expect any guidance on the competence/ideology question from the Bush administration. Dick Cheney offered a few words yesterday, but he’s about as credible these days as Ann Coulter. Cheney said, “There will be no excuses, only action, and the federal bureaucracy will not slow that action down.” Two observations: If the press hadn’t exposed what was wrong, he would be urging no action today; and his attempt to blame “the federal bureaucracy” (which, as we know, is a code phrase for “big-government Democrats”) conveniently overlooks the privatization issue. Besides, the calendar tells me that he and Bush have been in charge of that federal bureaucracy six years in a row.
As for Bush - who has already mapped future budget cuts in veterans' health care - he has been largely AWOL on this scandal. Spokesman Tony Snow said the other day that when Bush saw the Post series, “that was the first he was aware of what was going on…” (I seem to recall Bush saying in the past that he doesn’t read newspapers, but never mind.) And when Snow was asked whether Bush was taking charge of the situation, he replied, “he had a very busy weekend, and he was on the road Thursday and Friday, as well. I’m not aware of any reach-out calls to ask people.”
Actually, Bush did surface today, with a speech to the reliably compliant American Legion. At one point he announced that "I have also directed the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to lead a task force composed of seven members of my Cabinet to focus and respond to immediate needs." That would be the aforementioned Jim Nicholson, the ex-GOP chairman who is dismissed by veterans groups as unresponsive and over his head; as one VFW official reportedly complains, "there is no free flow of information since he took over."
Heckuva job, Jimmy.
One might assume that the Democrats will benefit politically from this episode, that they will use their oversight role to demonstrate that they, not the Republicans, are truly the people who “support the troops.” Indeed, there are reports that the House Democrats have already huddled in private about this issue. But given the fact that these are the same House Democrats who continue to spin their wheels over Iraq (torn, as always, between their get-out-now liberal faction and their more cautious moderate faction), it’s no slam dunk that they will fully grasp this gift that the GOP has bestowed upon them.
I would imagine that they will persist, if only because “support the troops” has long been such a durable party line and habits are hard to break. Just recently, for instance, they made it clear during the House debate over Iraq that those who disagreed with the Decider’s troop escalation plan were clearly not “supporting the troops.” Last autumn, when the verbally clumsy John Kerry botched an Iraq joke, he too was assailed for not “supporting the troops.”
The GOP message is that the Republicans, who have basically run Washington for the last six years, enjoy a monopoly on “supporting the troops,” and the message starts at the top, with the supporter-in-chief. As President Bush declared last December, during his most recent trip to Walter Reed, “We owe them all we can give them. Not only for when they're in harm's way, but when they come home to help them adjust if they have wounds, or help them adjust after their time in service.”
But now that leaders of the governing party have been outed for allowing ex-soldiers to live in squalor; for trying to do treatment on the cheap even while the Iraq caseload was expanding; for privatizing Walter Reed support services by awarding a contract to (surprise) a former Halliburton official, thus trimming the support personnel staff from 300 to 50…now that all this has happened, with more to come (such as a broader probe of Veterans Affairs secretary Jim Nicholson, an ex-Republican national chairman with no previous experience advocating for vets), it would appear that the GOP’s traditional “support the troops” rhetoric has proved to be about as flimsy as a yellow ribbon tied to a tree.
Some commentators have equated this scandal, which victimizes vets, with the Katrina debacle that victimized the poor of New Orleans. But that strikes me as a facile comparison – because, in some ways, the Walter Reed scandal is worse. Notwithstanding all the Bush administration incompetence that was exposed in the wake of Katrina (incompetence that was heavily documented by House Republican investigators, to their credit), a hurricane is still an act of nature. Whereas Walter Reed is an act of man – or, more accurately, it is the product of man’s inaction.
Problems at the army medical center have been surfacing in the press since 2003, long before the Washington Post blew the whistle in its February series, but there is scant evidence that anybody in charge took the reports seriously – not the congressional Republican overseers, not the president who repeatedly trekked to the place for photo ops, and not the Walter Reed director who was warned, in a memo last autumn signed by a high-ranking subordinate, that unless more federal workers were hired, “base operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”
And why was this subordinate, Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi, urging that more federal workers be hired? Because, as reported by the Army Times newspaper, he was concerned about the privatizing of services at the health facility. Thanks to cost-cutting measures initiated by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, coupled with Bush’s “competitive sourcing” program, private companies were being tapped to handle facilities management, patient care, and guard duty. As a result, many skilled government workers decided to leave. Yet, while all this was happening, the caseload expanded, courtesy of the wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq. (Garibaldi’s request for more workers was ignored, by the way.)
The congressional committees, one of which was meeting today, will have to determine whether the Walter Reed scandal is a product of simply human incompetence, or a conservative ideological hostility to governance, or a combination of both. (The same debate took place after Katrina.) A verdict may be delayed until the probes are exhausted, because even some of the Republicans, notably congressman Tom Davis of Virginia, are now saying that Walter Reed is merely "the tip of the iceberg." But they know that already; back in the spring of 2005, VA chief Nicholson, the ex-Republican chairman, admitted that the VA had underestimated the number of vets who were expected to seek treatment that year...by nearly 80,000, because somehow the agency hadn't taken the growing Iraq caseload into account.
Don’t expect any guidance on the competence/ideology question from the Bush administration. Dick Cheney offered a few words yesterday, but he’s about as credible these days as Ann Coulter. Cheney said, “There will be no excuses, only action, and the federal bureaucracy will not slow that action down.” Two observations: If the press hadn’t exposed what was wrong, he would be urging no action today; and his attempt to blame “the federal bureaucracy” (which, as we know, is a code phrase for “big-government Democrats”) conveniently overlooks the privatization issue. Besides, the calendar tells me that he and Bush have been in charge of that federal bureaucracy six years in a row.
As for Bush - who has already mapped future budget cuts in veterans' health care - he has been largely AWOL on this scandal. Spokesman Tony Snow said the other day that when Bush saw the Post series, “that was the first he was aware of what was going on…” (I seem to recall Bush saying in the past that he doesn’t read newspapers, but never mind.) And when Snow was asked whether Bush was taking charge of the situation, he replied, “he had a very busy weekend, and he was on the road Thursday and Friday, as well. I’m not aware of any reach-out calls to ask people.”
Actually, Bush did surface today, with a speech to the reliably compliant American Legion. At one point he announced that "I have also directed the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to lead a task force composed of seven members of my Cabinet to focus and respond to immediate needs." That would be the aforementioned Jim Nicholson, the ex-GOP chairman who is dismissed by veterans groups as unresponsive and over his head; as one VFW official reportedly complains, "there is no free flow of information since he took over."
Heckuva job, Jimmy.
One might assume that the Democrats will benefit politically from this episode, that they will use their oversight role to demonstrate that they, not the Republicans, are truly the people who “support the troops.” Indeed, there are reports that the House Democrats have already huddled in private about this issue. But given the fact that these are the same House Democrats who continue to spin their wheels over Iraq (torn, as always, between their get-out-now liberal faction and their more cautious moderate faction), it’s no slam dunk that they will fully grasp this gift that the GOP has bestowed upon them.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Clintons and Coulter and an obituary worthy of note
A bunch of things…
After writing yesterday in my Sunday newspaper column that “a sizeable number of Democrats” are afflicted with “Clinton fatigue” and fear that Hillary as the ’08 nominee would be burdened by Clinton family baggage, some Clinton fans sent me angry emails. They essentially made two arguments: (1) There is no Clinton fatigue among Democrats, and (2) There is no “package deal,” because President Hillary would not make any decisions that would benefit Bill politically, just as President Bill did not make any decisions that benefited Hillary politically.
I disagree, obviously. The candidacies of Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden, and the yearning on the left for an Al Gore candidacy, are proof of Clinton fatigue in the Democratic ranks. It might not be sufficient to deny Hillary the nomination, but it persists in many quarters as a low-grade virus.
Many of those who exhibit the symptoms are quick to contend in private conversations that they’re not fatigued by Bill’s private behavior. They insist that their main concerns are about policy and ideology. It’s not sexy or exciting to talk about, but the (overlooked) fact remains that many liberals have long been miffed by the Clintons’ centrist political instincts, and have no desire for eight more years of the same.
They complain that Bill basically governed like an Eisenhower-style moderate Republican (signing free trade agreements that screwed domestic organized labor, balancing the budget as a sop to Wall Street, paying down the federal debt as a top priority, expanding the federal death penalty, building more prisons), failed to lead on health insurance after the Hillary’s ’93 plan blew up (the number of uninsured Americans rose from 37 million to 42 million on his watch), and that he junked some important pledges (such as campaign finance reform). Indeed, it’s noteworthy that Hillary’s two top rivals, Obama and Edwards, are positioned to her left.
At the moment they are using Iraq to draw restive liberal primary voters away from Hillary (Obama was against the war before it began, and Edwards apologized for his ’02 Senate vote, whereas Hillary has not), but the bill of particulars against the Clintons goes way back to the early ‘90s. That’s the fight that many Democrats have long been seeking to wage. It will play out over the next 11 months, until the nominee is likely decided in the big state primaries on Feb. 5.
As for those Clinton fans who argue that Hillary-Bill will be no more of a package deal than Bill-Hillary was, I would like to refresh their memories about one particular incident in August of 1999. (I’m not arguing that a package deal is necessarily a disqualifier. I am just biased against amnesia.)
On Aug. 11 of that year, Bill made a decision that was opposed by the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, federal prosecutors, and a number of senior Democrats. He offered clemency to 16 members of a Puerto Rican terrorist group, FALN, that had been responsible for six deaths and dozens of injuries in more than 100 bombings on U.S. soil between 1974 and 1983. Fourteen of the 16 were still in prison on weapons and conspiracy offenses. He said, in essence, that they could go free if they promised not to do it again, and not to associate with each other.
A debate ensued: Why had Bill made this decision? Why had he approved clemency for only the third time of his presidency, out of 3000 petitions? Did it have anything to do with the fact….naw, it couldn’t be…that his spouse had set up an exploratory Senate candidacy, and would need to build bridges to New York’s 1.3 million Puerto Ricans, a key voting group in the 2000 race? Was it possible that he was bending public policy to politically aid the spouse who had stood by him in tough political times?
Hillary at the time insisted that she had known nothing in advance about her husband’s decision. Unfortunately, she had just told a magazine, weeks earlier, that she and Bill talked policy and politics all the time. (“We talk in the solarium, we talk in the bedroom, in the kitchen it’s just constant conversation.”). But, in this one case, we were supposed to believe that Bill had decided to rule on a terrorist clemency case without giving Hillary any heads-up on how it might impact her own Senate bid.
Anyway, the controversy raged for weeks, especially in New York, until finally Hillary publicly distanced herself from Bill’s decision. I remember discussing the whole flap with former Clinton White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers, who said, “I’ve kind of given up trying to make sense of what happens over there.”
Well, that’s what the next 11 months are for.
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There are hundreds of ways to rebut the lazy charge that the mainstream media is “liberal” – starting with its general failure to question the Bush administration’s prewar WMD claims – but the latest Ann Coulter incident provides fresh grist.
On Friday, as most of you probably know by now, Coulter spoke to an audience of conservative activists. She said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I -- so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”
So let us review: A best-selling conservative author, delivering the day’s keynote speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, arguably the most prominent organization of rightward grassroots activists, declared in public that a major Democratic presidential contender was a “faggot.” And (after a few surprised gasps), she was greeted with widespread applause from the audience of thousands…..
Yet The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Associated Press all failed to mention the incident in their CPAC reports.
The nightly network broadcasts also failed to report it.
The print folks basically got around to reporting the incident 24 hours later, only after the Democrats, and some of the Republican presidential candidates, voiced their objections to Coulter. That’s the dance of objectivity; as long as somebody takes “the other side,” a reporter is on safe ground to write something “balanced.” This way, there is no need for a reporter to exercise his or her own best professional judgment on whether a remark is newsworthy.
Howard Kurtz today, while also deploring the MSM omission, suggested one possible reason: "A collective shrug that, well, you know, it's Coulter, there she goes again, what do you expect? And it's that attitude that lets her off the hook."
So I’m just wondering: if Michael Moore, or some other left-leaning flamer, had keynoted a national liberal conference, and had called a major Republican contender a “faggot,” would these mainstream media outlets have failed to mention that?
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Thomas Eagleton died yesterday. His passage is worth noting, if only because he demonstrated the perils of allowing personal ambition to cloud political judgment at a critical moment in history. He was also responsible for the introduction of a phrase that has since become synonymous with political dishonesty – even though he wasn’t the one who said it.
In 1972, as some of you older readers may remember, Missouri senator Eagleton was tapped to be George McGovern’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, in a year when President Nixon was mired in Vietnam and working to minimize the Watergate scandal. Eagleton was so anxious to get the nod that he failed to tell McGovern’s people about a few incidents in his past that might be viewed as problematical – namely, that he had been hospitalized three times for depression, and twice undergone electroshock therapy. (There was no Lithium in those days, assuming that would have helped Eagleton.)
Anyway, the truth came out, in the usual dribs and drabs, and it put McGovern on the spot. Finally he felt compelled to declare that he stood behind Eagleton “1000 percent” – even though, at the time he said it, the McGovern camp was already moving to dump Eagleton. (As McGovern told CBS’ Bob Schieffer many years later, “After saying I was behind him 1000 percent, it made me look like a damn fool, but I decided we had to ask him to leave.”)
We all know that straying “off message” is a cardinal sin, so imagine if something like this happened today: On a Sunday in August of 1972, Eagleton went on Face the Nation and declared that he intended to stay on the ticket – while, over on NBC, at virtually the same hour, McGovern’s handpicked Democratic national chairwoman was telling Meet the Press that Eagleton would best serve his party by stepping down. This would be blogger bliss. (Complicating things further, McGovern told Eagleton later that day that he, McGovern, had not asked the chairwoman to say what she had said.)
Within a day, Eagleton stepped down. Decades later, I bet you will never hear a candidate claim that he or she supports somebody or anything “1000 percent.” Yet I wonder if a candidate afflicted with depression today would share the same impulse to hide it. Up-front honesty is generally the best strategy.
After writing yesterday in my Sunday newspaper column that “a sizeable number of Democrats” are afflicted with “Clinton fatigue” and fear that Hillary as the ’08 nominee would be burdened by Clinton family baggage, some Clinton fans sent me angry emails. They essentially made two arguments: (1) There is no Clinton fatigue among Democrats, and (2) There is no “package deal,” because President Hillary would not make any decisions that would benefit Bill politically, just as President Bill did not make any decisions that benefited Hillary politically.
I disagree, obviously. The candidacies of Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden, and the yearning on the left for an Al Gore candidacy, are proof of Clinton fatigue in the Democratic ranks. It might not be sufficient to deny Hillary the nomination, but it persists in many quarters as a low-grade virus.
Many of those who exhibit the symptoms are quick to contend in private conversations that they’re not fatigued by Bill’s private behavior. They insist that their main concerns are about policy and ideology. It’s not sexy or exciting to talk about, but the (overlooked) fact remains that many liberals have long been miffed by the Clintons’ centrist political instincts, and have no desire for eight more years of the same.
They complain that Bill basically governed like an Eisenhower-style moderate Republican (signing free trade agreements that screwed domestic organized labor, balancing the budget as a sop to Wall Street, paying down the federal debt as a top priority, expanding the federal death penalty, building more prisons), failed to lead on health insurance after the Hillary’s ’93 plan blew up (the number of uninsured Americans rose from 37 million to 42 million on his watch), and that he junked some important pledges (such as campaign finance reform). Indeed, it’s noteworthy that Hillary’s two top rivals, Obama and Edwards, are positioned to her left.
At the moment they are using Iraq to draw restive liberal primary voters away from Hillary (Obama was against the war before it began, and Edwards apologized for his ’02 Senate vote, whereas Hillary has not), but the bill of particulars against the Clintons goes way back to the early ‘90s. That’s the fight that many Democrats have long been seeking to wage. It will play out over the next 11 months, until the nominee is likely decided in the big state primaries on Feb. 5.
As for those Clinton fans who argue that Hillary-Bill will be no more of a package deal than Bill-Hillary was, I would like to refresh their memories about one particular incident in August of 1999. (I’m not arguing that a package deal is necessarily a disqualifier. I am just biased against amnesia.)
On Aug. 11 of that year, Bill made a decision that was opposed by the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, federal prosecutors, and a number of senior Democrats. He offered clemency to 16 members of a Puerto Rican terrorist group, FALN, that had been responsible for six deaths and dozens of injuries in more than 100 bombings on U.S. soil between 1974 and 1983. Fourteen of the 16 were still in prison on weapons and conspiracy offenses. He said, in essence, that they could go free if they promised not to do it again, and not to associate with each other.
A debate ensued: Why had Bill made this decision? Why had he approved clemency for only the third time of his presidency, out of 3000 petitions? Did it have anything to do with the fact….naw, it couldn’t be…that his spouse had set up an exploratory Senate candidacy, and would need to build bridges to New York’s 1.3 million Puerto Ricans, a key voting group in the 2000 race? Was it possible that he was bending public policy to politically aid the spouse who had stood by him in tough political times?
Hillary at the time insisted that she had known nothing in advance about her husband’s decision. Unfortunately, she had just told a magazine, weeks earlier, that she and Bill talked policy and politics all the time. (“We talk in the solarium, we talk in the bedroom, in the kitchen it’s just constant conversation.”). But, in this one case, we were supposed to believe that Bill had decided to rule on a terrorist clemency case without giving Hillary any heads-up on how it might impact her own Senate bid.
Anyway, the controversy raged for weeks, especially in New York, until finally Hillary publicly distanced herself from Bill’s decision. I remember discussing the whole flap with former Clinton White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers, who said, “I’ve kind of given up trying to make sense of what happens over there.”
Well, that’s what the next 11 months are for.
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There are hundreds of ways to rebut the lazy charge that the mainstream media is “liberal” – starting with its general failure to question the Bush administration’s prewar WMD claims – but the latest Ann Coulter incident provides fresh grist.
On Friday, as most of you probably know by now, Coulter spoke to an audience of conservative activists. She said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I -- so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”
So let us review: A best-selling conservative author, delivering the day’s keynote speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, arguably the most prominent organization of rightward grassroots activists, declared in public that a major Democratic presidential contender was a “faggot.” And (after a few surprised gasps), she was greeted with widespread applause from the audience of thousands…..
Yet The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Associated Press all failed to mention the incident in their CPAC reports.
The nightly network broadcasts also failed to report it.
The print folks basically got around to reporting the incident 24 hours later, only after the Democrats, and some of the Republican presidential candidates, voiced their objections to Coulter. That’s the dance of objectivity; as long as somebody takes “the other side,” a reporter is on safe ground to write something “balanced.” This way, there is no need for a reporter to exercise his or her own best professional judgment on whether a remark is newsworthy.
Howard Kurtz today, while also deploring the MSM omission, suggested one possible reason: "A collective shrug that, well, you know, it's Coulter, there she goes again, what do you expect? And it's that attitude that lets her off the hook."
So I’m just wondering: if Michael Moore, or some other left-leaning flamer, had keynoted a national liberal conference, and had called a major Republican contender a “faggot,” would these mainstream media outlets have failed to mention that?
-------
Thomas Eagleton died yesterday. His passage is worth noting, if only because he demonstrated the perils of allowing personal ambition to cloud political judgment at a critical moment in history. He was also responsible for the introduction of a phrase that has since become synonymous with political dishonesty – even though he wasn’t the one who said it.
In 1972, as some of you older readers may remember, Missouri senator Eagleton was tapped to be George McGovern’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, in a year when President Nixon was mired in Vietnam and working to minimize the Watergate scandal. Eagleton was so anxious to get the nod that he failed to tell McGovern’s people about a few incidents in his past that might be viewed as problematical – namely, that he had been hospitalized three times for depression, and twice undergone electroshock therapy. (There was no Lithium in those days, assuming that would have helped Eagleton.)
Anyway, the truth came out, in the usual dribs and drabs, and it put McGovern on the spot. Finally he felt compelled to declare that he stood behind Eagleton “1000 percent” – even though, at the time he said it, the McGovern camp was already moving to dump Eagleton. (As McGovern told CBS’ Bob Schieffer many years later, “After saying I was behind him 1000 percent, it made me look like a damn fool, but I decided we had to ask him to leave.”)
We all know that straying “off message” is a cardinal sin, so imagine if something like this happened today: On a Sunday in August of 1972, Eagleton went on Face the Nation and declared that he intended to stay on the ticket – while, over on NBC, at virtually the same hour, McGovern’s handpicked Democratic national chairwoman was telling Meet the Press that Eagleton would best serve his party by stepping down. This would be blogger bliss. (Complicating things further, McGovern told Eagleton later that day that he, McGovern, had not asked the chairwoman to say what she had said.)
Within a day, Eagleton stepped down. Decades later, I bet you will never hear a candidate claim that he or she supports somebody or anything “1000 percent.” Yet I wonder if a candidate afflicted with depression today would share the same impulse to hide it. Up-front honesty is generally the best strategy.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Rudy wraps himself in Reagan
Rudy Giuliani’s sales pitch to Republican conservatives boils down to this: Ignore the stuff about me that makes you uncomfortable – like my past support for gun control, gay rights and abortion rights – and simply view me as the 21st century version of Ronald Reagan, a resolute optimist who will vanquish the terrorists just as the Gipper took down the communists.
This was the gist of Giuliani’s noontime talk to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual Washington gathering of activists who, thus far, have been looking largely in vain for a properly credentialed Leader to replace the lame-duck Decider. Giuliani was auditioning, in the literal sense; he had been barred from addressing CPAC just two years ago, because the organizers didn’t see him as a true conservative.
Many are still wary of him. But now that the right is feeling gloomy – what with the Democrats running Congress, Hillary and Obama looming as credible White House candidates, President Bush forever in free fall (29 percent approval in the latest national poll), and the GOP ’08 field littered with flip-flopping panderers – Giuliani doesn’t seem nearly so bad anymore. That’s what the polls say, anyway. In recent weeks he has opened a stong lead against John McCain, reportedly because a lot of white evangelical Protestants now seem willing to ignore those pesky social issues and focus on his tough-guy credentials.
Giuliani hit that theme today, inviting everybody to keep ignoring what they don’t like. At one point he declared: “Ronald Reagan used to say, ‘My 80 percent ally is not my 20 percent enemy.’ What he meant by that is, ‘We don’t have to see eye to eye on everything….I don’t agree with myself on everything. The point of a presidential election is to figure out who you do believe the most, and what you think are the most important things for this country at this particular time. We do believe in many of the same things, I’m sure,” such as the Republican principles of promoting freedom and cutting taxes.
That was basically how he dealt with the abortion issue – by not mentioning it. (He has said elsewhere that he still supports the legal right to choose, although he does seem to be "adjusting" his stance on partial birth abortion. Now he seems to be against it, after first being for it.) Rather, his overall message is that if tolerating disagreements was good enough for Reagan, it should be good enough for the conservative grassroots.
(By the way, check out the line where he said, “I don’t agree with myself on everything.” If Hillary Clinton had said those same words, the Republicans would have instantly parsed it for a talking point, mocking her for being less resolute than John Kerry.)
Giuliani also advanced a Manhattan Miracle message. It is beyond dispute that New York City crime dropped dramatically during the Giuliani years, and that the city once thought to be ungovernable enjoyed a rebirth with him at the helm. He spent considerable time today talking about the lower homicide rate, the moving of citizens from welfare to work, and the taxes that he cut even while the budget was mired in red ink. These themes might well attract skeptical conservatives, who enjoy visiting a safe and resurgent New York City as much as anybody else.
Obviously, Giuliani’s rivals will do the work of reminding conservatives about his past left-leaning sentiments, not to mention his three marriages; they’ll note that even though Giuliani has vowed to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, he actually nominated a lot of liberal judges during his mayoral reign. But Giuliani is playing it smart, in this sense: Rather than engage these criticisms, and seek to explain or nuance them, he is simply trying to trump them. He is calculating that his image as the scourge of evil-doers will triumph over all.
His hawkish stance on the terrorist threat, as outlined in his speech today, seeks to accomplish three goals: Establish himself as heir to the Reagan tradition, thus uniting the various conservative camps; paint the Democrats as wimps who, rather than fight, would prefer to negotiate with the help of nations such as France (requisite boos from the audience); and give conservatives a way to excuse or explain away Bush’s disastrous miscalculations in Iraq.
On the first goal, he voiced Reaganesque optimism about defeating the terrorists: “We will get there the same way Ronald Reagan got there – peace through strength.” He invoked that as the closing line in his speech, just to make sure that he would be remembered as having walked in the icon’s shoes.
On the second goal, he scoffed at the Democrats for opposing Bush’s domestic surveillance program, which he sees as an essential tool to stopping the bad guys. That’s a standard Republican line, but Giuliani did something clever with it. He put the issue in real terms, invoking his days as a federal prosecutor who wiretapped Gambino family mobsters in New York: “We had to intrude into their activity, we had to breach their privacy…It requires being on offense.”
One can always argue (as many Democrats would) that there’s a big difference between a secret federal program that might invade the privacy rights of innocent people, and a narrowly-targeted wiretap regimen that targets people already known to be mobsters, but what matters here is that Giuliani’s use of his own biography might be an effective way to woo conservative primary voters.
And the last goal, regarding Iraq, merits attention. Even though conservatives remain largely supportive of Bush’s mission in Iraq, they are well aware that most Americans disagree, and Iraq could be a dead weight on ’08 GOP prospects. Giuliani’s message, however, is that Iraq is no big deal in the eyes of history, and that conservatives (and all Americans) shouldn’t feel bad about it.
He said that the Battle of the Bulge, fought during the final winter of World War II, at a heavy cost to American lives, was actually a major U.S. intelligence failure (it was thought at the time, erroneously, that the Nazis had been licked). But Giuliani pointed out that even this failure didn’t deter America from its overall mission.
Then he tied that setback to the current war on terror: “The reality is, it’s the general thrust of what we’re doing with terrorism that is enormously important, not the fact that every single thing hasn’t worked….We should not be embarrassed about ourselves. We should not have our heads down…”
That’s potentially powerful stuff for conservative voters. In the service of optimism and “the general thrust,” Giuliani is telling them that it’s OK not to feel bad about “every single thing (that) hasn’t worked,” even if one of those “things” is straining the entire American military, impacting our ability to fight al Qaeda where it is headquartered, and costing current and future American taxpayers $2 billion a week (excluding the tab for post-combat hospitalization and treatment).
All told, perhaps these themes might be enough to buoy a candidate who flunks the party’s abortion test. Indeed, with Giuliani currently topping the Republican candidate roster in the polls, here’s a question for the other party: Are there any circumstances under which the Democrats would confer frontrunner status on a candidate who opposes abortion?
This was the gist of Giuliani’s noontime talk to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual Washington gathering of activists who, thus far, have been looking largely in vain for a properly credentialed Leader to replace the lame-duck Decider. Giuliani was auditioning, in the literal sense; he had been barred from addressing CPAC just two years ago, because the organizers didn’t see him as a true conservative.
Many are still wary of him. But now that the right is feeling gloomy – what with the Democrats running Congress, Hillary and Obama looming as credible White House candidates, President Bush forever in free fall (29 percent approval in the latest national poll), and the GOP ’08 field littered with flip-flopping panderers – Giuliani doesn’t seem nearly so bad anymore. That’s what the polls say, anyway. In recent weeks he has opened a stong lead against John McCain, reportedly because a lot of white evangelical Protestants now seem willing to ignore those pesky social issues and focus on his tough-guy credentials.
Giuliani hit that theme today, inviting everybody to keep ignoring what they don’t like. At one point he declared: “Ronald Reagan used to say, ‘My 80 percent ally is not my 20 percent enemy.’ What he meant by that is, ‘We don’t have to see eye to eye on everything….I don’t agree with myself on everything. The point of a presidential election is to figure out who you do believe the most, and what you think are the most important things for this country at this particular time. We do believe in many of the same things, I’m sure,” such as the Republican principles of promoting freedom and cutting taxes.
That was basically how he dealt with the abortion issue – by not mentioning it. (He has said elsewhere that he still supports the legal right to choose, although he does seem to be "adjusting" his stance on partial birth abortion. Now he seems to be against it, after first being for it.) Rather, his overall message is that if tolerating disagreements was good enough for Reagan, it should be good enough for the conservative grassroots.
(By the way, check out the line where he said, “I don’t agree with myself on everything.” If Hillary Clinton had said those same words, the Republicans would have instantly parsed it for a talking point, mocking her for being less resolute than John Kerry.)
Giuliani also advanced a Manhattan Miracle message. It is beyond dispute that New York City crime dropped dramatically during the Giuliani years, and that the city once thought to be ungovernable enjoyed a rebirth with him at the helm. He spent considerable time today talking about the lower homicide rate, the moving of citizens from welfare to work, and the taxes that he cut even while the budget was mired in red ink. These themes might well attract skeptical conservatives, who enjoy visiting a safe and resurgent New York City as much as anybody else.
Obviously, Giuliani’s rivals will do the work of reminding conservatives about his past left-leaning sentiments, not to mention his three marriages; they’ll note that even though Giuliani has vowed to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, he actually nominated a lot of liberal judges during his mayoral reign. But Giuliani is playing it smart, in this sense: Rather than engage these criticisms, and seek to explain or nuance them, he is simply trying to trump them. He is calculating that his image as the scourge of evil-doers will triumph over all.
His hawkish stance on the terrorist threat, as outlined in his speech today, seeks to accomplish three goals: Establish himself as heir to the Reagan tradition, thus uniting the various conservative camps; paint the Democrats as wimps who, rather than fight, would prefer to negotiate with the help of nations such as France (requisite boos from the audience); and give conservatives a way to excuse or explain away Bush’s disastrous miscalculations in Iraq.
On the first goal, he voiced Reaganesque optimism about defeating the terrorists: “We will get there the same way Ronald Reagan got there – peace through strength.” He invoked that as the closing line in his speech, just to make sure that he would be remembered as having walked in the icon’s shoes.
On the second goal, he scoffed at the Democrats for opposing Bush’s domestic surveillance program, which he sees as an essential tool to stopping the bad guys. That’s a standard Republican line, but Giuliani did something clever with it. He put the issue in real terms, invoking his days as a federal prosecutor who wiretapped Gambino family mobsters in New York: “We had to intrude into their activity, we had to breach their privacy…It requires being on offense.”
One can always argue (as many Democrats would) that there’s a big difference between a secret federal program that might invade the privacy rights of innocent people, and a narrowly-targeted wiretap regimen that targets people already known to be mobsters, but what matters here is that Giuliani’s use of his own biography might be an effective way to woo conservative primary voters.
And the last goal, regarding Iraq, merits attention. Even though conservatives remain largely supportive of Bush’s mission in Iraq, they are well aware that most Americans disagree, and Iraq could be a dead weight on ’08 GOP prospects. Giuliani’s message, however, is that Iraq is no big deal in the eyes of history, and that conservatives (and all Americans) shouldn’t feel bad about it.
He said that the Battle of the Bulge, fought during the final winter of World War II, at a heavy cost to American lives, was actually a major U.S. intelligence failure (it was thought at the time, erroneously, that the Nazis had been licked). But Giuliani pointed out that even this failure didn’t deter America from its overall mission.
Then he tied that setback to the current war on terror: “The reality is, it’s the general thrust of what we’re doing with terrorism that is enormously important, not the fact that every single thing hasn’t worked….We should not be embarrassed about ourselves. We should not have our heads down…”
That’s potentially powerful stuff for conservative voters. In the service of optimism and “the general thrust,” Giuliani is telling them that it’s OK not to feel bad about “every single thing (that) hasn’t worked,” even if one of those “things” is straining the entire American military, impacting our ability to fight al Qaeda where it is headquartered, and costing current and future American taxpayers $2 billion a week (excluding the tab for post-combat hospitalization and treatment).
All told, perhaps these themes might be enough to buoy a candidate who flunks the party’s abortion test. Indeed, with Giuliani currently topping the Republican candidate roster in the polls, here’s a question for the other party: Are there any circumstances under which the Democrats would confer frontrunner status on a candidate who opposes abortion?
Thursday, March 01, 2007
You won't catch Mitt wearing a beret atop that perfect hair
Mon dieu! I was mesmerized to see how Mitt Romney’s campaign aides have sized up their own candidate. The material, contained in a 77-slide Power Point presentation, was leaked the other day to the Boston Globe. I would link it here, but apparently this server has had a bug for more than 24 hours, and won't permit links. Anyway, predictably, Mitt’s minions are fretting about his flip-flop history and his perfect hair (both of which make him seen inauthentic), while charting ways to demolish their GOP rivals (such as John McCain, who is dismissed as “uncertain, erratic, unreliable").
But the best part is where Team Mitt suggests that the candidate run against a few well-chosen “bogeymen” – in other words, invent some enemies and bash them, as a way of attracting conservative primary voters to the Romney banner. And the bogeyman of choice is…
France. Naturellement!
Better yet, the idea (which may never get past the musing phase) is to trash France as a second-rate country, then tie Hillary to France, then trash them in tandem. As the Globe reported: “Enmity toward France, where Romney did his Mormon mission during college, is a recurring theme of the document. The European Union, it says at one point, wants to ‘drag America down to Europe's standards,’ adding: ‘That's where Hillary and Dems would take us. Hillary = France.’ The plan even envisions ‘First, not France’ bumper stickers.”
Hillary = France….Here we go again, with the Freedom Fries and the French wines being emptied into the patriotic sinks. Maybe the Romney team will leak a blind quote to the New York Times, hinting that Hillary “looks French” (as the Bush team did to John Kerry). And I don’t doubt that there is still a constituency for French-bashing. I’ll acknowledge that, at least by all-American standards, there is something a tad eccentric about a country that worships Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke, and cares not a whit when 70-year-old men hose down their sailboats while buck naked (a sight that fascinated my kids when they were little, during a visit to Provence).
But is France a sufficient bogeyman this time around? To me, the idea seems so four years ago. The guy who came up with the Freedom Fries label, congressman Bob Ney, has just been dispatched to jail for 30 months, courtesy of the Jack Abramoff scandal. And besides, let’s face it, the French were right about Iraq (they scoffed at the WMD pseudo-evidence, and warned that the consequences of invasion would be dire and unpredictable), while the U.S. president whom Romney declines to criticize was flat wrong.
And what’s all this stuff from Team Mitt about France and the European Union wanting to drag us down to their standards? Granted, our economy is more productive (and bigger) than theirs. But, in terms of France’s other standards, we should be so lucky. A few years back, the World Health Organization, assessing the health care in 190 countries, ranked the French health system as…number one. The United States showed up at number 37, sandwiched between Costa Rica and Slovenia. And in recent years France has outpaced America in science literary, math literacy, reading literacy, life expectancy, and healthy life expectancy.
But since these caveats might be trumped by the visceral appeal of “Hillary = France,” the Romney attack team can probably find all kinds of juicy ammo (even though Hillary's ancestors appear to have been English, not French):
For instance, her husband used to love gobbling junk food at McDonalds; there must be photos still around from 1992, showing him hoisting a French fry. And how about the fact that Hillary represents the state where the Statue of Liberty is situated, and has even said some nice things about it? Is she unaware that the Statue of Liberty was a gift from…France? Or how about the fact that she wants U.S. troops out of Iraq next year – isn’t that the same as the French surrender to the Nazis in 1940? And what about that state dinner that Bill and Hillary hosted for French president Jacques Chirac in 1996, complete with lemon-thyme lobster and roasted eggplant soup? It’s right there in her 2003 memoir, on page 338. And speaking of that memoir, why did she have it translated into French by a French publisher, and renamed Mon Histoire? And isn’t it troubling that, when she appeared on French TV in 2003, the host told her that the French people have “great admiration” for her? The same people who refused to invade Iraq?
The possibilities are endless, assuming that Romney is around long enough to dip into this baguette of tricks.
But the best part is where Team Mitt suggests that the candidate run against a few well-chosen “bogeymen” – in other words, invent some enemies and bash them, as a way of attracting conservative primary voters to the Romney banner. And the bogeyman of choice is…
France. Naturellement!
Better yet, the idea (which may never get past the musing phase) is to trash France as a second-rate country, then tie Hillary to France, then trash them in tandem. As the Globe reported: “Enmity toward France, where Romney did his Mormon mission during college, is a recurring theme of the document. The European Union, it says at one point, wants to ‘drag America down to Europe's standards,’ adding: ‘That's where Hillary and Dems would take us. Hillary = France.’ The plan even envisions ‘First, not France’ bumper stickers.”
Hillary = France….Here we go again, with the Freedom Fries and the French wines being emptied into the patriotic sinks. Maybe the Romney team will leak a blind quote to the New York Times, hinting that Hillary “looks French” (as the Bush team did to John Kerry). And I don’t doubt that there is still a constituency for French-bashing. I’ll acknowledge that, at least by all-American standards, there is something a tad eccentric about a country that worships Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke, and cares not a whit when 70-year-old men hose down their sailboats while buck naked (a sight that fascinated my kids when they were little, during a visit to Provence).
But is France a sufficient bogeyman this time around? To me, the idea seems so four years ago. The guy who came up with the Freedom Fries label, congressman Bob Ney, has just been dispatched to jail for 30 months, courtesy of the Jack Abramoff scandal. And besides, let’s face it, the French were right about Iraq (they scoffed at the WMD pseudo-evidence, and warned that the consequences of invasion would be dire and unpredictable), while the U.S. president whom Romney declines to criticize was flat wrong.
And what’s all this stuff from Team Mitt about France and the European Union wanting to drag us down to their standards? Granted, our economy is more productive (and bigger) than theirs. But, in terms of France’s other standards, we should be so lucky. A few years back, the World Health Organization, assessing the health care in 190 countries, ranked the French health system as…number one. The United States showed up at number 37, sandwiched between Costa Rica and Slovenia. And in recent years France has outpaced America in science literary, math literacy, reading literacy, life expectancy, and healthy life expectancy.
But since these caveats might be trumped by the visceral appeal of “Hillary = France,” the Romney attack team can probably find all kinds of juicy ammo (even though Hillary's ancestors appear to have been English, not French):
For instance, her husband used to love gobbling junk food at McDonalds; there must be photos still around from 1992, showing him hoisting a French fry. And how about the fact that Hillary represents the state where the Statue of Liberty is situated, and has even said some nice things about it? Is she unaware that the Statue of Liberty was a gift from…France? Or how about the fact that she wants U.S. troops out of Iraq next year – isn’t that the same as the French surrender to the Nazis in 1940? And what about that state dinner that Bill and Hillary hosted for French president Jacques Chirac in 1996, complete with lemon-thyme lobster and roasted eggplant soup? It’s right there in her 2003 memoir, on page 338. And speaking of that memoir, why did she have it translated into French by a French publisher, and renamed Mon Histoire? And isn’t it troubling that, when she appeared on French TV in 2003, the host told her that the French people have “great admiration” for her? The same people who refused to invade Iraq?
The possibilities are endless, assuming that Romney is around long enough to dip into this baguette of tricks.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
A progress (?!) report on the fight against terror
The Bush administration essentially won a second term in 2004 by contending that it would keep America safe. So how’s that pledge working out these days?
Well, let’s see: Pakistan, which is supposedly working with Bush to eradicate terrorism, has instead become a safer haven for al Qaeda. The group, “is forging stronger operational connections” with its affiliates elsewhere in the world – this, according to Bush’s own intelligence chief, Mike McConnell, who ‘fessed up yesterday in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. McConnell also testified that Osama bin Laden is personally involved in the new efforts; this is the same Osama bin Laden who was dismissed by Bush as unimportant during a White House news conference in March 2002 ("I truly am not that concerned about him").
Pakistan, let us recall, was also treated to a visit the other day from Vice President Cheney, who warned its leaders that if they didn’t clean out the bad guys, the Democratic Congress would cut off their financial aid. (Which means that Cheney, who usually assails the Democrats as weak on terrorism, has suddenly found it useful to portray the Democrats on the world stage as tough on terrorism. Therefore, why should anybody believe he is sincere when he assails them?)
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan yesterday, a suicide bomber blew himself up a mile away from Cheney, taking out 23 people (merely the latest symptom of growing violence there), and clearly demonstrating that the country is experiencing “the resurgence of the Taliban.” That’s were McConnell’s words yesterday – in stark contrast to what Bush flak Tony Snow said yesterday, when he shrugged off the bombing thusly: “I’m not sure it says anything.” No doubt the White House would also argue that its fight against terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan has not been damaged by its decision to expend most of the nation’s military resources and firepower and funds ($2 billion every week) on its war of choice in Iraq.
It’s also not a good sign for the administration (or for us, as citizens seeking safety) when even people in the conservative camp seem willing to accuse Bush of botching the war on terrorism. I spied this little item yesterday on “The Corner,” a blog sponsored by the National Review; the author is longtime contributing editor Andrew Stuttaford: “Who is losing Afghanistan? George W. Bush, that's who. His watch. His administration. His incompetence. His arrogance. His failure to learn from failure.”
Then he quoted this passage from a British newspaper story: "British officials are worried about the consequences of U.S. proposals to eradicate Afghanistan's opium poppy harvest, which include spraying the crops from the air, a policy it adopted in Colombia. The fear is that tough anti-narcotic measures would alienate poor farmers who have no alternative livelihood, and drive more Afghans into the hands of the Taliban. Such a policy would further endanger British troops, military commanders say."
Stuttaford, having thus warned that Bush is hurting the troops, concludes in his own words: “As I've said time and time before, the decision by the Bush administration to prioritize the drug war ahead of the war against the Taliban is of course, madness. It's time for the Brits to take a stand, and announce that either Bush's drug warriors leave Afghanistan, or Britain's troops do. Ninety days would seem to be adequate warning.”
No doubt, if the British troops did leave Afghanistan, Dick Cheney would try to spin it as a sign of progress.
Indeed, one problem for the Bush team is that its top war-on-terror spinners don't have much credibility anymore. Which, I suppose, is why it decided the other night to tap one of its few remaining credible experts – that would be policy wonk Laura Bush – and put her on national television. (Although they did play it safe by sending her to the somnolent Larry King, who has far more snap in his suspenders than in his questioning.)
At one point, the First Lady offered her assessment of why Americans seem to be so sour about the war in Iraq. She said – big surprise – that it’s the media’s fault: “(M)any parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody.”
In reality, however, “what we see on television” merely scratches the surface. The Brookings Institution, which charts the Iraq violence on a monthly basis, using the best available government statistics, lately estimates that there are 80 car bombings every day in Iraq; that there are 185 insurgent and militia attacks each day; and that (as of January) the number of people, both soldiers and civilians, killed and wounded in bombings and other attacks are now the highest yet recorded – nearly 2000 last month alone. And the statistics don’t include all the civilians killed in sectarian reprisals, those who have been dumped on the street without their heads. Those casualties, for obvious reasons, are never shown on television at all.
Contrary to Laura Bush’s assertion, the TV coverage has actually been kind to the Bush administration. Rather than showing too much, it has actually shown too little of the realities on the ground that are undercutting America’s overall effectiveness in the war on terror.
Americans get the true picture anyway; in the latest ABC-Washington Post-ABC News poll, 52 percent say they trust the Democratic Congress to take the lead in the war on terror, while only 39 percent prefer Bush. RealClearPolitics blogger Tom Bevan puts it best: "(I)f someone had told you that, five and a half years after September 11, the Republican President who shepherded America through the worst terrorist attack in her history would be running 13 points behind Democrats in Congress on the question of who can better handle the war on terror, you probably would have thought that to be very unlikely, if not a bit nuts."
Well, let’s see: Pakistan, which is supposedly working with Bush to eradicate terrorism, has instead become a safer haven for al Qaeda. The group, “is forging stronger operational connections” with its affiliates elsewhere in the world – this, according to Bush’s own intelligence chief, Mike McConnell, who ‘fessed up yesterday in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. McConnell also testified that Osama bin Laden is personally involved in the new efforts; this is the same Osama bin Laden who was dismissed by Bush as unimportant during a White House news conference in March 2002 ("I truly am not that concerned about him").
Pakistan, let us recall, was also treated to a visit the other day from Vice President Cheney, who warned its leaders that if they didn’t clean out the bad guys, the Democratic Congress would cut off their financial aid. (Which means that Cheney, who usually assails the Democrats as weak on terrorism, has suddenly found it useful to portray the Democrats on the world stage as tough on terrorism. Therefore, why should anybody believe he is sincere when he assails them?)
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan yesterday, a suicide bomber blew himself up a mile away from Cheney, taking out 23 people (merely the latest symptom of growing violence there), and clearly demonstrating that the country is experiencing “the resurgence of the Taliban.” That’s were McConnell’s words yesterday – in stark contrast to what Bush flak Tony Snow said yesterday, when he shrugged off the bombing thusly: “I’m not sure it says anything.” No doubt the White House would also argue that its fight against terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan has not been damaged by its decision to expend most of the nation’s military resources and firepower and funds ($2 billion every week) on its war of choice in Iraq.
It’s also not a good sign for the administration (or for us, as citizens seeking safety) when even people in the conservative camp seem willing to accuse Bush of botching the war on terrorism. I spied this little item yesterday on “The Corner,” a blog sponsored by the National Review; the author is longtime contributing editor Andrew Stuttaford: “Who is losing Afghanistan? George W. Bush, that's who. His watch. His administration. His incompetence. His arrogance. His failure to learn from failure.”
Then he quoted this passage from a British newspaper story: "British officials are worried about the consequences of U.S. proposals to eradicate Afghanistan's opium poppy harvest, which include spraying the crops from the air, a policy it adopted in Colombia. The fear is that tough anti-narcotic measures would alienate poor farmers who have no alternative livelihood, and drive more Afghans into the hands of the Taliban. Such a policy would further endanger British troops, military commanders say."
Stuttaford, having thus warned that Bush is hurting the troops, concludes in his own words: “As I've said time and time before, the decision by the Bush administration to prioritize the drug war ahead of the war against the Taliban is of course, madness. It's time for the Brits to take a stand, and announce that either Bush's drug warriors leave Afghanistan, or Britain's troops do. Ninety days would seem to be adequate warning.”
No doubt, if the British troops did leave Afghanistan, Dick Cheney would try to spin it as a sign of progress.
Indeed, one problem for the Bush team is that its top war-on-terror spinners don't have much credibility anymore. Which, I suppose, is why it decided the other night to tap one of its few remaining credible experts – that would be policy wonk Laura Bush – and put her on national television. (Although they did play it safe by sending her to the somnolent Larry King, who has far more snap in his suspenders than in his questioning.)
At one point, the First Lady offered her assessment of why Americans seem to be so sour about the war in Iraq. She said – big surprise – that it’s the media’s fault: “(M)any parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody.”
In reality, however, “what we see on television” merely scratches the surface. The Brookings Institution, which charts the Iraq violence on a monthly basis, using the best available government statistics, lately estimates that there are 80 car bombings every day in Iraq; that there are 185 insurgent and militia attacks each day; and that (as of January) the number of people, both soldiers and civilians, killed and wounded in bombings and other attacks are now the highest yet recorded – nearly 2000 last month alone. And the statistics don’t include all the civilians killed in sectarian reprisals, those who have been dumped on the street without their heads. Those casualties, for obvious reasons, are never shown on television at all.
Contrary to Laura Bush’s assertion, the TV coverage has actually been kind to the Bush administration. Rather than showing too much, it has actually shown too little of the realities on the ground that are undercutting America’s overall effectiveness in the war on terror.
Americans get the true picture anyway; in the latest ABC-Washington Post-ABC News poll, 52 percent say they trust the Democratic Congress to take the lead in the war on terror, while only 39 percent prefer Bush. RealClearPolitics blogger Tom Bevan puts it best: "(I)f someone had told you that, five and a half years after September 11, the Republican President who shepherded America through the worst terrorist attack in her history would be running 13 points behind Democrats in Congress on the question of who can better handle the war on terror, you probably would have thought that to be very unlikely, if not a bit nuts."
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Joe Lieberman's titillation routine
Here we go again, with more breathless reporting on Joe Lieberman’s perpetual tease.
Not since Paris Hilton has there been a media figure who draws more attention for doing nothing. Barely a week passes without Lieberman flashing a little thigh (politically speaking), and hinting (in sorrow, of course) that if his Senate Democratic colleagues fail to bend to his will and support the Republican president’s demonstrably ruinous mission in Iraq, he might just decide to retaliate by partying forevermore with the GOP. And by doing so, he would presumably shift power in the closely-divided Senate over to the Republicans (which is inaccurate, although a lot of media outlets don’t seem to know this). Yet he always qualifies the defection threat by saying that he’s probably not serious – thereby clearing the decks for the next tease cycle.
And media people keep falling for his pitch. Time magazine, in its new March 5 issue, reports on Lieberman’s GOP flirtation, then calls it “a remote possibility.” The Washington website Politico.com brought it up last week, quoting Lieberman as saying that Democratic efforts to restrict President Bush’s war funding might induce him, or maybe not, to join forces with the Bush enablers; as he put it, “I hope we don’t get to that point. That’s all I will say on it today. That would hurt.” (Note how he plays the sorrow card.)
And the perpetual tease, naturally, is ongoing grist for those in the conservative media who would love to see him defect – notably The Drudge Report, which gave ample attention to the Politico story, and Brit Hume on Fox News, who announced last week that “there are signs tonight that Senate Joe Lieberman might reconsider his decision to remain a Democrat” - a move, Hume erroneously added, that would “give control of the chamber back to the Republicans.”
Lieberman has been playing this game since last November, when he won re-election as an independent, having been spurned by Connecticut Democratic voters in a summer primary. What’s striking is that media people keep reporting his threat without challenging him to explain how he can possibly square his threat with the promises he made to the people of Connecticut in 2006. One day after he won re-election, he stated with Shermanesque certitude that he would remain a Democrat (“When I give my word, I stick to it”), and that it was a waste of time to speculate on whether he would ever change his mind (it’s “a closed issue”). On the other hand, the tease began four days later, when he showed up on Meet the Press and said, in response to a question as to whether he might switch to the GOP some day, “I’m not ruling it out, but I hope I don’t get to that point.”
So why is he constantly being rewarded with the media attention that he craves (a common senatorial character trait)? In part, it’s because of the flawed perception that he can shift power in the chamber merely by shifting his party allegiance. Politico.com said that Lieberman’s “extraordinary move…would flip control of the Senate.” Even CongressDaily, a respected non-partisan report, said the other day that Lieberman switch “would swing the Senate back to GOP control.” Yet the truth is actually far more complicated.
When the Senate organized itself last month, in the wake of the Democratic takeover, it enacted rules (which the Republicans did not contest) that basically give the Democrats control of the chamber and its committee chairmanships until January 2009 - even if the GOP somehow winds up with more seats in the interim. It’s true that the Senate went Democratic back in 2001 when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords left the GOP, but the organizing rules at the time were different. Those rules contained a “kick-out clause,” which decreed that Senate power would shift if the minority party became the majority. Yet there is no such “kick-out clause” in effect today, because the Republicans last month didn’t insist on one. If Lieberman did switch sides, the Republicans could still argue that they deserved to take control, but in all likelihood a lengthy parliamentary fight would ensue, with the Democrats defending the rules as enacted, and blocking the GOP via filibuster.
Hey, I told you that the reality was complicated. And that’s just one reason why Lieberman’s ongoing act is probably a crock. Here are a few more:
Iraq aside, he is a bad fit for the Republicans. Over the past two months, he reportedly has voted with the Democrats 90 percent of the time, a statistic that roughly mirrors his generally posture over the years. He stuck with the Senate Democrats, for instance, during passage of the minimum-wage hike – twice providing the margin of victory as Republicans sought to amend the hike. He even proposed a new tax (a “war on terror tax”), and, as we know, a tax-hiker in the GOP is about as likely as Jack Bauer keynoting an ACLU convention.
So if Lieberman actually acted on his tease, he would feel more isolated than ever. His convictions on domestic issues (“I’ll die a Democrat,” he declared last summer) would be out of sync with those of his colleagues – while his ex-colleagues would be liberated from their current impulse to indulge him.
And, more importantly, this would be a lousy time to sign on with the GOP. Lieberman, who is an instinctive political animal beneath his public sanctimony, surely understands that 2008 looms as a bad year for the Republicans. There is every indication that the Democrats could add new Senate seats, largely because swing voters are increasingly fed up with the war that Lieberman continues to promote ("we've got a totally new plan for how to succeed in Iraq"). Indeed, of the seven Senate seats thought to be most competitive next year, five (in Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Oregon) are currently held by Republicans.
The last thing that Lieberman would want is to be relegated to six long years of minority status. Remember, this is a guy who today would be a heartbeat away from the presidency, if not for hanging chads, a butterfly ballot, and a 5-4 Supreme Court. A guy like that sees himself as a player. Which is why his ongoing play for attention should be treated with the skepticism it deserves.
-------
I wrote yesterday about the latest symptoms of Democratic incoherence and inertia on the Iraq issue. Well, this is exactly what I was talking about: splits between Senate liberals and moderates, and no debate over Iraq for two more weeks. If they keep this up, Lieberman will get his wish. In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, he urged Democrats to stay silent until the summer.
Not since Paris Hilton has there been a media figure who draws more attention for doing nothing. Barely a week passes without Lieberman flashing a little thigh (politically speaking), and hinting (in sorrow, of course) that if his Senate Democratic colleagues fail to bend to his will and support the Republican president’s demonstrably ruinous mission in Iraq, he might just decide to retaliate by partying forevermore with the GOP. And by doing so, he would presumably shift power in the closely-divided Senate over to the Republicans (which is inaccurate, although a lot of media outlets don’t seem to know this). Yet he always qualifies the defection threat by saying that he’s probably not serious – thereby clearing the decks for the next tease cycle.
And media people keep falling for his pitch. Time magazine, in its new March 5 issue, reports on Lieberman’s GOP flirtation, then calls it “a remote possibility.” The Washington website Politico.com brought it up last week, quoting Lieberman as saying that Democratic efforts to restrict President Bush’s war funding might induce him, or maybe not, to join forces with the Bush enablers; as he put it, “I hope we don’t get to that point. That’s all I will say on it today. That would hurt.” (Note how he plays the sorrow card.)
And the perpetual tease, naturally, is ongoing grist for those in the conservative media who would love to see him defect – notably The Drudge Report, which gave ample attention to the Politico story, and Brit Hume on Fox News, who announced last week that “there are signs tonight that Senate Joe Lieberman might reconsider his decision to remain a Democrat” - a move, Hume erroneously added, that would “give control of the chamber back to the Republicans.”
Lieberman has been playing this game since last November, when he won re-election as an independent, having been spurned by Connecticut Democratic voters in a summer primary. What’s striking is that media people keep reporting his threat without challenging him to explain how he can possibly square his threat with the promises he made to the people of Connecticut in 2006. One day after he won re-election, he stated with Shermanesque certitude that he would remain a Democrat (“When I give my word, I stick to it”), and that it was a waste of time to speculate on whether he would ever change his mind (it’s “a closed issue”). On the other hand, the tease began four days later, when he showed up on Meet the Press and said, in response to a question as to whether he might switch to the GOP some day, “I’m not ruling it out, but I hope I don’t get to that point.”
So why is he constantly being rewarded with the media attention that he craves (a common senatorial character trait)? In part, it’s because of the flawed perception that he can shift power in the chamber merely by shifting his party allegiance. Politico.com said that Lieberman’s “extraordinary move…would flip control of the Senate.” Even CongressDaily, a respected non-partisan report, said the other day that Lieberman switch “would swing the Senate back to GOP control.” Yet the truth is actually far more complicated.
When the Senate organized itself last month, in the wake of the Democratic takeover, it enacted rules (which the Republicans did not contest) that basically give the Democrats control of the chamber and its committee chairmanships until January 2009 - even if the GOP somehow winds up with more seats in the interim. It’s true that the Senate went Democratic back in 2001 when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords left the GOP, but the organizing rules at the time were different. Those rules contained a “kick-out clause,” which decreed that Senate power would shift if the minority party became the majority. Yet there is no such “kick-out clause” in effect today, because the Republicans last month didn’t insist on one. If Lieberman did switch sides, the Republicans could still argue that they deserved to take control, but in all likelihood a lengthy parliamentary fight would ensue, with the Democrats defending the rules as enacted, and blocking the GOP via filibuster.
Hey, I told you that the reality was complicated. And that’s just one reason why Lieberman’s ongoing act is probably a crock. Here are a few more:
Iraq aside, he is a bad fit for the Republicans. Over the past two months, he reportedly has voted with the Democrats 90 percent of the time, a statistic that roughly mirrors his generally posture over the years. He stuck with the Senate Democrats, for instance, during passage of the minimum-wage hike – twice providing the margin of victory as Republicans sought to amend the hike. He even proposed a new tax (a “war on terror tax”), and, as we know, a tax-hiker in the GOP is about as likely as Jack Bauer keynoting an ACLU convention.
So if Lieberman actually acted on his tease, he would feel more isolated than ever. His convictions on domestic issues (“I’ll die a Democrat,” he declared last summer) would be out of sync with those of his colleagues – while his ex-colleagues would be liberated from their current impulse to indulge him.
And, more importantly, this would be a lousy time to sign on with the GOP. Lieberman, who is an instinctive political animal beneath his public sanctimony, surely understands that 2008 looms as a bad year for the Republicans. There is every indication that the Democrats could add new Senate seats, largely because swing voters are increasingly fed up with the war that Lieberman continues to promote ("we've got a totally new plan for how to succeed in Iraq"). Indeed, of the seven Senate seats thought to be most competitive next year, five (in Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Oregon) are currently held by Republicans.
The last thing that Lieberman would want is to be relegated to six long years of minority status. Remember, this is a guy who today would be a heartbeat away from the presidency, if not for hanging chads, a butterfly ballot, and a 5-4 Supreme Court. A guy like that sees himself as a player. Which is why his ongoing play for attention should be treated with the skepticism it deserves.
-------
I wrote yesterday about the latest symptoms of Democratic incoherence and inertia on the Iraq issue. Well, this is exactly what I was talking about: splits between Senate liberals and moderates, and no debate over Iraq for two more weeks. If they keep this up, Lieberman will get his wish. In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, he urged Democrats to stay silent until the summer.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Democrats "couldn't find a unified message if it was tattooed on their butts"
The Democrats appear to have a special talent for incoherence. Here they are, holding the reins of power in both congressional chambers, and enjoying solid majority support from the American people, yet apparently they still don’t have a clue how to best confront an unpopular president who is waging a disastrous and unpopular war.
Leave aside the '08 Democratic presidential contenders (the top three have three different plans), and come with me to Capitol Hill. Congress is back in session this week, and the Democrats, yet again, have gone back to the drawing board in search of a strategy that will unite its various factions while also perhaps attracting enough Republicans to give it bipartisan cover. The problem is, the Democratic Senate has one new idea what to do (although the Senate idea isn’t popular among GOP war skeptics), the Democratic House has another idea what to do (although the House idea is already considered dead on arrival), and the party’s antiwar left is still at odds with the party’s moderates over what to do. Or vice versa.
Somehow I am reminded of the Democratic incoherence that prevailed in the autumn of 2002, when President Bush was hyping the specious case for war. Back then, we had Democratic doves who said that war with Saddam Hussein would be madness, and that we should stick with containment and weapons inspections; we had outright Democratic hawks who said we should back Bush and take Hussein out; we had moderate hawks (or were they moderate doves?) who said it was time to get Hussein, but only if the United Nations said so, or only if we could be assured that the broader war against al Qaeda wouldn’t suffer, or only if Bush offered proof of a Hussein-al-Qaeda link, or maybe we should scrap “regime change" and just destroy Hussein's most lethal weapons…
Seriously, you needed a scorecard. I think Charlie Cook, the nonpartisan Washington analyst nailed the Democrats best that autumn when he told me, “They couldn’t find a unified message if it was tattooed on their butts.”
Not much has changed. The current Democratic Senate, which couldn’t get enough votes even to debate a toothless anti-escalation resolution, is now floating the idea of amending the 2002 war authorization - narrowing the combat mission, decreeing that our soldiers limit themselves to the training of Iraqi forces and to counterterrorism thrusts against al Qaeda…with the ultimate objective of withdrawing all combat forces within 13 months. The political problem is, only a couple Republicans are reportedly prepared to vote for this idea, which means that it’ll never get out of the Senate anyway.
Meanwhile, the House Democrats haven’t looked at that idea, not yet anyway, because lately they have been too busy shoveling dirt on the idea that they were ballyhooing barely a week ago: the John Murtha plan to hamper war funding. It sounded daring when Speaker Pelosi was talking it up. Murtha wanted to bar new troops from going to Iraq unless they could first meet tough readiness and equipment standards; he wanted to attach these conditions to Bush’s new $100-billion war money request. It sounded like a good way for Democratic war critics to show that they were “for” the troops.
The problem was Murtha himself; 11 days ago, he unveiled his plan on the antiwar MoveCongress.org website by saying that his plan “will limit the options of the president” – a statement that didn’t sit well with moderate Democrats from swing districts who are uncomfortable with anything that sounds like congressional micromanagement in time of war. (More on them in a moment.) Meanwhile, the liberal antiwar House Democrats (members of the Out of Iraq Caucus) don’t think that Murtha’s idea goes far enough, anyway.
Note how the Republicans deal with all this. Supposedly they are the folks playing defense, but you would never know it. They just spent an entire week banging away at the Democrats with one repetitive buzz phrase: the argument that the Murtha plan was a “slow-bleed” strategy. And they didn’t even invent that slogan; they just borrowed it from a story that appeared on politico.com, the new Washington website, and made it their own. It’s perfectly visceral for their purposes, because it conjurs the image of hampered U.S. troops, their life blood inexorably draining away.
So the Republicans have taken this slogan, and they have used it to dramatize the one Iraq issue that breaks their way in the polls. Almost every Iraq indicator favors the Democrats; as the latest AP-Ipsos and Gallup surveys demonstrate, a landslide majority of Americans believe (among other things) that the war was a mistake, that it’s right to criticize the war, that his troop escalation idea is wrong, that the troop hike will fail to work, and that Congress should establish a pullout timetable. But when asked whether Congress should cut off war money, or even money for the additional troops, landslide majorities say no.
The GOP counter-punchers have seized on that one theme, and they have spooked the majority party into a retreat. The Democrats party won’t touch the Murtha plan now, or anything else (such as a nonbinding Senate resolution, pitched by the Republicans) that would force the Democrats to go on record as “for” or “against” troop money cutoffs.
Carl Levin, one of the Senate Democrats who is pushing the idea of amending the ’02 war authorization, said candidly on Meet the Press yesterday that a lot of Democrats would never vote to cut off the money- because they view it as a political loser: “The president would then use the defeat of a cut-off-the-funding resolution as a way of supporting his (war) policy. So we’d be playing right into the hands of the president and his policymakers.” (Actually, Levin got off easy, because Tim Russert never bothered to ask him what he thought about Murtha’s specific idea.)
Right now, the heart of the Democrats’ problem (besides the fact that even a weakened wartime president has a lot of political weapons, and besides the fact that the Republicans are still more effective at playing hardball) is that their diversity begets disunity.
Most of the antiwar liberals in House, the people typically pushing for money cutoffs and troop withdrawal, occupy safe seats in deeply-blue districts. But the newest House Democrats – the people typically wary of money cutoffs and troop withdrawals – are moderates who were elected last November in swing and red districts that normally favor Republicans. These lawmakers, along with longer-serving southern and western Democrats from conservative districts, clearly feel that they can’t afford to back anything perceived as undercutting the troops.
And the House Democratic strategists know this. Looking ahead to 2008, for instance, the strategists have already drawn up a list of 29 Democratic lawmakers who will need priority assistance in their re-election bids. Most are freshmen, but, more importantly, 22 of the 29 lawmakers hail from districts that supported Bush over John Kerry in the ’04 presidential race. At least two of them, for instance, have already gone public opposing any idea that would cut off the war money.
So don’t hold your breath this week that the Democrats will get their act together, not when so few routes to unity seem available. And if they can't deal with Iraq, what will they do if Bush ups the ante and opts for direct confrontation with Iran (the country that is now a greater threat, thanks to his misadventures in Iraq)?
Leave aside the '08 Democratic presidential contenders (the top three have three different plans), and come with me to Capitol Hill. Congress is back in session this week, and the Democrats, yet again, have gone back to the drawing board in search of a strategy that will unite its various factions while also perhaps attracting enough Republicans to give it bipartisan cover. The problem is, the Democratic Senate has one new idea what to do (although the Senate idea isn’t popular among GOP war skeptics), the Democratic House has another idea what to do (although the House idea is already considered dead on arrival), and the party’s antiwar left is still at odds with the party’s moderates over what to do. Or vice versa.
Somehow I am reminded of the Democratic incoherence that prevailed in the autumn of 2002, when President Bush was hyping the specious case for war. Back then, we had Democratic doves who said that war with Saddam Hussein would be madness, and that we should stick with containment and weapons inspections; we had outright Democratic hawks who said we should back Bush and take Hussein out; we had moderate hawks (or were they moderate doves?) who said it was time to get Hussein, but only if the United Nations said so, or only if we could be assured that the broader war against al Qaeda wouldn’t suffer, or only if Bush offered proof of a Hussein-al-Qaeda link, or maybe we should scrap “regime change" and just destroy Hussein's most lethal weapons…
Seriously, you needed a scorecard. I think Charlie Cook, the nonpartisan Washington analyst nailed the Democrats best that autumn when he told me, “They couldn’t find a unified message if it was tattooed on their butts.”
Not much has changed. The current Democratic Senate, which couldn’t get enough votes even to debate a toothless anti-escalation resolution, is now floating the idea of amending the 2002 war authorization - narrowing the combat mission, decreeing that our soldiers limit themselves to the training of Iraqi forces and to counterterrorism thrusts against al Qaeda…with the ultimate objective of withdrawing all combat forces within 13 months. The political problem is, only a couple Republicans are reportedly prepared to vote for this idea, which means that it’ll never get out of the Senate anyway.
Meanwhile, the House Democrats haven’t looked at that idea, not yet anyway, because lately they have been too busy shoveling dirt on the idea that they were ballyhooing barely a week ago: the John Murtha plan to hamper war funding. It sounded daring when Speaker Pelosi was talking it up. Murtha wanted to bar new troops from going to Iraq unless they could first meet tough readiness and equipment standards; he wanted to attach these conditions to Bush’s new $100-billion war money request. It sounded like a good way for Democratic war critics to show that they were “for” the troops.
The problem was Murtha himself; 11 days ago, he unveiled his plan on the antiwar MoveCongress.org website by saying that his plan “will limit the options of the president” – a statement that didn’t sit well with moderate Democrats from swing districts who are uncomfortable with anything that sounds like congressional micromanagement in time of war. (More on them in a moment.) Meanwhile, the liberal antiwar House Democrats (members of the Out of Iraq Caucus) don’t think that Murtha’s idea goes far enough, anyway.
Note how the Republicans deal with all this. Supposedly they are the folks playing defense, but you would never know it. They just spent an entire week banging away at the Democrats with one repetitive buzz phrase: the argument that the Murtha plan was a “slow-bleed” strategy. And they didn’t even invent that slogan; they just borrowed it from a story that appeared on politico.com, the new Washington website, and made it their own. It’s perfectly visceral for their purposes, because it conjurs the image of hampered U.S. troops, their life blood inexorably draining away.
So the Republicans have taken this slogan, and they have used it to dramatize the one Iraq issue that breaks their way in the polls. Almost every Iraq indicator favors the Democrats; as the latest AP-Ipsos and Gallup surveys demonstrate, a landslide majority of Americans believe (among other things) that the war was a mistake, that it’s right to criticize the war, that his troop escalation idea is wrong, that the troop hike will fail to work, and that Congress should establish a pullout timetable. But when asked whether Congress should cut off war money, or even money for the additional troops, landslide majorities say no.
The GOP counter-punchers have seized on that one theme, and they have spooked the majority party into a retreat. The Democrats party won’t touch the Murtha plan now, or anything else (such as a nonbinding Senate resolution, pitched by the Republicans) that would force the Democrats to go on record as “for” or “against” troop money cutoffs.
Carl Levin, one of the Senate Democrats who is pushing the idea of amending the ’02 war authorization, said candidly on Meet the Press yesterday that a lot of Democrats would never vote to cut off the money- because they view it as a political loser: “The president would then use the defeat of a cut-off-the-funding resolution as a way of supporting his (war) policy. So we’d be playing right into the hands of the president and his policymakers.” (Actually, Levin got off easy, because Tim Russert never bothered to ask him what he thought about Murtha’s specific idea.)
Right now, the heart of the Democrats’ problem (besides the fact that even a weakened wartime president has a lot of political weapons, and besides the fact that the Republicans are still more effective at playing hardball) is that their diversity begets disunity.
Most of the antiwar liberals in House, the people typically pushing for money cutoffs and troop withdrawal, occupy safe seats in deeply-blue districts. But the newest House Democrats – the people typically wary of money cutoffs and troop withdrawals – are moderates who were elected last November in swing and red districts that normally favor Republicans. These lawmakers, along with longer-serving southern and western Democrats from conservative districts, clearly feel that they can’t afford to back anything perceived as undercutting the troops.
And the House Democratic strategists know this. Looking ahead to 2008, for instance, the strategists have already drawn up a list of 29 Democratic lawmakers who will need priority assistance in their re-election bids. Most are freshmen, but, more importantly, 22 of the 29 lawmakers hail from districts that supported Bush over John Kerry in the ’04 presidential race. At least two of them, for instance, have already gone public opposing any idea that would cut off the war money.
So don’t hold your breath this week that the Democrats will get their act together, not when so few routes to unity seem available. And if they can't deal with Iraq, what will they do if Bush ups the ante and opts for direct confrontation with Iran (the country that is now a greater threat, thanks to his misadventures in Iraq)?
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