During the past two weeks, Republicans have been feeling a tad panicked, as if they were being propelled down a white-water river, careening straight for the waterfall without a raft or a paddle. Which is why they’re now clinging to the North Korea nuclear blast story as if it was the overhanging tree branch that could save them from the final plummet on election day.
Iraq is a mess, the Mark “Maf54” Foley scandal is an embarrassment (the latest CBS-New York Times poll says that the Democrats have become the preferred party of moral values), and the economy isn’t paying the GOP any political dividends…so here, courtesy of dictator Kim Jong Il, is perhaps the October development that will finally cause voting Americans to spurn those purportedly weak Democrats and instead take refuge beneath the Republicans’ dependable national security umbrella.
That’s the talk today in conservative circles. A poster on the redstate.com website asks hopefully, “Has North Korea just blown up the Democrats' best chance to capture the House?” Republicans, sensing that the nuclear story might boost their imperiled image as the tough national security party, are now combing through the voting records of Democratic candidates, to see who might be painted as soft on the Korean threat; sure enough, they’re already assailing Maryland senatorial candidate Ben Cardin for having voted, as a member of the House, to cut spending for a missile defense system. And they might find it useful that Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker in waiting, voted against the establishment of such a system; so did congressman Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senatorial candidate in winnable Ohio.
Meanwhile, the commentator Rich Lowry thinks the North Korean test is vivid proof that voters shouldn’t trust the Democrats with their lives: “Ned Lamont, the liberal hero who vanquished Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman in a Democratic primary in August, declared a few months ago that our nation is stronger when we ‘negotiate with our enemies.’ He thus neatly summarized post-9/11 Democratic foreign-policy thought in four words. The criminal regime of North Korea…has now issued a rejoinder to this foreign-policy axiom that measured 4.2 on the Richter scale.”
And conservative blogger and political analyst Tom Bevan puts it bluntly: “By almost any standard, the testing of a nuclear bomb by a rogue regime is a pretty significant event. It is also, one would hope, worthy of a great deal of attention and a far more serious debate than the one we've been having for the last ten days over a few pervy IMs from a gay Congressman. Obviously, with only 30 days or so left to the election, this represents a pretty big, and perhaps final opportunity for Republicans to put the focus back on national security….Republicans will be more than happy to sling mud back and forth and refight the issue of whose to blame over North Korea because it keeps the focus off Mark Foley and off Iraq. It may not be exactly the fight the GOP wanted to have for the final four weeks of the midterm election, but it will certainly do. Beggars, after all, can't be choosers.”
So the question is whether the North Korea story really has the potential to send the Republicans soaring northward in the polls. Will voters, perhaps sensing a threat to their safety, quickly forget their frustrations with the governing party and seek shelter within the Republicans’ protective embrace? Or will the boom above a faraway mountain turn out to be a bust for the GOP?
One political development is already evident: the Democrats have not gone into their traditional defense crouch. Quite the contrary, this time. They are confident that they can paint this event as a byproduct of the Bush misadventure in Iraq.
Rather than cede the dialogue to the GOP, they clearly feel that they can fight back on solid ground. It was noteworthy, in today’s New York Times, that the key Democratic talking point was most prominently articulated by Sam Nunn, the former Georgia senator who in his day was respected by both parties as a credibly hawkish policymaker. In just a few sentences, he argued that the North Korean test is proof of President Bush’s failure to make America safer: “What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the ‘axis of evil.’ We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that.”
Other Democrats are speaking in similar terms; Democratic senatorial candidate Bob Menendez, who is trying to shrug off scandal allegations and hang on to his New Jersey seat, put out a statement late yesterday, contending that the North Korean test “illustrates just how much the Bush administration’s incompetence has endangered our nation. We invaded Iraq, the country that didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and ignored Iran and North Korea, the two that did.”
The GOP is already working to place much of the blame on Bill Clinton, by contending that his administration allowed the North Korean despot to run wild. They do have some raw material to work with: Clinton talked directly with the renegades, and those talks yielded a pact that the North Koreas soon began to cheat on, by setting up a secret uranium-enrichment program. The political argument here is that, if voters elect Democrats, they would choose to negotiate directly with enemies who will merely take advantage.
The potential downside to that argument, however, is that voters – already in a foul mood about the incumbent party – might not be so willing to re-debate the 1990s, not when they have six Bush years in the foreground. The Bush/GOP foreign policy record is on the ballot this year, not Clinton’s. And even if the issue is about whether it’s a sign of softness to talk directly with enemies, there are plenty of Republicans and intelligence experts who believe that Bush has been wrong not to talk to the North Koreans.
This past Sunday on ABC, Republican James Baker – who served the senior George Bush as secretary of state and is currently reviewing Iraq policy at the current president’s request – articulated his own philosophy: “I believe in talking to your enemies. It’s got to be hard-nosed, it’s got to be determined. You don’t give away anything, but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”
And career CIA official Donald Gregg, who served the senior Bush as a national security advisor and as ambassador to South Korea, made these scathing comments yesterday: “Why won't the Bush administration talk bilaterally and substantively with NK, as the Brits (and eventually the U.S.) did with Libya? Because the Bush administration sees diplomacy as something to be engaged in with another country as a reward for that country's good behavior. They seem not to see diplomacy as a tool to be used with antagonistic countries or parties, that might bring about an improvement in the behavior of such entities, and a resolution to the issues that trouble us. Thus we do not talk to Iran, Syria, Hezbollah or North Korea. We only talk to our friends - a huge mistake.”
With people like Baker and Gregg openly rebuking the administration, it's no surprise that the press is asking the White House whether it thinks it could have done more to halt or reverse the North Korean nuclear program, especially since Bush had declared three years ago that such weaponry would not be tolerated. That very question came up today. But Bush spokesman Tony Snow replied, "It's a silly question." When a reporter objected and said that, in fact, it was "a fair question," Snow explained that "you need to give presidents the benefit of the doubt when national security is involved."
You need to give presidents the benefit of the doubt...That was certainly an interesting remark, given the fact that, at 2:21 this afternoon, the Republican National Committee sent out an email with this subhead: "Clinton administration made a deal with North Korea and failed."
Defenders of the current President Bush will, of course, dismiss Baker and Gregg as anachronisms; at the very least, however, these remarks hint at disunity within the GOP camp, and undercut the notion that the North Korean test can be an election-eve boon to ailing Republicans. Iraq is a glaring and easily graspable vulnerability; and the nuances of Far East diplomacy, past and present, are too complex for the casual voter – unlike the nuances of the Foley scandal.
As one disconsolate conservative blogger remarks on redstate.com, “Even after this (North Korean) event, regardless of the coverage it generates, there will still be more people in the United States who can identify Maf54 and locate him on a map than can do the same for Kim Jong-Il.”
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Monday, October 09, 2006
The GOP's "Hey, how about that awesome Dow?" defense
As part of their ongoing attempts to defuse the Mark Foley scandal, the Republicans have now come up with another talking point, another strategy designed to change the subject from their own potential culpability. In essence, it can be called the “Hey, how about that awesome Dow?” defense.
As I mentioned here last Thursday, the Republicans, mindful that their dominance of Congress is imperiled with just four weeks remaining in the ’06 congressional elections, have been trying out all kinds of defenses. On the Sunday shows yesterday, for example, Florida congressman Adam Putnam, the number-five guy in the House GOP hierarchy, brought up the “Yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton?” defense; while under fire on ABC’s This Week, he charged that the other two people seated at the interview table – Democratic congressman Rahm Emanuel and host George Stephanopolous, had once worked for Clinton and had “covered up” for him. (Stephanopolous quickly pointed out that he had left Clinton’s employ two years before the Lewinsky scandal.)
And Putnam tried another tack, which can be called the “When trapped, simply make stuff up” defense. While seeking to defend the embattled House GOP leadership, he said this about the events of Friday, Sept. 29: “Within hours of the explicit email coming to light, (the Speaker’s office) demanded Foley’s resignation.” But this attempt to paint Dennis Hastert as a man in charge, a talking point that was also floated late last week by GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, does not square with factual reality. When ABC News was preparing to break the story that day, it called Foley’s office in the morning with the details. An hour later, Foley called back and said he was quitting Congress. House Speaker Dennis Hastert played no role in the decision – and said so himself last Monday: “When (the instant messages) were released, Congressman Foley resigned. And I’m glad he did. If he had not, I would have demanded his expulsion from the House of Representatives.”
So that brings us to the Dow defense.
On paper, this would appear to be a potent way to change the subject, by arguing in essence that voters should be more focused on the money in their pocket than on the particulars of one sleazy episode. The macroeconomic indicators are healthy these days, and any incumbent party in a tight spot would try to take credit. Putnam reeled off some of the stats yesterday: plummeting gasoline prices, a low jobless rate, and “three record-breaking days for the Dow last week.” Illinois congressman Ray LaHood did the same thing over on CBS yesterday, and a trip of Republicans echoed this theme on the Sunday New York Times’ op-ed page; as former California congressman Tom Campbell contended, “The robust economy stems from actions the Republican president and Congress have taken…”
Yet, if all this is true, then why are the Republicans getting no credit from the voters for the sunny economic stats? In a Newsweek poll released yesterday, Democrats were favored over the Republicans as the party best trusted to handle the economy – by a margin of 53 to 31 percent. Other polls lately have reported similar margins. Privately, a number of Republican strategists are deeply frustrated by these findings, and their party’s apparent inability to reap political benefits. One of them asked me recently, “Can you explain it?”
It’s not so tough to explain. One could always make the argument that most voters are dismissing the sunny numbers as irrelevant to their everyday lives; after all, counter-stats show that the real wages of working Americans have stagnated during the Bush years, and that the gap between the richest and poorest Americans continues to widen. It was Henry Paulson, the Bush administration’s new Treasury secretary, who effectively undercut the Sunday show Republicans, when he said in a speech two months ago that “amid this country’s strong economic expansion, many Americans simply aren’t feeling the benefits. Their increases in wages are being eaten up by high energy prices and rising health care costs, among others.”
But the GOP’s current inability to get credit for the economy can probably be attributed to a more fundamental factor: the Bush administration’s credibility gap.
Iraq is the animating issue in the ’06 elections, and, as yesterday’s Newsweek poll pointed out, a majority of Americans now believe that the president (backed by the GOP Congress) deceived the nation into war. This climate of distrust permeates the national mood at the moment. Disenchanted voters, who feel they have been deceived, are hardly in the mood to accept as truth the GOP’s claims of effective economic stewardship – especially at a time of deep budget deficits, caused in part by a war that is costing the taxpayer $2 billion a week.
Meanwhile, the Foley scandal has managed to underscore the GOP’s credibility woes. Republican congressman Tom Davis - who has headed the House GOP’s campaign efforts in the past, and who is respected for his willingness to dump the talking points and talk straight – put his finger on the problem yesterday, during his appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation. He said simply that the Republicans can’t get any “oxygen” to talk about their preferred issues, because of “the very difficult atmospherics” of the moment.
And to truly gauge how difficult the “atmospherics” have become, consider the plight of Tom Reynolds, the Republican congressman who is helming the current House GOP campaign efforts.
An upstate New York incumbent who was widely assumed to be a cinch re-election winner, he suddenly trails his Democratic challenger by 15 points – because of his role in the Foley chronology. He says he informed Hastert about Foley last spring, but Hastert says he doesn’t remember that. And Reynolds reportedly asked Foley to run for re-election at a time when evidence about Foley’s behavior was already circulating (although he now says he can’t recall when it was that he asked Foley to run again).
Reynolds was supposed to appear on ABC yesterday, but he canceled. No surprise there. More surprising was the release of his new TV ad in his home district. Appearing on camera, he recounts his version of events, starting with last spring: “I reported what I had been told to the Speaker of the House….I trusted that others had investigated.”
Now there’s a political commercial that you normally don’t see: In a bid to save his own skin, an incumbent from the governing party is attacking the leader of his own party as untrustworthy.
With that kind of material out on the airwaves, is it any wonder why the Republicans are having problems changing the subject to the economy?
-------
Will social and religious conservative voters stay home on election day and tip the balance to the Democrats? Some polls say yes; The New York Times today isn't so sure. Either way, and no matter who wins this autumn, tensions will persist within the fragile Republican conservative coalition, at least according to one print column that ran Sunday. That would be mine.
As I mentioned here last Thursday, the Republicans, mindful that their dominance of Congress is imperiled with just four weeks remaining in the ’06 congressional elections, have been trying out all kinds of defenses. On the Sunday shows yesterday, for example, Florida congressman Adam Putnam, the number-five guy in the House GOP hierarchy, brought up the “Yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton?” defense; while under fire on ABC’s This Week, he charged that the other two people seated at the interview table – Democratic congressman Rahm Emanuel and host George Stephanopolous, had once worked for Clinton and had “covered up” for him. (Stephanopolous quickly pointed out that he had left Clinton’s employ two years before the Lewinsky scandal.)
And Putnam tried another tack, which can be called the “When trapped, simply make stuff up” defense. While seeking to defend the embattled House GOP leadership, he said this about the events of Friday, Sept. 29: “Within hours of the explicit email coming to light, (the Speaker’s office) demanded Foley’s resignation.” But this attempt to paint Dennis Hastert as a man in charge, a talking point that was also floated late last week by GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, does not square with factual reality. When ABC News was preparing to break the story that day, it called Foley’s office in the morning with the details. An hour later, Foley called back and said he was quitting Congress. House Speaker Dennis Hastert played no role in the decision – and said so himself last Monday: “When (the instant messages) were released, Congressman Foley resigned. And I’m glad he did. If he had not, I would have demanded his expulsion from the House of Representatives.”
So that brings us to the Dow defense.
On paper, this would appear to be a potent way to change the subject, by arguing in essence that voters should be more focused on the money in their pocket than on the particulars of one sleazy episode. The macroeconomic indicators are healthy these days, and any incumbent party in a tight spot would try to take credit. Putnam reeled off some of the stats yesterday: plummeting gasoline prices, a low jobless rate, and “three record-breaking days for the Dow last week.” Illinois congressman Ray LaHood did the same thing over on CBS yesterday, and a trip of Republicans echoed this theme on the Sunday New York Times’ op-ed page; as former California congressman Tom Campbell contended, “The robust economy stems from actions the Republican president and Congress have taken…”
Yet, if all this is true, then why are the Republicans getting no credit from the voters for the sunny economic stats? In a Newsweek poll released yesterday, Democrats were favored over the Republicans as the party best trusted to handle the economy – by a margin of 53 to 31 percent. Other polls lately have reported similar margins. Privately, a number of Republican strategists are deeply frustrated by these findings, and their party’s apparent inability to reap political benefits. One of them asked me recently, “Can you explain it?”
It’s not so tough to explain. One could always make the argument that most voters are dismissing the sunny numbers as irrelevant to their everyday lives; after all, counter-stats show that the real wages of working Americans have stagnated during the Bush years, and that the gap between the richest and poorest Americans continues to widen. It was Henry Paulson, the Bush administration’s new Treasury secretary, who effectively undercut the Sunday show Republicans, when he said in a speech two months ago that “amid this country’s strong economic expansion, many Americans simply aren’t feeling the benefits. Their increases in wages are being eaten up by high energy prices and rising health care costs, among others.”
But the GOP’s current inability to get credit for the economy can probably be attributed to a more fundamental factor: the Bush administration’s credibility gap.
Iraq is the animating issue in the ’06 elections, and, as yesterday’s Newsweek poll pointed out, a majority of Americans now believe that the president (backed by the GOP Congress) deceived the nation into war. This climate of distrust permeates the national mood at the moment. Disenchanted voters, who feel they have been deceived, are hardly in the mood to accept as truth the GOP’s claims of effective economic stewardship – especially at a time of deep budget deficits, caused in part by a war that is costing the taxpayer $2 billion a week.
Meanwhile, the Foley scandal has managed to underscore the GOP’s credibility woes. Republican congressman Tom Davis - who has headed the House GOP’s campaign efforts in the past, and who is respected for his willingness to dump the talking points and talk straight – put his finger on the problem yesterday, during his appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation. He said simply that the Republicans can’t get any “oxygen” to talk about their preferred issues, because of “the very difficult atmospherics” of the moment.
And to truly gauge how difficult the “atmospherics” have become, consider the plight of Tom Reynolds, the Republican congressman who is helming the current House GOP campaign efforts.
An upstate New York incumbent who was widely assumed to be a cinch re-election winner, he suddenly trails his Democratic challenger by 15 points – because of his role in the Foley chronology. He says he informed Hastert about Foley last spring, but Hastert says he doesn’t remember that. And Reynolds reportedly asked Foley to run for re-election at a time when evidence about Foley’s behavior was already circulating (although he now says he can’t recall when it was that he asked Foley to run again).
Reynolds was supposed to appear on ABC yesterday, but he canceled. No surprise there. More surprising was the release of his new TV ad in his home district. Appearing on camera, he recounts his version of events, starting with last spring: “I reported what I had been told to the Speaker of the House….I trusted that others had investigated.”
Now there’s a political commercial that you normally don’t see: In a bid to save his own skin, an incumbent from the governing party is attacking the leader of his own party as untrustworthy.
With that kind of material out on the airwaves, is it any wonder why the Republicans are having problems changing the subject to the economy?
-------
Will social and religious conservative voters stay home on election day and tip the balance to the Democrats? Some polls say yes; The New York Times today isn't so sure. Either way, and no matter who wins this autumn, tensions will persist within the fragile Republican conservative coalition, at least according to one print column that ran Sunday. That would be mine.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Foley-watchers, remember that thing overseas? Costs us $2 billion a week? Oh, yeah
The Mark Foley firestorm has diverted attention this week away from a fairly important story with major political implications. If memory serves, it’s that ongoing matter in Iraq.
While Americans were busy reading Foley’s exchanges with underage boys (including the kid who interrupted the congressman’s reverie to say that his mom was yelling for him), 13 American soldiers were killed over a span of three days, the worst three-day mark since the war began.
And while we were all riveted on what House Speaker Dennis Hastert knew and when he knew it or should have known it, the Bob Woodward book about the struggling Bush war team picked up a major endorsement from someone with no links to liberals or George Soros or “Defeatocrats.” This would be Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan and Bush speechwriter.
She writes today on the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page that “it is a good book. It may be a great one. It is serious, densely, even exhaustively, reported, and a real contribution to history in that it gives history what it most requires, first-person testimony.” She endorses the book’s depiction of President Bush as a “vain and intensely limited man,” accepts its reportage that Bush and his people are mired in “a state of unknowingness” about factual reality in Iraq, and then she twists the knife by contending that the administration hawks have screwed things up in part because none of them have actually served in war:
“I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is, what building a foreign nation entails.”
It should also be noted today that, while we were all watching the Foley affair, Americans were telling the pollsters that the president’s 9/11 anniversary bounce was over. In the latest Associated Press-IPSOS survey, likely voters said (by 44 to 42 percent) that they now trust Democrats over Republicans to fight terrorism effectively, and that (by 45 to 43 percent) they trust the Democrats to more effectively protect the country. And that sentiment was measured before Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia returned from Iraq and warned yesterday that Congress may need to buck Bush and forge a solution of its own – in his words, make “bold decisions” after weighing all options - if the violence is not reversed within the next 60 to 90 days. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Navy secretary under Richard Nixon, is a barometer of the increasingly restive Republican sentiment.
All this demonstrates why the GOP is hamstrung at the moment. It can’t change the subject from Foley to Iraq, for obvious reasons. And it can’t change the subject from Iraq to the domestic realm, because the Foley scandal is dominant there. And if it tries to dismiss the Foley scandal as a liberal/Democratic/gay/Soros conspiracy, there are now plenty of prominent conservative voices who recognize the GOP leaders’ culpability – and perceive the serious political dangers, on the eve of the ’06 elections.
Consider Myrna Blyth, an author who considers herself a scourge of liberalism. She writes today on the National Review website that the “security moms” of 2004, the married women with children who voted for President Bush, have become the outraged moms of 2006:
“What were those guys thinking? That is what every woman I’ve spoken to has said about the Foley mess…Unlike the discussions about the war, this is a very simple story to understand. Most of us don’t know what to do about Iraq or Iran or North Korea. There can be plenty of debate about how to handle these enormous challenges. But we do know how we should act if we were told about someone sending inappropriate messages to a teenager and we were in a position to do something about it. We would ask many more, and tougher, questions than these Congressmen say they did. And we would act to protect the kid and any other youngster whom that overly friendly guy might be tempted to bother. It has nothing to do with politics or policy, but just common sense. And the fact that the Republican leaders didn’t show enough concern, and some basic common sense, is what is most troubling of all.”
The exodus of these women could spell doom at the polls. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia, one of our most detail-oriented political junkies, today has a new comprehensive rundown of the GOP’s deepening woes, here. No doubt it will be interesting to see what Tom Reynolds, one of the House GOP leaders currently on the hot seat, has to say when he defends himself this Sunday morning on ABC’s This Week; he’s the guy who, as director of the ’06 Republican campaign effort, persuaded Mark Foley to run for re-election even though evidence of Foley’s pursuit of underage House pages had already surfaced. That could be a cringe-worthy interview.
But for the moment, at least, the cringe-worthy award goes to whoever wrote the editorial yesterday in The Hill, a serious newspaper that covers Congress. Charting the various conflicting statements that Hastert and House Majority Leader John Boehner have issued about the Foley scandal, the editorial writer concludes with this gift to Leno and Letterman:
“Hastert and Boehner need to get on the same page or Republican troubles will continue to mount.”
While Americans were busy reading Foley’s exchanges with underage boys (including the kid who interrupted the congressman’s reverie to say that his mom was yelling for him), 13 American soldiers were killed over a span of three days, the worst three-day mark since the war began.
And while we were all riveted on what House Speaker Dennis Hastert knew and when he knew it or should have known it, the Bob Woodward book about the struggling Bush war team picked up a major endorsement from someone with no links to liberals or George Soros or “Defeatocrats.” This would be Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan and Bush speechwriter.
She writes today on the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page that “it is a good book. It may be a great one. It is serious, densely, even exhaustively, reported, and a real contribution to history in that it gives history what it most requires, first-person testimony.” She endorses the book’s depiction of President Bush as a “vain and intensely limited man,” accepts its reportage that Bush and his people are mired in “a state of unknowingness” about factual reality in Iraq, and then she twists the knife by contending that the administration hawks have screwed things up in part because none of them have actually served in war:
“I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is, what building a foreign nation entails.”
It should also be noted today that, while we were all watching the Foley affair, Americans were telling the pollsters that the president’s 9/11 anniversary bounce was over. In the latest Associated Press-IPSOS survey, likely voters said (by 44 to 42 percent) that they now trust Democrats over Republicans to fight terrorism effectively, and that (by 45 to 43 percent) they trust the Democrats to more effectively protect the country. And that sentiment was measured before Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia returned from Iraq and warned yesterday that Congress may need to buck Bush and forge a solution of its own – in his words, make “bold decisions” after weighing all options - if the violence is not reversed within the next 60 to 90 days. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Navy secretary under Richard Nixon, is a barometer of the increasingly restive Republican sentiment.
All this demonstrates why the GOP is hamstrung at the moment. It can’t change the subject from Foley to Iraq, for obvious reasons. And it can’t change the subject from Iraq to the domestic realm, because the Foley scandal is dominant there. And if it tries to dismiss the Foley scandal as a liberal/Democratic/gay/Soros conspiracy, there are now plenty of prominent conservative voices who recognize the GOP leaders’ culpability – and perceive the serious political dangers, on the eve of the ’06 elections.
Consider Myrna Blyth, an author who considers herself a scourge of liberalism. She writes today on the National Review website that the “security moms” of 2004, the married women with children who voted for President Bush, have become the outraged moms of 2006:
“What were those guys thinking? That is what every woman I’ve spoken to has said about the Foley mess…Unlike the discussions about the war, this is a very simple story to understand. Most of us don’t know what to do about Iraq or Iran or North Korea. There can be plenty of debate about how to handle these enormous challenges. But we do know how we should act if we were told about someone sending inappropriate messages to a teenager and we were in a position to do something about it. We would ask many more, and tougher, questions than these Congressmen say they did. And we would act to protect the kid and any other youngster whom that overly friendly guy might be tempted to bother. It has nothing to do with politics or policy, but just common sense. And the fact that the Republican leaders didn’t show enough concern, and some basic common sense, is what is most troubling of all.”
The exodus of these women could spell doom at the polls. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia, one of our most detail-oriented political junkies, today has a new comprehensive rundown of the GOP’s deepening woes, here. No doubt it will be interesting to see what Tom Reynolds, one of the House GOP leaders currently on the hot seat, has to say when he defends himself this Sunday morning on ABC’s This Week; he’s the guy who, as director of the ’06 Republican campaign effort, persuaded Mark Foley to run for re-election even though evidence of Foley’s pursuit of underage House pages had already surfaced. That could be a cringe-worthy interview.
But for the moment, at least, the cringe-worthy award goes to whoever wrote the editorial yesterday in The Hill, a serious newspaper that covers Congress. Charting the various conflicting statements that Hastert and House Majority Leader John Boehner have issued about the Foley scandal, the editorial writer concludes with this gift to Leno and Letterman:
“Hastert and Boehner need to get on the same page or Republican troubles will continue to mount.”
Thursday, October 05, 2006
The art of political apologia, which Nixon called "the modified limited hangout route"
Politicians generally take responsibility for errors only when trapped in a corner with no way out. And since such a confession has to be wrung out of them, what value does the mea culpa really have?
So it goes with the House Speaker Dennis Hastert - which is ironic, given the fact that his man in the White House has been trying to paint the GOP as the party of personal responsibility; as President Bush said in 2003, “The culture of America is changing from one that has said, ‘if it feels good, do it’ and ‘if you've got a problem, blame somebody else,’ to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life."
Until today, when he realized he was cornered, Hastert apparently didn’t get that memo.
In recent days, while being peppered with evidence that his office took no substantive action against congressman Mark Foley despite repeated warnings, and while being assailed for this inaction by other Republican leaders (who didn’t want to accept responsibility, either), Hastert had been busy trying to blame somebody else.
It’s all a Democratic plot, he said. It‘s all a liberal media plot, he said. It’s a liberal conspiracy, he said. And sometimes it’s all three: “"When the (Republican) base finds out who's feeding this monster, they're not going to be happy. The people who want to see this thing blow up are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros,” a reference to the rich liberal philanthropist who has been on the GOP’s bogeyman roster since 2004.
Well, the GOP House leader’s bid to perpetuate the blame-somebody-else culture was foiled today in the wake of reports that the key scandal tipster was actually a former House Republican staffer. And it was becoming increasingly difficult, as well as politically embarrassing, for Hastert to fend off responsibility when the people “feeding this monster” were actually his brethren in the GOP hierarchy. I doubt that Majority Whip Roy Blunt first consulted with George Soros before remarking yesterday that Hastert had been slow to act in the Foley matter (“you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of”); and I doubt that Senator John McCain first touched base with “Democratic operatives” before essentially saying yesterday that Hastert cannot be trusted to fully probe the Foley affair (“I think it needs to be addressed by people who are credible”).
Blunt, by the way, put out a new statement this afternoon, insisting that he and Hastert are tight. He said, “There is not, and has not been, any daylight between the Speaker and me” – which is curious, since 24 hours earlier, he had demonstrated precisely the opposite. But such contradictions typically abound during political crises, when the urge is to circle the wagons.
Besides, Hastert was dissed today, in awkward fashion, by one of the Republicans who serves on the House Ethics Committee. Congressman Doc Hastings at first told reporters that Hastert, as House leader, has done “an excellent job.” Then he felt the need to amend himself: “Before I, before we quit here, I just simply want to say the remarks that I made regarding Speaker Hastert is not related to the matter at hand here.”
Meanwhile, Hastert was getting cornered by the adverse public reaction. An Associated Press-IPSOS poll, conducted in the wake of the Foley revelations, shows that half of all likely November voters now view corruption and scandal disclosures as very or extremely important voting factors – and, by a 2-1 margin, they see the Democrats as the party more capable of conducting a cleanup. And, according to a new Time poll, two-third of Americans with knowledge of the Foley scandal believe that the GOP leaders covered it up.
Thus trapped with no exit strategy, Hastert shifted into contrition mode this afternoon, at a press event in his native Illinois: “The bottom line is, I am taking responsibility for it, because ultimately the buck stops here. I'm sorry that this happened.” Whether these remarks are enough to save his speaker job, or trigger a pro-GOP public opinion resurgence, is another matter, of course. If you read between the lines, he’s not saying that he did anything wrong. He’s just saying he has to shoulder the hit because his high standing requires it – and he’s only saying this under duress anyway. Indeed, conservative commentator Larry Kudlow at National Review Online is not impressed: “(Hastert) didn’t take responsibility for the timeline that clearly points to either his knowing about the Foley problem, or his staff knowing, which is all the same thing in my view.”
But just to demonstrate that Hastert is merely one example of the coerced contrition phenomenon, consider one of his foot soldiers, Pennsylvania congressman Donald Sherwood. He got some bad publicity a few years ago when word broke that the veteran campaigner for family values had allegedly tried to choke his longtime extramarital mistress – who then sued him and ultimately settled out of court (the details were sealed). He tried toughing it out, which seemed like a good idea, given the fact that he had long been unassailable in his district.
But now that he’s trailing his challenger by nine points in the polls with just a month left in the campaign (and with only 60 percent of Republicans saying they will vote for him), he wants everybody to know how sorry he feels, and he’s ponying up the money to say it. A new TV ad that went on the air yesterday: “I made a mistake that nearly cost me the love of my wife, Carol, and our daughters. As a family, we’ve worked through this because of my deep regret, our love, and the fact that the allegation of abuse was never true. While I’m truly sorry for disappointing you, I never wavered from my commitment to reduce taxes, create jobs and bring home our fair share. Should you forgive me, you can count on me to keep on fighting hard for you and your family.”
To appreciate the grudging nature of erring politicians, here’s some historical perspective: Richard Nixon said he took responsibility for Watergate (after his aides started getting indicted), but he quit his job without taking the blame. Senator Bob Packwood (remember him?) finally said he was sorry about all the women he had sexually harassed, ``if I did the things that they said I did.'' Lest we forget Chappaquiddick, Senator Edward Kennedy went into contrition mode in a TV address, yet seemed to put the blame on his vehicle: ``The car that I was driving went off a narrow bridge.'' And, of course, there was Bill Clinton, who ‘fessed about Monica Lewinsky in an August 1998 TV address (``a personal failure . . . for which I am solely and completely responsible'') only because she had just cut a deal with the special prosecutor and his avenues of escape had closed.
Undoubtedly, the current defenders of the Hastert regime – mindful of the impending congressional elections – will cite such cases (the Democratic cases, anyway) in an effort to diffuse the Foley issue and contend that sleaze is a bipartisan phenomenon. But only the Hastert GOP establishment is on the ballot next month, and this scandal looms (in the words of columnist George Will) as “a maraschino cherry atop the Democrats' delectable sundae of Republican miseries.”
Former Democratic Louisiana congressman Edwin Edwards once framed the terms of political failure thusly: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” And in our techie era, instant messaging can be as politically risky as an actual boudoir.
So it goes with the House Speaker Dennis Hastert - which is ironic, given the fact that his man in the White House has been trying to paint the GOP as the party of personal responsibility; as President Bush said in 2003, “The culture of America is changing from one that has said, ‘if it feels good, do it’ and ‘if you've got a problem, blame somebody else,’ to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life."
Until today, when he realized he was cornered, Hastert apparently didn’t get that memo.
In recent days, while being peppered with evidence that his office took no substantive action against congressman Mark Foley despite repeated warnings, and while being assailed for this inaction by other Republican leaders (who didn’t want to accept responsibility, either), Hastert had been busy trying to blame somebody else.
It’s all a Democratic plot, he said. It‘s all a liberal media plot, he said. It’s a liberal conspiracy, he said. And sometimes it’s all three: “"When the (Republican) base finds out who's feeding this monster, they're not going to be happy. The people who want to see this thing blow up are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros,” a reference to the rich liberal philanthropist who has been on the GOP’s bogeyman roster since 2004.
Well, the GOP House leader’s bid to perpetuate the blame-somebody-else culture was foiled today in the wake of reports that the key scandal tipster was actually a former House Republican staffer. And it was becoming increasingly difficult, as well as politically embarrassing, for Hastert to fend off responsibility when the people “feeding this monster” were actually his brethren in the GOP hierarchy. I doubt that Majority Whip Roy Blunt first consulted with George Soros before remarking yesterday that Hastert had been slow to act in the Foley matter (“you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of”); and I doubt that Senator John McCain first touched base with “Democratic operatives” before essentially saying yesterday that Hastert cannot be trusted to fully probe the Foley affair (“I think it needs to be addressed by people who are credible”).
Blunt, by the way, put out a new statement this afternoon, insisting that he and Hastert are tight. He said, “There is not, and has not been, any daylight between the Speaker and me” – which is curious, since 24 hours earlier, he had demonstrated precisely the opposite. But such contradictions typically abound during political crises, when the urge is to circle the wagons.
Besides, Hastert was dissed today, in awkward fashion, by one of the Republicans who serves on the House Ethics Committee. Congressman Doc Hastings at first told reporters that Hastert, as House leader, has done “an excellent job.” Then he felt the need to amend himself: “Before I, before we quit here, I just simply want to say the remarks that I made regarding Speaker Hastert is not related to the matter at hand here.”
Meanwhile, Hastert was getting cornered by the adverse public reaction. An Associated Press-IPSOS poll, conducted in the wake of the Foley revelations, shows that half of all likely November voters now view corruption and scandal disclosures as very or extremely important voting factors – and, by a 2-1 margin, they see the Democrats as the party more capable of conducting a cleanup. And, according to a new Time poll, two-third of Americans with knowledge of the Foley scandal believe that the GOP leaders covered it up.
Thus trapped with no exit strategy, Hastert shifted into contrition mode this afternoon, at a press event in his native Illinois: “The bottom line is, I am taking responsibility for it, because ultimately the buck stops here. I'm sorry that this happened.” Whether these remarks are enough to save his speaker job, or trigger a pro-GOP public opinion resurgence, is another matter, of course. If you read between the lines, he’s not saying that he did anything wrong. He’s just saying he has to shoulder the hit because his high standing requires it – and he’s only saying this under duress anyway. Indeed, conservative commentator Larry Kudlow at National Review Online is not impressed: “(Hastert) didn’t take responsibility for the timeline that clearly points to either his knowing about the Foley problem, or his staff knowing, which is all the same thing in my view.”
But just to demonstrate that Hastert is merely one example of the coerced contrition phenomenon, consider one of his foot soldiers, Pennsylvania congressman Donald Sherwood. He got some bad publicity a few years ago when word broke that the veteran campaigner for family values had allegedly tried to choke his longtime extramarital mistress – who then sued him and ultimately settled out of court (the details were sealed). He tried toughing it out, which seemed like a good idea, given the fact that he had long been unassailable in his district.
But now that he’s trailing his challenger by nine points in the polls with just a month left in the campaign (and with only 60 percent of Republicans saying they will vote for him), he wants everybody to know how sorry he feels, and he’s ponying up the money to say it. A new TV ad that went on the air yesterday: “I made a mistake that nearly cost me the love of my wife, Carol, and our daughters. As a family, we’ve worked through this because of my deep regret, our love, and the fact that the allegation of abuse was never true. While I’m truly sorry for disappointing you, I never wavered from my commitment to reduce taxes, create jobs and bring home our fair share. Should you forgive me, you can count on me to keep on fighting hard for you and your family.”
To appreciate the grudging nature of erring politicians, here’s some historical perspective: Richard Nixon said he took responsibility for Watergate (after his aides started getting indicted), but he quit his job without taking the blame. Senator Bob Packwood (remember him?) finally said he was sorry about all the women he had sexually harassed, ``if I did the things that they said I did.'' Lest we forget Chappaquiddick, Senator Edward Kennedy went into contrition mode in a TV address, yet seemed to put the blame on his vehicle: ``The car that I was driving went off a narrow bridge.'' And, of course, there was Bill Clinton, who ‘fessed about Monica Lewinsky in an August 1998 TV address (``a personal failure . . . for which I am solely and completely responsible'') only because she had just cut a deal with the special prosecutor and his avenues of escape had closed.
Undoubtedly, the current defenders of the Hastert regime – mindful of the impending congressional elections – will cite such cases (the Democratic cases, anyway) in an effort to diffuse the Foley issue and contend that sleaze is a bipartisan phenomenon. But only the Hastert GOP establishment is on the ballot next month, and this scandal looms (in the words of columnist George Will) as “a maraschino cherry atop the Democrats' delectable sundae of Republican miseries.”
Former Democratic Louisiana congressman Edwin Edwards once framed the terms of political failure thusly: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” And in our techie era, instant messaging can be as politically risky as an actual boudoir.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Hastert seeks shelter with Rush, but it's raining too hard
Quote of the day, from House Speaker Dennis Hastert: “We are the insulation to protect this country.”
One could argue, of course, that Hastert and others in the congressional Republican leadership haven’t exactly excelled at sufficiently insulating certain underage Americans. But Hastert was not referring here to the Mark Foley/GOP leadership scandal. Actually, he was referring to 9/11 – the party’s predictable default defense. Here’s how it works: If anyone suggests that the governing party might have screwed something up (such as, for example, by allowing a veteran Republican congressman to prey on kids), then the party is simply to respond by saying, in effect, “Vote for us if you want to live.”
Just as noteworthy was the venue where Hastert uttered that remark. Under fire from all sides, fighting to hang on to his lofty title, and seeking a friendly place where he knew he could be insulated and protected from serious questions about his own conduct in the Foley matter, he sought refuge yesterday with the most obsequious shouter in the conservative echo chamber.
I am referring, of course, to Rush Limbaugh.
One could make the case that, at a time when Hastert needs to defend his party’s family-values credentials, it might be seem odd to seek out Limbaugh, a guy with a history of bad marriages and drug prescription fraud. But what matters is that he’s such an accommodating host. For instance…
Rush: "Well, it's clear to me that what the Democrats are doing here in some sort of cooperation with some in the media is to suppress conservative turnout by making it look like you guys knew this all along but because you're so interested in holding the House rather than protecting children that you covered it up."
Hastert: "Yeah."
Here’s another…
Rush: "This is a strategic political, or politically timed, release of information, particularly based on how long ago it has been known, and there is -- I have to tell you there's -- a hunger and a real craving amongst conservative voters for Republicans in Washington, House and Senate both, to simply refuse to be set back on your heels and accept this defensive position and just go on offense and strike back at these guys. 'Hey, Mark Foley is not what the future of this country is about. It's about protecting the nation, national security, prosperity, ongoing efforts to maintain a good economy, not destroying the health care system,' and this sort of thing. Is there a problem that Republicans in the House and the Senate have about going on offense when these kind of things happen?"
Hastert: "Absolutely not."
And this...
Rush: "Okay. Before I let you go, you know that the Democrats and the media are going to continue to press the Foley issue -- even though you've dealt with it, even though he's gone, even though the mistake has been corrected. What is the battle plan to deal with these continuing allegations and accusations that are going to be designed to depress voter turnout?"
Hastert’s answers don’t even matter, since Limbaugh basically does all the heavy rhetorical lifting. For instance, look again at the latter Limbaugh comment. Especially the part where he says “even though you’ve dealt with it…even though the mistake has been corrected.” There’s something a tad odd about those pronouncements – such as the fact that they’re flat wrong.
It now turns out, according to news reports today, that Hastert’s office had multiple opportunities to deal with the Foley issue starting back in 2003 – and never dealt with it, never corrected the “mistake.” Limbaugh’s initial remark notwithstanding, it’s not “the Democrats” who are blowing the whistle on Hastert; it’s his own side.
Foley’s former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, said today that he warned senior Hastert staffers more than three years ago that his boss was preying on the House pages. Hastert’s office then put out a statement which contends that Fordham is lying. Fordham then put out a statement saying that Hastert’s office is lying: “"Rather than trying to shift the blame on me, those who are employed by these House leaders should acknowledge what they know about their action or inaction in response to the information they knew about Mr. Foley prior to 2005.”
And sorry, Rush, but if the issue has been “dealt with,” then why are House Republicans weighing the idea of bringing in a high-profile attorney to assess the situation (as the Wall Street Journal reported today), and why has the House Ethics Committee (along with the Justice Department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement), deemed it appropriate to probe this matter further?
With top officials in the “family values” party now calling each other liars, is it any wonder that clear-headed conservatives are fearing a political debacle? Hastert might not have fared so easily if he had sat down today with Rich Lowry of the National Review:
“The fundamental problem congressional Republicans are experiencing now is that they have almost no moral capital left after the last two years. Again and again, when given the choice to reform their practices or do little or nothing, they always picked the latter. On travel, on Abramoff, on earmarking—you name it. The impression they always gave was that the integrity of the institution and the public interest had to take a back-seat to their own convenience.
“They wanted to squeak by this year on gerrymandering, negative ads, and money, and just might have succeeded—had nothing more gone wrong. Well, now it has and people feel confirmed in what they always suspected: that it is unable to police its own practices and is full of people who don't follow the same rules as the rest of us. This is deadly."
One could argue, of course, that Hastert and others in the congressional Republican leadership haven’t exactly excelled at sufficiently insulating certain underage Americans. But Hastert was not referring here to the Mark Foley/GOP leadership scandal. Actually, he was referring to 9/11 – the party’s predictable default defense. Here’s how it works: If anyone suggests that the governing party might have screwed something up (such as, for example, by allowing a veteran Republican congressman to prey on kids), then the party is simply to respond by saying, in effect, “Vote for us if you want to live.”
Just as noteworthy was the venue where Hastert uttered that remark. Under fire from all sides, fighting to hang on to his lofty title, and seeking a friendly place where he knew he could be insulated and protected from serious questions about his own conduct in the Foley matter, he sought refuge yesterday with the most obsequious shouter in the conservative echo chamber.
I am referring, of course, to Rush Limbaugh.
One could make the case that, at a time when Hastert needs to defend his party’s family-values credentials, it might be seem odd to seek out Limbaugh, a guy with a history of bad marriages and drug prescription fraud. But what matters is that he’s such an accommodating host. For instance…
Rush: "Well, it's clear to me that what the Democrats are doing here in some sort of cooperation with some in the media is to suppress conservative turnout by making it look like you guys knew this all along but because you're so interested in holding the House rather than protecting children that you covered it up."
Hastert: "Yeah."
Here’s another…
Rush: "This is a strategic political, or politically timed, release of information, particularly based on how long ago it has been known, and there is -- I have to tell you there's -- a hunger and a real craving amongst conservative voters for Republicans in Washington, House and Senate both, to simply refuse to be set back on your heels and accept this defensive position and just go on offense and strike back at these guys. 'Hey, Mark Foley is not what the future of this country is about. It's about protecting the nation, national security, prosperity, ongoing efforts to maintain a good economy, not destroying the health care system,' and this sort of thing. Is there a problem that Republicans in the House and the Senate have about going on offense when these kind of things happen?"
Hastert: "Absolutely not."
And this...
Rush: "Okay. Before I let you go, you know that the Democrats and the media are going to continue to press the Foley issue -- even though you've dealt with it, even though he's gone, even though the mistake has been corrected. What is the battle plan to deal with these continuing allegations and accusations that are going to be designed to depress voter turnout?"
Hastert’s answers don’t even matter, since Limbaugh basically does all the heavy rhetorical lifting. For instance, look again at the latter Limbaugh comment. Especially the part where he says “even though you’ve dealt with it…even though the mistake has been corrected.” There’s something a tad odd about those pronouncements – such as the fact that they’re flat wrong.
It now turns out, according to news reports today, that Hastert’s office had multiple opportunities to deal with the Foley issue starting back in 2003 – and never dealt with it, never corrected the “mistake.” Limbaugh’s initial remark notwithstanding, it’s not “the Democrats” who are blowing the whistle on Hastert; it’s his own side.
Foley’s former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, said today that he warned senior Hastert staffers more than three years ago that his boss was preying on the House pages. Hastert’s office then put out a statement which contends that Fordham is lying. Fordham then put out a statement saying that Hastert’s office is lying: “"Rather than trying to shift the blame on me, those who are employed by these House leaders should acknowledge what they know about their action or inaction in response to the information they knew about Mr. Foley prior to 2005.”
And sorry, Rush, but if the issue has been “dealt with,” then why are House Republicans weighing the idea of bringing in a high-profile attorney to assess the situation (as the Wall Street Journal reported today), and why has the House Ethics Committee (along with the Justice Department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement), deemed it appropriate to probe this matter further?
With top officials in the “family values” party now calling each other liars, is it any wonder that clear-headed conservatives are fearing a political debacle? Hastert might not have fared so easily if he had sat down today with Rich Lowry of the National Review:
“The fundamental problem congressional Republicans are experiencing now is that they have almost no moral capital left after the last two years. Again and again, when given the choice to reform their practices or do little or nothing, they always picked the latter. On travel, on Abramoff, on earmarking—you name it. The impression they always gave was that the integrity of the institution and the public interest had to take a back-seat to their own convenience.
“They wanted to squeak by this year on gerrymandering, negative ads, and money, and just might have succeeded—had nothing more gone wrong. Well, now it has and people feel confirmed in what they always suspected: that it is unable to police its own practices and is full of people who don't follow the same rules as the rest of us. This is deadly."
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
A crisis for the party of "family values"
The Mark Foley scandal is the Cliff Notes version of the Jack Abramoff scandal.
Even though both share a common theme – Republicans breaching their conservative principles in order to perpetuate their power – the details of the Abramoff scandal can’t be reduced to resonant shorthand. Abramoff, a high-rolling lobbyist who in his youth embodied the conservative revolution, defrauded clients and poured tainted money that was routed through various non-profit front groups into the GOP’s coffers…you see the problem. How many voters can grasp all that in a heartbeat? The Foley case, however, is something else. Here’s the shorthand: “The party of conservative family values knew about a member who was preying on boys, yet did nothing about it.”
Why bother trying to navigate the nuances of federal campaign and lobbying laws, and to figure out how they apply to Abramoff and his GOP golfing buddies, when you can behold the honorable Mr. Foley - as chairman of the congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, he was the GOP's designated guardian of our nation's youth - taking a leisure break in 2003 from the rigors of House business in order to have Internet sex with an underage male?
Here he is (Maf54), as revealed this afternoon in the latest exchange supplied by a former page to ABC News. Foley had ducked out of the chamber, in the midst of a floor discussion over Iraq war appropriations.
Maf54: I miss you
Teen: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too
(The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen apparently describe their orgasms.)
Maf54: ok..i better go vote..did you know you would have this effect on me
Teen: lol I guessed
Teen: ya go vote…I don't want to keep you from doing our job
Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight
Teen: :-*
Teen:
No wonder the governing GOP is in full panic mode today. Midterm elections are all about party base turnout; if partisan Republican voters are more motivated than their Democratic counterparts, then the GOP wins (see the Newt Gingrich election of 1994), and vice versa. The Foley scandal, which more accurately might be called the House Republican leadership scandal, has the potential to depress turnout among the social and religious conservatives who, despite all their frustrations with the ruling GOP, have at least been secure in their belief that the leaders were protecting family values.
But now conservative voters know that House Speaker Dennis Hastert was informed months ago about Foley, yet did nothing to investigate further. (Hastert’s story is that he says he doesn’t remember the warning, and he’s sticking to it).
And the conservative voters know that John Shimkus, the Republican congressman who oversees the House Page Board (which runs the teenage page program) was told about Foley in 2005, yet kept the matter under wraps by failing to share the information with the only Democrat who serves with him on the Page Board.
And the conservative voters are wondering why the warning about Foley didn’t immediately spur the GOP hierarchy to action – given the fact that Capitol Hill denizens have known for years about Foley’s interest in underage males. One possible answer is that Foley was a cash cow for the party. He raised a ton of money for the ’06 House re-election campaigns, a credential that was useful to GOP congressman Tom Reynolds, chairman of the ’06 House campaign effort – who also knew this past spring about some of Foley’s emails, yet did nothing to investigate further…beyond telling his boss.
Reynolds, in other words, is the guy who says he passed the tip about Foley to Speaker Hastert. This is the tip that Hastert says he doesn’t remember, even though Hastert conceded yesterday on CNN that he might have heard it “in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things.” (I suppose this means that, if a House leader is told that one of his top members is preying on underage kids, it’s just not very memorable.)
Anyway, the weight of this affair is starting to crack the conservative coalition. This morning, the editorial page of the Washington Times, a staunch defender of the faith, demanded that Hastert vacate his job: “Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away. He gave phony answers Friday to the old and ever-relevant questions of what did he know and when did he know it? Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance."
Conservative commentator Brendan Miniter writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that “it's the implication of willful ignorance that will plague the GOP…Republicans were unwilling to take a closer look at something that long ago demanded a much more detailed inspection. If the GOP had uncovered Mr. Foley last year or even this past spring, the party wouldn't now be facing a full blown sex scandal in October. Heading into this election year, Democrats knew they had a chance to retake the House, if everything broke their way. What no one predicted is that they'd be handed so many breaks by Republicans.”
Conservative activist Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat, excoriated the GOP leadership on CNN yesterday: “They had an obligation, that same day (when they were first informed), to investigate him further, to call in the FBI, if that was an appropriate action, and also to call in those pages and make certain that every one of them was interviewed to see if there (are) any problems here that go deeper than what (the leaders) are already knew. They failed the parents of this country, is what they did.”
Failed the parents of this country…There’s the Democrats’ bumper-sticker message, courtesy of the opposition.
It should be noted, of course, that not all conservatives and Republican leaders profess to be upset or worried about the Foley scandal and its potential impact on the ’06 elections. A number of rebuttals have already been floated:
1. The “all in good fun” defense. Tony Snow, the White House press secretary and one-time conservative commentator, tried this one yesterday. He dismissed Foley’s chatter with the kids as “simply naughty.”
2. The “yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton?” defense. This one was to be expected. Commentator Ben Stein wrote yesterday that Foley is just “a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys,” but that’s nothing compared to “a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive emails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex…”
3. The “who’s out to get us?” defense. Mark Levin, an attorney for a conservative legal foundation, blogged Sunday that the real outrage in the Foley case is that somebody was leaking about Foley to the press on the eve of the ’06 elections: “The timing of this revelation has more to do about helping Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats than protecting teenagers.” (But Brian Ross, who broke the saga late last week on the ABC News website, indicated in a New York Times story today that his sources were Republican.)
4. The “homosexual agenda” defense. One top religious conservative group, the Family Research Council, broke its silence on the story late yesterday by arguing that, even though “the slow response” of House leaders is noteworthy, “the real issue” is that Foley is proof of the depravity of gay behavior – because he demonstrates “the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse.” (Actually, many abuse experts have long concluded the overwhelming majority of men who sexually abuse children live their lives as heterosexual men.)
Nevertheless, it’s noteworthy that a number of religious conservative groups haven’t lifted a finger to defend the Republican leaders. Not a word about the scandal has appeared thus far on the websites of the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Coalition or Focus on the Family. And it’s noteworthy that conservatives who normally train their fire at liberals and the Democrats are instead invoking the Foley scandal as just the latest example of the GOP’s culture of corruption.
Witness Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative activist who pioneered direct mail fundraising back in the days when the movement was in the wilderness. Last night on CNN, he rebuked the GOP leadership for the Foley scandal by resurrecting the old Watergate question: “Who knew what, and when did they know it?”
Then he said: “This is not an issue standing alone by itself. We have many years of these Republican leaders engaging in whatever type of activity…simply for the sole, immoral, corrupt purpose of holding onto power….They use conservative voters, conservative issues, conservative donors, in order to get elected, and then they abandon those voters.”
In other words, the same voters who were already fed up with the GOP’s deficit spending, troublesome war, and the failure to outlaw gay marriage now have another potential reason to stay home on election day.
Conservative commentator Tod Lindberg remarked with wry sarcasm this morning that the GOP had actually been gaining ground during September, passing some decent bills, capitalizing on the 9/11 anniversary, and anticipating success in November… “Why, it would take something on the order of a Capitol Hill Republican sex scandal involving minors plus a leadership coverup to undo such fine political handiwork. And what are the chances of that?”
Even though both share a common theme – Republicans breaching their conservative principles in order to perpetuate their power – the details of the Abramoff scandal can’t be reduced to resonant shorthand. Abramoff, a high-rolling lobbyist who in his youth embodied the conservative revolution, defrauded clients and poured tainted money that was routed through various non-profit front groups into the GOP’s coffers…you see the problem. How many voters can grasp all that in a heartbeat? The Foley case, however, is something else. Here’s the shorthand: “The party of conservative family values knew about a member who was preying on boys, yet did nothing about it.”
Why bother trying to navigate the nuances of federal campaign and lobbying laws, and to figure out how they apply to Abramoff and his GOP golfing buddies, when you can behold the honorable Mr. Foley - as chairman of the congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, he was the GOP's designated guardian of our nation's youth - taking a leisure break in 2003 from the rigors of House business in order to have Internet sex with an underage male?
Here he is (Maf54), as revealed this afternoon in the latest exchange supplied by a former page to ABC News. Foley had ducked out of the chamber, in the midst of a floor discussion over Iraq war appropriations.
Maf54: I miss you
Teen: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too
(The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen apparently describe their orgasms.)
Maf54: ok..i better go vote..did you know you would have this effect on me
Teen: lol I guessed
Teen: ya go vote…I don't want to keep you from doing our job
Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight
Teen: :-*
Teen:
No wonder the governing GOP is in full panic mode today. Midterm elections are all about party base turnout; if partisan Republican voters are more motivated than their Democratic counterparts, then the GOP wins (see the Newt Gingrich election of 1994), and vice versa. The Foley scandal, which more accurately might be called the House Republican leadership scandal, has the potential to depress turnout among the social and religious conservatives who, despite all their frustrations with the ruling GOP, have at least been secure in their belief that the leaders were protecting family values.
But now conservative voters know that House Speaker Dennis Hastert was informed months ago about Foley, yet did nothing to investigate further. (Hastert’s story is that he says he doesn’t remember the warning, and he’s sticking to it).
And the conservative voters know that John Shimkus, the Republican congressman who oversees the House Page Board (which runs the teenage page program) was told about Foley in 2005, yet kept the matter under wraps by failing to share the information with the only Democrat who serves with him on the Page Board.
And the conservative voters are wondering why the warning about Foley didn’t immediately spur the GOP hierarchy to action – given the fact that Capitol Hill denizens have known for years about Foley’s interest in underage males. One possible answer is that Foley was a cash cow for the party. He raised a ton of money for the ’06 House re-election campaigns, a credential that was useful to GOP congressman Tom Reynolds, chairman of the ’06 House campaign effort – who also knew this past spring about some of Foley’s emails, yet did nothing to investigate further…beyond telling his boss.
Reynolds, in other words, is the guy who says he passed the tip about Foley to Speaker Hastert. This is the tip that Hastert says he doesn’t remember, even though Hastert conceded yesterday on CNN that he might have heard it “in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things.” (I suppose this means that, if a House leader is told that one of his top members is preying on underage kids, it’s just not very memorable.)
Anyway, the weight of this affair is starting to crack the conservative coalition. This morning, the editorial page of the Washington Times, a staunch defender of the faith, demanded that Hastert vacate his job: “Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away. He gave phony answers Friday to the old and ever-relevant questions of what did he know and when did he know it? Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance."
Conservative commentator Brendan Miniter writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that “it's the implication of willful ignorance that will plague the GOP…Republicans were unwilling to take a closer look at something that long ago demanded a much more detailed inspection. If the GOP had uncovered Mr. Foley last year or even this past spring, the party wouldn't now be facing a full blown sex scandal in October. Heading into this election year, Democrats knew they had a chance to retake the House, if everything broke their way. What no one predicted is that they'd be handed so many breaks by Republicans.”
Conservative activist Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat, excoriated the GOP leadership on CNN yesterday: “They had an obligation, that same day (when they were first informed), to investigate him further, to call in the FBI, if that was an appropriate action, and also to call in those pages and make certain that every one of them was interviewed to see if there (are) any problems here that go deeper than what (the leaders) are already knew. They failed the parents of this country, is what they did.”
Failed the parents of this country…There’s the Democrats’ bumper-sticker message, courtesy of the opposition.
It should be noted, of course, that not all conservatives and Republican leaders profess to be upset or worried about the Foley scandal and its potential impact on the ’06 elections. A number of rebuttals have already been floated:
1. The “all in good fun” defense. Tony Snow, the White House press secretary and one-time conservative commentator, tried this one yesterday. He dismissed Foley’s chatter with the kids as “simply naughty.”
2. The “yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton?” defense. This one was to be expected. Commentator Ben Stein wrote yesterday that Foley is just “a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys,” but that’s nothing compared to “a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive emails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex…”
3. The “who’s out to get us?” defense. Mark Levin, an attorney for a conservative legal foundation, blogged Sunday that the real outrage in the Foley case is that somebody was leaking about Foley to the press on the eve of the ’06 elections: “The timing of this revelation has more to do about helping Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats than protecting teenagers.” (But Brian Ross, who broke the saga late last week on the ABC News website, indicated in a New York Times story today that his sources were Republican.)
4. The “homosexual agenda” defense. One top religious conservative group, the Family Research Council, broke its silence on the story late yesterday by arguing that, even though “the slow response” of House leaders is noteworthy, “the real issue” is that Foley is proof of the depravity of gay behavior – because he demonstrates “the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse.” (Actually, many abuse experts have long concluded the overwhelming majority of men who sexually abuse children live their lives as heterosexual men.)
Nevertheless, it’s noteworthy that a number of religious conservative groups haven’t lifted a finger to defend the Republican leaders. Not a word about the scandal has appeared thus far on the websites of the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Coalition or Focus on the Family. And it’s noteworthy that conservatives who normally train their fire at liberals and the Democrats are instead invoking the Foley scandal as just the latest example of the GOP’s culture of corruption.
Witness Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative activist who pioneered direct mail fundraising back in the days when the movement was in the wilderness. Last night on CNN, he rebuked the GOP leadership for the Foley scandal by resurrecting the old Watergate question: “Who knew what, and when did they know it?”
Then he said: “This is not an issue standing alone by itself. We have many years of these Republican leaders engaging in whatever type of activity…simply for the sole, immoral, corrupt purpose of holding onto power….They use conservative voters, conservative issues, conservative donors, in order to get elected, and then they abandon those voters.”
In other words, the same voters who were already fed up with the GOP’s deficit spending, troublesome war, and the failure to outlaw gay marriage now have another potential reason to stay home on election day.
Conservative commentator Tod Lindberg remarked with wry sarcasm this morning that the GOP had actually been gaining ground during September, passing some decent bills, capitalizing on the 9/11 anniversary, and anticipating success in November… “Why, it would take something on the order of a Capitol Hill Republican sex scandal involving minors plus a leadership coverup to undo such fine political handiwork. And what are the chances of that?”
Monday, October 02, 2006
The "Woodward is terrific" talking point is now inoperative
The Bush administration has apparently come up with a set of rules designed to help Americans determine how they should feel about journalist and author Bob Woodward:
1. If Woodward writes a book which paints the president as a wise, steely-eyed, resolute, and well-informed Decider, and if he depicts the top presidential aides as seamless cogs in a wise, steely-eyed, and resolute war team, then he is to be lauded as a credit to his craft, as a paragon of objectivity, and his books are to be praised by the Republican party as must-reads for all good citizens.
Hence the decision by the Republican National Committee in 2002 to promote Woodward’s Bush at War on the official RNC website. Hence the gushing praise from Condoleezza Rice two years later, upon the publication of Woodward’s Plan of Attack, when she told CNN that Woodward “is terrific, he’s a great journalist." Hence the happy talk from White House counselor Dan Bartlett, who in 2004 seemed ready to join the publicity team at Simon & Schuster: “We’re urging people to buy the book.”
2. But if the same Bob Woodward writes a book that depicts Bush as a clueless commander-in-chief who seems incapable of telling the full truth about the Iraq war in part because he seems incapable of processing factual reality; and if the same Bob Woodward shows the supposedly vaunted war team to be increasingly dysfunctional as the occupation of Iraq drags on…well, that means he is not a “great journalist” at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The aforementioned Dan Bartlett, who praised Woodward for doing a “good job” in 2004, has now suddenly decided that – brainstorm - the guy is really bad at his job. The new Woodward book, State of Denial, is in the stores today, and it doesn’t exactly burnish the Decider’s image; for instance, while chronicling Iraq administrator Jay Garner’s disenchantment with his bosses, Woodward writes (clearly from Garner’s perspective) that “in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, he did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good stories and a good time had by all.”
The White House spent most of the past weekend trying to knock the book down, and to depict its author as just another biased scribe with an unfair agenda. Bartlett told ABC yesterday that, even though White House officials had cooperated with Woodward as usual, “from the outset, he had already formulated conclusions before the interviews began.”
It’s easy to see what happened: Woodward, who in recent years has been assailed by Bush critics as the administration’s court stenographer, was returning to his favorite subject – Bush at war – at a time when long years of conflict in Iraq had clearly taken their toll on the president and his team. The violence was getting worse, and the private assessments at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill did not square with the sunnier public assessments about the war. (During the same week that the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret memo warning about the potential for increasing violence in Iraq through 2007, the administration, via Donald Rumsfeld’s office, told the public that the violence was likely to “wane.” Woodward also strongly suggests, in his book, that Rumsfeld remains entrenched at the Pentagon because Bush is reluctant to confront him.)
The track record of failed promises and the growing mountain of documentation (already mined by many other authors) were impossible for Woodward to ignore. So he asked questions about these things, and the White House didn’t like that; as Bartlett sees it, Woodward had already “formulated conclusions.”
On the Sunday shows yesterday, Bartlett also left open the possibility that Woodward may have simply concocted some explosive material – such as his description of a meeting, two months before 9/11, between national security adviser Rice and CIA chief George Tenet. In the book, Tenet hurried to the White House with a top aide in tow, hoping to share his urgent concerns about an imminent terrorist attack on American soil, but Rice reportedly blew him off. Bartlett told CBS yesterday that Rice doesn’t remember such an encounter. When host Bob Schieffer asked Bartlett if he thought Woodward would make up such a scene, Bartlett said, “I just don’t know. It leaves us somewhat puzzled.”
But it’s not puzzling at all. Clearly, Tenet was Woodward’s source, and that’s the point: When government insiders start fighting in print with other insiders, that’s a sign of serious trouble.
When the wheels come off in Washington, when major policies go awry and message discipline breaks down, insiders often flee the wreckage while trying to salvage their own reputations. They typically do this by dishing to reporters. That’s clearly what has happened in State of Denial. But what I also detect, after reading several book excerpts, is that some of the insiders dished to Woodward because they were deeply frustrated by an administration that seems determined not to confront its shortcomings on the war. As Woodward said on CBS last night, “There is a concern that we need to face realism (and not be) the voice that says ‘Oh no, everything’s fine.’ Well, it’s not.”
It was noteworthy yesterday that the administration’s rebuke of Woodward was basically polite. It didn’t brand Woodward with the liberal label, or link him to Michael Moore, or imply via insinuation that he was somehow helping the terrorists. That would have never worked. Three times the White House has welcomed Woodward into the fold, thereby vetting his credentials.
And he is also a brand name in America. Scores of books critical of the Bush administration have been published this year; very few will influence the ’06 political climate, on the eve of important congressional elections. Woodward’s might be the exception. He and his book will be publicized all week on everything from Charlie Rose to Larry King, and the White House will be stuck in response mode.
Woodward in a sense may be late to the game – documents showing the fact gap between Iraq reality and White House rhetoric have been available, and abundantly reported, for much of the past four years – but Woodward potentially confers extra credibility, if only because he was so solicitous of the administration’s viewpoint in his earlier works.
Some Bush defenders insist that the Woodward episode will simply blow over; in the words of conservative radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt, "the public will grow bored quickly, and Woodward will clip another set of royalty coupons and the (2006) campaign will be right back where it has been since the July arrests surrounding the London bombing plot: A choice between serious and surrender on the issues surrounding security and the war."
Perhaps. But Woodward's damning critique can also be viewed in an historical context. Back in 1968, Lyndon Johnson knew he was in political trouble over Vietnam when Walter Cronkite reported critically on the war; LBJ reportedly said that when he lost Cronkite, he knew he had lost the center of the electorate. It would now appear that President Bush has lost Bob Woodward.
1. If Woodward writes a book which paints the president as a wise, steely-eyed, resolute, and well-informed Decider, and if he depicts the top presidential aides as seamless cogs in a wise, steely-eyed, and resolute war team, then he is to be lauded as a credit to his craft, as a paragon of objectivity, and his books are to be praised by the Republican party as must-reads for all good citizens.
Hence the decision by the Republican National Committee in 2002 to promote Woodward’s Bush at War on the official RNC website. Hence the gushing praise from Condoleezza Rice two years later, upon the publication of Woodward’s Plan of Attack, when she told CNN that Woodward “is terrific, he’s a great journalist." Hence the happy talk from White House counselor Dan Bartlett, who in 2004 seemed ready to join the publicity team at Simon & Schuster: “We’re urging people to buy the book.”
2. But if the same Bob Woodward writes a book that depicts Bush as a clueless commander-in-chief who seems incapable of telling the full truth about the Iraq war in part because he seems incapable of processing factual reality; and if the same Bob Woodward shows the supposedly vaunted war team to be increasingly dysfunctional as the occupation of Iraq drags on…well, that means he is not a “great journalist” at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The aforementioned Dan Bartlett, who praised Woodward for doing a “good job” in 2004, has now suddenly decided that – brainstorm - the guy is really bad at his job. The new Woodward book, State of Denial, is in the stores today, and it doesn’t exactly burnish the Decider’s image; for instance, while chronicling Iraq administrator Jay Garner’s disenchantment with his bosses, Woodward writes (clearly from Garner’s perspective) that “in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, he did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good stories and a good time had by all.”
The White House spent most of the past weekend trying to knock the book down, and to depict its author as just another biased scribe with an unfair agenda. Bartlett told ABC yesterday that, even though White House officials had cooperated with Woodward as usual, “from the outset, he had already formulated conclusions before the interviews began.”
It’s easy to see what happened: Woodward, who in recent years has been assailed by Bush critics as the administration’s court stenographer, was returning to his favorite subject – Bush at war – at a time when long years of conflict in Iraq had clearly taken their toll on the president and his team. The violence was getting worse, and the private assessments at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill did not square with the sunnier public assessments about the war. (During the same week that the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret memo warning about the potential for increasing violence in Iraq through 2007, the administration, via Donald Rumsfeld’s office, told the public that the violence was likely to “wane.” Woodward also strongly suggests, in his book, that Rumsfeld remains entrenched at the Pentagon because Bush is reluctant to confront him.)
The track record of failed promises and the growing mountain of documentation (already mined by many other authors) were impossible for Woodward to ignore. So he asked questions about these things, and the White House didn’t like that; as Bartlett sees it, Woodward had already “formulated conclusions.”
On the Sunday shows yesterday, Bartlett also left open the possibility that Woodward may have simply concocted some explosive material – such as his description of a meeting, two months before 9/11, between national security adviser Rice and CIA chief George Tenet. In the book, Tenet hurried to the White House with a top aide in tow, hoping to share his urgent concerns about an imminent terrorist attack on American soil, but Rice reportedly blew him off. Bartlett told CBS yesterday that Rice doesn’t remember such an encounter. When host Bob Schieffer asked Bartlett if he thought Woodward would make up such a scene, Bartlett said, “I just don’t know. It leaves us somewhat puzzled.”
But it’s not puzzling at all. Clearly, Tenet was Woodward’s source, and that’s the point: When government insiders start fighting in print with other insiders, that’s a sign of serious trouble.
When the wheels come off in Washington, when major policies go awry and message discipline breaks down, insiders often flee the wreckage while trying to salvage their own reputations. They typically do this by dishing to reporters. That’s clearly what has happened in State of Denial. But what I also detect, after reading several book excerpts, is that some of the insiders dished to Woodward because they were deeply frustrated by an administration that seems determined not to confront its shortcomings on the war. As Woodward said on CBS last night, “There is a concern that we need to face realism (and not be) the voice that says ‘Oh no, everything’s fine.’ Well, it’s not.”
It was noteworthy yesterday that the administration’s rebuke of Woodward was basically polite. It didn’t brand Woodward with the liberal label, or link him to Michael Moore, or imply via insinuation that he was somehow helping the terrorists. That would have never worked. Three times the White House has welcomed Woodward into the fold, thereby vetting his credentials.
And he is also a brand name in America. Scores of books critical of the Bush administration have been published this year; very few will influence the ’06 political climate, on the eve of important congressional elections. Woodward’s might be the exception. He and his book will be publicized all week on everything from Charlie Rose to Larry King, and the White House will be stuck in response mode.
Woodward in a sense may be late to the game – documents showing the fact gap between Iraq reality and White House rhetoric have been available, and abundantly reported, for much of the past four years – but Woodward potentially confers extra credibility, if only because he was so solicitous of the administration’s viewpoint in his earlier works.
Some Bush defenders insist that the Woodward episode will simply blow over; in the words of conservative radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt, "the public will grow bored quickly, and Woodward will clip another set of royalty coupons and the (2006) campaign will be right back where it has been since the July arrests surrounding the London bombing plot: A choice between serious and surrender on the issues surrounding security and the war."
Perhaps. But Woodward's damning critique can also be viewed in an historical context. Back in 1968, Lyndon Johnson knew he was in political trouble over Vietnam when Walter Cronkite reported critically on the war; LBJ reportedly said that when he lost Cronkite, he knew he had lost the center of the electorate. It would now appear that President Bush has lost Bob Woodward.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Will the Iraq "firestorm" consume the Republicans?
I scribbled intensely, as torrents of Defeatocrat pessimism fell into my notebook.
This happened last night in Philadelphia, at a forum on national security sponsored by the World Affairs Council. A speaker on stage was saying all kinds of dire downbeat stuff about Iraq, openly contradicting the sunnier talking points uttered during campaign ’06 by the President of the United States. For instance, on the topic of ever-spiraling violence in Iraq:
“I think we’re about to witness the great Shiite revenge…We’ve got a real firestorm brewing (thanks to) the hell that’s going to be unleashed as the Shiites start to eat the Sunnis…(The Bush administration’s) huge mistake was to underestimate the Sunnis’ willpower (to launch an insurgency)” -- and that insurgency in turn has triggered the Shiite revenge.
Well, that clinched it for me: There is now a rough national consensus that conditions in Iraq war are far worse than the White House chooses to admit. The source of those remarks was not a Democrat, or some liberal gloom-and-doomer who might be ripe for caricature in the GOP message shop; the speaker was Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA specialist on the Middle East and Bush supporter who worked at the Project for a New American Century, one of the neoconservative think tanks that pioneered the idea of toppling Saddam Hussein.
In political terms, how can the Republicans expect to retain control of Congress in the ’06 elections when there seems to be no way to spin Iraq as an upbeat GOP achievement? And when even the 16 spy agencies that work for Bush have authored an intelligence report that flatly disputes Bush’s declaration, in a speech three weeks ago, that “we’re on the offense against terrorists on every battlefront”?
Indeed, Gerecht’s words were further confirmation that the partially-leaked National Intelligence Estimate was really not telling us much of anything that we didn’t already know. Gerecht knows that Iraq is a firestorm (as opposed to the predicted “cakewalk”) in the heart of the Middle East. A majority of the American people know that the Iraq war has made us less safe, having already expressed this sentiment in countless ’06 polls. And officials from the nation’s foreign-policy establishment - of all ideological persuasions - know that the war has been a disaster, having already voiced that opinion this summer with Foreign Policy magazine.
One of the people who helped produce that magazine’s “Terrorism Index” survey was Joe Cirincione, a national security expert, former congressional staffer, former director for nonproliferation issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and now a senior vice president at the Center for American Progress (a Democratic think tank). He too spoke at the World Affairs Council event, and shared the survey statistics: Of the 100 top foreign-policy people, 86 percent say the world is more dangerous for Americans today than it was five years ago; 87 percent said that the war in Iraq has negatively affected our ability to fight global terrorism; 84 percent disagreed with Bush’s core claim that we’re winning the war on terror.
Most significant was the sentiment among the conservative experts: 81 percent said the world is more dangerous today for Americans; 61 percent said that Iraq has hurt our efforts; and 71 percent disagreed with Bush’s core claim.
“I don’t think we understood what we were reaping when we went into Iraq,” Cirincione said. “Just as the British didn’t (when they occupied Iraq in 1919). We are going to reap the whirlwind, and the administration doesn’t have a plan to deal with it.”
Bush tried yesterday to recoup, by again seeking to paint the Democrats as “the party of cut and run,” but his problem is that a plurality of likely ’06 voters now regard the withdrawal of troops as an attractive option. Here’s a new poll: by 46 percent to 36 percent, voters prefer a congressional candidate who wants us to get out of Iraq, over a candidate who wants us to stay. And the percentage spread is even more pronounced among independent swing voters, 50 to 25. The sponsor of this poll? Fox News.
And next week could be even worse for the president. Bob Woodward’s new book about Bush and Iraq (State of Denial, which says it all) gets the big publicity rollout on Sunday in The Washington Post and on 60 Minutes. One story today, citing the book, reports that Bush, eight months into the war, was still refusing to accept the reality of an anti-American insurgency; and that when weapons inspector David Kay tried to warn the White House, during the first summer of the war, that there were no WMDs, he was reportedly told, “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting.”
The new material from Woodward – who, until now, was often dismissed by Bush critics as an administration lackey – will play out for many days. So will the growing dispute over whether a new NIE, dealing only with Iraq, which has been in the works since the beginning of August, should be released before the election, or, as the administration prefers, should be released next January. All these furors will spark fresh questions, in the heat of an election season, over whether voters should entrust the Iraq cleanup to the same party that made the mess. Indeed, even now, some of the GOP incumbents don’t seem sufficiently enlightened. As evidence, I give you Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, speaking yesterday:
“Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.”
This happened last night in Philadelphia, at a forum on national security sponsored by the World Affairs Council. A speaker on stage was saying all kinds of dire downbeat stuff about Iraq, openly contradicting the sunnier talking points uttered during campaign ’06 by the President of the United States. For instance, on the topic of ever-spiraling violence in Iraq:
“I think we’re about to witness the great Shiite revenge…We’ve got a real firestorm brewing (thanks to) the hell that’s going to be unleashed as the Shiites start to eat the Sunnis…(The Bush administration’s) huge mistake was to underestimate the Sunnis’ willpower (to launch an insurgency)” -- and that insurgency in turn has triggered the Shiite revenge.
Well, that clinched it for me: There is now a rough national consensus that conditions in Iraq war are far worse than the White House chooses to admit. The source of those remarks was not a Democrat, or some liberal gloom-and-doomer who might be ripe for caricature in the GOP message shop; the speaker was Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA specialist on the Middle East and Bush supporter who worked at the Project for a New American Century, one of the neoconservative think tanks that pioneered the idea of toppling Saddam Hussein.
In political terms, how can the Republicans expect to retain control of Congress in the ’06 elections when there seems to be no way to spin Iraq as an upbeat GOP achievement? And when even the 16 spy agencies that work for Bush have authored an intelligence report that flatly disputes Bush’s declaration, in a speech three weeks ago, that “we’re on the offense against terrorists on every battlefront”?
Indeed, Gerecht’s words were further confirmation that the partially-leaked National Intelligence Estimate was really not telling us much of anything that we didn’t already know. Gerecht knows that Iraq is a firestorm (as opposed to the predicted “cakewalk”) in the heart of the Middle East. A majority of the American people know that the Iraq war has made us less safe, having already expressed this sentiment in countless ’06 polls. And officials from the nation’s foreign-policy establishment - of all ideological persuasions - know that the war has been a disaster, having already voiced that opinion this summer with Foreign Policy magazine.
One of the people who helped produce that magazine’s “Terrorism Index” survey was Joe Cirincione, a national security expert, former congressional staffer, former director for nonproliferation issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and now a senior vice president at the Center for American Progress (a Democratic think tank). He too spoke at the World Affairs Council event, and shared the survey statistics: Of the 100 top foreign-policy people, 86 percent say the world is more dangerous for Americans today than it was five years ago; 87 percent said that the war in Iraq has negatively affected our ability to fight global terrorism; 84 percent disagreed with Bush’s core claim that we’re winning the war on terror.
Most significant was the sentiment among the conservative experts: 81 percent said the world is more dangerous today for Americans; 61 percent said that Iraq has hurt our efforts; and 71 percent disagreed with Bush’s core claim.
“I don’t think we understood what we were reaping when we went into Iraq,” Cirincione said. “Just as the British didn’t (when they occupied Iraq in 1919). We are going to reap the whirlwind, and the administration doesn’t have a plan to deal with it.”
Bush tried yesterday to recoup, by again seeking to paint the Democrats as “the party of cut and run,” but his problem is that a plurality of likely ’06 voters now regard the withdrawal of troops as an attractive option. Here’s a new poll: by 46 percent to 36 percent, voters prefer a congressional candidate who wants us to get out of Iraq, over a candidate who wants us to stay. And the percentage spread is even more pronounced among independent swing voters, 50 to 25. The sponsor of this poll? Fox News.
And next week could be even worse for the president. Bob Woodward’s new book about Bush and Iraq (State of Denial, which says it all) gets the big publicity rollout on Sunday in The Washington Post and on 60 Minutes. One story today, citing the book, reports that Bush, eight months into the war, was still refusing to accept the reality of an anti-American insurgency; and that when weapons inspector David Kay tried to warn the White House, during the first summer of the war, that there were no WMDs, he was reportedly told, “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting.”
The new material from Woodward – who, until now, was often dismissed by Bush critics as an administration lackey – will play out for many days. So will the growing dispute over whether a new NIE, dealing only with Iraq, which has been in the works since the beginning of August, should be released before the election, or, as the administration prefers, should be released next January. All these furors will spark fresh questions, in the heat of an election season, over whether voters should entrust the Iraq cleanup to the same party that made the mess. Indeed, even now, some of the GOP incumbents don’t seem sufficiently enlightened. As evidence, I give you Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, speaking yesterday:
“Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.”
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Is he or isn't he? A retro '90s debate
The flap over Bill Clinton’s Fox News flareup has now entered its fifth day, and in some ways I see it as a perversely nostalgic exercise, a return to the days when Americans of all ideological persuasions spent a fair bit of time trying to fathom and explain the president’s psyche.
And here we are again, this time debating whether Clinton was faking his indignation last Sunday when he railed against Fox News, accused host Chris Wallace of engineering “a conservative hit job” against him, as well as smirking at him. Was he genuinely and spontaneously angry at Wallace for asking him what was, quite frankly, a journalistically legitimate question about his failed pursuit of Osama bin Laden – or was he just acting in cold calculation, seeking merely to rally Democratic voters, employing the legendary skills that ought to be taught to every student at the Actors Studio?
In other words, it’s the old question visited anew: how authentic is this guy, anyway? There are apparently two schools of thought:
Bill Clinton, master thespian. People in this camp believe that he knew exactly what he was doing. William Kristol, the conservative commentator and Iraq war promoter, says: “Bill Clinton is a smart and calculating politician….(His spouse) has been having problems with the left wing of the Democratic party. With this interview, Bill Clinton has the entire left wing of the Democratic party rallying to him. Some of this solidarity can presumably be transferred to Hillary.”
Newt Gingrich, who frequently sparred with Clinton during his days as House Speaker, tells ABC News, “I think that as the most experienced professional in the Democratic Party, he didn’t walk onto that set and suddenly get upset. He probably decided in advance he was going to pick a fight with Chris Wallace. I think as a calculated political decision, it’s reasonably smart.”
Bill Clinton, authentic inner loon. People in this camp believe that the former president was betraying his true self, the self he normally keeps hidden from public view. For instance, his former pollster, Dick Morris, writes, “There he was on live television, those who have worked for him have come to know – the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch….the volcanic rage beneath the surface of this would-be statesman.” Morris, who helped craft Clinton’s ’96 re-election strategy, experienced that behavior; in his political memoir, he recalled the time, way back in the Arkansas era, when he and Clinton had an argument in Clinton’s kitchen – whereupon the young governor grabbed Morris from behind, Morris slipped to the floor, Hillary had to help him up...you get the idea.
Another supporter of the spontaneous wig-out theory is Jonathan Alter, the liberal commentator. Interviewed the other day at Brown University, and asked about the Fox incident, Alter said, “I thought he lost his temper. Yes, it rallies the Democratic base, but he talks a lot about bringing people together and trying to win the election without rubbing raw a lot of old wounds. He has a temper. He was right on the merits of (what he said), but ... if he had to do it over again, I don't think he would have insulted Chris Wallace that way.”
And Wallace himself buys this theory. In recent days he has said that the atmosphere in the studio stayed tense after the cameras were shut off, and that Clinton and his entourage were arguing about the encounter as they were leaving the premises.
Bill Clinton, shrewd but undisciplined. This hybrid theory posits that he arrived at Fox determined to put up his dukes if necessary, in a polite but firm manner befitting a former president, but that his inner demons got the better of him and he wound up going too far. Mark Davis, a Dallas columnist and radio host, writes: “I don't believe the former president sat down intending to lose that much cool. But I do believe he was spoiling for a degree of conflict that would bolster his anti-terror credentials and energize Democrats to ‘get tough’ with anyone doubting the party's national security credentials.”
In the end, what probably matters most is that, either by accident or design, Clinton cranked up base Democrats who have been thirsting for inspiration in an election year (maybe he also cranked up the conservatives, reminding them why they should vote GOP, but that’s another issue). Here’s the bottom line, according to one of my email pen pals: “Clinton is the only Democrat on the planet who could do what he did and get away with it. He's got the requisite gravitas. Besides, the Democrats have become a political party of geldings, scared (wit)less by anything even remotely GOP. I found that Clinton having the (guts) to successfully stare down Chris Wallace on his Fox home turf, was not only a good thing that could serve to energize his party, but a necessary move - one that was way overdue!”
By the way, here’s one last assessment of Clinton. Yesterday, Fox News chief Roger Ailes said: “I frankly think the assault on Chris Wallace is an assault on all journalists.”
That’s pretty rich, coming from Ailes – the same guy who, as Richard Nixon’s 1968 TV producer, pioneered the tactics of isolating a presidential candidate from the inconvenient questions of political journalists. Ailes kept his client in TV studios, where he staged Q&A sessions between Nixon and “average citizens,” a format that, in its time, was widely viewed as an assault on all journalists. Asked at the time why the journalists were being barred from the studio tapings, Ailes (as reported in The Selling of the President), replied, "(Screw) 'em. It's not a press conference...the press has no business on the set."
-------
But enough about Clinton. Last I checked, he has a successor. And that president provided some interesting fodder of his own last Sunday; fortunately for him, Clinton got most of the attention.
In case you missed it, President Bush uttered a head-scratching remark that day on CNN. In the interests of full context, here was his exchange with Wolf Blitzer:
Q: “Let’s move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war--if not already a civil war. We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.”
BUSH: “Yes, you see you see it on TV, and that’s the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there’s also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is - my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy.”
Pick your way through the presidential verbiage, and ignore the fact that U.S. officials these days are openly questioning that supposedly “strong will for democracy,” and you can easily spot the key line: Bush’s contention that, when future Americans look in the rear-view mirror, the bloodshed in Iraq will be seen as “just a comma.”
Just a comma…not the kind of remark that is likely to comfort the families of slain and wounded U.S. soldiers. We can assume that he didn’t intend to convey that particular message. So we’re left to wonder, if he wasn’t trying to be dismissive of the current (and increasing) brutality in Iraq, how and why did he come up with that phrase? Well, here’s where things really get surreal:
Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher went googling, and came up with this conclusion: Bush was borrowing from a line that often appears in Christian teaching and sermons (“Don’t put a period where God puts a comma”), and Christian leaders in turn – I told you it gets surreal - seem to have adopted that line from…the late comedienne Gracie Allen, who is purported to have said, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”
Anyway…On more earthly ground, there are reports today that Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, will expose efforts by Bush and his war team to cover up the true extent of the violence on the ground in Iraq. If true, Bush at some point may need to change his comma to an exclamation mark.
And here we are again, this time debating whether Clinton was faking his indignation last Sunday when he railed against Fox News, accused host Chris Wallace of engineering “a conservative hit job” against him, as well as smirking at him. Was he genuinely and spontaneously angry at Wallace for asking him what was, quite frankly, a journalistically legitimate question about his failed pursuit of Osama bin Laden – or was he just acting in cold calculation, seeking merely to rally Democratic voters, employing the legendary skills that ought to be taught to every student at the Actors Studio?
In other words, it’s the old question visited anew: how authentic is this guy, anyway? There are apparently two schools of thought:
Bill Clinton, master thespian. People in this camp believe that he knew exactly what he was doing. William Kristol, the conservative commentator and Iraq war promoter, says: “Bill Clinton is a smart and calculating politician….(His spouse) has been having problems with the left wing of the Democratic party. With this interview, Bill Clinton has the entire left wing of the Democratic party rallying to him. Some of this solidarity can presumably be transferred to Hillary.”
Newt Gingrich, who frequently sparred with Clinton during his days as House Speaker, tells ABC News, “I think that as the most experienced professional in the Democratic Party, he didn’t walk onto that set and suddenly get upset. He probably decided in advance he was going to pick a fight with Chris Wallace. I think as a calculated political decision, it’s reasonably smart.”
Bill Clinton, authentic inner loon. People in this camp believe that the former president was betraying his true self, the self he normally keeps hidden from public view. For instance, his former pollster, Dick Morris, writes, “There he was on live television, those who have worked for him have come to know – the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch….the volcanic rage beneath the surface of this would-be statesman.” Morris, who helped craft Clinton’s ’96 re-election strategy, experienced that behavior; in his political memoir, he recalled the time, way back in the Arkansas era, when he and Clinton had an argument in Clinton’s kitchen – whereupon the young governor grabbed Morris from behind, Morris slipped to the floor, Hillary had to help him up...you get the idea.
Another supporter of the spontaneous wig-out theory is Jonathan Alter, the liberal commentator. Interviewed the other day at Brown University, and asked about the Fox incident, Alter said, “I thought he lost his temper. Yes, it rallies the Democratic base, but he talks a lot about bringing people together and trying to win the election without rubbing raw a lot of old wounds. He has a temper. He was right on the merits of (what he said), but ... if he had to do it over again, I don't think he would have insulted Chris Wallace that way.”
And Wallace himself buys this theory. In recent days he has said that the atmosphere in the studio stayed tense after the cameras were shut off, and that Clinton and his entourage were arguing about the encounter as they were leaving the premises.
Bill Clinton, shrewd but undisciplined. This hybrid theory posits that he arrived at Fox determined to put up his dukes if necessary, in a polite but firm manner befitting a former president, but that his inner demons got the better of him and he wound up going too far. Mark Davis, a Dallas columnist and radio host, writes: “I don't believe the former president sat down intending to lose that much cool. But I do believe he was spoiling for a degree of conflict that would bolster his anti-terror credentials and energize Democrats to ‘get tough’ with anyone doubting the party's national security credentials.”
In the end, what probably matters most is that, either by accident or design, Clinton cranked up base Democrats who have been thirsting for inspiration in an election year (maybe he also cranked up the conservatives, reminding them why they should vote GOP, but that’s another issue). Here’s the bottom line, according to one of my email pen pals: “Clinton is the only Democrat on the planet who could do what he did and get away with it. He's got the requisite gravitas. Besides, the Democrats have become a political party of geldings, scared (wit)less by anything even remotely GOP. I found that Clinton having the (guts) to successfully stare down Chris Wallace on his Fox home turf, was not only a good thing that could serve to energize his party, but a necessary move - one that was way overdue!”
By the way, here’s one last assessment of Clinton. Yesterday, Fox News chief Roger Ailes said: “I frankly think the assault on Chris Wallace is an assault on all journalists.”
That’s pretty rich, coming from Ailes – the same guy who, as Richard Nixon’s 1968 TV producer, pioneered the tactics of isolating a presidential candidate from the inconvenient questions of political journalists. Ailes kept his client in TV studios, where he staged Q&A sessions between Nixon and “average citizens,” a format that, in its time, was widely viewed as an assault on all journalists. Asked at the time why the journalists were being barred from the studio tapings, Ailes (as reported in The Selling of the President), replied, "(Screw) 'em. It's not a press conference...the press has no business on the set."
-------
But enough about Clinton. Last I checked, he has a successor. And that president provided some interesting fodder of his own last Sunday; fortunately for him, Clinton got most of the attention.
In case you missed it, President Bush uttered a head-scratching remark that day on CNN. In the interests of full context, here was his exchange with Wolf Blitzer:
Q: “Let’s move on and talk a little bit about Iraq. Because this is a huge, huge issue, as you know, for the American public, a lot of concern that perhaps they are on the verge of a civil war--if not already a civil war. We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation. The Shia and the Sunni, the Iranians apparently having a negative role. Of course, al Qaeda in Iraq is still operating.”
BUSH: “Yes, you see you see it on TV, and that’s the power of an enemy that is willing to kill innocent people. But there’s also an unbelievable will and resiliency by the Iraqi people. Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago. I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is - my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy.”
Pick your way through the presidential verbiage, and ignore the fact that U.S. officials these days are openly questioning that supposedly “strong will for democracy,” and you can easily spot the key line: Bush’s contention that, when future Americans look in the rear-view mirror, the bloodshed in Iraq will be seen as “just a comma.”
Just a comma…not the kind of remark that is likely to comfort the families of slain and wounded U.S. soldiers. We can assume that he didn’t intend to convey that particular message. So we’re left to wonder, if he wasn’t trying to be dismissive of the current (and increasing) brutality in Iraq, how and why did he come up with that phrase? Well, here’s where things really get surreal:
Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher went googling, and came up with this conclusion: Bush was borrowing from a line that often appears in Christian teaching and sermons (“Don’t put a period where God puts a comma”), and Christian leaders in turn – I told you it gets surreal - seem to have adopted that line from…the late comedienne Gracie Allen, who is purported to have said, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”
Anyway…On more earthly ground, there are reports today that Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, will expose efforts by Bush and his war team to cover up the true extent of the violence on the ground in Iraq. If true, Bush at some point may need to change his comma to an exclamation mark.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
If a Democratic president was contradicted by his own spy agencies, just imagine Karl Rove's TV ad
So this is the best that the Bush administration can do: Yesterday it selectively released a few pages from a national intelligence assessment of the war on terror – just 13 percent of the overall content – yet it turns out that even those cherry-picked passages seriously undercut the president’s core message for the ’06 congressional elections.
On behalf of his fellow Republicans seeking to retain control of the House and Senate, Bush has been arguing all month that he has made America safer. Yet here are passages in a document, vetted by his 16 spy agencies, which flatly declare that, in the wake of Bush’s war of choice in Iraq, America is actually becoming less safe. That’s not the kind of message that Karl Rove and his political lieutenants had in mind for the runup to November. (Bush spokesman Tony Snow, earlier today, sought to dismiss the intelligence document findings with a remark that I suppose he assumed would put the whole matter to rest: "Well, the president says we're winning.")
Obviously, there are a few lines in those three declassified pages that Bush can trumpet in his own defense. On the first page, for instance, the intelligence authorities write, “Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit,” and on page two, they write, “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry the fight.” Taken together, those passages can be read by Bush supporters as a defense of democratization in the Middle East, and as a confirmation of the Bush view that we should stay in Iraq and defeat the terrorists so that fewer will be “inspired” in the future.
But these pages also contain sufficient new ammunition for the Democrats, as they seek to advance their argument that Bush has been failing as our national security steward. The best way to illustrate this point is to posit a hypothetical.
Just imagine what would happen if we had a Democratic president, on the eve of congressional elections, who was trying to fight global terrorism while bogged down in a foreign war of choice. Imagine that this Democratic president had been insisting for many months that he was making America safer. Then imagine that, under strong political pressure, he had been forced to release a few pages of the latest National Intelligence Estimate. And imagine that Karl Rove and his message masters sat down with those pages and a Magic Marker. Here’s the kind of TV ad that we might expect the Republicans to craft (and everything that appears between quotation marks is drawn from the declassified NIE pages):
Cue scary percussion background music. Shadowy images of terrorists move across screen in slow-motion. Voiceover narrator speaks, in serious but faintly mocking tone.
NARRATOR:
In a dangerous world, where enemies continue to threaten our family values and our very lives, where toughness and honesty is required here in the homeland, our Democrat president has been going around claiming that he is actually winning the war on the terror, and making us safer.
CUT TO TREMULOUS SUBURBAN MOTHER, CUDDLING HER KIDS:
I want to believe in our president. I want to trust what he says. The lives of my children depend on that.
NARRATOR:
But can we really trust a Democrat president to tell us the truth in time of war -- when even the experts in his own administration, the foks on the front line of battle, now say that we are losing the global fight against the terrorists?
CUT TO PHRASES FROM DOCUMENT, LOOMING LARGER ON SCREEN:
“…the global jihadist movement…is spreading and adapting…increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.”
NARRATOR:
And can we really trust a Democrat president and a Democrat Congress when they say that their war in Iraq is helping us to win that global fight?
CUT TO NEW DOCUMENT PHRASES:
“the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives…the Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”
NARRATOR:
With the stakes so high, can we ever really afford to trust the Democrats…
QUICK CUT TO IMAGE OF JIMMY CARTER AND THE IRANIAN HOSTAGES, AS NARRATOR CONTINUES:
…to keep us safe in time of war? When even their own intelligence experts don’t think so? Vote Republican on November 7. As if your life depended on it.
-------
And that's just the stuff that can fit in 30 seconds. Remember, too, that this NIE report is actually the third official slapdown of the Bush administration in recent weeks. First, the Pentagon released a study on Sept. 1 (the eve of Labor Day weekend, when supposedly fewer people would notice) which concluded that the violence in Iraq is creating "the conditions that could lead to civil war" -- a stinging rebuke to Bush's recent dismissal of critics who, in his words, carp about "civil war this and civil war that." Second, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on Sept. 8 stating that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks -- undercutting the countless Bush administration insinuations.
So is there sufficient political ammo for the Democrats to at least make a case for Bush failure on the issue he has long deemed to be his strenth? It would appear so. Will they go for the jugular, the way a generation of Republican operatives has been taught to do? That's what even the most diehard Democratic voter wants to know.
On behalf of his fellow Republicans seeking to retain control of the House and Senate, Bush has been arguing all month that he has made America safer. Yet here are passages in a document, vetted by his 16 spy agencies, which flatly declare that, in the wake of Bush’s war of choice in Iraq, America is actually becoming less safe. That’s not the kind of message that Karl Rove and his political lieutenants had in mind for the runup to November. (Bush spokesman Tony Snow, earlier today, sought to dismiss the intelligence document findings with a remark that I suppose he assumed would put the whole matter to rest: "Well, the president says we're winning.")
Obviously, there are a few lines in those three declassified pages that Bush can trumpet in his own defense. On the first page, for instance, the intelligence authorities write, “Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit,” and on page two, they write, “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry the fight.” Taken together, those passages can be read by Bush supporters as a defense of democratization in the Middle East, and as a confirmation of the Bush view that we should stay in Iraq and defeat the terrorists so that fewer will be “inspired” in the future.
But these pages also contain sufficient new ammunition for the Democrats, as they seek to advance their argument that Bush has been failing as our national security steward. The best way to illustrate this point is to posit a hypothetical.
Just imagine what would happen if we had a Democratic president, on the eve of congressional elections, who was trying to fight global terrorism while bogged down in a foreign war of choice. Imagine that this Democratic president had been insisting for many months that he was making America safer. Then imagine that, under strong political pressure, he had been forced to release a few pages of the latest National Intelligence Estimate. And imagine that Karl Rove and his message masters sat down with those pages and a Magic Marker. Here’s the kind of TV ad that we might expect the Republicans to craft (and everything that appears between quotation marks is drawn from the declassified NIE pages):
Cue scary percussion background music. Shadowy images of terrorists move across screen in slow-motion. Voiceover narrator speaks, in serious but faintly mocking tone.
NARRATOR:
In a dangerous world, where enemies continue to threaten our family values and our very lives, where toughness and honesty is required here in the homeland, our Democrat president has been going around claiming that he is actually winning the war on the terror, and making us safer.
CUT TO TREMULOUS SUBURBAN MOTHER, CUDDLING HER KIDS:
I want to believe in our president. I want to trust what he says. The lives of my children depend on that.
NARRATOR:
But can we really trust a Democrat president to tell us the truth in time of war -- when even the experts in his own administration, the foks on the front line of battle, now say that we are losing the global fight against the terrorists?
CUT TO PHRASES FROM DOCUMENT, LOOMING LARGER ON SCREEN:
“…the global jihadist movement…is spreading and adapting…increasing in both number and geographic dispersion.”
NARRATOR:
And can we really trust a Democrat president and a Democrat Congress when they say that their war in Iraq is helping us to win that global fight?
CUT TO NEW DOCUMENT PHRASES:
“the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives…the Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”
NARRATOR:
With the stakes so high, can we ever really afford to trust the Democrats…
QUICK CUT TO IMAGE OF JIMMY CARTER AND THE IRANIAN HOSTAGES, AS NARRATOR CONTINUES:
…to keep us safe in time of war? When even their own intelligence experts don’t think so? Vote Republican on November 7. As if your life depended on it.
-------
And that's just the stuff that can fit in 30 seconds. Remember, too, that this NIE report is actually the third official slapdown of the Bush administration in recent weeks. First, the Pentagon released a study on Sept. 1 (the eve of Labor Day weekend, when supposedly fewer people would notice) which concluded that the violence in Iraq is creating "the conditions that could lead to civil war" -- a stinging rebuke to Bush's recent dismissal of critics who, in his words, carp about "civil war this and civil war that." Second, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on Sept. 8 stating that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks -- undercutting the countless Bush administration insinuations.
So is there sufficient political ammo for the Democrats to at least make a case for Bush failure on the issue he has long deemed to be his strenth? It would appear so. Will they go for the jugular, the way a generation of Republican operatives has been taught to do? That's what even the most diehard Democratic voter wants to know.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
You ask why there's no third-party movement in America? Here's one reason
It’s the kind of story that routinely gets buried inside a newspaper: A judge throws a third-party candidate off a ballot, for arcane and technical reasons that thoroughly bore the average reader, who probably never heard of the candidate and probably wouldn’t vote for him anyway.
So it goes today, with the news that Carl Romanelli, a Green party candidate in the Pennsylvania Senate race, has been ejected from the November ballot because a judge says there are too many invalid petition signatures. To your average political pundit, Romanelli’s court defeat seems significant only because of how it affects the main event, the showdown between incumbent Republican Rick Santorum and Democratic challenger Bob Casey Jr. And the shorthand is that Casey benefits, because without Romanelli on the ballot in the nation’s marquee Senate race, liberals who deem Casey insufficiently liberal have no way to cast a protest vote – much to the dismay of the Santorum forces, who have labored to promote Romanelli’s candidacy.
Both major parties have long played that nakedly political game, of course. Santorum (now down by 12 points in a new poll released today) has been trying to boost the third-party guy in order to divide Democratic voters, not because he cares a whit about the principle of ballot access. And Democratic operatives have done the same thing. My favorite story is about Jack Kennedy’s first House campaign, in 1946. When a popular politician, city councilman Joseph Russo joined the race, Kennedy’s father promptly found a nobody named Joseph Russo and got him on the ballot, for the role purpose of dividing the Joseph Russo vote.
Anyway, I digress. The Romanelli story has important resonance beyond the Casey-Santorum connection. The bottom line is that it highlights the plight of third party candidates in general, and demonstrates the longstanding barriers erected by the two dominant political parties.
I am often asked, by people who are fed up with both the Democrats and Republicans, why there are so few alternatives, and “is there any chance we’ll have a third party to vote for?” The blunt answer is, dream on. One big reason is because the election laws in many states make it very difficult for new parties and candidates to gain any traction.
Case in point: Pennsylvania. I have yet to see, in any of the stories about Romanelli’s court loss, any mention of the fact that Pennsylvania’s ballot laws are among the most restrictive in America (according to the nonpartisan Ballot Access News, which specializes in such matters). Romanelli came up short in his push for valid ballot signatures – he needed 67,071 and he had 58,139 – but the real issue is why he needed to get so many.
That’s because of the way the state law is written. When somebody like Romanelli seeks to get on the ballot via petition signatures, here’s the magic number he must reach: two percent of all the votes that were cast in the previous election for the statewide candidate who got the highest vote tally. In this case, (ironically) the biggest vote-getter in 2004 was the Democratic candidate for treasurer, Bob Casey Jr. And the vote tally was especially high because 2004 was a presidential election year, which meant a much higher turnout than in a midterm election year. Two percent of the ’04 Casey vote equals 67, 071.
Romanelli’s 58, 319 is actually the highest valid signature tally of any third-party or independent candidate in America this year, except for two independent gubernatorial candidates in Texas, yet it’s still not deemed to be good enough (barring a theoretical final ruling by the state’s highest court). To put the Pennsylvania requirement into perspective, just check out some of the other states: Minnesota, for instance, requires only 2000 valid signatures. Ohio requires 5000. New Jersey requires 800.
Several years ago, in Pennsylvania, a gubernatorial Election Reform Task Force voted 12-0 to loosen the state ballot access requirements, concluding in a report that the law "be amended to provide greater access to the ballot for minor political parties and political bodies". One member stated, "I think it is time to have equal and fair standards for all candidates." But that time appears to have come and gone, because the GOP-dominated state legislature hasn’t budged (not that a Democratic majority legislature would have done any different).
The irony is that today’s two dominant parties actually benefited, in their infancy, from the dearth of ballot access restrictions. Back in the early nineteenth century, state governments welcomed all parties fairly equally. Scholars have written that the newly-created Republican party gained an immediate toehold in 1854 – winning more gubernatorial and House races than any other party – because there were no laws on the books inhibiting their access to the ballot box. That all came later, toward the end of the century, once the two parties were fully embedded.
These ballot laws remind me of beach access restrictions; folks who own property at the shore often try to bar the newbies. Carl Romanelli is hoping for a final reprieve from the state Supreme Court, but he’d be well advised not to pack his sun lotion.
So it goes today, with the news that Carl Romanelli, a Green party candidate in the Pennsylvania Senate race, has been ejected from the November ballot because a judge says there are too many invalid petition signatures. To your average political pundit, Romanelli’s court defeat seems significant only because of how it affects the main event, the showdown between incumbent Republican Rick Santorum and Democratic challenger Bob Casey Jr. And the shorthand is that Casey benefits, because without Romanelli on the ballot in the nation’s marquee Senate race, liberals who deem Casey insufficiently liberal have no way to cast a protest vote – much to the dismay of the Santorum forces, who have labored to promote Romanelli’s candidacy.
Both major parties have long played that nakedly political game, of course. Santorum (now down by 12 points in a new poll released today) has been trying to boost the third-party guy in order to divide Democratic voters, not because he cares a whit about the principle of ballot access. And Democratic operatives have done the same thing. My favorite story is about Jack Kennedy’s first House campaign, in 1946. When a popular politician, city councilman Joseph Russo joined the race, Kennedy’s father promptly found a nobody named Joseph Russo and got him on the ballot, for the role purpose of dividing the Joseph Russo vote.
Anyway, I digress. The Romanelli story has important resonance beyond the Casey-Santorum connection. The bottom line is that it highlights the plight of third party candidates in general, and demonstrates the longstanding barriers erected by the two dominant political parties.
I am often asked, by people who are fed up with both the Democrats and Republicans, why there are so few alternatives, and “is there any chance we’ll have a third party to vote for?” The blunt answer is, dream on. One big reason is because the election laws in many states make it very difficult for new parties and candidates to gain any traction.
Case in point: Pennsylvania. I have yet to see, in any of the stories about Romanelli’s court loss, any mention of the fact that Pennsylvania’s ballot laws are among the most restrictive in America (according to the nonpartisan Ballot Access News, which specializes in such matters). Romanelli came up short in his push for valid ballot signatures – he needed 67,071 and he had 58,139 – but the real issue is why he needed to get so many.
That’s because of the way the state law is written. When somebody like Romanelli seeks to get on the ballot via petition signatures, here’s the magic number he must reach: two percent of all the votes that were cast in the previous election for the statewide candidate who got the highest vote tally. In this case, (ironically) the biggest vote-getter in 2004 was the Democratic candidate for treasurer, Bob Casey Jr. And the vote tally was especially high because 2004 was a presidential election year, which meant a much higher turnout than in a midterm election year. Two percent of the ’04 Casey vote equals 67, 071.
Romanelli’s 58, 319 is actually the highest valid signature tally of any third-party or independent candidate in America this year, except for two independent gubernatorial candidates in Texas, yet it’s still not deemed to be good enough (barring a theoretical final ruling by the state’s highest court). To put the Pennsylvania requirement into perspective, just check out some of the other states: Minnesota, for instance, requires only 2000 valid signatures. Ohio requires 5000. New Jersey requires 800.
Several years ago, in Pennsylvania, a gubernatorial Election Reform Task Force voted 12-0 to loosen the state ballot access requirements, concluding in a report that the law "be amended to provide greater access to the ballot for minor political parties and political bodies". One member stated, "I think it is time to have equal and fair standards for all candidates." But that time appears to have come and gone, because the GOP-dominated state legislature hasn’t budged (not that a Democratic majority legislature would have done any different).
The irony is that today’s two dominant parties actually benefited, in their infancy, from the dearth of ballot access restrictions. Back in the early nineteenth century, state governments welcomed all parties fairly equally. Scholars have written that the newly-created Republican party gained an immediate toehold in 1854 – winning more gubernatorial and House races than any other party – because there were no laws on the books inhibiting their access to the ballot box. That all came later, toward the end of the century, once the two parties were fully embedded.
These ballot laws remind me of beach access restrictions; folks who own property at the shore often try to bar the newbies. Carl Romanelli is hoping for a final reprieve from the state Supreme Court, but he’d be well advised not to pack his sun lotion.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Bill Clinton attacks the messenger
Bill Clinton’s meltdown yesterday on Fox News was fascinating. Clearly, the former president is extremely concerned that the ongoing debate over his anti-terrorist policies could seriously taint his legacy; and that any suggestions that he was soft on Osama bin Laden during the ‘90s might help George W. Bush and the GOP win the ’06 congressional elections.
If you haven’t heard about Clinton’s Sunday outburst – in his first appearance on Fox, he assailed host Chris Wallace for asking him some tough questions about his pre-9/11 terrorist policies – then you can read the transcript. Clinton is generally painted these days as a serene and happy warrior, but yesterday, after Wallace asked “why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business,” Clinton wigged out to the point where he even accused Wallace of smirking at him.
I don’t intend here to revisit whether Clinton deserves major or minor blame for failing to kill bin Laden during a decade when few Americans (and congressional Republicans) were focused on that goal; actually, I dealt with that issue here two weeks ago. Instead, just a few observations:
On the merits, Clinton was right when he complained that Wallace hasn’t asked Bush administration leaders equally tough questions about their own conduct. Clinton pointed out that al Qaeda’s ties to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole weren’t confirmed until the early days of the Bush era, yet Wallace has never asked Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, or Condolleezza Rice why no retaliatory actions were taken during their nine months in office prior to 9/11. Clinton went after Wallace on this: “You never asked that, did you?” And Wallace just dodged the question: “With Iraq and Afghanistan, there's plenty of stuff to ask.”
But Wallace did point out, accurately, that Clinton’s performance is critically assessed in both the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report and the new, widely praised book The Looming Tower. (According to the New York Times book review, author Lawrence Wright "argues that the Clinton administration’s reaction to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa — launching cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in a failed effort to kill Mr. bin Laden — helped turn the terrorist into a global celebrity and enabled him to mythologize himself further.") Yesterday, Clinton acknowledged to Wallace that his performance could have been better, simply because the record shows that he failed to kill bin Laden – but then he went back to attacking Wallace and Fox News.
I would bet that a lot of Democratic base voters, long frustrated by the timidity of party leaders, were thrilled yesterday that Clinton played smashmouth with the enemy. Here’s a sampling of what Clinton said, at various intervals:
"So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me…You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch's supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you'd spend half the time talking about -- you said you'd spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7-billion-plus in three days from 215 different commitments. And you don't care…it set me off on a tear because you didn't formulate it in an honest way and because you people ask me questions you don't ask the other side…And you've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever.”
For partisan Democrats, this is satisfying stuff, the equivalent of an end-zone dance by their favorite football star. Here’s the political problem, though: Whenever President Bush and his top surrogates react with hostility to questions, and seek to disparage the press questioners by impugning their motives, and seek to convey the impression that ideological enemies are plotting hit jobs against the administration, Democrats generally cite that behavior as further proof of the GOP’s mendacity. Yet here was Clinton doing much the same thing, trying to paint himself as a victim, and using that as a shield.
In other words, I don’t see how Bill Clinton’s outburst could possibly help his wife’s prospects as a presidential candidate. By losing his cool and lashing out, he basically sent the message that he remains a strongly polarizing political figure. Which is precisely why many Democrats remain worried about handing the ’08 nomination to Hillary Clinton. They are asking themselves whether independent swing voters, wearied by our polarized politics, are really enthused about a presidency that would inevitably spark an ideological refighting of the 1990s.
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By the way, Clinton also appeared yesterday on Meet the Press, where he performed with greater equanimity. But I can't resist sharing this eye-rolling moment:
At one point, when the topic of Hillary's prospective candidacy came up, he said that "we shouldn't be talking about it or thinking about it now...I don't know if she's going to run, I--and I don't want to talk to her about it, and I don't want her thinking about it."
Does he actually expect people to believe that the Democrats' best strategist isn't talking presidential politics with the apparent Democratic presidential frontrunner? Hillary Clinton has already raised $50 million this year, most of which will not be needed for her Senate re-election race, and she has already hired ex-Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe as her fundraising vaccum-cleaner -- and we're supposed to believe that Bill doesn't want her to be thinking about 2008?
Maybe his new finger-wagging line should be, "I did not talk politics with that woman."
If you haven’t heard about Clinton’s Sunday outburst – in his first appearance on Fox, he assailed host Chris Wallace for asking him some tough questions about his pre-9/11 terrorist policies – then you can read the transcript. Clinton is generally painted these days as a serene and happy warrior, but yesterday, after Wallace asked “why didn't you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business,” Clinton wigged out to the point where he even accused Wallace of smirking at him.
I don’t intend here to revisit whether Clinton deserves major or minor blame for failing to kill bin Laden during a decade when few Americans (and congressional Republicans) were focused on that goal; actually, I dealt with that issue here two weeks ago. Instead, just a few observations:
On the merits, Clinton was right when he complained that Wallace hasn’t asked Bush administration leaders equally tough questions about their own conduct. Clinton pointed out that al Qaeda’s ties to the attack on the U.S.S. Cole weren’t confirmed until the early days of the Bush era, yet Wallace has never asked Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, or Condolleezza Rice why no retaliatory actions were taken during their nine months in office prior to 9/11. Clinton went after Wallace on this: “You never asked that, did you?” And Wallace just dodged the question: “With Iraq and Afghanistan, there's plenty of stuff to ask.”
But Wallace did point out, accurately, that Clinton’s performance is critically assessed in both the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report and the new, widely praised book The Looming Tower. (According to the New York Times book review, author Lawrence Wright "argues that the Clinton administration’s reaction to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa — launching cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in a failed effort to kill Mr. bin Laden — helped turn the terrorist into a global celebrity and enabled him to mythologize himself further.") Yesterday, Clinton acknowledged to Wallace that his performance could have been better, simply because the record shows that he failed to kill bin Laden – but then he went back to attacking Wallace and Fox News.
I would bet that a lot of Democratic base voters, long frustrated by the timidity of party leaders, were thrilled yesterday that Clinton played smashmouth with the enemy. Here’s a sampling of what Clinton said, at various intervals:
"So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me…You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch's supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you'd spend half the time talking about -- you said you'd spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7-billion-plus in three days from 215 different commitments. And you don't care…it set me off on a tear because you didn't formulate it in an honest way and because you people ask me questions you don't ask the other side…And you've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever.”
For partisan Democrats, this is satisfying stuff, the equivalent of an end-zone dance by their favorite football star. Here’s the political problem, though: Whenever President Bush and his top surrogates react with hostility to questions, and seek to disparage the press questioners by impugning their motives, and seek to convey the impression that ideological enemies are plotting hit jobs against the administration, Democrats generally cite that behavior as further proof of the GOP’s mendacity. Yet here was Clinton doing much the same thing, trying to paint himself as a victim, and using that as a shield.
In other words, I don’t see how Bill Clinton’s outburst could possibly help his wife’s prospects as a presidential candidate. By losing his cool and lashing out, he basically sent the message that he remains a strongly polarizing political figure. Which is precisely why many Democrats remain worried about handing the ’08 nomination to Hillary Clinton. They are asking themselves whether independent swing voters, wearied by our polarized politics, are really enthused about a presidency that would inevitably spark an ideological refighting of the 1990s.
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By the way, Clinton also appeared yesterday on Meet the Press, where he performed with greater equanimity. But I can't resist sharing this eye-rolling moment:
At one point, when the topic of Hillary's prospective candidacy came up, he said that "we shouldn't be talking about it or thinking about it now...I don't know if she's going to run, I--and I don't want to talk to her about it, and I don't want her thinking about it."
Does he actually expect people to believe that the Democrats' best strategist isn't talking presidential politics with the apparent Democratic presidential frontrunner? Hillary Clinton has already raised $50 million this year, most of which will not be needed for her Senate re-election race, and she has already hired ex-Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe as her fundraising vaccum-cleaner -- and we're supposed to believe that Bill doesn't want her to be thinking about 2008?
Maybe his new finger-wagging line should be, "I did not talk politics with that woman."
Sunday, September 24, 2006
National security and Howard Dean: villified and vindicated
My new-fangled biweekly column in the Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday Currents section was launched today, and it seemed appropriate to goose the Democrats for their ongoing inability -- even with the wind at their backs -- to craft a consistent and resonant national security message. And I wrote the column even before Democratic chairman Howard Dean helpfully stepped forward to ratify my theme.
Last Friday, Dean and his GOP counterpart, Ken Mehlman, both wrote pieces for the Wall Street Journal's commentary page about the stakes in the '06 election. As conservative blogger Tom Bevan pointed out, Mehlman's first 642 words were about national security and the war on terror. And what did Dean do? He got around to the issue in his second-to-last paragraph, devoting 53 words to what is arguably the most important issue this autumn.
Yes, it can be argued that Mehlman's GOP rhetoric on national security is old and predictable and increasingly detached from Iraq realities. But at least it's a consistent, high-profile message, as opposed to Dean's disappearing act. On Friday Bevan wrote this, and I think he got it right:
"If Democrats want to take back control of Congress this November, one thing they cannot do is to let Republicans draw a clear line between the two parties on national security and to present voters with a distinct choice between who is more serious, more attentive, and more committed to protecting the country. They need to try and blur the line and muddy the choice by talking about national security (and Iraq) every chance they get. That's why Ken Mehlman must have been so happy to see his op-ed running alongside Howard Dean's this morning in one of the largest papers in the country. By essentially ignoring the issue of national security and the war on terror, Howard Dean helped draw exactly the contrast Republicans want (and need) most this year."
And one prominent liberal blogger's verdict on Dean was basically no different. Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly, noting that Dean devoted most of his space to the standard Democratic domestic issues (stagnant wages, health care, higher taxes on the rich) proceeded to eviscerate the guy. Speaking directly to Dean, he wrote:
"Do you really think (the Wall Street Journal) is the place for a thousand words of pitchfork-waving, tax-cut-hating, populist agit-prop? Even if you couldn't bring yourself to write about national security, don't you think you could have picked a slightly better approach to win the hearts and minds of the conservative business titans who read the Journal? Know your audience. This is Persuasion 101. Can't anybody play this game anymore?"
Which is what, in my print column, I was wondering as well.
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But let's cut Dean a break on one topical matter:
It was hard to miss the big weekend news about the war in Iraq. It seems that, yet again, there is fresh evidence flatly contradicting President Bush's assertion that the war, and the removal of Saddam Hussein, has made America safer. It appears that some authoritative voices are now saying that, contrary to Bush's '06 election argument, the American invasion and occupation have actually made the world less safe, by spawning a new generation of Islamic radicals and ratcheting up the post-9/11 terrorist threat.
Is this just another Bush-hating argument from liberals and Democrats (or, as the GOP message shop prefers to call them, "Defeatocrats")?
Nope. This is the consensus view of the 16 federal spy agencies that work for President Bush. As reported here, a classified report containing this finding, a National Intelligence Estimate, was completed during the spring, and constitutes the first comprehensive assessment by those agencies since the Irar war was launched. Howard Dean, as a Democratic presidential candidate, was pilloried in December 2003 when he said the world wasn't necessarily safer in the wake of Saddam's capture. Now it appears that Bush's own intelligence authorities see it the same way.
One might wonder how Bush defenders could explain away this one, but Al Haig did give it a try this morning. (You might remember Al Haig; he was Reagan's first secretary of state.) Haig went on CNN and said that the story was "written especially for the Democratic Party." Which is news to me, because I had no idea that Dean was so tight with the 16 spy agencies that they would bend their views to accomodate him.
Last Friday, Dean and his GOP counterpart, Ken Mehlman, both wrote pieces for the Wall Street Journal's commentary page about the stakes in the '06 election. As conservative blogger Tom Bevan pointed out, Mehlman's first 642 words were about national security and the war on terror. And what did Dean do? He got around to the issue in his second-to-last paragraph, devoting 53 words to what is arguably the most important issue this autumn.
Yes, it can be argued that Mehlman's GOP rhetoric on national security is old and predictable and increasingly detached from Iraq realities. But at least it's a consistent, high-profile message, as opposed to Dean's disappearing act. On Friday Bevan wrote this, and I think he got it right:
"If Democrats want to take back control of Congress this November, one thing they cannot do is to let Republicans draw a clear line between the two parties on national security and to present voters with a distinct choice between who is more serious, more attentive, and more committed to protecting the country. They need to try and blur the line and muddy the choice by talking about national security (and Iraq) every chance they get. That's why Ken Mehlman must have been so happy to see his op-ed running alongside Howard Dean's this morning in one of the largest papers in the country. By essentially ignoring the issue of national security and the war on terror, Howard Dean helped draw exactly the contrast Republicans want (and need) most this year."
And one prominent liberal blogger's verdict on Dean was basically no different. Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly, noting that Dean devoted most of his space to the standard Democratic domestic issues (stagnant wages, health care, higher taxes on the rich) proceeded to eviscerate the guy. Speaking directly to Dean, he wrote:
"Do you really think (the Wall Street Journal) is the place for a thousand words of pitchfork-waving, tax-cut-hating, populist agit-prop? Even if you couldn't bring yourself to write about national security, don't you think you could have picked a slightly better approach to win the hearts and minds of the conservative business titans who read the Journal? Know your audience. This is Persuasion 101. Can't anybody play this game anymore?"
Which is what, in my print column, I was wondering as well.
-------
But let's cut Dean a break on one topical matter:
It was hard to miss the big weekend news about the war in Iraq. It seems that, yet again, there is fresh evidence flatly contradicting President Bush's assertion that the war, and the removal of Saddam Hussein, has made America safer. It appears that some authoritative voices are now saying that, contrary to Bush's '06 election argument, the American invasion and occupation have actually made the world less safe, by spawning a new generation of Islamic radicals and ratcheting up the post-9/11 terrorist threat.
Is this just another Bush-hating argument from liberals and Democrats (or, as the GOP message shop prefers to call them, "Defeatocrats")?
Nope. This is the consensus view of the 16 federal spy agencies that work for President Bush. As reported here, a classified report containing this finding, a National Intelligence Estimate, was completed during the spring, and constitutes the first comprehensive assessment by those agencies since the Irar war was launched. Howard Dean, as a Democratic presidential candidate, was pilloried in December 2003 when he said the world wasn't necessarily safer in the wake of Saddam's capture. Now it appears that Bush's own intelligence authorities see it the same way.
One might wonder how Bush defenders could explain away this one, but Al Haig did give it a try this morning. (You might remember Al Haig; he was Reagan's first secretary of state.) Haig went on CNN and said that the story was "written especially for the Democratic Party." Which is news to me, because I had no idea that Dean was so tight with the 16 spy agencies that they would bend their views to accomodate him.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Obamamania and my theory of relativity
How best to assess, with a clear head and cold eye, the latest outbreak of Obamamania?
I am referring, of course, to the burgeoning desire among many Democrats for an ’08 presidential primary season that would conclude with the convention coronation of Senator Barack Obama – the silver-tongued African-American from Illinois who gets 300 speaking requests a week (according to his office), and whose reputed ability to wow a crowd ranks second only to Bill Clinton’s. Which is quite a compliment, since it has often been said that Clinton could talk a dog off a meat truck.
I was told several times this week that if I didn’t find a way to watch Obama’s recent speech in Iowa – last Sunday, he keynoted the annual steak fry hosted by Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin – then I was missing something special. So, through the combined forces of C-Span and TiVo, I checked it out.
Well, it was good, but not great. Much of it was the expected Democratic boilerplate. Some of it was wry and forceful (on Bush and the politics of 9/11: “I’ve had enough of using terrorism as a wedge issue. I don’t know about you, but the war against terrorism isn’t supposed to crop up just between September and November in even-numbered years”). But he also had the usual lines you hear in almost every speech from every politician in both parties (“Our parents and our grandparents faced greater challenges than we face, and yet somehow they were able to overcome it, that’s the essence of America”).
On the issue of Iraq, he didn’t bob and weave; even though he wasn’t in the Senate when it voted to authorize war back in 2002, he took pains to say that he had opposed an Iraq invasion while he was still a state senator in Illinois; on the other hand, that’s exactly what Harkin’s liberal audience would have wanted to hear. Yet when the moment arrived for him to propose what America should do next in Iraq, he deftly abandoned the topic, segueing seamlessly into a new anecdote about a 105-year-old woman of whom he had spoken earlier.
But he said it all very well, and most striking were the faces in the audience – rapt, mesmerized, eyes ablaze with hope. That’s probably what matters most. Charisma is a rare commodity; it can’t be bottled for general candidate consumption. They either have it or they don’t, and most don’t. Obama also has the gift of weaving the details of his own personal story (community organizer, law professor, “church-going man,” son of a Kenyan and a white Kansas mom) into a larger narrative about the hope and promise and “idea of America.”
The question is, does this mean he’s an historic figure in the wings, the miracle worker who can finally lead thirsty Democrats out of the desert?
Upside: He’s a fresh face, less than two years in the Senate at this point, and therefore unencumbered by the usual Washington baggage; his base is Chicago, a major Democratic fundraising hub; Illinois abuts Iowa, which means that, during the Iowa caucuses, he can flood the zone with volunteers; he can potentially galvanize the party’s African-American voters, while potentially drawing some white “values voters,” with his frank talk about the importance of religion in politics (last June, he rebuked “liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical”). He can do the red-meat rhetoric, but he doesn’t get personal (on Sunday: “I don’t think that George Bush is a bad man”), which means that he’s not likely to polarize our politics any further. And did I mention his charisma?
Downside: Two years ago at this moment, the guy was a state senator in Springfield, Illinois. He has run only once in a statewide race, winning his ’04 Senate seat in a landslide only because his first GOP opponent, Jack Ryan, had to quit the race after seamy details surfaced about his divorce; and because the replacement opponent, right-wing radio host Alan Keyes, has long been a national joke. It’s also tough to think of a single time when he has taken a risky public stand against the Republicans on Capitol Hill; there was a brief tiff with John McCain over an ethics issue that nobody outside of Washington remembers. Indeed, he is so new to the national scene that some Democrats have no idea how he’d react if or when the Republicans feel compelled to try to dent his halo (either by cherry-picking his Senate votes, highlighting some inevitable Senate compromises, or simply Swift Boating him).
In other words, we don’t know at this point whether he’s hero or hype. But it’s fair to say that the current fervor is less about Obama than about the lack of fervor for the rest of the prospective ’08 field. On paper, his assets seem to stand out because of the others’ perceived deficits. Call it my theory of relativity. This is what I hear most often:
Hillary Clinton? A polarizer, and a didactic speaker.
Al Gore? Old news, and ripe again for GOP caricature.
Mark Warner? Too technocratic, not inspiring.
Evan Bayh? No passion, too long in the Senate, too centrist for the liberals.
John Edwards? GOP will zap him with “rich trial lawyer” image.
Bill Richardson? Reputedly lackluster on the stump, and bad on TV.
Joe Biden? Too long in the Senate, too verbose.
Russ Feingold? Too liberal to get elected.
Chris Dodd? Northeastern liberal, and too long in the Senate.
Tom Vilsack: Solid Iowan, but charisma-challenged.
John Kerry? Oh, please.
Wes Clark? Oh, please II.
Conclusion: Obamamania is not just about Obama. It’s also about grading on a curve.
I am referring, of course, to the burgeoning desire among many Democrats for an ’08 presidential primary season that would conclude with the convention coronation of Senator Barack Obama – the silver-tongued African-American from Illinois who gets 300 speaking requests a week (according to his office), and whose reputed ability to wow a crowd ranks second only to Bill Clinton’s. Which is quite a compliment, since it has often been said that Clinton could talk a dog off a meat truck.
I was told several times this week that if I didn’t find a way to watch Obama’s recent speech in Iowa – last Sunday, he keynoted the annual steak fry hosted by Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin – then I was missing something special. So, through the combined forces of C-Span and TiVo, I checked it out.
Well, it was good, but not great. Much of it was the expected Democratic boilerplate. Some of it was wry and forceful (on Bush and the politics of 9/11: “I’ve had enough of using terrorism as a wedge issue. I don’t know about you, but the war against terrorism isn’t supposed to crop up just between September and November in even-numbered years”). But he also had the usual lines you hear in almost every speech from every politician in both parties (“Our parents and our grandparents faced greater challenges than we face, and yet somehow they were able to overcome it, that’s the essence of America”).
On the issue of Iraq, he didn’t bob and weave; even though he wasn’t in the Senate when it voted to authorize war back in 2002, he took pains to say that he had opposed an Iraq invasion while he was still a state senator in Illinois; on the other hand, that’s exactly what Harkin’s liberal audience would have wanted to hear. Yet when the moment arrived for him to propose what America should do next in Iraq, he deftly abandoned the topic, segueing seamlessly into a new anecdote about a 105-year-old woman of whom he had spoken earlier.
But he said it all very well, and most striking were the faces in the audience – rapt, mesmerized, eyes ablaze with hope. That’s probably what matters most. Charisma is a rare commodity; it can’t be bottled for general candidate consumption. They either have it or they don’t, and most don’t. Obama also has the gift of weaving the details of his own personal story (community organizer, law professor, “church-going man,” son of a Kenyan and a white Kansas mom) into a larger narrative about the hope and promise and “idea of America.”
The question is, does this mean he’s an historic figure in the wings, the miracle worker who can finally lead thirsty Democrats out of the desert?
Upside: He’s a fresh face, less than two years in the Senate at this point, and therefore unencumbered by the usual Washington baggage; his base is Chicago, a major Democratic fundraising hub; Illinois abuts Iowa, which means that, during the Iowa caucuses, he can flood the zone with volunteers; he can potentially galvanize the party’s African-American voters, while potentially drawing some white “values voters,” with his frank talk about the importance of religion in politics (last June, he rebuked “liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical”). He can do the red-meat rhetoric, but he doesn’t get personal (on Sunday: “I don’t think that George Bush is a bad man”), which means that he’s not likely to polarize our politics any further. And did I mention his charisma?
Downside: Two years ago at this moment, the guy was a state senator in Springfield, Illinois. He has run only once in a statewide race, winning his ’04 Senate seat in a landslide only because his first GOP opponent, Jack Ryan, had to quit the race after seamy details surfaced about his divorce; and because the replacement opponent, right-wing radio host Alan Keyes, has long been a national joke. It’s also tough to think of a single time when he has taken a risky public stand against the Republicans on Capitol Hill; there was a brief tiff with John McCain over an ethics issue that nobody outside of Washington remembers. Indeed, he is so new to the national scene that some Democrats have no idea how he’d react if or when the Republicans feel compelled to try to dent his halo (either by cherry-picking his Senate votes, highlighting some inevitable Senate compromises, or simply Swift Boating him).
In other words, we don’t know at this point whether he’s hero or hype. But it’s fair to say that the current fervor is less about Obama than about the lack of fervor for the rest of the prospective ’08 field. On paper, his assets seem to stand out because of the others’ perceived deficits. Call it my theory of relativity. This is what I hear most often:
Hillary Clinton? A polarizer, and a didactic speaker.
Al Gore? Old news, and ripe again for GOP caricature.
Mark Warner? Too technocratic, not inspiring.
Evan Bayh? No passion, too long in the Senate, too centrist for the liberals.
John Edwards? GOP will zap him with “rich trial lawyer” image.
Bill Richardson? Reputedly lackluster on the stump, and bad on TV.
Joe Biden? Too long in the Senate, too verbose.
Russ Feingold? Too liberal to get elected.
Chris Dodd? Northeastern liberal, and too long in the Senate.
Tom Vilsack: Solid Iowan, but charisma-challenged.
John Kerry? Oh, please.
Wes Clark? Oh, please II.
Conclusion: Obamamania is not just about Obama. It’s also about grading on a curve.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Just asking: a three-act drama
Just asking:
1. If the Democrats botch their ’06 opportunity to recapture the Congress in November, will they demand Howard Dean’s head on a pike? Because if money is any kind of measurement, it would appear that the national party chairman is currently demonstrating why he flamed out as a presidential candidate while losing 17 of 18 primaries.
Take a look at the latest party figures, as reported to federal elections officials: On the eve of an autumn campaign that will hinge on the importance of grassroots turnout and state-by-state advertising, the Democratic National Committee had $10.9 million in the kitty…while the Republican National Committee had nearly four times that amount, $39.3 million.
Worse yet for the Democrats, there are reports that the RNC, bolstered with new fund-raising revenue this fall, plans to outspend Dean’s DNC by a margin of five to one. The Republicans’ $60 million will go to turnout and advertising efforts in the states and districts deemed crucial to their prospects for keeping the Senate and House; the DNC, by contrast, is reportedly planning to spend $12 million on turnout, and nothing on advertising.
It should be noted that other Democratic outposts are keeping pace with the GOP. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises and spends money for House raises, is holding its own against the GOP House campaign group; and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is actually doing better than its Republican Senate campaign counterpart. But Dean’s performance – and some of his spending priorities – are clearly rankling the Democratic players on Capitol Hill. When Democratic Senate campaign leader Chuck Schumer – who is rarely at a loss for words about anything – was asked about Dean yesterday, he declined comment.
The problem all along is that Dean has refused to focus headquarters money on the states and districts that are most crucial to the ’06 outcome; rather, he has spread it nationwide in an effort to build the party even in deeply red states. Naturally, the state Democratic chairmen in these neglected states love him for that. The flip side, however, is that valuable resources are going to places where Democratic House and Senate candidates face virtually impossible odds.
Democrats already fear – perhaps with good reason – the vaunted GOP turnout machine. So if the Republicans successfully pull out their voters, with the help of more efficiently expended resources, the Democratic long knives will be unsheathed beginning Nov. 8. And in Washington, Howard Dean may need to watch his back.
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2. How long will the Democrats sit back and allow the GOP to twist Nancy Pelosi’s words out of context?
This morning, for perhaps the umpteenth time, I received a Republican email that seeks to hang the House Democratic leader for something she said in May of 2002. The parsed phrase goes like this: “I don’t really consider ourselves at war.” Clearly, the GOP wants to use this as the ’06 campaign equivalent of John Kerry’s infamous ’04 utterance about having voted for an Iraq aid bill before voting against it; in other words, whole Kerry’s remark exposed him as a waffler, Pelosi’s remark is supposed to demonstrate that she’s a wuss.
Well, I just took the trouble to track down her remark, which appeared at the bottom of a Newhouse wire service story on May 6, 2002. It may come as no surprise that Pelosi actually said a lot of things, during that breakfast with reporters, and that the phrase at issue is best read in context. Here’s Pelosi in the Newhouse story: "I don't really consider ourselves at war. We're in a struggle against terrorism throughout the world, and we stand with the president in that fight," but that does not bestow "some kind of mantle on the president that he can't be subject to criticism."
Pelosi herself might well wish she had phrased the first sentence better. But, interestingly, I don’t see the GOP quoting the rest of that paragraph.
And at that same breakfast meeting, Pelosi also discussed the mounting Bush administration push for a war in Iraq. Voicing concern about granting the president a blank check, she said:
"Let's hope we don't have to resort to the use of force, because one thing is guaranteed: American military personnel will be killed, collateral damage will occur, and we don't know if we will achieve mission success."
Strange, I don’t see the Republicans quoting any of that.
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3. How has ’08 presidential hopeful George Allen turned his slam-dunk ’06 Senate campaign into a carnival sideshow?
First, the Virginia Republican senator poked fun at a young Indian-American, who was standing in the middle of an all-white audience, by calling him macaca (a racial slur), then spent the better part of two weeks offering a slew of explanations about whether he knew or didn’t know what the term meant or didn’t mean. And now he’s caught in an avoidable contretemps about when he knew or didn’t know that he was part-Jewish, and why he got defensive about it when asked.
At a debate Monday night, the moderator asked Allen about a report in a Jewish newspaper that had found some Jewish lineage on his mother’s side. Allen freaked out on camera, then huffed, "My mother's French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her. And I was raised as she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian." In reality, Allen reportedly learned from his mother last month that she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia before emigrating to America.
Why not just acknowledge the Jewish newspaper report, and move on? Instead, oy vey, what a mess: Allen’s defensive denial promptly gave his opponent, Jim Webb, and a number of Jewish leaders, the opening to raise questions about whether Allen was embarrassed about his heritage. Some liberal bloggers even asked whether Allen had something against the Jews.
Still playing defense, Allen had to put out a statement declaring that he is indeed proud of the heritage that he denied during the debate (“I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including my Lumbroso family line's Jewish heritage, which I learned about from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed”). And shortly afterward, to show that he really embraced the heritage he had denied, he charged that his critics were behaving like anti-Semites. At this rate, he’ll be showing up in shul this weekend for Rosh Hashanah.
But it should be noted that politicians can be weird about issues of ethnicity and religion. My favorite case in point: John Kerry.
For years he intimated, to his heavily Irish-American Massachusetts electorate, that he was Irish. Consider these Kerry remarks, which appeared in the Congressional Record on March 18, 1986: "For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestory, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans, from the time of the Revolutionary War to the present, have made to building a strong and vibrant nation.”
Well, the fact is that Kerry isn’t Irish at all. (He does have Jewish ancestors.) When he was busted for those Congressional Record remarks, his office performed the usual damage control ritual, by blaming the whole incident on a staffer.
So which is worse: a politician (Allen) who denies who he is, or a politician (Kerry) who paints himself as someone he isn’t?
Just asking.
1. If the Democrats botch their ’06 opportunity to recapture the Congress in November, will they demand Howard Dean’s head on a pike? Because if money is any kind of measurement, it would appear that the national party chairman is currently demonstrating why he flamed out as a presidential candidate while losing 17 of 18 primaries.
Take a look at the latest party figures, as reported to federal elections officials: On the eve of an autumn campaign that will hinge on the importance of grassroots turnout and state-by-state advertising, the Democratic National Committee had $10.9 million in the kitty…while the Republican National Committee had nearly four times that amount, $39.3 million.
Worse yet for the Democrats, there are reports that the RNC, bolstered with new fund-raising revenue this fall, plans to outspend Dean’s DNC by a margin of five to one. The Republicans’ $60 million will go to turnout and advertising efforts in the states and districts deemed crucial to their prospects for keeping the Senate and House; the DNC, by contrast, is reportedly planning to spend $12 million on turnout, and nothing on advertising.
It should be noted that other Democratic outposts are keeping pace with the GOP. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises and spends money for House raises, is holding its own against the GOP House campaign group; and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is actually doing better than its Republican Senate campaign counterpart. But Dean’s performance – and some of his spending priorities – are clearly rankling the Democratic players on Capitol Hill. When Democratic Senate campaign leader Chuck Schumer – who is rarely at a loss for words about anything – was asked about Dean yesterday, he declined comment.
The problem all along is that Dean has refused to focus headquarters money on the states and districts that are most crucial to the ’06 outcome; rather, he has spread it nationwide in an effort to build the party even in deeply red states. Naturally, the state Democratic chairmen in these neglected states love him for that. The flip side, however, is that valuable resources are going to places where Democratic House and Senate candidates face virtually impossible odds.
Democrats already fear – perhaps with good reason – the vaunted GOP turnout machine. So if the Republicans successfully pull out their voters, with the help of more efficiently expended resources, the Democratic long knives will be unsheathed beginning Nov. 8. And in Washington, Howard Dean may need to watch his back.
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2. How long will the Democrats sit back and allow the GOP to twist Nancy Pelosi’s words out of context?
This morning, for perhaps the umpteenth time, I received a Republican email that seeks to hang the House Democratic leader for something she said in May of 2002. The parsed phrase goes like this: “I don’t really consider ourselves at war.” Clearly, the GOP wants to use this as the ’06 campaign equivalent of John Kerry’s infamous ’04 utterance about having voted for an Iraq aid bill before voting against it; in other words, whole Kerry’s remark exposed him as a waffler, Pelosi’s remark is supposed to demonstrate that she’s a wuss.
Well, I just took the trouble to track down her remark, which appeared at the bottom of a Newhouse wire service story on May 6, 2002. It may come as no surprise that Pelosi actually said a lot of things, during that breakfast with reporters, and that the phrase at issue is best read in context. Here’s Pelosi in the Newhouse story: "I don't really consider ourselves at war. We're in a struggle against terrorism throughout the world, and we stand with the president in that fight," but that does not bestow "some kind of mantle on the president that he can't be subject to criticism."
Pelosi herself might well wish she had phrased the first sentence better. But, interestingly, I don’t see the GOP quoting the rest of that paragraph.
And at that same breakfast meeting, Pelosi also discussed the mounting Bush administration push for a war in Iraq. Voicing concern about granting the president a blank check, she said:
"Let's hope we don't have to resort to the use of force, because one thing is guaranteed: American military personnel will be killed, collateral damage will occur, and we don't know if we will achieve mission success."
Strange, I don’t see the Republicans quoting any of that.
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3. How has ’08 presidential hopeful George Allen turned his slam-dunk ’06 Senate campaign into a carnival sideshow?
First, the Virginia Republican senator poked fun at a young Indian-American, who was standing in the middle of an all-white audience, by calling him macaca (a racial slur), then spent the better part of two weeks offering a slew of explanations about whether he knew or didn’t know what the term meant or didn’t mean. And now he’s caught in an avoidable contretemps about when he knew or didn’t know that he was part-Jewish, and why he got defensive about it when asked.
At a debate Monday night, the moderator asked Allen about a report in a Jewish newspaper that had found some Jewish lineage on his mother’s side. Allen freaked out on camera, then huffed, "My mother's French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her. And I was raised as she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian." In reality, Allen reportedly learned from his mother last month that she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia before emigrating to America.
Why not just acknowledge the Jewish newspaper report, and move on? Instead, oy vey, what a mess: Allen’s defensive denial promptly gave his opponent, Jim Webb, and a number of Jewish leaders, the opening to raise questions about whether Allen was embarrassed about his heritage. Some liberal bloggers even asked whether Allen had something against the Jews.
Still playing defense, Allen had to put out a statement declaring that he is indeed proud of the heritage that he denied during the debate (“I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including my Lumbroso family line's Jewish heritage, which I learned about from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed”). And shortly afterward, to show that he really embraced the heritage he had denied, he charged that his critics were behaving like anti-Semites. At this rate, he’ll be showing up in shul this weekend for Rosh Hashanah.
But it should be noted that politicians can be weird about issues of ethnicity and religion. My favorite case in point: John Kerry.
For years he intimated, to his heavily Irish-American Massachusetts electorate, that he was Irish. Consider these Kerry remarks, which appeared in the Congressional Record on March 18, 1986: "For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestory, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans, from the time of the Revolutionary War to the present, have made to building a strong and vibrant nation.”
Well, the fact is that Kerry isn’t Irish at all. (He does have Jewish ancestors.) When he was busted for those Congressional Record remarks, his office performed the usual damage control ritual, by blaming the whole incident on a staffer.
So which is worse: a politician (Allen) who denies who he is, or a politician (Kerry) who paints himself as someone he isn’t?
Just asking.
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