Well, the GOP's latest political brainstorm flopped on Capitol Hill yesterday. But maybe the Republicans can spin it successfully on the campaign trail anyway.
As I noted here the other day, congressional Republican leaders had a problem. They have never liked the idea of raising the $5.15 minimum wage; in fact, they hadn't raised it once during the past nine years. After all, raising the minimum wage has long been a Democratic issue. But some of their own Republican lawmakers -- moderates in the Northeast, for example, people with tough re-election races -- were clamoring for a wage hike, because they wanted to show working people in their districts that Congress is actually doing something to address their bread and butter concerns.
So GOP leaders came up with a clever strategy: they essentially told these moderates, as well as the Democratic lawmakers, that if they wanted the wage hike, they also had to accept (in the same legislative package) the conservative pet proposal that would hamper or bar Uncle Sam from taxing the billions of dollars that rich people intend to leave to their heirs. In other words, GOP leaders said in effect, "If you want to throw a few more dollars to average working stiffs, you've got to let the rich keep a lot more of their money." Or, as GOP congressman Zach Wamp of Tennessee told Democrats the other day, as he trumpeted the party's tactic, "You've seen us really outfox you."
Well, maybe not. It turns out that the Senate yesterday rejected the package yesterday; only a handful of Democrats went for the deal, and a couple of Republicans broke ranks and voted no. Somehow they didn't think that approving a wage hike should be tied to a cut in the estate tax, which, according to one study, would have slashed government revenue (for social programs and other needs) by $700 billion in the next 10 years.
So all that's left is the autumn spin war. Republicans will cite this incident as evidence that Democrats are obstructionists who don't want to help working people if it means handing the GOP a bipartisan victory. And the Democrats will cite the incident as evidence of a "do-nothing" Republican Congress that practices cynical politics at the expense of working people.
My prediction? A lot of folks will just tune it all out.
But in the meantime, you can test your political acumen this weekend with Paul Slansky's latest Bush trivia quiz. Fun for the whole family.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Can Joe survive a slaughter that hasn't happened yet (and may not even happen)?
There's no escaping the likely political impact of a decisive Joe Lieberman loss in the Connecticut Democratic primary next Tuesday. I'm heading up there on Sunday for the home stretch, and, as I mentioned yesterday, all signs seem bleak for President Bush's favorite Democratic senatorial hawk.
Antiwar challenger Ned Lamont was a blip on the radar screen just three months ago, a rich guy and a political novice whose most striking trait (to borrow a line from Connecticut radio host Colin McEnroe) seemed to be his facial resemblence to The Cat in the Hat. But today, with polls suggesting that he might actually thrash Lieberman by double digits, thanks to a galvanized antiwar Democratic turnout, talk has already turned to what the political world would look like next Wednesday morning.
For starters, a Lamont rout would roil the Democratic waters nationwide; elected Democrats in all but the reddest states might well conclude that it's politically smart to be outspokenly critical of the war in Iraq. Yes, Connecticut is a blue state, and its primary is open only to Democratic voters. But nationwide polls now show that independent swing voters are nearly as critical of the war, and nearly as hostile to the Bush administration's "stay the course"credo.
And what about the fate of Lieberman himself? He has already vowed not to accept a thumbs-down verdict from his Democratic voters, promising instead to run in November as an independent. But seasoned observers over the past 24 hours have been suggesting that, if he is seriously trounced next Tuesday, he would face serious pressure to fall on his sword, shelve his November plans (which would create a three-person race), and clear the field for Lamont to face the GOP candidate.
Here's a take on that situation, via Political Wire, from Connecticut columnist and ex-state senator Kevin Rennie: "State Democratic leaders are now trying to figure out how to dissuade Lieberman from carrying on as an independent. The first formal shot should come at a unity press conference (next) Wednesday. If he wins the night before, Lamont will find himself surrounded by dozens of Democratic leaders now pledged to Lieberman. No one can see how Lieberman will save himself from a stunning rout on Tuesday and they’ve stopped trying to figure it out."
And another, from non-partisan Washington analyst Stuart Rothenberg: "A resounding Lamont victory would make it very difficult for Democratic elected officials (and for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) to stick with Lieberman in a three-way...The primary result would create an entirely new dynamic in the race, undercutting Lieberman’s support for an independent bid and putting pressure on him to exit the race gracefully. That doesn’t mean the Senator couldn’t win a three-way race, only that early polls showing him with a commanding advantage in a three-way contest are meaningless. Lamont’s general election numbers would immediately spike and Lieberman’s would drop, and the Senator’s prospects for victory in November would be uncertain."
Lamont may be a big-league rookie, but I bet he isn't entirely pleased with the fact that everybody who wrote him off this spring is now writing him up as a big winner before anyone has even voted. The bar is being set so high all of a sudden, that now even a narrow Lamont victory (say, three points or less) might be spun by the Lieberman forces as sufficient grounds for staying the course and fighting on this autumn.
Antiwar challenger Ned Lamont was a blip on the radar screen just three months ago, a rich guy and a political novice whose most striking trait (to borrow a line from Connecticut radio host Colin McEnroe) seemed to be his facial resemblence to The Cat in the Hat. But today, with polls suggesting that he might actually thrash Lieberman by double digits, thanks to a galvanized antiwar Democratic turnout, talk has already turned to what the political world would look like next Wednesday morning.
For starters, a Lamont rout would roil the Democratic waters nationwide; elected Democrats in all but the reddest states might well conclude that it's politically smart to be outspokenly critical of the war in Iraq. Yes, Connecticut is a blue state, and its primary is open only to Democratic voters. But nationwide polls now show that independent swing voters are nearly as critical of the war, and nearly as hostile to the Bush administration's "stay the course"credo.
And what about the fate of Lieberman himself? He has already vowed not to accept a thumbs-down verdict from his Democratic voters, promising instead to run in November as an independent. But seasoned observers over the past 24 hours have been suggesting that, if he is seriously trounced next Tuesday, he would face serious pressure to fall on his sword, shelve his November plans (which would create a three-person race), and clear the field for Lamont to face the GOP candidate.
Here's a take on that situation, via Political Wire, from Connecticut columnist and ex-state senator Kevin Rennie: "State Democratic leaders are now trying to figure out how to dissuade Lieberman from carrying on as an independent. The first formal shot should come at a unity press conference (next) Wednesday. If he wins the night before, Lamont will find himself surrounded by dozens of Democratic leaders now pledged to Lieberman. No one can see how Lieberman will save himself from a stunning rout on Tuesday and they’ve stopped trying to figure it out."
And another, from non-partisan Washington analyst Stuart Rothenberg: "A resounding Lamont victory would make it very difficult for Democratic elected officials (and for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee) to stick with Lieberman in a three-way...The primary result would create an entirely new dynamic in the race, undercutting Lieberman’s support for an independent bid and putting pressure on him to exit the race gracefully. That doesn’t mean the Senator couldn’t win a three-way race, only that early polls showing him with a commanding advantage in a three-way contest are meaningless. Lamont’s general election numbers would immediately spike and Lieberman’s would drop, and the Senator’s prospects for victory in November would be uncertain."
Lamont may be a big-league rookie, but I bet he isn't entirely pleased with the fact that everybody who wrote him off this spring is now writing him up as a big winner before anyone has even voted. The bar is being set so high all of a sudden, that now even a narrow Lamont victory (say, three points or less) might be spun by the Lieberman forces as sufficient grounds for staying the course and fighting on this autumn.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
What, me rosy?
My dictionary defines delusion as "a false belief strongly held, in spite of invalidating evidence." In other words, a government official is delusional when he insists on believing and stating a falsehood that is demonstrably disproved by factual reality.
Exhibit A: Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who was recently lauded by President Bush for "doing a fine job."
Rumsfeld has been symptomatic in the past. For instance, in September 2003, when he was reminded by a questioner that he had predicted prior to the Iraq war that the U.S. troops would be warmly welcomed by the Iraqi people, he insisted that he had said no such thing: "Never said that. Never did...You're thinking of somebody else." He stuck to his story, even though there was videotape of him declaring, seven months earlier, that "there is no question that they would be welcomed" by the Iraqis, and that the Iraqis would behave like the people in Afghanistan, "playing music, cheering, flying kites."
Fast forward to Rumsfeld's testimony today before a U.S. Senate committee. (Yesterday morning, he said he wouldn't appear because his "calendar" was full. Later, that full calendar magically opened up.) Anyway, while testifying, he told the senators that he had “never painted a rosy picture” about how the war in Iraq would go; in fact, he even insisted that "you would have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I have been overly optimistic.”
There he goes again, with those symptoms.
From the reality-based community files:
1. His aforementioned kite-flying prediction, uttered on Feb. 20, 2003.
2. His war's duration prediction, on Feb. 7, 2003: "It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
3. His WMDs prediction, on March 30, 2003: "We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
It's entirely possible, of course, that Rumsfeld simply doesn't remember his past statements. In other words, maybe this is about amnesia, not delusion. I offer the moment on June 26, 2005, when Rumsfeld told Tim Russert on NBC that, prewar, he had given Bush a list of "15 things that could go terribly wrong," such as oil fields aflame and and mass refugees on the road. Yet when Russert asked whether the Defense secretary had cited the danger of a "robust insurgency," Rumsfeld replied thusly:
"I don't remember if that was on there."
-------
So Rummy's rhetorical wanderings aren't exactly new. But there was something new today -- a clear hint of rebellion from the hawkish Republican establishment.
One of the Senate's old bulls, Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner of Virginia, heretofore a staunch defender of the Bush mission in Iraq, today implied at the hearing that the patience of the GOP Congress may not extend to presiding with U.S. troops over an open-ended sectarian civil war.
After a couple military generals said that, yes, a civil war seems to be a growing possibility, Warner said this: "I think we have to examine very carefully what Congress (in 2002) authorized the president to do in the context of a situation if we’re faced with an all-out civil war, and whether we have to come back to the Congress to get further indication of support."
Translation: We Bush allies didn't sign on for a civil war, so maybe the blank check stops here.
Exhibit A: Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who was recently lauded by President Bush for "doing a fine job."
Rumsfeld has been symptomatic in the past. For instance, in September 2003, when he was reminded by a questioner that he had predicted prior to the Iraq war that the U.S. troops would be warmly welcomed by the Iraqi people, he insisted that he had said no such thing: "Never said that. Never did...You're thinking of somebody else." He stuck to his story, even though there was videotape of him declaring, seven months earlier, that "there is no question that they would be welcomed" by the Iraqis, and that the Iraqis would behave like the people in Afghanistan, "playing music, cheering, flying kites."
Fast forward to Rumsfeld's testimony today before a U.S. Senate committee. (Yesterday morning, he said he wouldn't appear because his "calendar" was full. Later, that full calendar magically opened up.) Anyway, while testifying, he told the senators that he had “never painted a rosy picture” about how the war in Iraq would go; in fact, he even insisted that "you would have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I have been overly optimistic.”
There he goes again, with those symptoms.
From the reality-based community files:
1. His aforementioned kite-flying prediction, uttered on Feb. 20, 2003.
2. His war's duration prediction, on Feb. 7, 2003: "It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
3. His WMDs prediction, on March 30, 2003: "We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
It's entirely possible, of course, that Rumsfeld simply doesn't remember his past statements. In other words, maybe this is about amnesia, not delusion. I offer the moment on June 26, 2005, when Rumsfeld told Tim Russert on NBC that, prewar, he had given Bush a list of "15 things that could go terribly wrong," such as oil fields aflame and and mass refugees on the road. Yet when Russert asked whether the Defense secretary had cited the danger of a "robust insurgency," Rumsfeld replied thusly:
"I don't remember if that was on there."
-------
So Rummy's rhetorical wanderings aren't exactly new. But there was something new today -- a clear hint of rebellion from the hawkish Republican establishment.
One of the Senate's old bulls, Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner of Virginia, heretofore a staunch defender of the Bush mission in Iraq, today implied at the hearing that the patience of the GOP Congress may not extend to presiding with U.S. troops over an open-ended sectarian civil war.
After a couple military generals said that, yes, a civil war seems to be a growing possibility, Warner said this: "I think we have to examine very carefully what Congress (in 2002) authorized the president to do in the context of a situation if we’re faced with an all-out civil war, and whether we have to come back to the Congress to get further indication of support."
Translation: We Bush allies didn't sign on for a civil war, so maybe the blank check stops here.
Joe's new woes and the politics of flailing
More horrific news for Joe Lieberman today. The new Quinnipiac University Poll reports that the three-term Democratic senator, who nearly became vice president of the United States just six years ago, now seems destined to be humiliated in next Tuesday's Connecticut primary -- in essence, booted out of the party by a decisive share of the state's Democratic voters.
The new figures conclude that 54 percent of likely primary voters are flocking to political neophyte Ned Lamont, the antiwar challenger who has made Lieberman's hawkish Iraq stance -- and, more specifically, Lieberman's staunch support for President Bush on Iraq -- the central issue of his surprising upstart campaign. Lieberman pulls 41 percent. That 13-point gap is a significant setback for Lieberman, who trailed by only four points in the last Quinnipiac poll on July 20.
And a good case can be made that Lieberman's situation is even more dire than these numbers suggest. As Connecticut analyst (and former state senator) Kevin Rennie points out, a primary election held in the heat of August is likely to attract only the most motivated voters -- and, in this instance, a disproportionate share arguably will be the antiwar liberals most angered by Lieberman's Bush-enabling behavior. Rennie and his sources believe that the pollsters are undercounting this cohort. All told, he concludes today, "It's a mug's game for a moderate Connecticut Democrat to try to beat a jazzed liberal in a primary."
I suspect that Lieberman's people are sampling the same numbers, which may well explain why Lieberman has been flailing wildly in recent days, making specious charges against Lamont. He has tried to impugn Lamont for working across the aisle with Republicans during Lamont's brief stint as a Greenwich selectman -- even though Lieberman touts himself as a sensible guy who works across the aisle with Republicans in Washington. Meanwhile, this week, Lieberman is assailing Lamont for being a "millionaire" with vast family wealth, even though Lieberman touts himself as a proud devotee of John F. Kennedy -- a millionaire with vast family wealth, whose father greased his path to power.
But perhaps the best indication of Lieberman's dire predicament is the charge -- circulated by some of his supporters -- that the senator's political critics are motivated in part by anti-Semitism.
I have received emails that attempt to document that charge. Lieberman supporters have managed to cull a few comments posted by bloggers on the Internet. (One example, referring to Lieberman: "...everybody knows , Jews ONLY care about the welfare of other Jews." A second example: "Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp...and define what it means to be an American who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby." Another: "Geez, if Lieberman loses his Senate seat, it may out his multi-million graft as lobbyist for Israel at risk.")
Well, if you troll the Internet long enough, you'll find anything. There's no doubt that a relatively small slice of the antiwar left is hostile to Israel, and little doubt that some of those hostiles extend their enmity to Lieberman. But most Democrats who oppose Lieberman -- because of his stance on the Iraq war -- would hardly be pleased with the insinuation that perhaps they are motivated by anti-Semitism. Indeed, liberal (and Jewish) activist David Sirota argues on his own blog that the anti-Semitism insinuation is "gutter politics."
Unless Ned Lamont decides to bring Mel Gibson into his campaign, I simply see the anti-Semitism charge as further evidence of Joe's woes. Playing the "victim" card is rarely a sign of strength.
-------
Speaking of Mel Gibson (and how can I resist?), I have been waiting with interest to see how conservative commentators would treat the news of his anti-Semitic remarks. Their general take on Hollywood is that it's a left-wing, anti-values cesspool, and they view every left-leaning word and deed from the likes of Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore as grist for the mill. So how would they react when a conservative values megastar -- somebody with a track record of assailing gay people, campaigning against stem cell research, and opposing Catholic Church reforms -- is unmasked as a Jew-baiter? How does that square with the conservatives' stereotype of Hollywood (a place where, in reality, the only ideology is money)?
Well, now we have the answer: Mel is really just another Michael Moore Hollywood liberal.
Columnist Don Feder says that Mel is "chummy" with Michael Moore, who has criticized Israel in the past, so there you have it. Besides, as this conservative blog points out, Mel has even questioned the war in Iraq, just like Moore has (and there's even a picture here of Mel and Michael together).
So there's the solution for conservative discomfit: Lump Mel with the liberals, and the old stereotype remains intact.
The new figures conclude that 54 percent of likely primary voters are flocking to political neophyte Ned Lamont, the antiwar challenger who has made Lieberman's hawkish Iraq stance -- and, more specifically, Lieberman's staunch support for President Bush on Iraq -- the central issue of his surprising upstart campaign. Lieberman pulls 41 percent. That 13-point gap is a significant setback for Lieberman, who trailed by only four points in the last Quinnipiac poll on July 20.
And a good case can be made that Lieberman's situation is even more dire than these numbers suggest. As Connecticut analyst (and former state senator) Kevin Rennie points out, a primary election held in the heat of August is likely to attract only the most motivated voters -- and, in this instance, a disproportionate share arguably will be the antiwar liberals most angered by Lieberman's Bush-enabling behavior. Rennie and his sources believe that the pollsters are undercounting this cohort. All told, he concludes today, "It's a mug's game for a moderate Connecticut Democrat to try to beat a jazzed liberal in a primary."
I suspect that Lieberman's people are sampling the same numbers, which may well explain why Lieberman has been flailing wildly in recent days, making specious charges against Lamont. He has tried to impugn Lamont for working across the aisle with Republicans during Lamont's brief stint as a Greenwich selectman -- even though Lieberman touts himself as a sensible guy who works across the aisle with Republicans in Washington. Meanwhile, this week, Lieberman is assailing Lamont for being a "millionaire" with vast family wealth, even though Lieberman touts himself as a proud devotee of John F. Kennedy -- a millionaire with vast family wealth, whose father greased his path to power.
But perhaps the best indication of Lieberman's dire predicament is the charge -- circulated by some of his supporters -- that the senator's political critics are motivated in part by anti-Semitism.
I have received emails that attempt to document that charge. Lieberman supporters have managed to cull a few comments posted by bloggers on the Internet. (One example, referring to Lieberman: "...everybody knows , Jews ONLY care about the welfare of other Jews." A second example: "Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp...and define what it means to be an American who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby." Another: "Geez, if Lieberman loses his Senate seat, it may out his multi-million graft as lobbyist for Israel at risk.")
Well, if you troll the Internet long enough, you'll find anything. There's no doubt that a relatively small slice of the antiwar left is hostile to Israel, and little doubt that some of those hostiles extend their enmity to Lieberman. But most Democrats who oppose Lieberman -- because of his stance on the Iraq war -- would hardly be pleased with the insinuation that perhaps they are motivated by anti-Semitism. Indeed, liberal (and Jewish) activist David Sirota argues on his own blog that the anti-Semitism insinuation is "gutter politics."
Unless Ned Lamont decides to bring Mel Gibson into his campaign, I simply see the anti-Semitism charge as further evidence of Joe's woes. Playing the "victim" card is rarely a sign of strength.
-------
Speaking of Mel Gibson (and how can I resist?), I have been waiting with interest to see how conservative commentators would treat the news of his anti-Semitic remarks. Their general take on Hollywood is that it's a left-wing, anti-values cesspool, and they view every left-leaning word and deed from the likes of Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore as grist for the mill. So how would they react when a conservative values megastar -- somebody with a track record of assailing gay people, campaigning against stem cell research, and opposing Catholic Church reforms -- is unmasked as a Jew-baiter? How does that square with the conservatives' stereotype of Hollywood (a place where, in reality, the only ideology is money)?
Well, now we have the answer: Mel is really just another Michael Moore Hollywood liberal.
Columnist Don Feder says that Mel is "chummy" with Michael Moore, who has criticized Israel in the past, so there you have it. Besides, as this conservative blog points out, Mel has even questioned the war in Iraq, just like Moore has (and there's even a picture here of Mel and Michael together).
So there's the solution for conservative discomfit: Lump Mel with the liberals, and the old stereotype remains intact.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
The Democrats decide that it's safe to say "troops out"
The Capitol Hill Democrats have decided that it is politically safe to oppose the war in Iraq and insist that our fighting men and women be allowed to come home.
In a significant political move, the party's top congressional leaders yesterday put aside their longstanding disagreements over whether America should start pulling out troops or simply stay the course. In a letter to President Bush, they argued, in a rare display of unanimity, that troop withdrawals should begin by the end of this year: "In the interests of American national security, our troops and our taxpayers, the open-ended commitment in Iraq that you embraced cannot and should not be sustained."
More from the letter: "Despite the latest evidence that your administration lacks a coherent strategy to stabilize Iraq and achieve victory, there has been virtually no diplomatic effort to resolve sectarian differences, no regional effort to establish a broader security framework and no attempt to revive a struggling reconstruction effort. Instead, we learned of your plans to redeploy an additional 5,000 U.S. troops into an urban war zone in Baghdad. Far from implementing a comprehensive 'Strategy for Victory,' as you promised months ago, your administration's strategy appears to be one of trying to avoid defeat."
This stance is designed to offer voters a sharper contrast between the two camps during the runup to the '06 congressional elections, with the Democrats as the "start bringing 'em home" party, and the Republicans as the "stay the course" party. Antiwar liberals in the Democratic base have long been urging that the '06 race be framed in those terms.
What's most striking is the fact that the Democrats no longer seem spooked by the notion that they will be judged by the voters as surrender wimps and punished accordingly.
Even top Democrats who, as recently as last autumn, opposed any talk of troop withdrawals -- notably, Senate leader Harry Reid and House deputy leader Steny Hoyer -- signed on to the pullout letter (which doesn't posit a specific deadline for a total exit). This means that the Democratic leaders have scrutinized all the latest polls, and concluded that, because the public is so fed up with Bush's conduct of the war, there is no political price to be paid for urging a withdrawal. Indeed, the latest CBS-New York Times poll suggests that the public is ahead of the Democrats on this issue; last week, 56 percent said they want the U.S. to establish a pullout timetable. And Gallup, posing a slightly different question, reports that 55 percent favor a pullout either immediately or within the next 12 months. (Some liberals, citing this public mood, contend that the new Democratic stance still doesn't go far enough.)
Anyway, the Republicans quickly blasted the Democratic letter yesterday, although they had to adjust their tactics. All year, Bush's lieutenants have assailed the Democrats as indecisive and divided over the war. But now that the Democrats are more decisive and united, the GOP is focusing on its other longstanding argument, that the opposition is "waving a white flag." So the statement yesterday from GOP chairman Ken Mehlman invoked the "cut and run" theme.
The Bush camp is still banking that "stay the course" has broad public support. But the notoriously skittish Democrats would never adopt a "troops out" stance unless they were convinced that a sea change in public opinion has already occurred.
And, by the way, if that has indeed happened, then Bush-enabling Senator Joe Lieberman is cooked next Tuesday in the Connecticut Democratic primary.
In a significant political move, the party's top congressional leaders yesterday put aside their longstanding disagreements over whether America should start pulling out troops or simply stay the course. In a letter to President Bush, they argued, in a rare display of unanimity, that troop withdrawals should begin by the end of this year: "In the interests of American national security, our troops and our taxpayers, the open-ended commitment in Iraq that you embraced cannot and should not be sustained."
More from the letter: "Despite the latest evidence that your administration lacks a coherent strategy to stabilize Iraq and achieve victory, there has been virtually no diplomatic effort to resolve sectarian differences, no regional effort to establish a broader security framework and no attempt to revive a struggling reconstruction effort. Instead, we learned of your plans to redeploy an additional 5,000 U.S. troops into an urban war zone in Baghdad. Far from implementing a comprehensive 'Strategy for Victory,' as you promised months ago, your administration's strategy appears to be one of trying to avoid defeat."
This stance is designed to offer voters a sharper contrast between the two camps during the runup to the '06 congressional elections, with the Democrats as the "start bringing 'em home" party, and the Republicans as the "stay the course" party. Antiwar liberals in the Democratic base have long been urging that the '06 race be framed in those terms.
What's most striking is the fact that the Democrats no longer seem spooked by the notion that they will be judged by the voters as surrender wimps and punished accordingly.
Even top Democrats who, as recently as last autumn, opposed any talk of troop withdrawals -- notably, Senate leader Harry Reid and House deputy leader Steny Hoyer -- signed on to the pullout letter (which doesn't posit a specific deadline for a total exit). This means that the Democratic leaders have scrutinized all the latest polls, and concluded that, because the public is so fed up with Bush's conduct of the war, there is no political price to be paid for urging a withdrawal. Indeed, the latest CBS-New York Times poll suggests that the public is ahead of the Democrats on this issue; last week, 56 percent said they want the U.S. to establish a pullout timetable. And Gallup, posing a slightly different question, reports that 55 percent favor a pullout either immediately or within the next 12 months. (Some liberals, citing this public mood, contend that the new Democratic stance still doesn't go far enough.)
Anyway, the Republicans quickly blasted the Democratic letter yesterday, although they had to adjust their tactics. All year, Bush's lieutenants have assailed the Democrats as indecisive and divided over the war. But now that the Democrats are more decisive and united, the GOP is focusing on its other longstanding argument, that the opposition is "waving a white flag." So the statement yesterday from GOP chairman Ken Mehlman invoked the "cut and run" theme.
The Bush camp is still banking that "stay the course" has broad public support. But the notoriously skittish Democrats would never adopt a "troops out" stance unless they were convinced that a sea change in public opinion has already occurred.
And, by the way, if that has indeed happened, then Bush-enabling Senator Joe Lieberman is cooked next Tuesday in the Connecticut Democratic primary.
"Menendez, Martinez/ Martinez, Menendez/ Let's call the whole thing off" (with apologies to the Gershwins)
I guess the briefers weren't around that day, to instruct President Bush on the fine art of being able to distinguish one Latino male from another, even when one of those males used to work for him.
From an article this weekend in The Washington Post:
"Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), at the White House this spring for a meeting with other senators to discuss immigration with President Bush, was surprised when Bush approached him as the meeting broke up and observed: 'Senator Martinez, you've been very quiet.'
" 'That's Martinez,' Menendez said, pointing to Mel Martinez -- Florida's junior senator and Bush's former secretary of housing and urban development. " 'I'm Menendez.'
"Bush turned bright red..."
From an article this weekend in The Washington Post:
"Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), at the White House this spring for a meeting with other senators to discuss immigration with President Bush, was surprised when Bush approached him as the meeting broke up and observed: 'Senator Martinez, you've been very quiet.'
" 'That's Martinez,' Menendez said, pointing to Mel Martinez -- Florida's junior senator and Bush's former secretary of housing and urban development. " 'I'm Menendez.'
"Bush turned bright red..."
Monday, July 31, 2006
Karl, Rudy, wage-hike trickery, and an '08 strategy
Catching up after a long summer weekend:
I note that Karl Rove apparently has a few complaints about journalists. On Saturday, the architect of President Bush's political career delivered a commencement address at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, and told aspiring campaign operatives that members of the Fourth Estate (as opposed to people like him) are really to blame for ruining American politics.
While assailing the "cynicism" of political journalists, he lamented "the corrosive role their coverage has played, focusing attention on process and not substance."
OK, I will stipulate that we veteran scribes can be cynical, and that we sometimes focus on the "process" of polls and primary calendars and tactics, etcetera. But being accused of cynicism and corrosiveness by Karl Rove is akin to being accused of anti-Semitism by Mel Gibson.
Cynicism? Corrosiveness? Let's review just a small sampling of past Rove behavior:
1. Rove target John McCain, in 2000, was hit with a whispering campaign which suggested that he was mentally unstable, that he fathered a black child, and that he was too close to gays.
2. Rove target Ann Richards, the Democratic governor of Texas, was beset by rumors, during her '94 campaign against Bush, that she was a lesbian.
3. Rove target Mark Kennedy, a Democratic incumbent judge in Alabama, was hit with rumors, during a '94 state judicial campaign, that he was a gay pedophile.
4. Rove, as a young operative in 1973, ran a GOP seminar that taught other young operatives how to perform dirty tricks.
5. Speaking of dirty tricks...Rove target Kenneth Ingram, an incumbent Democratic judge on the Alabama Supreme Court, was hit with rumors in 1996 that he was a personally vicious individual. It appeared that Ingram was circulating flyers that personally attacked the family of opponent Harold See. In reality, Rove (on behalf of his client, Harold See) concocted the flyers, figuring that the voters would pin the blame on Ingram.
The See incident was thoroughly vetted by Atlantic magazine a couple years ago. Here's an excerpt: "According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up—absent any trace of who was behind them—viciously attacking See and his family.
"'We were trying to craft a message to reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people,'" the staffer says. "'You'd roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it at houses late at night. I was told, Do not hand it to anybody, do not tell anybody who you're with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn't have your tags. So I borrowed a buddy's car [and drove] down the middle of the street … I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these rolled-up pamphlets, and I'd cruise the designated neighborhoods, throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my knees.'
"The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order 'to create a backlash against the Democrat,' as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it...Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family....See won the race."
-------
I note that the conservative backlash against Rudy Giuliani has begun in earnest. The ex-New York mayor, 9/11 icon, and darling of the speaker circuit, had been scoring very well in the GOP '08 primary matchups against all potential rivals, including John McCain. Too well, as it turns out. Now the GOP's conservative wing has moved to take him down a few pegs, before he gains any more traction.
Just check out the Aug. 7 lead of National Review magazine. There, on the cover, is a color photo of Rudy Giuliani in drag -- blonde bewigged and feathered.
He had dressed up for a satirical dinner back in 1997, a spoof of Victor/Victoria; the magazine is virtually inviting conservatives to use it against him. The article, clearly fed by conservative party strategists, lays out all the reasons for laying waste to "America's mayor": He "has regularly marched in the city's vulgar gay-pride parades"; he moved in with a gay couple when he was on the outs with his second wife; he is "thrice married," with a history of paramours; he endorsed Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1994; he once called Ed Meese, Reagan's attorney general, a "sleaze"; he has supported gun control; he and his first wife were second cousins.
This shot across Rudy's bow carries a clear message: Stay out of Iowa, or we'll fit you for that blonde wig all over again.
-------
Yet another example of the GOP's tactical brilliance:
For weeks, the Republicans on Capitol Hill were getting squeezed on the minimum wage issue. The Republicans didn't want to raise it, and the Democrats did. The public seemed to sympathize strongly with the Democrats, given the fact that working people hadn't seen a raise in nine years. Democrats readied themselves to use the wage issue in the '06 elections.
But last Friday, House Republicans pulled a clever switcheroo. They passed a $2.10 hourly wage hike, effective in 2007 -- but, in the same bill, they also voted to repeal the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans. The latter is a GOP favorite, mostly affecting the richest sliver of the electorate. This week, House lawmakers are essentially telling their Senate counterparts: The deal is, you either pass both, or you pass neither.
So now the Senate Democrats are in a somewhat tricky position. They can either vote for the long-sought minimum wage hike and thus deliver financial aid to working people -- or they can vote against the wage hike they have sought, on the grounds that it's unfair to also reward rich people with another anti-tax windfall. And even if they choose the latter, the Senate Republican majority might enact the whole package anyway...thereby leaving the Democrats to look powerless once again, exposing their inability to stop a tax giveaway that will further imperil Medicaid and Social Security funding. It's hard to see how that would please their liberal base, even in the wake of a wage-hike.
On the other hand, if the Senate fails to pass anything, expect the Democrats to tell their voters that the wage-hike trickery is merely the latest manifestation of the GOP's "do-nothing Congress."
-------
Last Tuesday, I mentioned the potential '08 Democratic presidential rivalry between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, and the latter's potential to become the unHillary alternative. Now we have a New Republic magazine article that takes up the same topic, and concludes this about Edwards: "A southern, moderate, antiwar, pro-labor candidate with low negatives and high positives who has already run for president is not a bad combination." The material about Edwards' wooing of labor unions in Nevada (which is set to become an early primary state) is particulary interesting. And since you would need to subscribe to the New Republic Online in order to read the whole piece, I'll excerpt a relevent chunk that deals with his quiet backstage maneuverings:
"Edwards seems to be the candidate making the greatest strides with the labor movement. It all started in 2004 when, trying to differentiate himself from John Kerry after the Iowa caucuses, Edwards attacked Kerry's stance on free trade and tried to scrape together some union backing. Only one union supported Edwards in that short, quixotic bid to overthrow Kerry: the textile union UNITE, which had supported him in his 1998 Senate bid in North Carolina. It has continued to be an important alliance.
"In the summer of 2004, UNITE merged with HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers union (it was an ideal marriage: UNITE had money, and HERE had members). After the election, Edwards continued a close relationship with the new UNITE HERE union and especially its general president, Bruce Raynor, who engineered UNITE's 2004 endorsement of Edwards. Union sources credit this relationship with Edwards's current emphasis on poverty and the minimum wage.
"'Raynor and others at UNITE HERE start talking to Edwards about poverty and low-wage issues,' explains one union strategist, 'and someone starts telling him that unions are the best poverty prevention program in America. And Edwards, out of conviction or opportunism or whatever combination drives politicians, buys it.' The upshot is that Edwards has become a darling of the labor left, especially the more modern and progressive unions that represent service employees. And it just happens that one of the most powerful players in Democratic politics in the newly influential caucus state of Nevada is the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 employees, mostly in the gambling industry, and is an affiliate of the Edwards-friendly UNITE HERE.
"Edwards's success with unions, one of the institutional pillars of Clinton's campaign, has started to rattle Hillaryland. In March, when Change to Win, the new labor umbrella group that includes UNITE HERE and several other large unions, held a convention in Las Vegas, only one prospective 2008 candidate spoke to the group: Edwards. But Hillary Clinton happened to have a friend in town as well: Bill. According to a labor source in Nevada, Clinton's husband flew in and met secretly with seven union presidents at the Change to Win convention. His message: Don't commit to anyone, and give Hillary a fighting chance. A spokesman for Bill Clinton confirmed the meeting took place but says 2008 wasn't discussed."
Hat tip to the magazine's author, Ryan Lizza.
I note that Karl Rove apparently has a few complaints about journalists. On Saturday, the architect of President Bush's political career delivered a commencement address at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, and told aspiring campaign operatives that members of the Fourth Estate (as opposed to people like him) are really to blame for ruining American politics.
While assailing the "cynicism" of political journalists, he lamented "the corrosive role their coverage has played, focusing attention on process and not substance."
OK, I will stipulate that we veteran scribes can be cynical, and that we sometimes focus on the "process" of polls and primary calendars and tactics, etcetera. But being accused of cynicism and corrosiveness by Karl Rove is akin to being accused of anti-Semitism by Mel Gibson.
Cynicism? Corrosiveness? Let's review just a small sampling of past Rove behavior:
1. Rove target John McCain, in 2000, was hit with a whispering campaign which suggested that he was mentally unstable, that he fathered a black child, and that he was too close to gays.
2. Rove target Ann Richards, the Democratic governor of Texas, was beset by rumors, during her '94 campaign against Bush, that she was a lesbian.
3. Rove target Mark Kennedy, a Democratic incumbent judge in Alabama, was hit with rumors, during a '94 state judicial campaign, that he was a gay pedophile.
4. Rove, as a young operative in 1973, ran a GOP seminar that taught other young operatives how to perform dirty tricks.
5. Speaking of dirty tricks...Rove target Kenneth Ingram, an incumbent Democratic judge on the Alabama Supreme Court, was hit with rumors in 1996 that he was a personally vicious individual. It appeared that Ingram was circulating flyers that personally attacked the family of opponent Harold See. In reality, Rove (on behalf of his client, Harold See) concocted the flyers, figuring that the voters would pin the blame on Ingram.
The See incident was thoroughly vetted by Atlantic magazine a couple years ago. Here's an excerpt: "According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up—absent any trace of who was behind them—viciously attacking See and his family.
"'We were trying to craft a message to reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people,'" the staffer says. "'You'd roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it at houses late at night. I was told, Do not hand it to anybody, do not tell anybody who you're with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn't have your tags. So I borrowed a buddy's car [and drove] down the middle of the street … I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these rolled-up pamphlets, and I'd cruise the designated neighborhoods, throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my knees.'
"The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order 'to create a backlash against the Democrat,' as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it...Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family....See won the race."
-------
I note that the conservative backlash against Rudy Giuliani has begun in earnest. The ex-New York mayor, 9/11 icon, and darling of the speaker circuit, had been scoring very well in the GOP '08 primary matchups against all potential rivals, including John McCain. Too well, as it turns out. Now the GOP's conservative wing has moved to take him down a few pegs, before he gains any more traction.
Just check out the Aug. 7 lead of National Review magazine. There, on the cover, is a color photo of Rudy Giuliani in drag -- blonde bewigged and feathered.
He had dressed up for a satirical dinner back in 1997, a spoof of Victor/Victoria; the magazine is virtually inviting conservatives to use it against him. The article, clearly fed by conservative party strategists, lays out all the reasons for laying waste to "America's mayor": He "has regularly marched in the city's vulgar gay-pride parades"; he moved in with a gay couple when he was on the outs with his second wife; he is "thrice married," with a history of paramours; he endorsed Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1994; he once called Ed Meese, Reagan's attorney general, a "sleaze"; he has supported gun control; he and his first wife were second cousins.
This shot across Rudy's bow carries a clear message: Stay out of Iowa, or we'll fit you for that blonde wig all over again.
-------
Yet another example of the GOP's tactical brilliance:
For weeks, the Republicans on Capitol Hill were getting squeezed on the minimum wage issue. The Republicans didn't want to raise it, and the Democrats did. The public seemed to sympathize strongly with the Democrats, given the fact that working people hadn't seen a raise in nine years. Democrats readied themselves to use the wage issue in the '06 elections.
But last Friday, House Republicans pulled a clever switcheroo. They passed a $2.10 hourly wage hike, effective in 2007 -- but, in the same bill, they also voted to repeal the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans. The latter is a GOP favorite, mostly affecting the richest sliver of the electorate. This week, House lawmakers are essentially telling their Senate counterparts: The deal is, you either pass both, or you pass neither.
So now the Senate Democrats are in a somewhat tricky position. They can either vote for the long-sought minimum wage hike and thus deliver financial aid to working people -- or they can vote against the wage hike they have sought, on the grounds that it's unfair to also reward rich people with another anti-tax windfall. And even if they choose the latter, the Senate Republican majority might enact the whole package anyway...thereby leaving the Democrats to look powerless once again, exposing their inability to stop a tax giveaway that will further imperil Medicaid and Social Security funding. It's hard to see how that would please their liberal base, even in the wake of a wage-hike.
On the other hand, if the Senate fails to pass anything, expect the Democrats to tell their voters that the wage-hike trickery is merely the latest manifestation of the GOP's "do-nothing Congress."
-------
Last Tuesday, I mentioned the potential '08 Democratic presidential rivalry between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, and the latter's potential to become the unHillary alternative. Now we have a New Republic magazine article that takes up the same topic, and concludes this about Edwards: "A southern, moderate, antiwar, pro-labor candidate with low negatives and high positives who has already run for president is not a bad combination." The material about Edwards' wooing of labor unions in Nevada (which is set to become an early primary state) is particulary interesting. And since you would need to subscribe to the New Republic Online in order to read the whole piece, I'll excerpt a relevent chunk that deals with his quiet backstage maneuverings:
"Edwards seems to be the candidate making the greatest strides with the labor movement. It all started in 2004 when, trying to differentiate himself from John Kerry after the Iowa caucuses, Edwards attacked Kerry's stance on free trade and tried to scrape together some union backing. Only one union supported Edwards in that short, quixotic bid to overthrow Kerry: the textile union UNITE, which had supported him in his 1998 Senate bid in North Carolina. It has continued to be an important alliance.
"In the summer of 2004, UNITE merged with HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers union (it was an ideal marriage: UNITE had money, and HERE had members). After the election, Edwards continued a close relationship with the new UNITE HERE union and especially its general president, Bruce Raynor, who engineered UNITE's 2004 endorsement of Edwards. Union sources credit this relationship with Edwards's current emphasis on poverty and the minimum wage.
"'Raynor and others at UNITE HERE start talking to Edwards about poverty and low-wage issues,' explains one union strategist, 'and someone starts telling him that unions are the best poverty prevention program in America. And Edwards, out of conviction or opportunism or whatever combination drives politicians, buys it.' The upshot is that Edwards has become a darling of the labor left, especially the more modern and progressive unions that represent service employees. And it just happens that one of the most powerful players in Democratic politics in the newly influential caucus state of Nevada is the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents 60,000 employees, mostly in the gambling industry, and is an affiliate of the Edwards-friendly UNITE HERE.
"Edwards's success with unions, one of the institutional pillars of Clinton's campaign, has started to rattle Hillaryland. In March, when Change to Win, the new labor umbrella group that includes UNITE HERE and several other large unions, held a convention in Las Vegas, only one prospective 2008 candidate spoke to the group: Edwards. But Hillary Clinton happened to have a friend in town as well: Bill. According to a labor source in Nevada, Clinton's husband flew in and met secretly with seven union presidents at the Change to Win convention. His message: Don't commit to anyone, and give Hillary a fighting chance. A spokesman for Bill Clinton confirmed the meeting took place but says 2008 wasn't discussed."
Hat tip to the magazine's author, Ryan Lizza.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
The '06 election and the failure of Pax Americana
The lead photo today on page one of The New York Times says it all: Condoleezza Rice looking weary, her eyelids at low mast, the palm of her left hand pressed against her brow, seemingly in dire need of a couple extra-strength Advils. What better visual symbol of a Bush administration overmatched by international events -- precisely at a time (the runup to the '06 congressional elections) when President Bush badly needs to rack up some diplomatic or military triumphs?
Right now, there seem to be two schools of thought about whether the turmoil abroad -- Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea -- will further damage Bush's domestic standing and thus hurt his Capitol Hill followers who are running for re-election. The optimistic GOP scenario posits that Bush and the Republicans can actually benefit because voters are often wary of switching horses (in this case, handing congressional power to the Democrats) in midstream when the international waters are especially turbulent.
As Republican consultant Lance Tarrance told The Washington Post today, these crises give Bush an opportunity "to demonstrate presidential leadership," and the latest Times-CBS poll does show strong plurality approval for the way Bush is responding to the Israel-Hezbollah hostitilies. In other words, the optimistic GOP scenario relies heavily on the traditional rally-round-the-commander-in-chief behavioral model, coupled with fresh Wall Street Journal-NBC polling evidence that, for all the president's woes, the Democrats still can't seem to inspire public confidence (32 percent favorably, 39 percent unfavorable).
The countervailing scenario, however, is at least equally persuasive. Bush has apparently taxed the public's patience to the point where he has very little room to manuever. The two new polls cited above report that most Americans are witheringly critial of Bush's performance in Iraq, and recognize that at this point he garners little respect around the world. And he inspires little confidence at home, as evidenced by the pessimism measured in the Times-CBS survey: only 35 percent approve of the way Bush is generally handling foreign policy, and 61 percent believe that the Israel-Hezbollah fighting is likely to trigger a larger regional war (a finding which suggests that few Americans expect The Decider to be decisively effective in this crisis).
Worse yet, even prominent conservatives are now openly pessimistic about Bush's stewardship in Iraq; consider this argument, voiced yesterday: "Hands up, everybody who believes that the 'hundreds' of troops that the Pentagon plans to move from the rest of Iraq into Baghdad will suffice to secure the capital against the sectarian militias now waging war upon the civilian populations of the city. Anybody? No, I didn't think so....The present plan -- 'as the Iraqis stand up, we stand down' -- has not worked to date, as the president admitted (Tuesday), and there seems little reason to hope it will work better over the next months than it has in the recent past."
If a Democrat had uttered those words, he or she would be labeled as "defeatist" or worse by Bush's defenders. But those are the words of David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who helped coin the phrase axis of evil. If someone like Frum is so gloomy, it's not hard to imagine that the average voter is any less. Especially given the fact that (as the Times-CBS poll reports) a whopping 56 percent of Americans now support a withdrawal timetable, which puts public sentiment at odds with the Bush team and far ahead of the Washington Democratic establishment.
And there's also a broader context that arguably bodes ill for Bush and his congressional enablers on election day: The current crises in the Middle East -- particularly the fact that America is now too bogged down in the Iraqi religious (civil) war to respond effectively -- provides stark evidence that Bush and the neoconservatives' grand design for a broadly democratic Middle East appears to be going up in flames.
The original plan was to topple the Iraqi evil-doer in a cakewalk, install peace and democracy with minimal troops, and then watch the flowers bloom in the region's heretofore inhospitable soil. This ambitious Pax Americana was widely applauded, and a lot of us in the press occasionally got suckered by it (including me, here), prior to the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections this past January.
Most Americans aren't foreign policy experts, and don't live their lives debating neoconservative theory, but they do know instinctively when there's a mess that their president seems ill-positioned to clean up, and they do seem to know when Congress seems inattentive to what's really important (especially since the GOP lawmakers have spent their time lately passing flag-waving bills, such as the one designed to keep the word "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance). Perhaps this is why conservative columnist Robert Novak is now reporting that one of his top GOP congressional sources, somebody "who publicly exudes optimism," is privately predicting "a loss of 30 House seats," and thus a Democratic takeover.
And conservative strategist Kellyanne Conway also sees trouble ahead for the GOP; as she writes today, "All of the conventional (polling) indices...portend disaster for the party in power, in this case, the GOP. The right direction/wrong track figures, congressional and presidential approval ratings, and confidence measures, are all 'upside-down,' which is pollster parlance for crappy."
Nevertheless, as one Democrat said to me the other day, after itemizing Bush's woes, "How do you think we'll screw this one up?" I'll consider that question further tomorrow.
Right now, there seem to be two schools of thought about whether the turmoil abroad -- Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea -- will further damage Bush's domestic standing and thus hurt his Capitol Hill followers who are running for re-election. The optimistic GOP scenario posits that Bush and the Republicans can actually benefit because voters are often wary of switching horses (in this case, handing congressional power to the Democrats) in midstream when the international waters are especially turbulent.
As Republican consultant Lance Tarrance told The Washington Post today, these crises give Bush an opportunity "to demonstrate presidential leadership," and the latest Times-CBS poll does show strong plurality approval for the way Bush is responding to the Israel-Hezbollah hostitilies. In other words, the optimistic GOP scenario relies heavily on the traditional rally-round-the-commander-in-chief behavioral model, coupled with fresh Wall Street Journal-NBC polling evidence that, for all the president's woes, the Democrats still can't seem to inspire public confidence (32 percent favorably, 39 percent unfavorable).
The countervailing scenario, however, is at least equally persuasive. Bush has apparently taxed the public's patience to the point where he has very little room to manuever. The two new polls cited above report that most Americans are witheringly critial of Bush's performance in Iraq, and recognize that at this point he garners little respect around the world. And he inspires little confidence at home, as evidenced by the pessimism measured in the Times-CBS survey: only 35 percent approve of the way Bush is generally handling foreign policy, and 61 percent believe that the Israel-Hezbollah fighting is likely to trigger a larger regional war (a finding which suggests that few Americans expect The Decider to be decisively effective in this crisis).
Worse yet, even prominent conservatives are now openly pessimistic about Bush's stewardship in Iraq; consider this argument, voiced yesterday: "Hands up, everybody who believes that the 'hundreds' of troops that the Pentagon plans to move from the rest of Iraq into Baghdad will suffice to secure the capital against the sectarian militias now waging war upon the civilian populations of the city. Anybody? No, I didn't think so....The present plan -- 'as the Iraqis stand up, we stand down' -- has not worked to date, as the president admitted (Tuesday), and there seems little reason to hope it will work better over the next months than it has in the recent past."
If a Democrat had uttered those words, he or she would be labeled as "defeatist" or worse by Bush's defenders. But those are the words of David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who helped coin the phrase axis of evil. If someone like Frum is so gloomy, it's not hard to imagine that the average voter is any less. Especially given the fact that (as the Times-CBS poll reports) a whopping 56 percent of Americans now support a withdrawal timetable, which puts public sentiment at odds with the Bush team and far ahead of the Washington Democratic establishment.
And there's also a broader context that arguably bodes ill for Bush and his congressional enablers on election day: The current crises in the Middle East -- particularly the fact that America is now too bogged down in the Iraqi religious (civil) war to respond effectively -- provides stark evidence that Bush and the neoconservatives' grand design for a broadly democratic Middle East appears to be going up in flames.
The original plan was to topple the Iraqi evil-doer in a cakewalk, install peace and democracy with minimal troops, and then watch the flowers bloom in the region's heretofore inhospitable soil. This ambitious Pax Americana was widely applauded, and a lot of us in the press occasionally got suckered by it (including me, here), prior to the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections this past January.
Most Americans aren't foreign policy experts, and don't live their lives debating neoconservative theory, but they do know instinctively when there's a mess that their president seems ill-positioned to clean up, and they do seem to know when Congress seems inattentive to what's really important (especially since the GOP lawmakers have spent their time lately passing flag-waving bills, such as the one designed to keep the word "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance). Perhaps this is why conservative columnist Robert Novak is now reporting that one of his top GOP congressional sources, somebody "who publicly exudes optimism," is privately predicting "a loss of 30 House seats," and thus a Democratic takeover.
And conservative strategist Kellyanne Conway also sees trouble ahead for the GOP; as she writes today, "All of the conventional (polling) indices...portend disaster for the party in power, in this case, the GOP. The right direction/wrong track figures, congressional and presidential approval ratings, and confidence measures, are all 'upside-down,' which is pollster parlance for crappy."
Nevertheless, as one Democrat said to me the other day, after itemizing Bush's woes, "How do you think we'll screw this one up?" I'll consider that question further tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Freedom is fear, democracy is tyranny, up is down
The George Orwell Award for the Debasement of Political Language is hereby presented to Nuru Kamal al-Maliki, the latest prime minister of Iraq, who addressed a joint session of Congress today, and who was honored with the requisite multiple standing ovations as he recited various Orwellian talking points cadged from the tattered Bush administration playbook.
How he and his White House patron think they can sway the American public with this kind of rhetoric -- at this late stage of the tragic game, with Iraqi bloodletting again on the upswing -- is anybody's guess. The latest Gallup poll shows that 62 percent of the public is turned off to President Bush's handling of Iraq, and it's implausible that Maliki's remarks today will spark joy in the streets.
In domestic political terms, Bush should be downright grateful that the press coverage these days is being dominated by the Israel-Hezbollah fighting, which has pushed Iraq off page one. I would bet that relatively few Americans are aware that far more Iraqi civilians have been killed (roughly 1400) during the past two weeks in their increasingly sectarian war than in the hostilities further west. As veteran political analyst Larry Sabato emailed today, "The near black-out of news on Iraq can only help the White House. Were it not for the bombs falling on Beirut and the rockets raining down on Haifa, the nearly unprecedented carnage throughout the blood-soaked nation of Iraq would surely be leading the news. Bush owns Iraq, and GOP (congressional '06) candidates would surely suffer from the chaos, just as they have been doing for a year or more."
But over the long haul, the Iraq story will reassert itself. And it will be hard for the administration to mask the fact that Maliki -- ballyhooed by the Bush team as a symbol of the new democracy, and viewed by the team as perhaps our last, best hope -- has already failed in his initial mission to tame the rampant sectarian violence around Baghdad.
The so-called Operation Enduring Freedom is out, to be replaced by some sort of Plan B, which we can probably call Operation Unending Crisis. And this plan, naturally, requires the participation of more U.S. troops, to buttress the overmatched and inadequately prepared Iraqi forces. Translation: we can probably shelve those Pentagon scenarios about U.S. troop reductions this autumn; it doesn't sound like the beleagured GOP congressional candidates will get a political gift out of Iraq on election eve after all.
But here's how Maliki, in his congressional address, nailed down the Orwellian award:
1. He declared that "Iraq is free." I guess that's true, if you define freedom as fear. Life around Baghdad has become steadily more oppressive, since the supposedly glorious June day when the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. All reports indicate that 100 civilians a day are being killed by sectarian gangs, Sunnis and Shiites are increasingly segregating themselves into respective ethnic enclaves, and some death-squad militias are gaining strength because they are protected and aided by the Interior Ministry of the new "democratic" government.
2. Which brings us to Maliki's declaration that Iraq now has "a fully-fledged democratic government," with "multiple political parties." I guess that's true, if you define democracy as tyranny. Sunni citizens are being terrorized by the militias allied with the Shiite-run Interior Ministry. That ministry supposedly reports to Maliki, who informed the congressmen today that "it is your duty" to help him pacify Iraq. But pacifiying Iraq is a bit of challenge, because the "fully-fledged democratic government" now includes freely-elected armed Shiite fundamentalists -- people such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the most powerful (and freely-elected) Shiite party, and who intends to set up armed vigilante squads to protect Shiiite residential enclaves.
3. Which brings us to Maliki himself. He came to power largely because he had the support of his ethnic "base" -- which includes the aforementioned armed Shiite fundamentalists. In his speech today, he repeatedly assailed "the terrorists" and the "extremists who value no life," and recited the old Bush theme about how"Iraq is free, and the terrorists cannot stand this." His implication, of course, was that "free" Iraqis are battling murderous insurgent outsiders, but not even the Bush administration seems to buy that one anymore; as Bush national security adviser Stephen Hadley said yesterday, "This isn't about terror. This is about sectarian violence." In essence -- although Hadley didn't say it -- Maliki's Iraqi allies are actually feeding the ranks of "the terrorists."
4. In George Orwell's 1984, the government of Oceania was adept at empty sloganeering, conjuring images of a bright -- albeit distant -- future. Maliki threw out a few lines of his own ("peace, prosperity, and hope...liberty, hope, and equality"), as he insisted that the first steps toward that future are already being taken. For instance, "we are making great economic strides." I guess that's true, if "great strides" in the economy and quality of life are defined as striding backward. The latest economic statistics, available in Washington, show that the unemployment rate -- pegged at between 25 and 40 percent -- has barely budged since late 2004; that domestic oil production remains lower than the prewar peak; that Baghdad residents have less potable water and less daily electricity than they had, prewar.
Maliki did say, at one point, that "the journey has been perilous, and the future is not guaranteed." That sounds about right. And perhaps it is unfair to focus too much on Maliki; he is merely the latest byproduct of the troubled American mission in Iraq. Indeed, I'd give the candor award to a U.S. military colonel who is quoted in Fiasco, Thomas Ricks' new book on the war. This colonel, assessing his own government's handling of Iraq since 2003, described it as "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."
How he and his White House patron think they can sway the American public with this kind of rhetoric -- at this late stage of the tragic game, with Iraqi bloodletting again on the upswing -- is anybody's guess. The latest Gallup poll shows that 62 percent of the public is turned off to President Bush's handling of Iraq, and it's implausible that Maliki's remarks today will spark joy in the streets.
In domestic political terms, Bush should be downright grateful that the press coverage these days is being dominated by the Israel-Hezbollah fighting, which has pushed Iraq off page one. I would bet that relatively few Americans are aware that far more Iraqi civilians have been killed (roughly 1400) during the past two weeks in their increasingly sectarian war than in the hostilities further west. As veteran political analyst Larry Sabato emailed today, "The near black-out of news on Iraq can only help the White House. Were it not for the bombs falling on Beirut and the rockets raining down on Haifa, the nearly unprecedented carnage throughout the blood-soaked nation of Iraq would surely be leading the news. Bush owns Iraq, and GOP (congressional '06) candidates would surely suffer from the chaos, just as they have been doing for a year or more."
But over the long haul, the Iraq story will reassert itself. And it will be hard for the administration to mask the fact that Maliki -- ballyhooed by the Bush team as a symbol of the new democracy, and viewed by the team as perhaps our last, best hope -- has already failed in his initial mission to tame the rampant sectarian violence around Baghdad.
The so-called Operation Enduring Freedom is out, to be replaced by some sort of Plan B, which we can probably call Operation Unending Crisis. And this plan, naturally, requires the participation of more U.S. troops, to buttress the overmatched and inadequately prepared Iraqi forces. Translation: we can probably shelve those Pentagon scenarios about U.S. troop reductions this autumn; it doesn't sound like the beleagured GOP congressional candidates will get a political gift out of Iraq on election eve after all.
But here's how Maliki, in his congressional address, nailed down the Orwellian award:
1. He declared that "Iraq is free." I guess that's true, if you define freedom as fear. Life around Baghdad has become steadily more oppressive, since the supposedly glorious June day when the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. All reports indicate that 100 civilians a day are being killed by sectarian gangs, Sunnis and Shiites are increasingly segregating themselves into respective ethnic enclaves, and some death-squad militias are gaining strength because they are protected and aided by the Interior Ministry of the new "democratic" government.
2. Which brings us to Maliki's declaration that Iraq now has "a fully-fledged democratic government," with "multiple political parties." I guess that's true, if you define democracy as tyranny. Sunni citizens are being terrorized by the militias allied with the Shiite-run Interior Ministry. That ministry supposedly reports to Maliki, who informed the congressmen today that "it is your duty" to help him pacify Iraq. But pacifiying Iraq is a bit of challenge, because the "fully-fledged democratic government" now includes freely-elected armed Shiite fundamentalists -- people such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the most powerful (and freely-elected) Shiite party, and who intends to set up armed vigilante squads to protect Shiiite residential enclaves.
3. Which brings us to Maliki himself. He came to power largely because he had the support of his ethnic "base" -- which includes the aforementioned armed Shiite fundamentalists. In his speech today, he repeatedly assailed "the terrorists" and the "extremists who value no life," and recited the old Bush theme about how"Iraq is free, and the terrorists cannot stand this." His implication, of course, was that "free" Iraqis are battling murderous insurgent outsiders, but not even the Bush administration seems to buy that one anymore; as Bush national security adviser Stephen Hadley said yesterday, "This isn't about terror. This is about sectarian violence." In essence -- although Hadley didn't say it -- Maliki's Iraqi allies are actually feeding the ranks of "the terrorists."
4. In George Orwell's 1984, the government of Oceania was adept at empty sloganeering, conjuring images of a bright -- albeit distant -- future. Maliki threw out a few lines of his own ("peace, prosperity, and hope...liberty, hope, and equality"), as he insisted that the first steps toward that future are already being taken. For instance, "we are making great economic strides." I guess that's true, if "great strides" in the economy and quality of life are defined as striding backward. The latest economic statistics, available in Washington, show that the unemployment rate -- pegged at between 25 and 40 percent -- has barely budged since late 2004; that domestic oil production remains lower than the prewar peak; that Baghdad residents have less potable water and less daily electricity than they had, prewar.
Maliki did say, at one point, that "the journey has been perilous, and the future is not guaranteed." That sounds about right. And perhaps it is unfair to focus too much on Maliki; he is merely the latest byproduct of the troubled American mission in Iraq. Indeed, I'd give the candor award to a U.S. military colonel who is quoted in Fiasco, Thomas Ricks' new book on the war. This colonel, assessing his own government's handling of Iraq since 2003, described it as "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Goodbye "Deep Throat," Hello "French Cuffs"
Washingtonians are suckers for political intrigue, and there was a new mystery today:
Which Republican Senate candidate was dissing his president, complaining to reporters under a cloak of anonymity that George W. Bush is a big drag on his '06 candidacy?
Only in Washington could this kind of mystery even happen. Only in Washington, with its bizarre and fungible rules about the permitted use of anonymous sources, would a Senate candidate -- somebody running in the open for high public office -- sit down for a very public meal with nine (yes, nine) political reporters, and gripe about his president on the condition that he not be named. And then he persisted with that proviso even after Senate GOP leader Bill Frist dropped by and saw him sitting there, holding court with the nine reporters -- all of whom agreed to the deal, perhaps figuring that this insight into his real thoughts would help them write with more knowledgeable nuance about his public rhetoric.
Still, perhaps Anonymous' voters in his Anonymous state might have wanted to know what their Republican candidate really thought...
About the Bush administration's performance during Katrina: "A monumental failure...In Katrina, the president is at 30,000 feet in an airplane looking down at people dying, living on a bridge. And that disconnect, I think, sums up, for me at least, the frustration that Americans feel."
Or about Bush administration failures in Iraq, which he calls "the single thread that is weaving through every issue....People want an honest assessment from the administration, and they want to hear the administration admit we thought this, and it didn't happen that way, and -- guess what -- it didn't work, so we're going to try a Plan B. Let's call it what it is. We thought this was going to be a different kind of engagement."
Or about whether he wants Bush to come to his state and stump for him: "To be honest with you, probably not."
Or about the high-spending, low-achieving, polarized Republican Congress: "We've lost our way... the spending, the finger-pointing, not getting the bills passed. Just shut up and get something done."
So who was this mystery man who lamented wearing the Republican label ("It's an impediment. It's a hurdle I have to overcome. I've got an 'R' here, a scarlet letter")?" This had the political world in a tizzy today, with the bloggers naturally on board. Wonkette was even running a poll.
The nominees started with incumbent Jim Talent of Missouri, who's getting roasted in his state because centrist voters there support federal stem-cell research, which Bush vetoed last week. But Missouri is a red state (or it was, anyway, in '00 and '04), and Anonymous seemed to imply that he's laboring in a blue state.
Another nominee was candidate Thomas Kean Jr. of New Jersey, who recently insisted that a traffic jam was the reason why he didn't show up at a fundraiser that featured Dick Cheney. But Anonymous said at one point that he agreed with Bush's stem-cell veto. Kean does not agree.
Another was candidate Mark Kennedy of blue-state Minnesota, who is five points down in the latest state poll, and who managed, in his latest campaign ad, to skip the fact that he's a three-term member of the GOP Congress. But Kennedy is not considered a clothing dandy, as opposed to Anonymous, who was depicted by the Washington Post as having "his French cuffs sprouting cuff links coordinated with his necktie."
Another nominee was incumbent Mike DeWine of Ohio, who always manages to be busy when Bush drops into his state. That has already happened four times. But, again, Ohio has not been a blue state.
So what about Maryland Senate candidate Michael Steele, the current lieutenant governor? He dresses sharp. He's struggling to win in a very blue state. He lives near Washington D.C., hence he can pop in for lunch. And best of all, Anonymous' gripe about Bush and Katrina was similar even in phrasing to a remark that columnist Robert Novak attributed to Steele last May.
And if it is Michael Steele (can this really stay a secret? and should it?), there is also one other factor well worth noting: He is African-American. If indeed his candidacy is in trouble -- he's trailing the two most viable Democrats in the polls -- that would be further proof that this year's oft-repeated story line about "the rise of the black Republicans" is a crock.
I have been repeatedly tempted this year to write "the rise of" story, but whenever I gear up, I ultimately shut down, having digested the latest evidence -- that Lynn Swann's gubernatorial candidacy in Pennsylvania peaked the day he announced; that Ken Blackwell's gubernatorial candidacy in Ohio is threatening to tank (he's now down by 20 points); and, now again, that Michael Steele might be lamenting his fate as a carrier of Bush baggage....OK, I'll emphasize might. Here's a pic of Steele. Are those French cuffs I see?
UPDATE: The envelope, please...And the winner is Steele. His office confirmed late in the day that he is indeed the mystery malcontent.
Which Republican Senate candidate was dissing his president, complaining to reporters under a cloak of anonymity that George W. Bush is a big drag on his '06 candidacy?
Only in Washington could this kind of mystery even happen. Only in Washington, with its bizarre and fungible rules about the permitted use of anonymous sources, would a Senate candidate -- somebody running in the open for high public office -- sit down for a very public meal with nine (yes, nine) political reporters, and gripe about his president on the condition that he not be named. And then he persisted with that proviso even after Senate GOP leader Bill Frist dropped by and saw him sitting there, holding court with the nine reporters -- all of whom agreed to the deal, perhaps figuring that this insight into his real thoughts would help them write with more knowledgeable nuance about his public rhetoric.
Still, perhaps Anonymous' voters in his Anonymous state might have wanted to know what their Republican candidate really thought...
About the Bush administration's performance during Katrina: "A monumental failure...In Katrina, the president is at 30,000 feet in an airplane looking down at people dying, living on a bridge. And that disconnect, I think, sums up, for me at least, the frustration that Americans feel."
Or about Bush administration failures in Iraq, which he calls "the single thread that is weaving through every issue....People want an honest assessment from the administration, and they want to hear the administration admit we thought this, and it didn't happen that way, and -- guess what -- it didn't work, so we're going to try a Plan B. Let's call it what it is. We thought this was going to be a different kind of engagement."
Or about whether he wants Bush to come to his state and stump for him: "To be honest with you, probably not."
Or about the high-spending, low-achieving, polarized Republican Congress: "We've lost our way... the spending, the finger-pointing, not getting the bills passed. Just shut up and get something done."
So who was this mystery man who lamented wearing the Republican label ("It's an impediment. It's a hurdle I have to overcome. I've got an 'R' here, a scarlet letter")?" This had the political world in a tizzy today, with the bloggers naturally on board. Wonkette was even running a poll.
The nominees started with incumbent Jim Talent of Missouri, who's getting roasted in his state because centrist voters there support federal stem-cell research, which Bush vetoed last week. But Missouri is a red state (or it was, anyway, in '00 and '04), and Anonymous seemed to imply that he's laboring in a blue state.
Another nominee was candidate Thomas Kean Jr. of New Jersey, who recently insisted that a traffic jam was the reason why he didn't show up at a fundraiser that featured Dick Cheney. But Anonymous said at one point that he agreed with Bush's stem-cell veto. Kean does not agree.
Another was candidate Mark Kennedy of blue-state Minnesota, who is five points down in the latest state poll, and who managed, in his latest campaign ad, to skip the fact that he's a three-term member of the GOP Congress. But Kennedy is not considered a clothing dandy, as opposed to Anonymous, who was depicted by the Washington Post as having "his French cuffs sprouting cuff links coordinated with his necktie."
Another nominee was incumbent Mike DeWine of Ohio, who always manages to be busy when Bush drops into his state. That has already happened four times. But, again, Ohio has not been a blue state.
So what about Maryland Senate candidate Michael Steele, the current lieutenant governor? He dresses sharp. He's struggling to win in a very blue state. He lives near Washington D.C., hence he can pop in for lunch. And best of all, Anonymous' gripe about Bush and Katrina was similar even in phrasing to a remark that columnist Robert Novak attributed to Steele last May.
And if it is Michael Steele (can this really stay a secret? and should it?), there is also one other factor well worth noting: He is African-American. If indeed his candidacy is in trouble -- he's trailing the two most viable Democrats in the polls -- that would be further proof that this year's oft-repeated story line about "the rise of the black Republicans" is a crock.
I have been repeatedly tempted this year to write "the rise of" story, but whenever I gear up, I ultimately shut down, having digested the latest evidence -- that Lynn Swann's gubernatorial candidacy in Pennsylvania peaked the day he announced; that Ken Blackwell's gubernatorial candidacy in Ohio is threatening to tank (he's now down by 20 points); and, now again, that Michael Steele might be lamenting his fate as a carrier of Bush baggage....OK, I'll emphasize might. Here's a pic of Steele. Are those French cuffs I see?
UPDATE: The envelope, please...And the winner is Steele. His office confirmed late in the day that he is indeed the mystery malcontent.
Calendar story a yawn, but not Hillary and John
I tend not to write much about how the political parties are always tinkering with the presidential primary calendar, because I sense that only the most hardcore junkies are fascinated by the debate over what state should go first, or whether Iowa and New Hampshire should be joined at the starting gate by more populous states, or whether the whole system should be "front loaded" with small states and "back loaded" with big states, or some form of vice versa. I used to shlepp myself to national party confabs in places like Indianapolis, listen to endless internecine debates about this stuff, take a lot of notes -- and then the whole story would quietly die several months later when party leaders put the kibosh on an overhaul.
So I have largely ignored the doings this past weekend in Washington, where a Democratic National Committee panel decided to crowd Iowa and New Hampshire at the top of the '08 primary calendar by adding early contests in South Carolina and Nevada; all four will take place prior to Feb. 5 of that year. The Democrats clearly are aiming for a more diverse early electorate. Nevada has burgeoning suburbs, a big union presence around Las Vegas, and a growing Hispanic population; South Carolina would presumably offer the prospective nominees a chance to test their early appeal in an Old Confederacy red state.
Whatever. I am blase about these tinkerings, maybe because of what happened in 1988, when the Democrats, hoping to tilt the playing field for a candidate with southern appeal, bunched most of their southern primaries on one day and called it Super Tuesday -- and wound up nominating Michael Dukakis from Massachusetts, who subsequently lost every southern state on election day.
However, one incident at the weekend DNC meeting is truly worth recounting, because it provides fresh evidence of the ongoing rivalry between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. That alone is worth watching during the long runup to 2008.
The tipoff came when Harold Ickes, a former senior staffer in the Bill Clinton White House and a certified Friend of Hillary, spoke at the meeting in his capacity as a DNC member. He argued strongly against giving South Carolina an early slot, because that would be an automatic win for John Edwards (who was born there, and represented neighboring North Carolina while in the Senate). He lost his argument, but repeated it again for CNN: "The fact is that if he runs, and I think he is running, that South Carolina will be considered almost his home state and...I just don't think it is going to be taken seriously (by other candidates). The purpose of moving these states up is that they will be taken seriously."
He said that his objections to South Carolina "have nothing to do with Hillary or anti-Hillary," but that strains credulity.
The polls of Democratic voters show that Edwards, the '04 vice presidential nominee, is arguably Hillary Clinton's toughest rival. (Al Gore finishes second to Hillary in the latest horse-race surveys, but he has given no indication that he'll run; John Kerry is roughly at parity with Edwards in third place, but nobody except Kerry thinks he has a shot.) Edwards is a more galvanizing speaker. In a June Gallup poll of Democratic voters, he was ranked the most acceptable candidate (71 percent rated him as acceptable, 25 percent said he was unacceptable. Hillary came next, at 69-25.)
And, most importantly, Edwards has that southern pedigree. One of the biggest threats to the Clinton candidacy is the widely held perception within the party that she would get shut out below the Mason Dixon line, dismissed as yet another northern Democratic liberal. Ickes may be right about the South Carolina primary: If Hillary competes with Edwards there and loses big, the press will write that she can't win in the South. If she cedes that primary to Edwards by staying away, the press will write that she has acknowledged she can't win in the South.
The rivalry talk surfaced at the 2004 convention, when Edwards was tapped for the ticket, and Hillary's people issued the usual denials. So it was amusing to learn of an incident that took place this past spring. When Hillary's people learned that Edwards was slated to address the National Press Club in June, they demanded that the organization give Hillary a speech gig in May.
But for those of you who want to track the rivalry during the next 18 months, it's best to start with the best anecdote of all.
Where: The floor of the U. S. Senate. When: During the prelude to the Iraq war.
Clinton wanted a speaking slot in prime time, so she could explain at length why she was voting for President Bush's war authorization resolution. Her request was granted. Then Edwards rushed to the floor and asked for a speaking slot. Democratic leaders said no, because all the time was alotted. Whereupon Clinton said to him (in a voice loud enough for the galleries to hear), "Just stand there and look pretty, John."
So I have largely ignored the doings this past weekend in Washington, where a Democratic National Committee panel decided to crowd Iowa and New Hampshire at the top of the '08 primary calendar by adding early contests in South Carolina and Nevada; all four will take place prior to Feb. 5 of that year. The Democrats clearly are aiming for a more diverse early electorate. Nevada has burgeoning suburbs, a big union presence around Las Vegas, and a growing Hispanic population; South Carolina would presumably offer the prospective nominees a chance to test their early appeal in an Old Confederacy red state.
Whatever. I am blase about these tinkerings, maybe because of what happened in 1988, when the Democrats, hoping to tilt the playing field for a candidate with southern appeal, bunched most of their southern primaries on one day and called it Super Tuesday -- and wound up nominating Michael Dukakis from Massachusetts, who subsequently lost every southern state on election day.
However, one incident at the weekend DNC meeting is truly worth recounting, because it provides fresh evidence of the ongoing rivalry between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. That alone is worth watching during the long runup to 2008.
The tipoff came when Harold Ickes, a former senior staffer in the Bill Clinton White House and a certified Friend of Hillary, spoke at the meeting in his capacity as a DNC member. He argued strongly against giving South Carolina an early slot, because that would be an automatic win for John Edwards (who was born there, and represented neighboring North Carolina while in the Senate). He lost his argument, but repeated it again for CNN: "The fact is that if he runs, and I think he is running, that South Carolina will be considered almost his home state and...I just don't think it is going to be taken seriously (by other candidates). The purpose of moving these states up is that they will be taken seriously."
He said that his objections to South Carolina "have nothing to do with Hillary or anti-Hillary," but that strains credulity.
The polls of Democratic voters show that Edwards, the '04 vice presidential nominee, is arguably Hillary Clinton's toughest rival. (Al Gore finishes second to Hillary in the latest horse-race surveys, but he has given no indication that he'll run; John Kerry is roughly at parity with Edwards in third place, but nobody except Kerry thinks he has a shot.) Edwards is a more galvanizing speaker. In a June Gallup poll of Democratic voters, he was ranked the most acceptable candidate (71 percent rated him as acceptable, 25 percent said he was unacceptable. Hillary came next, at 69-25.)
And, most importantly, Edwards has that southern pedigree. One of the biggest threats to the Clinton candidacy is the widely held perception within the party that she would get shut out below the Mason Dixon line, dismissed as yet another northern Democratic liberal. Ickes may be right about the South Carolina primary: If Hillary competes with Edwards there and loses big, the press will write that she can't win in the South. If she cedes that primary to Edwards by staying away, the press will write that she has acknowledged she can't win in the South.
The rivalry talk surfaced at the 2004 convention, when Edwards was tapped for the ticket, and Hillary's people issued the usual denials. So it was amusing to learn of an incident that took place this past spring. When Hillary's people learned that Edwards was slated to address the National Press Club in June, they demanded that the organization give Hillary a speech gig in May.
But for those of you who want to track the rivalry during the next 18 months, it's best to start with the best anecdote of all.
Where: The floor of the U. S. Senate. When: During the prelude to the Iraq war.
Clinton wanted a speaking slot in prime time, so she could explain at length why she was voting for President Bush's war authorization resolution. Her request was granted. Then Edwards rushed to the floor and asked for a speaking slot. Democratic leaders said no, because all the time was alotted. Whereupon Clinton said to him (in a voice loud enough for the galleries to hear), "Just stand there and look pretty, John."
Monday, July 24, 2006
Bush and the rule of law, next chapter
Writer's note: Blogspot server hassles prevented me from posting this earlier today. Apologies. However, I have finally expanded my blogroll, here on the home page. Feel free to partake, on the condition that you return.
It has been clear for a long time that President Bush doesn’t like lawyers – unless they’re on his payroll, crafting arguments for the unfettered exercise of executive power. He has often said, with a touch of pride, that he’s not a lawyer, and in campaigns he has generally dismissed “trial lawyers” as greedy vultures who game the system for big paydays.
So he undoubtedly will dislike the blue-ribbon report released today by the American Bar Association, which assails him as a threat to democracy, “a threat to the rule of law,” and as a president who disrespects “our constitutional system of separation of powers.” Most likely he’ll just ignore it, but I happen to think this report will be of interest to millions of his fellow citizens.
It’s interesting for a number of reasons. First, it arrives just two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court (more lawyers) decreed that Bush can’t simply do whatever he wants in violation of international law and the separation of powers.
Second, it has been authored by a bipartisan ABA task force that includes a number of notables from the conservative camp, such as Bruce Fein (who held two high-ranking Justice Department posts under Ronald Reagan), Mickey Edwards (former House Republican leader from 1977 to 1992, and a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation), not to mention former FBI director William Sessions, who served under the first George Bush.
And third, it targets one of the most compelling – yet unsexy and therefore largely overlooked – issues in the growing debate over whether Bush is engaged in a dangerous power grab. It deals with Bush’s frequent use of “signing statements,” which often assert, in so many dry words, that the president really isn’t required to obey the bills that he is signing into law.
I mentioned this issue in passing the other day. Bush has now issued more than 800 signing statements – 200 more than all other presidents combined (and most of those were benign). The ABA task force, which was convened in June after the Boston Globe and now-defunct Knight Ridder exposed the practice, critiques Bush in detail and basically concludes that Congress needs to fight back by passing a law that would allow lawmakers to sue Bush in court for his behavior.
In other words, these pillars of the legal establishment are arguing that this particular president is potentially wreaking havoc with the Constitution, and that the only way to thwart him is for Congress to take drastic action that could put it on a collision course with the White House. I haven’t heard talk like this from the legal establishment since Richard Nixon's executive excesses during Watergate.
“This report,” says ABA president Michael Greco, “raises serious concerns crucial to the survival of our democracy. If left unchecked, the president’s practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances, that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries. Immediate action is required to address this threat to the Constitution and to the rule of law in our country.”
Basically, Bush has been arguing in his signing statements that, as leader of the “unitary executive branch,” he can pick and choose the laws he wishes to obey and enforce, and reserves the right to decide when, how, or if he will report to Congress on what he is doing.
This issue came up last December when he signed a bill curbing his administration’s right to torture terrorist suspects, but stated that he would obey “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch.” But he has repeatedly taken this stance – defying (among many others) a Patriot Act requirement that he report to Congress about possible search and seizure abuses; a law designed to ban the use of illegally collected intelligence; and a law designed to protect whistleblowers.
The ABA report doesn’t think highly of this “unitary executive” argument. It says the Bush signing statements “generally carry no citation of authority or detailed explanation.” And that’s one reason why task force chairman and former federal prosecutor Neal Sonnett (who is now Jack Abramoff's defense attorney in Florida) contends that Bush’s behavior “poses a threat to the rule of law.”
So what happens next? The ABA report has to be formally adopted by the group’s policy arm, the House of Delegates, on August 7, but it’s doubtful that this will humble the Republican Congress into to taking any action. Bush’s allies on the Hill can always shrug off the whole issue by saying that it’s an irresolvable legal quagmire. The high court has said, as recently as 1997, that Congress has only a very limited right to sue the president in separation of powers cases – so how could Congress write a meaningful law that would expand that right? And wouldn’t Bush have to sign it? Nevertheless, Bruce Fein reportedly is drafting a bill for Arlen Specter’s Senate Judiciary Committee.
Most likely, Bush’s defenders will respond in the usual fashion, by attacking the source of the criticism rather than the criticism itself. They have long dismissed the ABA as unacceptably liberal (Clarence Thomas assailed the ABA back in the '90s), and they dislike the ABA’s longstanding role as a vetter of judicial nominees. Conservative legal groups, notably the Federalist Society, have flourished in recent years as counterweights to the ABA. (For a critical perspective of the ABA's report, see this critique today by think tanker Edward Whalen, a former Justice Department official during Bush's first term. He calls the ABA report "shoddy and irresponsible, and says that the participants "ought to be ashamed of themselves.")
And let’s not forget that Bush did not invent the idea of using the signing statement as a muscle-flexing presidential tactic. Young conservative legal eagles in the Reagan administration were among the first to recognize its possibilities. As one wrote in a 1986 memo, this use of the signing statement would “increase the power of the executive to shape the law.” Today, the author of that memo, Samuel Alito, sits on the U.S. Supreme Court. His presence could prove significant in the years ahead, as legal challenges to Bush's concept of executive power wend their way to the top.
It has been clear for a long time that President Bush doesn’t like lawyers – unless they’re on his payroll, crafting arguments for the unfettered exercise of executive power. He has often said, with a touch of pride, that he’s not a lawyer, and in campaigns he has generally dismissed “trial lawyers” as greedy vultures who game the system for big paydays.
So he undoubtedly will dislike the blue-ribbon report released today by the American Bar Association, which assails him as a threat to democracy, “a threat to the rule of law,” and as a president who disrespects “our constitutional system of separation of powers.” Most likely he’ll just ignore it, but I happen to think this report will be of interest to millions of his fellow citizens.
It’s interesting for a number of reasons. First, it arrives just two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court (more lawyers) decreed that Bush can’t simply do whatever he wants in violation of international law and the separation of powers.
Second, it has been authored by a bipartisan ABA task force that includes a number of notables from the conservative camp, such as Bruce Fein (who held two high-ranking Justice Department posts under Ronald Reagan), Mickey Edwards (former House Republican leader from 1977 to 1992, and a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation), not to mention former FBI director William Sessions, who served under the first George Bush.
And third, it targets one of the most compelling – yet unsexy and therefore largely overlooked – issues in the growing debate over whether Bush is engaged in a dangerous power grab. It deals with Bush’s frequent use of “signing statements,” which often assert, in so many dry words, that the president really isn’t required to obey the bills that he is signing into law.
I mentioned this issue in passing the other day. Bush has now issued more than 800 signing statements – 200 more than all other presidents combined (and most of those were benign). The ABA task force, which was convened in June after the Boston Globe and now-defunct Knight Ridder exposed the practice, critiques Bush in detail and basically concludes that Congress needs to fight back by passing a law that would allow lawmakers to sue Bush in court for his behavior.
In other words, these pillars of the legal establishment are arguing that this particular president is potentially wreaking havoc with the Constitution, and that the only way to thwart him is for Congress to take drastic action that could put it on a collision course with the White House. I haven’t heard talk like this from the legal establishment since Richard Nixon's executive excesses during Watergate.
“This report,” says ABA president Michael Greco, “raises serious concerns crucial to the survival of our democracy. If left unchecked, the president’s practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances, that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries. Immediate action is required to address this threat to the Constitution and to the rule of law in our country.”
Basically, Bush has been arguing in his signing statements that, as leader of the “unitary executive branch,” he can pick and choose the laws he wishes to obey and enforce, and reserves the right to decide when, how, or if he will report to Congress on what he is doing.
This issue came up last December when he signed a bill curbing his administration’s right to torture terrorist suspects, but stated that he would obey “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president to supervise the unitary executive branch.” But he has repeatedly taken this stance – defying (among many others) a Patriot Act requirement that he report to Congress about possible search and seizure abuses; a law designed to ban the use of illegally collected intelligence; and a law designed to protect whistleblowers.
The ABA report doesn’t think highly of this “unitary executive” argument. It says the Bush signing statements “generally carry no citation of authority or detailed explanation.” And that’s one reason why task force chairman and former federal prosecutor Neal Sonnett (who is now Jack Abramoff's defense attorney in Florida) contends that Bush’s behavior “poses a threat to the rule of law.”
So what happens next? The ABA report has to be formally adopted by the group’s policy arm, the House of Delegates, on August 7, but it’s doubtful that this will humble the Republican Congress into to taking any action. Bush’s allies on the Hill can always shrug off the whole issue by saying that it’s an irresolvable legal quagmire. The high court has said, as recently as 1997, that Congress has only a very limited right to sue the president in separation of powers cases – so how could Congress write a meaningful law that would expand that right? And wouldn’t Bush have to sign it? Nevertheless, Bruce Fein reportedly is drafting a bill for Arlen Specter’s Senate Judiciary Committee.
Most likely, Bush’s defenders will respond in the usual fashion, by attacking the source of the criticism rather than the criticism itself. They have long dismissed the ABA as unacceptably liberal (Clarence Thomas assailed the ABA back in the '90s), and they dislike the ABA’s longstanding role as a vetter of judicial nominees. Conservative legal groups, notably the Federalist Society, have flourished in recent years as counterweights to the ABA. (For a critical perspective of the ABA's report, see this critique today by think tanker Edward Whalen, a former Justice Department official during Bush's first term. He calls the ABA report "shoddy and irresponsible, and says that the participants "ought to be ashamed of themselves.")
And let’s not forget that Bush did not invent the idea of using the signing statement as a muscle-flexing presidential tactic. Young conservative legal eagles in the Reagan administration were among the first to recognize its possibilities. As one wrote in a 1986 memo, this use of the signing statement would “increase the power of the executive to shape the law.” Today, the author of that memo, Samuel Alito, sits on the U.S. Supreme Court. His presence could prove significant in the years ahead, as legal challenges to Bush's concept of executive power wend their way to the top.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Bush and the NAACP: a fundamental disconnect
President Bush addressed the NAACP yesterday for the first time since winning the White House, which means that he and the civil rights organization have finally reached a détente of sorts after six years of sporadic mutual distrust. I suppose I could just kiss off this event by noting that Bush’s bid to gin up black support for the GOP is probably futile, given the fact that, according to the polls, he currently enjoys the support of roughly nine percent of all African-Americans -- down from 18 percent in December ’04.
And it’s hard to imagine that Bush made many converts when he said that blacks should join him in his quest to eliminate the federal estate tax -- a pet GOP issue of greatest interest to rich white people who want to pass on their inheritances, and thus an issue that touches the lives of a minute fraction of black people. Indeed, there was predictably not a line in his speech about poverty, or, more specifically, about the latest Census Bureau figures which show that, during the first four years of his presidency, the percentage of blacks living below the poverty line jumped from 22.7 to 24.7, an increase of nine million.
There’s a lot more that can be said about what he didn’t say -- such as the fact that he opposes an increase in the minimum wage, and that he opposes expansion of the earned-income tax credit, a longstanding program that supplements low-wage incomes -- but I was most interested in something that he did say. One quick line, during the first 60 seconds:
“I come from a family committed to civil rights.”
That, really, is the crux of the matter. Yesterday’s address wasn’t just about trying to woo some black voters away from the Democrats party in the runup to the ’06 elections. It was, more importantly, the latest attempt (among countless attempts going back several generations) by a Bush family member to win over the black community simply by insisting that he is personally pure of heart. The Bushes have long sought to trumpet their good intentions, in the hopes that this would translate into mass black political support. The effort has never worked, but they keep trying anyway.
The president’s grandfather, Prescott, was a Connecticut senator during the ‘50s; he sponsored school desegregation bills. The president’s father, George H.W., was a young oil wildcatter in west Texas when he invited a local NAACP official to dinner at his house -- a shocking event in 1948. Some years later, when he chaired a county GOP committee, he put party funds in a black-owned bank, and in 1968, when he was serving in Congress, he supported fair housing legislation. The president’s brother, Jeb, has tried reaching out to blacks as Florida governor, and declaring how “it was wrong” when he ignored black voters during his first try for the big chair.
The problem, however, is that most black voters continue to judge politicians not on their good intentions, or whether their family has long been “committed to civil rights,” but on how they actually perform. President Bush may have admitted yesterday that he considered it “a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community,” but the fact is that the modern GOP over the past three decades has successfully wooed white voters with race-coded messages about crime, welfare, and job competition.
Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” was specifically designed to woo whites who couldn’t abide the northern Democratic-led crusades for desegregation and voting rights. The plan worked, and the GOP's dominance below the Mason-Dixon line is the result. Variations on the plan have worked ever since. The current president’s father won his 1988 race in part by sowing fear, in his TV ads, that his Democratic opponent would be soft on black criminals.
There is no sign thus far that George W. Bush will trigger a black stampede to the GOP simply because he is sincere about his intentions. It one thing for him to testify to his good heart, and to point out, as he did yesterday, that he applauds the GOP Congress’ renewal of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. But the reality is that the Bush administration’s Justice Department -- which is supposed to investigate such allegations as minority disenfranchisement at the ballot box – has not exactly followed the precepts of Martin Luther King.
The department's Civil Rights Division lawyers have twice signed off on Republican voting plans, in Georgia and Texas, that were later slapped down by the courts because they discriminated against minority voters. Not so coincidentally, the Division has been suffering a brain drain, with career civil rights lawyers quitting and young conservative idealogues taking their jobs. Reportedly, two-thirds of the lawyers in the Divison’s voting rights office have turned over during the past few years.
All told, it’s a cinch bet that Bush’s NAACP listeners care more about policy and performance than testaments to a family’s personal decency. As black politics expert David Bositis, an occasional GOP adviser on minority issues, told me right after the Katrina debacle, “Republicans always think that if they make some small (outreach) gestures, that African Americans will applaud their good intentions. They still don’t understand that African Americans would look at (the record) and conclude, ‘Those people really don’t like us.’”
And it’s hard to imagine that Bush made many converts when he said that blacks should join him in his quest to eliminate the federal estate tax -- a pet GOP issue of greatest interest to rich white people who want to pass on their inheritances, and thus an issue that touches the lives of a minute fraction of black people. Indeed, there was predictably not a line in his speech about poverty, or, more specifically, about the latest Census Bureau figures which show that, during the first four years of his presidency, the percentage of blacks living below the poverty line jumped from 22.7 to 24.7, an increase of nine million.
There’s a lot more that can be said about what he didn’t say -- such as the fact that he opposes an increase in the minimum wage, and that he opposes expansion of the earned-income tax credit, a longstanding program that supplements low-wage incomes -- but I was most interested in something that he did say. One quick line, during the first 60 seconds:
“I come from a family committed to civil rights.”
That, really, is the crux of the matter. Yesterday’s address wasn’t just about trying to woo some black voters away from the Democrats party in the runup to the ’06 elections. It was, more importantly, the latest attempt (among countless attempts going back several generations) by a Bush family member to win over the black community simply by insisting that he is personally pure of heart. The Bushes have long sought to trumpet their good intentions, in the hopes that this would translate into mass black political support. The effort has never worked, but they keep trying anyway.
The president’s grandfather, Prescott, was a Connecticut senator during the ‘50s; he sponsored school desegregation bills. The president’s father, George H.W., was a young oil wildcatter in west Texas when he invited a local NAACP official to dinner at his house -- a shocking event in 1948. Some years later, when he chaired a county GOP committee, he put party funds in a black-owned bank, and in 1968, when he was serving in Congress, he supported fair housing legislation. The president’s brother, Jeb, has tried reaching out to blacks as Florida governor, and declaring how “it was wrong” when he ignored black voters during his first try for the big chair.
The problem, however, is that most black voters continue to judge politicians not on their good intentions, or whether their family has long been “committed to civil rights,” but on how they actually perform. President Bush may have admitted yesterday that he considered it “a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African American community,” but the fact is that the modern GOP over the past three decades has successfully wooed white voters with race-coded messages about crime, welfare, and job competition.
Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” was specifically designed to woo whites who couldn’t abide the northern Democratic-led crusades for desegregation and voting rights. The plan worked, and the GOP's dominance below the Mason-Dixon line is the result. Variations on the plan have worked ever since. The current president’s father won his 1988 race in part by sowing fear, in his TV ads, that his Democratic opponent would be soft on black criminals.
There is no sign thus far that George W. Bush will trigger a black stampede to the GOP simply because he is sincere about his intentions. It one thing for him to testify to his good heart, and to point out, as he did yesterday, that he applauds the GOP Congress’ renewal of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. But the reality is that the Bush administration’s Justice Department -- which is supposed to investigate such allegations as minority disenfranchisement at the ballot box – has not exactly followed the precepts of Martin Luther King.
The department's Civil Rights Division lawyers have twice signed off on Republican voting plans, in Georgia and Texas, that were later slapped down by the courts because they discriminated against minority voters. Not so coincidentally, the Division has been suffering a brain drain, with career civil rights lawyers quitting and young conservative idealogues taking their jobs. Reportedly, two-thirds of the lawyers in the Divison’s voting rights office have turned over during the past few years.
All told, it’s a cinch bet that Bush’s NAACP listeners care more about policy and performance than testaments to a family’s personal decency. As black politics expert David Bositis, an occasional GOP adviser on minority issues, told me right after the Katrina debacle, “Republicans always think that if they make some small (outreach) gestures, that African Americans will applaud their good intentions. They still don’t understand that African Americans would look at (the record) and conclude, ‘Those people really don’t like us.’”
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Joe, Gil, Ralph, John, and The Massager
Let's do some quick hits:
When I heard the other day that a Washington-based Democratic strategist named Tom Lindenfeld was heading up to Connecticut to work for Senator Joe Lieberman's primary campaign, I knew it meant that Joe was in big trouble. And that Joe knows it as well.
Theoretically, an incumbent Democratic senator should have no need to hire a grassroots turnout specialist at the eleventh hour; theoretically, a senior figure like Lieberman should be no more concerned about his primary challenger than a picnicker is concerned about the fly who's buzzing his hamburger. Clearly, however, Lieberman's internal polling indicates that the average grassroots Connecticut Democrat is actually poised to strip away his party designation on Aug. 8, and award the '06 Senate nomination to his antiwar challenger, Ned Lamont. Hence the apparent need to rush Lindenfeld into the breach, in the hope that he can gin up a ground game in a mere 19 days.
And now we have outside confirmation of Lieberman's mounting woes. The latest Quinnipiac University poll now reports that the heretofore little-known Lamont, who trailed Lieberman by 15 points in June, today leads Lieberman by four points. That's a stunning finding. It's also further evidence that your average Connecticut Democrat increasingly views Lieberman as fatally compromised by his longstanding national-security alliance with President Bush; by his refusal to hold Bush accountable for the well-documented string of administration failures in Iraq; and by his insistence that Democratic dissent is not appropriate.
As a barometer of mainstream Democratic opinion, I offer Richard Schneller, age 84, a retired Connecticut legislator who led the state Senate Democrats back in the early '80s, when I was covering politics in that state. He emailed me the other day: "I just think that Joe is way off base in his support of the war in Iraq, and his support of Bush. I don't consider myself a liberal Democrat, whatever that is, but I'm voting for Ned Lamont because I want to send a message to Joe Lieberman that the war in Iraq, and many things that the Bush administration is doing as a result of invading Iraq, are very detrimental to the future health and well being of the United States."
It's not the liberal bloggers who Lieberman should be worried about on Aug. 8. It's folks like Dick Schneller.
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Speaking of Iraq, here's another defeatist, hate-America, cut-and-run complaint about the current conditions on the ground in Baghdad:
"The condition there is worse than I expected....I have to be perfectly candid: Baghdad is a serious problem.....It’s not safe to go anywhere outside of the Green Zone any part of the day....All of the information we receive sometimes from the Pentagon and the State Department isn’t always true....I don’t want to predict what will happen if things don’t get better....What I think we need to do more is withdraw more Americans."
Must be Michael Moore taking a quick tour, right? Or maybe a "liberal" journalist who is too chicken to leave the hotel room? Or maybe a weak-kneed Democratic senator who has succumbed to anti-Bush hysteria?
No, those remarks (here and here) were uttered this week by Republican congressman Gil Gutknecht of Minnesota. A member of the Newt Gingrich class of 1994. His 2004 rating from the American Conservative Union is 94 percent, his ACLU rating is zero percent, and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action rate him at five percent. And he's far from alone these days on the Republican side.
What does it say about Joe Lieberman when even a conservative back-bencher like Gil Gutknecht seems more willing than he is to question the Bush administration on Iraq?
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This is my last word on Ralph Reed, unless or until he resurrects his dashed political dreams. I only note today that, according to conservative journalist Rich Lowry, the ex-religious right leader and aspiring president has decided to blame his disastrous loss in Georgia not on his own shortcomings (well-documented corruption) but on those who exposed and reported on his corruption.
From Lowry today: "Reed's connection to the (Jack) Abramoff stuff had broken back in the summer of 2004, so it couldn't have been predicted that it would be such a huge deal even now. But it was. The Reed camp blames John McCain for playing payback for his 2000 primary defeat with a campaign of leaks, and the press, of course, was happy to pile on."
Blaming the press is the usual yawn. That aside, it's noteworthy that he blames McCain. It was McCain's panel, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which exposed Reed's unsavory relations with now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff, most recently in a report released in June. It so happens that McCain had the facts on his side, but let's just say that McCain is surely shedding no tears today, knowing that his panel's report helped fuel Reed's defeat in the lieutenant governor's race.
McCain's 2000 presidential fortunes crashed in the 2000 South Carolina primary, after conservative voters got wind of artfully circulated "rumors" that McCain was nuts due to his years as a POW; that he was the favored candidate of gay activists; and that he had fathered an illegitimate child (actually, he and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi girl). McCain has long blamed Reed for those rumors -- Reed was one of Bush's top southern honchos at the time -- so perhaps there is an element of "payback" in what happened in Georgia Tuesday night. But the bottom line is, Reed provided McCain with the factual ammo to blast him asunder.
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I don't want to make a big deal out of this, but I'm just asking:
Was there something wierdly inappropriate about The Decider unilaterally deciding this week to become The Massager?
It's captured on video: With war raging in the Middle East, with North Korea testing missiles, and with America's image in the world at low ebb, President Bush walks into a G-8 summit meeting, and decides to lay hands upon the only female world leader at the table. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel confers with a colleague on her right, Bush summarily administers a drive-by shoulder massage. Whereupon the surprised Merkel jerks her arms upward, in the kind of reflexive response last seen when a crazed tennis fan snuck up behind Monica Seles and stuck a blade in her back.
Some Bush defenders insist, naturally, that what he did with this woman isn't as bad as what Bill Clinton used to do with his women. (See first posted comment here). Granted, Clinton's myriad backstage peccadillos are well-established as factual reality. But, again, I'm just asking: Did Bill Clinton ever find it appropriate to exercise a right to preemptively grope a female head of state in a world summit meeting? And, if he had, can you imagine how his critics would have reacted? For those of you who do think that the Merkel massage was a tad cringe-worthy, you might enjoy this expression of disdain.
When I heard the other day that a Washington-based Democratic strategist named Tom Lindenfeld was heading up to Connecticut to work for Senator Joe Lieberman's primary campaign, I knew it meant that Joe was in big trouble. And that Joe knows it as well.
Theoretically, an incumbent Democratic senator should have no need to hire a grassroots turnout specialist at the eleventh hour; theoretically, a senior figure like Lieberman should be no more concerned about his primary challenger than a picnicker is concerned about the fly who's buzzing his hamburger. Clearly, however, Lieberman's internal polling indicates that the average grassroots Connecticut Democrat is actually poised to strip away his party designation on Aug. 8, and award the '06 Senate nomination to his antiwar challenger, Ned Lamont. Hence the apparent need to rush Lindenfeld into the breach, in the hope that he can gin up a ground game in a mere 19 days.
And now we have outside confirmation of Lieberman's mounting woes. The latest Quinnipiac University poll now reports that the heretofore little-known Lamont, who trailed Lieberman by 15 points in June, today leads Lieberman by four points. That's a stunning finding. It's also further evidence that your average Connecticut Democrat increasingly views Lieberman as fatally compromised by his longstanding national-security alliance with President Bush; by his refusal to hold Bush accountable for the well-documented string of administration failures in Iraq; and by his insistence that Democratic dissent is not appropriate.
As a barometer of mainstream Democratic opinion, I offer Richard Schneller, age 84, a retired Connecticut legislator who led the state Senate Democrats back in the early '80s, when I was covering politics in that state. He emailed me the other day: "I just think that Joe is way off base in his support of the war in Iraq, and his support of Bush. I don't consider myself a liberal Democrat, whatever that is, but I'm voting for Ned Lamont because I want to send a message to Joe Lieberman that the war in Iraq, and many things that the Bush administration is doing as a result of invading Iraq, are very detrimental to the future health and well being of the United States."
It's not the liberal bloggers who Lieberman should be worried about on Aug. 8. It's folks like Dick Schneller.
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Speaking of Iraq, here's another defeatist, hate-America, cut-and-run complaint about the current conditions on the ground in Baghdad:
"The condition there is worse than I expected....I have to be perfectly candid: Baghdad is a serious problem.....It’s not safe to go anywhere outside of the Green Zone any part of the day....All of the information we receive sometimes from the Pentagon and the State Department isn’t always true....I don’t want to predict what will happen if things don’t get better....What I think we need to do more is withdraw more Americans."
Must be Michael Moore taking a quick tour, right? Or maybe a "liberal" journalist who is too chicken to leave the hotel room? Or maybe a weak-kneed Democratic senator who has succumbed to anti-Bush hysteria?
No, those remarks (here and here) were uttered this week by Republican congressman Gil Gutknecht of Minnesota. A member of the Newt Gingrich class of 1994. His 2004 rating from the American Conservative Union is 94 percent, his ACLU rating is zero percent, and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action rate him at five percent. And he's far from alone these days on the Republican side.
What does it say about Joe Lieberman when even a conservative back-bencher like Gil Gutknecht seems more willing than he is to question the Bush administration on Iraq?
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This is my last word on Ralph Reed, unless or until he resurrects his dashed political dreams. I only note today that, according to conservative journalist Rich Lowry, the ex-religious right leader and aspiring president has decided to blame his disastrous loss in Georgia not on his own shortcomings (well-documented corruption) but on those who exposed and reported on his corruption.
From Lowry today: "Reed's connection to the (Jack) Abramoff stuff had broken back in the summer of 2004, so it couldn't have been predicted that it would be such a huge deal even now. But it was. The Reed camp blames John McCain for playing payback for his 2000 primary defeat with a campaign of leaks, and the press, of course, was happy to pile on."
Blaming the press is the usual yawn. That aside, it's noteworthy that he blames McCain. It was McCain's panel, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which exposed Reed's unsavory relations with now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff, most recently in a report released in June. It so happens that McCain had the facts on his side, but let's just say that McCain is surely shedding no tears today, knowing that his panel's report helped fuel Reed's defeat in the lieutenant governor's race.
McCain's 2000 presidential fortunes crashed in the 2000 South Carolina primary, after conservative voters got wind of artfully circulated "rumors" that McCain was nuts due to his years as a POW; that he was the favored candidate of gay activists; and that he had fathered an illegitimate child (actually, he and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi girl). McCain has long blamed Reed for those rumors -- Reed was one of Bush's top southern honchos at the time -- so perhaps there is an element of "payback" in what happened in Georgia Tuesday night. But the bottom line is, Reed provided McCain with the factual ammo to blast him asunder.
-------
I don't want to make a big deal out of this, but I'm just asking:
Was there something wierdly inappropriate about The Decider unilaterally deciding this week to become The Massager?
It's captured on video: With war raging in the Middle East, with North Korea testing missiles, and with America's image in the world at low ebb, President Bush walks into a G-8 summit meeting, and decides to lay hands upon the only female world leader at the table. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel confers with a colleague on her right, Bush summarily administers a drive-by shoulder massage. Whereupon the surprised Merkel jerks her arms upward, in the kind of reflexive response last seen when a crazed tennis fan snuck up behind Monica Seles and stuck a blade in her back.
Some Bush defenders insist, naturally, that what he did with this woman isn't as bad as what Bill Clinton used to do with his women. (See first posted comment here). Granted, Clinton's myriad backstage peccadillos are well-established as factual reality. But, again, I'm just asking: Did Bill Clinton ever find it appropriate to exercise a right to preemptively grope a female head of state in a world summit meeting? And, if he had, can you imagine how his critics would have reacted? For those of you who do think that the Merkel massage was a tad cringe-worthy, you might enjoy this expression of disdain.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
"OK, disease sufferers, you won't get advanced medical research, but at least we disagreed on whether to disappoint you!"
As I watched President Bush explain today why he vetoed the popular bill that would have expanded embryonic stem-cell research ("I'm not going to allow it!"), I realized that this episode does have a potential political upside for the GOP (notwithstanding everything I wrote yesterday). That scenario goes something like this:
The Democrats, with an eye on the '06 elections, are constantly inveighing against what they call "the rubber stamp Republicans," suggesting that the GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill basically march in step with The Decider -- and therefore deserve to be defeated in November. But the stem-cell episode undercuts that argument. In May 2005, when the House decisively passed the stem-cell bill, 50 of 230 Republicans voted Yes for passage. And yesterday, when the Senate decisively followed suit, 19 of 54 Republicans voted Yes for passage. The 19 defectors included anti-abortion stalwarts Bill Frist, Trent Lott, Orrin Hatch, and John Warner, all of whom saw expanded embryonic stem-cell research as a "pro-life" initiative.
Today, we also saw some anti-lockstep behavior in the Republican House. Witness Curt Weldon, the longtime Republican congressman who represents a suburban Philadelphia district that has been slowly trending Democratic. Weldon is in a tougher than expected re-election race. Last year, he voted NO on the expansion of stem-cell research. But today, he said he intended to vote YES, in favor of overriding Bush's veto. Clearly he thinks that fighting with with Bush on this issue could be a political boon back home; in defying Bush, he emailed this message today: "I find it difficult to look a mother or father in the eye who has a sick child and tell them I didn't do everything in my power to try to help them find a cure for their child."
Bush stood against all these dissenting Republicans today, but that's the point: By publicly disagreeing on such a high-stakes issue, they've all demonstrated (at least in this instance) that the GOP's game is not simply a matter of Follow the Leader. That might not be a comfort to families suffering from debilitating diseases and hoping that America might lead the world in medical advances, but a GOP "big tent" talking point might be enough to blunt the Democrats' "rubber stamp" line.
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By the way, I don't think it's worth spending a lot of time talking about how this is Bush's first veto, and about how historic that is because only Thomas Jefferson waited as long to nix a bill. The moment is overrated, because, lest we forget, Bush has become a master of the "signing statement." Instead of vetoing bills that he has disliked during the past five years, he has opted instead to sign them into law and append statements indicating that he reserved the right not to obey them. He has reportedly done this 750 times, a number that far exceeds the 575 signing statements issued by all his predecessors combined.
The Democrats, with an eye on the '06 elections, are constantly inveighing against what they call "the rubber stamp Republicans," suggesting that the GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill basically march in step with The Decider -- and therefore deserve to be defeated in November. But the stem-cell episode undercuts that argument. In May 2005, when the House decisively passed the stem-cell bill, 50 of 230 Republicans voted Yes for passage. And yesterday, when the Senate decisively followed suit, 19 of 54 Republicans voted Yes for passage. The 19 defectors included anti-abortion stalwarts Bill Frist, Trent Lott, Orrin Hatch, and John Warner, all of whom saw expanded embryonic stem-cell research as a "pro-life" initiative.
Today, we also saw some anti-lockstep behavior in the Republican House. Witness Curt Weldon, the longtime Republican congressman who represents a suburban Philadelphia district that has been slowly trending Democratic. Weldon is in a tougher than expected re-election race. Last year, he voted NO on the expansion of stem-cell research. But today, he said he intended to vote YES, in favor of overriding Bush's veto. Clearly he thinks that fighting with with Bush on this issue could be a political boon back home; in defying Bush, he emailed this message today: "I find it difficult to look a mother or father in the eye who has a sick child and tell them I didn't do everything in my power to try to help them find a cure for their child."
Bush stood against all these dissenting Republicans today, but that's the point: By publicly disagreeing on such a high-stakes issue, they've all demonstrated (at least in this instance) that the GOP's game is not simply a matter of Follow the Leader. That might not be a comfort to families suffering from debilitating diseases and hoping that America might lead the world in medical advances, but a GOP "big tent" talking point might be enough to blunt the Democrats' "rubber stamp" line.
-------
By the way, I don't think it's worth spending a lot of time talking about how this is Bush's first veto, and about how historic that is because only Thomas Jefferson waited as long to nix a bill. The moment is overrated, because, lest we forget, Bush has become a master of the "signing statement." Instead of vetoing bills that he has disliked during the past five years, he has opted instead to sign them into law and append statements indicating that he reserved the right not to obey them. He has reportedly done this 750 times, a number that far exceeds the 575 signing statements issued by all his predecessors combined.
Ralph Reed and the politically fatal intersection of God and commerce
The best laid plans of Ralph Reed -- the onetime cherubic public face of the Christian Coalition and media-savvy front man for the religious right -- have been rudely derailed by Georgia voters, who apparently decided last night that this purported exemplar of moral virtue had become a poster boy for Washington sleaze.
It now does not appear that Reed, a high-rolling lobbyist in recent years, will be charting a presidential bid in 2016 or 2020 after all (that was indeed part of his master plan), because as he sought to climb the first rung on the electoral ladder, he was summarily yanked back to earth. So much for his former boast about leaving his opponents in “body bags.”
Step one of his ascent was to be the lieutenant governor job in Georgia. But he was thrashed in the Republican primary last night by a little-known conservative challenger, state senator Casey Cagle, who took 56 percent of the vote and dominated in the populous conservative-leaning suburbs around Atlanta. Thus, in defeat, Reed becomes the first electoral casualty of the Jack Abramoff scandal and, more broadly, of the Washington “culture of corruption,” where morals are traded in for big money.
Reed’s defeat is arguably a warning to other scandal-marred pols that the ‘06 elections won’t necessarily be a cakewalk. This morning, public interest activist David Donnelly, the national campaigns director at the Public Campaign Action Fund, contended that the Reed debacle sends a message: “Politicians who side with donors and big-moneyed interests, and not with voters, can’t depend on their base” to stay faithful on election day. He cited five Capitol Hill incumbents (four Republicans, one Democrat) who are seeking re-election despite being enmeshed in money and lobbying scandals.
In the Georgia race, Cagle successfully persuaded conservative primary voters that Reed’s longstanding ties to convicted felon Abramoff had essentially dented his halo (Time magazine had once referred to Reed as the “right hand of God”). Cagle said of Reed, “his values are for sale,” and a U.S. Senate report backed him up. Reed, in 1999, had crusaded on moral grounds against southern gambling bills -- when, in reality, he was taking gambling money from a native-American tribe (the Mississippi Band of Choctaws) that already owned casinos and was mainly interested in ridding themselves of gambling competition.
As he took heat for this in Georgia, Reed insisted that he hadn’t known he was being paid with gambling money (the Choctaws were Abramoff clients, and the money had been routed through Abramoff). Reed’s standard stump line was, “Had I known then what I know now, I would not have taken the work.”
The problem with his denial, however, is that it rang false. The Senate report contains some juicy emails. One, from 1999, features Abramoff telling Reed to “get me invoices as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks ASAP.” And in 2000, Abramoff tells Reed, “The firm has held back all payments, pending receipt of a check from Choctaw.” It was this kind of evidence that prompted former Reed loyalist and Georgia lobbyist Clint Austin to announce in a primary eve Internet posting that he would vote for Cagle, because “Reed’s words and actions do not match up.”
In political circles, Reed’s struggles have prompted little sympathy. Centrist Democratic think tank denizen Marshall Wittmann, who once worked for Reed as a Christian Coalition lobbyist, wrote the other day, “Insofar as the Lord seems to treat the self-righteous with special disdain, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ralph gets a busy signal if he calls for divine intervention on his behalf.”
But Democrats generally might be well advised not to view Reed’s demise as a victory for their side. After all, he was beaten in a Republican primary by another conservative; the voters were not being asked to choose between him and a Democrat. And if he had won last might, he may well have beaten his Democratic opponent in November -- a plausible outcome in GOP-trending Georgia. In other words, Democrats still don’t know whether Abramoff baggage is fatal in an interparty contest.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that Ralph Reed can no longer lay claim to the loyalties of Christian conservatives, not after trading on their values for special-interest cash, and that in itself is a noteworthy development. Perhaps Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, best diagnosed Reed’s problem last April, when he told the press, in the wake of the Reed-Abramoff revelations, that “the Bible says you can’t serve God and Mammon.”
It now does not appear that Reed, a high-rolling lobbyist in recent years, will be charting a presidential bid in 2016 or 2020 after all (that was indeed part of his master plan), because as he sought to climb the first rung on the electoral ladder, he was summarily yanked back to earth. So much for his former boast about leaving his opponents in “body bags.”
Step one of his ascent was to be the lieutenant governor job in Georgia. But he was thrashed in the Republican primary last night by a little-known conservative challenger, state senator Casey Cagle, who took 56 percent of the vote and dominated in the populous conservative-leaning suburbs around Atlanta. Thus, in defeat, Reed becomes the first electoral casualty of the Jack Abramoff scandal and, more broadly, of the Washington “culture of corruption,” where morals are traded in for big money.
Reed’s defeat is arguably a warning to other scandal-marred pols that the ‘06 elections won’t necessarily be a cakewalk. This morning, public interest activist David Donnelly, the national campaigns director at the Public Campaign Action Fund, contended that the Reed debacle sends a message: “Politicians who side with donors and big-moneyed interests, and not with voters, can’t depend on their base” to stay faithful on election day. He cited five Capitol Hill incumbents (four Republicans, one Democrat) who are seeking re-election despite being enmeshed in money and lobbying scandals.
In the Georgia race, Cagle successfully persuaded conservative primary voters that Reed’s longstanding ties to convicted felon Abramoff had essentially dented his halo (Time magazine had once referred to Reed as the “right hand of God”). Cagle said of Reed, “his values are for sale,” and a U.S. Senate report backed him up. Reed, in 1999, had crusaded on moral grounds against southern gambling bills -- when, in reality, he was taking gambling money from a native-American tribe (the Mississippi Band of Choctaws) that already owned casinos and was mainly interested in ridding themselves of gambling competition.
As he took heat for this in Georgia, Reed insisted that he hadn’t known he was being paid with gambling money (the Choctaws were Abramoff clients, and the money had been routed through Abramoff). Reed’s standard stump line was, “Had I known then what I know now, I would not have taken the work.”
The problem with his denial, however, is that it rang false. The Senate report contains some juicy emails. One, from 1999, features Abramoff telling Reed to “get me invoices as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks ASAP.” And in 2000, Abramoff tells Reed, “The firm has held back all payments, pending receipt of a check from Choctaw.” It was this kind of evidence that prompted former Reed loyalist and Georgia lobbyist Clint Austin to announce in a primary eve Internet posting that he would vote for Cagle, because “Reed’s words and actions do not match up.”
In political circles, Reed’s struggles have prompted little sympathy. Centrist Democratic think tank denizen Marshall Wittmann, who once worked for Reed as a Christian Coalition lobbyist, wrote the other day, “Insofar as the Lord seems to treat the self-righteous with special disdain, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ralph gets a busy signal if he calls for divine intervention on his behalf.”
But Democrats generally might be well advised not to view Reed’s demise as a victory for their side. After all, he was beaten in a Republican primary by another conservative; the voters were not being asked to choose between him and a Democrat. And if he had won last might, he may well have beaten his Democratic opponent in November -- a plausible outcome in GOP-trending Georgia. In other words, Democrats still don’t know whether Abramoff baggage is fatal in an interparty contest.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that Ralph Reed can no longer lay claim to the loyalties of Christian conservatives, not after trading on their values for special-interest cash, and that in itself is a noteworthy development. Perhaps Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, best diagnosed Reed’s problem last April, when he told the press, in the wake of the Reed-Abramoff revelations, that “the Bible says you can’t serve God and Mammon.”
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Will Ralph Reed win redemption?
Still wondering whether Republicans will be hurt at the polls this year by the Jack Abramoff scandal, and its various corruption subplots? There has been scant evidence thus far, but we will see a fresh test tonight, in Georgia, where one-time religious right golden boy Ralph Reed is trying to win the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor.
Reed, who once helmed the Christian Coalition and was lionized at an early age for his political savvy, left the organization late in 1998 for the financially lucrative world of political consulting. He quickly hooked up with super-lobbyist/networker Abramoff, his conservative friend and comrade from the early '80s (telling Abramoff in an email, "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!"), and made a pile of dough. The problem is, the recent past has intruded on his maiden foray into elective politics - an important foray, because everyone around Reed knows that he sees the lieutenant governorship as the first stepping stone to very high office.
It will be instructive to see whether he prevails tonight, in his GOP primary race against state senator Casey Cagle. Last year, he looked like a cinch winner. But then his fundraising fell off, and now the polls show Cagle slightly ahead. What happened? Well, a Senate report was released in June showing that Reed took $5 million from Abramoff to wage a grassroots moral crusade against legalized gambling in the South; in reality, the money was put up by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (Abramoff clients), who already had Gulf Coast casinos and wanted to thwart any competitors from butting in. Nothing illegal here, just a shrewd (or hypocritical) meshing of God and commerce. In any case, Reed says now that he had no idea where the money came from. Also, Reed and Abramoff (now a convicted felon) are being sued by another tribe, in Texas, on charges of "corruption and deceit."
Will Georgians derail Reed from his carefully-charted political fast track? Tune in tomorrow.
Reed, who once helmed the Christian Coalition and was lionized at an early age for his political savvy, left the organization late in 1998 for the financially lucrative world of political consulting. He quickly hooked up with super-lobbyist/networker Abramoff, his conservative friend and comrade from the early '80s (telling Abramoff in an email, "I need to start humping in corporate accounts!"), and made a pile of dough. The problem is, the recent past has intruded on his maiden foray into elective politics - an important foray, because everyone around Reed knows that he sees the lieutenant governorship as the first stepping stone to very high office.
It will be instructive to see whether he prevails tonight, in his GOP primary race against state senator Casey Cagle. Last year, he looked like a cinch winner. But then his fundraising fell off, and now the polls show Cagle slightly ahead. What happened? Well, a Senate report was released in June showing that Reed took $5 million from Abramoff to wage a grassroots moral crusade against legalized gambling in the South; in reality, the money was put up by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (Abramoff clients), who already had Gulf Coast casinos and wanted to thwart any competitors from butting in. Nothing illegal here, just a shrewd (or hypocritical) meshing of God and commerce. In any case, Reed says now that he had no idea where the money came from. Also, Reed and Abramoff (now a convicted felon) are being sued by another tribe, in Texas, on charges of "corruption and deceit."
Will Georgians derail Reed from his carefully-charted political fast track? Tune in tomorrow.
Most call it hope for millions, Bush calls it "murder"
The Republican-led Senate has spoken -- today, by a 63-37 vote, it passed a bill expanding federally-financed stem cell research --and now President Bush must decide whether he sides with the religious and social conservatives who oppose that research, or with the clear majority of his fellow citizens.
Actually, he has already made up his mind -- his heart is with his political base -- which means that, when he issues the first veto of his presidency, he will be defying the medical community, the scientific community, 41 Nobel laureates, hundreds of citizen health groups, Nancy Reagan, and the millions of Americans who see value in doing the advanced research that could pioneer new treatments for serious diseases.
The stem-cell issue, which has been debated for the past several days, is a textbook example of the fundamental divide within the Republican party. Potentially, as the '06 election draws near, this issue is political poison for the GOP, although that assumes the Democrats would know what to do with the gift that is about to be placed in their perpetually tremulous hands.
The issue itself -- spending taxpayers' money to conduct research on diseases by using stem cells taken from human embryos -- is broadly popular among moderate Republicans, centrist Republicans, and probably conservative Republicans whose loved ones suffer from serious illness. Two years ago, a University of Pennsylvania National Annenberg Election Survey reported that 53 percent of Republicans nationwide support stem-cell research. Last year, a CBS poll reported a GOP plurality in favor of such research, 46 percent to 42 percent. The overall national percentage of Americans favoring stem-cell work is as high as 70 percent.
Even Senate Republican leader and presidential hopeul Bill Frist (anxious to repair his medical bona fides after that episode when he offered his video diagnosis of Terri Schiavo) strongly pushed the bill to expand stem-cell research. But, within the GOP base, the religious and social conservatives say thumbs-down - and they still hold sway at the White House. Bush and his lieutenants remain dedicated to keeping them happy, especially during the runup to congressional elections that will require a strong base turnout.
So the White House position is that Bush will veto this measure -- already passed last year by the Republican House, normally a bastion of pro-Bush sentiment -- and thus sustain the tight restrictions that Bush himself imposed on federal stem-cell research back in August 2001.
It's hard to see how the GOP can emerge from this episode politically unscathed. In the wake of Bush's expected veto -- which would probably be upheld, since two-thirds of the lawmakers in each chamber would be needed to override him -- independent and moderate swing voters may well conclude that Bush considers his fealty to the religious right to be more important than the health of millions of Americans.
A Bush veto could also put the political squeeze on conservative senators such as Jim Talent, who voted today against the stem-cell research bill. His re-election in Missouri is being threatened this year because swing-voting Missourians appear to be siding with stem cells and science. It's noteworthy that last weekend the national Democrats chose Talent's opponent, Claire McCaskill, to deliver the party's Saturday radio address.
Another potentially vulnerable senator is Rick Santorum, who's already trailing Democratic challenger Bob Casey Jr. by double digits in the polls, and who also voted NO today on stem-cell research. To survive in November, he'll need at least minimally respectable support out of the populous suburbs -- but that's where stem-cell research is broadly popular, and where Bush-style social conservatism is not. As Kenneth Davis, a county GOP chairman in the Philadelphia suburbs, told me a couple years ago, stem-cell research "is something everyone can relate to, because everyone has a story about a loved-one's illness." (Casey also broadly opposes using federal money on expanded stem-cell research; on the other hand, his party is far more supportive of the idea than Bush's GOP.)
Bush has long viewed his willingness to defy majority sentiment as an asset; in the words of press secretary Tony Snow the other day, "People like leadership much better than a finger in the wind." But in this case, the leader has misrepresented some of the facts. Bush claimed, in a White House message the other day, that the stem-cell bill "would use Federal taxpayer dollars to support and encourage the destruction of human life for research.” In reality, the stem cells covered by the bill have been specifically created for in-vitro fertilization, are no longer needed and, if not used for research purposes, would be discarded anyway as medical waste. Frist also described the bill this way, in a Washington Post op-ed column this morning.
But the White House is not interested in such nuance; as Snow put it today, "the simple answer is, he thinks murder's wrong." (Snow has only been at the White House a few months, but he's already starting to talk like Bush.)
By all accounts, a Bush veto thus presents Democrats with an electoral opportunity. Many Republicans recognize this; a northeastern party official told CNN today that the stem-cell issue is a "stinker" for the GOP, because "when you're portrayed as arguing against treatment of disease, it's a tough place to be politically."
As political columnist Jules Witcover notes here, even Democratic leaders acknowledge that they have failed in recent connections to connect with the day-to-day concerns of average voters. Yet as the polls demonstrate, the stem-cell issue already clicks with the concerns of average voters. Cancer, MS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, among many other crippling diseases, attack Americans across the ideological divide.
Therefore, the question is whether the Democrats can manage to invoke the Bush veto and rhetorically contend that the president is "out of the mainstream," that he is "against" improving the health and reducing the suffering of his fellow citizens. Even Bill Frist referred to the stem-cell bill as "preserving life," so what does opposition to the bill imply?
The Democrats will undoubtedly some attack lines during the (probably futile) effort later this week to override the expected veto. Suffice it to say that Karl Rove, if working for the other team, could craft this one in his sleep.
Actually, he has already made up his mind -- his heart is with his political base -- which means that, when he issues the first veto of his presidency, he will be defying the medical community, the scientific community, 41 Nobel laureates, hundreds of citizen health groups, Nancy Reagan, and the millions of Americans who see value in doing the advanced research that could pioneer new treatments for serious diseases.
The stem-cell issue, which has been debated for the past several days, is a textbook example of the fundamental divide within the Republican party. Potentially, as the '06 election draws near, this issue is political poison for the GOP, although that assumes the Democrats would know what to do with the gift that is about to be placed in their perpetually tremulous hands.
The issue itself -- spending taxpayers' money to conduct research on diseases by using stem cells taken from human embryos -- is broadly popular among moderate Republicans, centrist Republicans, and probably conservative Republicans whose loved ones suffer from serious illness. Two years ago, a University of Pennsylvania National Annenberg Election Survey reported that 53 percent of Republicans nationwide support stem-cell research. Last year, a CBS poll reported a GOP plurality in favor of such research, 46 percent to 42 percent. The overall national percentage of Americans favoring stem-cell work is as high as 70 percent.
Even Senate Republican leader and presidential hopeul Bill Frist (anxious to repair his medical bona fides after that episode when he offered his video diagnosis of Terri Schiavo) strongly pushed the bill to expand stem-cell research. But, within the GOP base, the religious and social conservatives say thumbs-down - and they still hold sway at the White House. Bush and his lieutenants remain dedicated to keeping them happy, especially during the runup to congressional elections that will require a strong base turnout.
So the White House position is that Bush will veto this measure -- already passed last year by the Republican House, normally a bastion of pro-Bush sentiment -- and thus sustain the tight restrictions that Bush himself imposed on federal stem-cell research back in August 2001.
It's hard to see how the GOP can emerge from this episode politically unscathed. In the wake of Bush's expected veto -- which would probably be upheld, since two-thirds of the lawmakers in each chamber would be needed to override him -- independent and moderate swing voters may well conclude that Bush considers his fealty to the religious right to be more important than the health of millions of Americans.
A Bush veto could also put the political squeeze on conservative senators such as Jim Talent, who voted today against the stem-cell research bill. His re-election in Missouri is being threatened this year because swing-voting Missourians appear to be siding with stem cells and science. It's noteworthy that last weekend the national Democrats chose Talent's opponent, Claire McCaskill, to deliver the party's Saturday radio address.
Another potentially vulnerable senator is Rick Santorum, who's already trailing Democratic challenger Bob Casey Jr. by double digits in the polls, and who also voted NO today on stem-cell research. To survive in November, he'll need at least minimally respectable support out of the populous suburbs -- but that's where stem-cell research is broadly popular, and where Bush-style social conservatism is not. As Kenneth Davis, a county GOP chairman in the Philadelphia suburbs, told me a couple years ago, stem-cell research "is something everyone can relate to, because everyone has a story about a loved-one's illness." (Casey also broadly opposes using federal money on expanded stem-cell research; on the other hand, his party is far more supportive of the idea than Bush's GOP.)
Bush has long viewed his willingness to defy majority sentiment as an asset; in the words of press secretary Tony Snow the other day, "People like leadership much better than a finger in the wind." But in this case, the leader has misrepresented some of the facts. Bush claimed, in a White House message the other day, that the stem-cell bill "would use Federal taxpayer dollars to support and encourage the destruction of human life for research.” In reality, the stem cells covered by the bill have been specifically created for in-vitro fertilization, are no longer needed and, if not used for research purposes, would be discarded anyway as medical waste. Frist also described the bill this way, in a Washington Post op-ed column this morning.
But the White House is not interested in such nuance; as Snow put it today, "the simple answer is, he thinks murder's wrong." (Snow has only been at the White House a few months, but he's already starting to talk like Bush.)
By all accounts, a Bush veto thus presents Democrats with an electoral opportunity. Many Republicans recognize this; a northeastern party official told CNN today that the stem-cell issue is a "stinker" for the GOP, because "when you're portrayed as arguing against treatment of disease, it's a tough place to be politically."
As political columnist Jules Witcover notes here, even Democratic leaders acknowledge that they have failed in recent connections to connect with the day-to-day concerns of average voters. Yet as the polls demonstrate, the stem-cell issue already clicks with the concerns of average voters. Cancer, MS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, among many other crippling diseases, attack Americans across the ideological divide.
Therefore, the question is whether the Democrats can manage to invoke the Bush veto and rhetorically contend that the president is "out of the mainstream," that he is "against" improving the health and reducing the suffering of his fellow citizens. Even Bill Frist referred to the stem-cell bill as "preserving life," so what does opposition to the bill imply?
The Democrats will undoubtedly some attack lines during the (probably futile) effort later this week to override the expected veto. Suffice it to say that Karl Rove, if working for the other team, could craft this one in his sleep.
Monday, July 17, 2006
The specter of vigorous oversight
Thank you, editors! Normally, I am not pleased when (on rare occasions) they cut stuff from my print columns without advance notice and I am left to discover the excisions when I pick up the paper. But yesterday, they probably did me a big favor when they trimmed a key paragraph in the interests of space.
In a column about the fitful efforts by the GOP Congress to conduct meaningful oversight of the Bush administration, I cited several examples of the Republicans seemingly rousing themselves from their five-year slumber. For instance, I wrote, "Last Thursday, after weeks of prodding by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, the White House agreed to comply, at least in part, with a 1978 law and thus submit its warrantless surveillance program for scrutiny by a secret intelligence court."
It turns out that the Specter sentence didn't make it into print. In retrospect, that's just as well -- because the more I look at Specter's deal with Bush, the less I am convinced that it qualifies as an example of meaningful oversight.
This was supposed to be Specter's finest moment, his triumph in holding President Bush accountable to the rule of law. Bush's domestic surveillance program, exposed last December, directly violated the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which basically decreed that all proposed surveillance targets be reviewed in advance by a secret FISA court . The law expressly states that FISA shall be the "exclusive" overseer of such executive activity. Bush's program, however, was proceeding without any legislative or judicial oversight. Hence, Specter's avowed determination to get some compliance.
Well, I've now read all the fine print in the ballyhooed deal -- and it looks like yet another triumph for the imperial presidency. Or, as Yale constitutional law professor Jack Balkin calls it, "a virtual blank check to the Executive...a complete and total sham."
Basically, rather than holding Bush to the rule of law, Specter's deal alters the rules to help Bush. The compromise bill makes it clear that FISA and its panel of judges are no longer the "seclusive" overseer of electronic survillance; under Specter's deal -- which still has to be approved by Congress -- electronic survillance would now be authorized "under the constitutional authority of the executive, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978."
Under the constitutional authority of the executive...now there's a loophole that would swallow an SUV. That's boilerplate for the Bush legal team's argument that the president has inherent powers to do what he wants in wartime, under Article II of the Constitution. In fact, Specter's bill states this even more explicitly in Section 801: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers." For the legal eagles at the White House, that sentence is the gold standard.
So the political question is, what will the congressional Democrats do about this? Will they basically accept the Specter compromise as a prudent "middle ground," for fear that they will be labeled as "soft of terrorists" if they fight for tougher restrictions on Bush? Or, as some First Amendment experts are urging, will they have the guts to frame the issue to their own advantage?
First Amendment lawyer Glenn Greenwald offered this formula over the weekend: "This is not a debate about whether to eavesdrop on al Qaeda -- everyone is for that -- but is about whether George Bish should have the power to eavesdrop on Americans with no oversight, an awesome power which this country overwhelmingly decided (by enacting FISA) 30 years ago, in the wake of decades of abuses, that we do not trust the president -- any president -- to have."
But it's probably not a good bet to expect the Democrats to go to the mat on this...not when they couldn't even stand firm and defend their online political ad which showed a quick visual of flag-covered coffins in Iraq.
As I noted here Friday (see below), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (which is running the effort to take over the House) had posted a web ad which touched on the war in Iraq by showing some coffins of slain soldiers. The Republicans squawked that this was "despicable," that the ad should be removed, and two incumbent southern Democratic congressmen agreed. For a couple days late last week, the national Democrats staunchly defended the ad, and suggested that the GOP had some nerve, given the fact that they where the ones who had shown disrespect for the troops by sending them into battle with inadequate body armor and equipment.
But, sure enough, late last Friday (politicians always do their embarrassing stuff on Fridays, when they don't think the press will notice), the Democrats pulled the ad off their website. They replaced with a minimum wage ad.
Why did they go belly up?
DCCC spokesman Bill Burton replied: "We're moving to another major effort that we're highlighting on our Web site."
Well, that certainly clears it up. Here's a translation: "We prefer not to say why we validated the Republican charge by bowing to their demands."
In a column about the fitful efforts by the GOP Congress to conduct meaningful oversight of the Bush administration, I cited several examples of the Republicans seemingly rousing themselves from their five-year slumber. For instance, I wrote, "Last Thursday, after weeks of prodding by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, the White House agreed to comply, at least in part, with a 1978 law and thus submit its warrantless surveillance program for scrutiny by a secret intelligence court."
It turns out that the Specter sentence didn't make it into print. In retrospect, that's just as well -- because the more I look at Specter's deal with Bush, the less I am convinced that it qualifies as an example of meaningful oversight.
This was supposed to be Specter's finest moment, his triumph in holding President Bush accountable to the rule of law. Bush's domestic surveillance program, exposed last December, directly violated the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which basically decreed that all proposed surveillance targets be reviewed in advance by a secret FISA court . The law expressly states that FISA shall be the "exclusive" overseer of such executive activity. Bush's program, however, was proceeding without any legislative or judicial oversight. Hence, Specter's avowed determination to get some compliance.
Well, I've now read all the fine print in the ballyhooed deal -- and it looks like yet another triumph for the imperial presidency. Or, as Yale constitutional law professor Jack Balkin calls it, "a virtual blank check to the Executive...a complete and total sham."
Basically, rather than holding Bush to the rule of law, Specter's deal alters the rules to help Bush. The compromise bill makes it clear that FISA and its panel of judges are no longer the "seclusive" overseer of electronic survillance; under Specter's deal -- which still has to be approved by Congress -- electronic survillance would now be authorized "under the constitutional authority of the executive, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978."
Under the constitutional authority of the executive...now there's a loophole that would swallow an SUV. That's boilerplate for the Bush legal team's argument that the president has inherent powers to do what he wants in wartime, under Article II of the Constitution. In fact, Specter's bill states this even more explicitly in Section 801: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers." For the legal eagles at the White House, that sentence is the gold standard.
So the political question is, what will the congressional Democrats do about this? Will they basically accept the Specter compromise as a prudent "middle ground," for fear that they will be labeled as "soft of terrorists" if they fight for tougher restrictions on Bush? Or, as some First Amendment experts are urging, will they have the guts to frame the issue to their own advantage?
First Amendment lawyer Glenn Greenwald offered this formula over the weekend: "This is not a debate about whether to eavesdrop on al Qaeda -- everyone is for that -- but is about whether George Bish should have the power to eavesdrop on Americans with no oversight, an awesome power which this country overwhelmingly decided (by enacting FISA) 30 years ago, in the wake of decades of abuses, that we do not trust the president -- any president -- to have."
But it's probably not a good bet to expect the Democrats to go to the mat on this...not when they couldn't even stand firm and defend their online political ad which showed a quick visual of flag-covered coffins in Iraq.
As I noted here Friday (see below), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (which is running the effort to take over the House) had posted a web ad which touched on the war in Iraq by showing some coffins of slain soldiers. The Republicans squawked that this was "despicable," that the ad should be removed, and two incumbent southern Democratic congressmen agreed. For a couple days late last week, the national Democrats staunchly defended the ad, and suggested that the GOP had some nerve, given the fact that they where the ones who had shown disrespect for the troops by sending them into battle with inadequate body armor and equipment.
But, sure enough, late last Friday (politicians always do their embarrassing stuff on Fridays, when they don't think the press will notice), the Democrats pulled the ad off their website. They replaced with a minimum wage ad.
Why did they go belly up?
DCCC spokesman Bill Burton replied: "We're moving to another major effort that we're highlighting on our Web site."
Well, that certainly clears it up. Here's a translation: "We prefer not to say why we validated the Republican charge by bowing to their demands."
Friday, July 14, 2006
"We're shocked, SHOCKED, that line-crossing is going on in here!"
It's always amusing to watch mud-slingers accuse each other of fighting dirty.
Exhibit A this week has been the orchestrated flap over a 60-second Democratic online video that includes a two-second clip of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. Seeking to advance its latest campaign message ("America Needs a New Direction"), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is helming the party's bid to take over the House in November, recently posted a web ad depicting all the bad things that Democrats are seeking to blame on President Bush and the GOP. One bad thing, the web ad alleges, is the war in Iraq. Hence, the quick shot of the coffins.
Hence, the Republicans have gone berserk. I just spent part of my workday reading and deleting the many expressions of their well-orchestrated outrage. It is "despicable," they say, that the Democrats should stoop so low as to show images of the fallen. Various Republican congressmen have come forth to say that the ad "turned my stomach," and that it is "tasteless", and that it "crossed the line."
Let us walk that "line" for a moment:
In the GOP's definition of ethical campaigning, it apparently "crosses the line" to show the coffins of dead U.S. soldiers (94.5 percent of whom have been killed subsequent to Bush's declaration that "major combat operations have ended") -- but it doesn't cross the line to put the face of a convicted black rapist on the TV screen (1988) and suggest that if the purported crime softy Michael Dukakis becomes president, your wives and daughters will be endangered. Under GOP rules, it crosses the line to show a quick visual depiction of America's overriding issue, but it doesn't cross the line to put Osama bin Laden's face on the TV screen (2002) and suggest that if Vietnam war hero Max Cleland is reelected to his Democratic Senate seat in Georgia, it would be good news for Osama bin Laden.
Some top conservative bloggers don't buy the GOP's argument. Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics writes, "The outrage seems misplaced, if not a bit phony and hypocritical...The war in Iraq is the defining issue of our time, and the Democratic party is vehemently opposed to it. Soldiers are, in fact, dying in Iraq on a daily basis. So why can't the Democrats show a split-second visual depiction of that reality? What are they supposed to do, show a graph of the U.S. casualty rate to depict the sacrifices we're making in Iraq? Not mention them at all?"
Another conservative blogger, at Captain's Quarters, writes that "we should be careful with our moral outrage. The Democrats have every right to campaign on a belief that the Iraq war has failed, all evidence to the contrary." And another, Ryan Sager, calls the Democratic imagery "a perfectly legitimate piece of political message-making," just as it was legitimate in 2004 when a Bush ad used a brief visual of a flag-draped coffin being carried from the rubble on 9/11.
And here's the capper. Mark McKinnon, President Bush's longtime ad man, says of the coffin visual, "This is one where I respectfully disagree with my colleagues: I think it is an appropriate image."
It's hard to imagine that rough and tumble Republican politicos are really and truly in a swivet over such a tactic. This is really just an exercise in hardball gamesmanship, a savvy attempt by the GOP to sow dissent within the Democratic ranks over what should be deemed the proper boundaries of political debate in 2006. After all, Democrats are known to be far less adept than their counterparts at maintaining unity and message discipline.
And here's a news flash: The GOP umbrage effort has already worked.
The Republicans sent word to their candidates in the field, asking that they put the squeeze on all Democratic opponents, demanding (in their framing of the issue) that the Democrats either side with the DCCC or with the brave American soldiers who are fighting and dying for freedom. Sure enough, three Democrats -- congressman John Spratt in South Carolina, congressman Chet Edwards in Texas, and candidate Bruce Braley in Iowa -- have broken ranks and asked the DCCC to pull the video.
There are no plans for a party mea culpa, and the GOP wouldn't expect that. This is merely about keeping the other team off balance, getting the opposition to perhaps pull its punches when the game is on the line later this year. Manufactured outrage can be a tool in making that happen.
As for conservative blogger Jim Geraghty at the National Review, he seems to feel that the GOP shouldn't waste its time taking umbrage at imagery, when in fact it has a stronger case on the merits: "I don't think it's inherently offensive to show images suggesting the fallen and contending, 'This is too high a price to pay.' Of course, the ad says jack squat about what Democratic legislators would do differently in Iraq, probably because they couldn't get a consensus in their caucus if their political lives depended on it."
No argument there.
Exhibit A this week has been the orchestrated flap over a 60-second Democratic online video that includes a two-second clip of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. Seeking to advance its latest campaign message ("America Needs a New Direction"), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is helming the party's bid to take over the House in November, recently posted a web ad depicting all the bad things that Democrats are seeking to blame on President Bush and the GOP. One bad thing, the web ad alleges, is the war in Iraq. Hence, the quick shot of the coffins.
Hence, the Republicans have gone berserk. I just spent part of my workday reading and deleting the many expressions of their well-orchestrated outrage. It is "despicable," they say, that the Democrats should stoop so low as to show images of the fallen. Various Republican congressmen have come forth to say that the ad "turned my stomach," and that it is "tasteless", and that it "crossed the line."
Let us walk that "line" for a moment:
In the GOP's definition of ethical campaigning, it apparently "crosses the line" to show the coffins of dead U.S. soldiers (94.5 percent of whom have been killed subsequent to Bush's declaration that "major combat operations have ended") -- but it doesn't cross the line to put the face of a convicted black rapist on the TV screen (1988) and suggest that if the purported crime softy Michael Dukakis becomes president, your wives and daughters will be endangered. Under GOP rules, it crosses the line to show a quick visual depiction of America's overriding issue, but it doesn't cross the line to put Osama bin Laden's face on the TV screen (2002) and suggest that if Vietnam war hero Max Cleland is reelected to his Democratic Senate seat in Georgia, it would be good news for Osama bin Laden.
Some top conservative bloggers don't buy the GOP's argument. Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics writes, "The outrage seems misplaced, if not a bit phony and hypocritical...The war in Iraq is the defining issue of our time, and the Democratic party is vehemently opposed to it. Soldiers are, in fact, dying in Iraq on a daily basis. So why can't the Democrats show a split-second visual depiction of that reality? What are they supposed to do, show a graph of the U.S. casualty rate to depict the sacrifices we're making in Iraq? Not mention them at all?"
Another conservative blogger, at Captain's Quarters, writes that "we should be careful with our moral outrage. The Democrats have every right to campaign on a belief that the Iraq war has failed, all evidence to the contrary." And another, Ryan Sager, calls the Democratic imagery "a perfectly legitimate piece of political message-making," just as it was legitimate in 2004 when a Bush ad used a brief visual of a flag-draped coffin being carried from the rubble on 9/11.
And here's the capper. Mark McKinnon, President Bush's longtime ad man, says of the coffin visual, "This is one where I respectfully disagree with my colleagues: I think it is an appropriate image."
It's hard to imagine that rough and tumble Republican politicos are really and truly in a swivet over such a tactic. This is really just an exercise in hardball gamesmanship, a savvy attempt by the GOP to sow dissent within the Democratic ranks over what should be deemed the proper boundaries of political debate in 2006. After all, Democrats are known to be far less adept than their counterparts at maintaining unity and message discipline.
And here's a news flash: The GOP umbrage effort has already worked.
The Republicans sent word to their candidates in the field, asking that they put the squeeze on all Democratic opponents, demanding (in their framing of the issue) that the Democrats either side with the DCCC or with the brave American soldiers who are fighting and dying for freedom. Sure enough, three Democrats -- congressman John Spratt in South Carolina, congressman Chet Edwards in Texas, and candidate Bruce Braley in Iowa -- have broken ranks and asked the DCCC to pull the video.
There are no plans for a party mea culpa, and the GOP wouldn't expect that. This is merely about keeping the other team off balance, getting the opposition to perhaps pull its punches when the game is on the line later this year. Manufactured outrage can be a tool in making that happen.
As for conservative blogger Jim Geraghty at the National Review, he seems to feel that the GOP shouldn't waste its time taking umbrage at imagery, when in fact it has a stronger case on the merits: "I don't think it's inherently offensive to show images suggesting the fallen and contending, 'This is too high a price to pay.' Of course, the ad says jack squat about what Democratic legislators would do differently in Iraq, probably because they couldn't get a consensus in their caucus if their political lives depended on it."
No argument there.
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