This morning I was catching up on my backlogged emails (mostly marketing junk, political propaganda, and random diatribes) when I chanced upon a standard submission from the Republican National Committee. It began this way:
“WHO IS MARKOS MOULITSAS ZUNIGA? A Partisan ‘Nutroot’ Who Turned His Hate-Filled Blog Daily Kos Into A Leadership Post In The Democrat Party.”
(By the way, this business about the "Democrat" party, a label clearly intended as a pejorative, is getting a little old. Wouldn't it sound equally dumb for the Democrats to refer to their opponents as the "Repub" party?)
Anyway, the email proceeded, at considerable length, to attack the blog proprietor for various alleged financial, political, and ideological sins. The GOP even attacked him for going on vacation in El Salvador, although I was unaware that El Salvador had been deemed by the governing party to be an unacceptable locale for the expenditure of leisure funds.
What’s most instructive here is not the bill of particulars amassed against a blogger whom most Americans still probably haven’t heard of; rather, it’s the fact that GOP headquarters opted to launch the attack at all. And the reason is clear: at a time when the party is down in the polls, and in danger of losing at least one chamber on Capitol Hill this November, the GOP is casting around for an enemy, any enemy, who might rile up the conservative base voters and get them out to the polls en masse.
It’s easy to see why the Republicans are worried. The Pew Research Center pollsters report that Democrats are 16 points more likely than Republicans to say that they are pumped up to vote this November; moreover, just 42 percent of Republicans and GOP-friendly independents are feeling good about the party’s track record in power -- and that’s down nearly 20 points from two years ago.
All the more reason to target somebody who might get the base to forget its beefs with President Bush and the GOP Congress, and instead direct its anger at the other camp. Most recently, the party has tried out a number of prospects: Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont (soft on terrorists), Nancy Pelosi (depicted in party emails as a wide-eyed zombie), Howard Dean (depicted in full scream mode), and, of course, the old reliable, Michael Moore (depicted in full scruffy mode). Now they’re trying out a blogger.
I suppose the big question, however, is whether conservative base voters on the GOP mailing list will now be motivated to forget their grievances about the GOP Congress’ red-ink budgets, as well as the president’s record on Katrina and Iraq...and be roused to storm the polls and strike down all Democratic candidates just because a liberal blogger says things like (gasp) "the French are right" and charges advertisers (gasp) $2400 a week for the most visible position on his home page.
Here’s how GOP strategist Rich Galen sees the November election (he predicts modest Democratic gains, but no takeover): “People will go into the polls somewhere between ambivalent with, and angry at, Republicans in the Congress. But, as they prepare to pull the lever, or press the button, or punch out the chad they (will) say to themselves, ‘I'm not happy with these guys, but I am very uncomfortable with the notion of putting the MoveOn.org/Al Sharpton wing of the Democratic Party in charge of national security.’”
Move over, Kos. In the hunt for enemies who might change the subject, there’s always Al and MoveOn. But the GOP’s big problem is that even some of their own incumbents don’t seem to believe that it’s possible to change the subject, given the current political climate.
Witness the latest news from vulnerable Connecticut congressman Christopher Shays -- who now says that he plans to unveil a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq. In a conference call yesterday, he said: “Our troops cannot be there indefinitely. We should be able to tell the American people what kind of timeline we can have to begin to draw down our troops.”
That’s precisely the kind of talk that GOP headquarters is attacking, when uttered by the likes of Ned Lamont...or the proprietor of Daily Kos. This autumn, it may be tough for the GOP to change the subject when its friends start talking like its foes.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Straight talk and the art of counter-pandering
It’s fascinating these days to watch the reputed straight-talker as he tailors his tongue to the political exigencies of the moment.
John McCain, with his eye on the '08 GOP nod, has been toiling for months on his top priority task -- making friends with all the conservatives who treated him like dirt during the '00 campaign. But clearly he and his handlers fear that Operation Pander has the potential to mess with his maverick image, and sour the old McCainiacs who see him as a font of integrity.
This is one of those times.
To be an effective panderer, McCain must repeatedly declare unswerving devotion to President Bush, because nothing is more prized by the Bush loyalists than loyalty itself. The problem, however, is that Bush loyalists now comprise no more than 1/3 of the general population, and the share of Americans who dislike Bush's handling of the Iraq war is now in the neighborhood of 65 percent.
That leaves the straight-talker with two options: He can keep pandering, or he can retool the talk. He has chosen the latter.
In Ohio the other day, McCain gave a stump speech assailing the execution of the Iraq war that could easily have been delivered by Hillary Clinton. The key passages:
""I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required. 'Stuff happens,' 'mission accomplished,' 'last throes,' 'a few dead-enders.' I'm just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be....(That kind of talk) has contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach, which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking."
What's with all the sarcasm from McCain, all of a sudden? "Stuff happens" was one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's gems, his dismissive shrug at critics who were questioning why the war was going badly. "Mission accomplished"...well, you all know that one. "Last throes"...again, you're undoubtedly familiar with Vice President Cheney's predictive track record. How about "dead-enders?" That was another Rumsfeld verbal misfire.
By the way, McCain may wish to pin all the blame on the Bush administration for assuring the public that the war would be a day at the beach, but he too wore rose-colored glasses on occasion. On MSNBC's Hardball, on the eve of war in 2003, Chris Matthews asked McCain, "Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the post-war scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq or at least a large number of them will treat us as liberators?" And McCain replied: "Absolutely. Absolutely." Two weeks later, McCain was back on the show and said that "there’s no doubt in my mind that we will prevail and there’s no doubt in my mind, once these (remaining terrorists) are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators."
But I digress. Clearly there is a concern among McCain's advisers that his ongoing displays of slavish loyalty to the Bush team could backfire with the moderate voters who liked him in the past. Yes he needs to prove his bona fides to the right-leaning activists who dominate the GOP, but no politician wants to be seriously out of sync with mainstream public opinion. Hence, the recalibrated straight talk. It's also noteworthy that it happened in Ohio, where support for Bush and the war has tanked, and where Republican Senator Mike DeWine (for whom McCain was campaigning) is ranked high on the list of endangered '06 incumbents.
And his outburst comes during the same week that the New York Times, clearly with the help or acquiesence of the McCain team, listed some of the foreign policy mavens who seem poised to join McCain's nascent brain trust. The names included a trio of Iraq war skeptics: Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to Bush's father; ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell; and Powell deputy Richard Armitage.
So is McCain tacking back toward true independence? Not necessarily. He has prominent neoconservative pals as well, notably William Kristol. The bottom line is that McCain is probably just hedging his bets, covering all bases, doing the pander while trying to protect his image and vice versa. That purported Straight Talk Express will need to chart many crooked paths on the road to power.
John McCain, with his eye on the '08 GOP nod, has been toiling for months on his top priority task -- making friends with all the conservatives who treated him like dirt during the '00 campaign. But clearly he and his handlers fear that Operation Pander has the potential to mess with his maverick image, and sour the old McCainiacs who see him as a font of integrity.
This is one of those times.
To be an effective panderer, McCain must repeatedly declare unswerving devotion to President Bush, because nothing is more prized by the Bush loyalists than loyalty itself. The problem, however, is that Bush loyalists now comprise no more than 1/3 of the general population, and the share of Americans who dislike Bush's handling of the Iraq war is now in the neighborhood of 65 percent.
That leaves the straight-talker with two options: He can keep pandering, or he can retool the talk. He has chosen the latter.
In Ohio the other day, McCain gave a stump speech assailing the execution of the Iraq war that could easily have been delivered by Hillary Clinton. The key passages:
""I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was underestimating the size of the task and the sacrifices that would be required. 'Stuff happens,' 'mission accomplished,' 'last throes,' 'a few dead-enders.' I'm just more familiar with those statements than anyone else because it grieves me so much that we had not told the American people how tough and difficult this task would be....(That kind of talk) has contributed enormously to the frustration that Americans feel today because they were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach, which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking."
What's with all the sarcasm from McCain, all of a sudden? "Stuff happens" was one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's gems, his dismissive shrug at critics who were questioning why the war was going badly. "Mission accomplished"...well, you all know that one. "Last throes"...again, you're undoubtedly familiar with Vice President Cheney's predictive track record. How about "dead-enders?" That was another Rumsfeld verbal misfire.
By the way, McCain may wish to pin all the blame on the Bush administration for assuring the public that the war would be a day at the beach, but he too wore rose-colored glasses on occasion. On MSNBC's Hardball, on the eve of war in 2003, Chris Matthews asked McCain, "Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the post-war scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq or at least a large number of them will treat us as liberators?" And McCain replied: "Absolutely. Absolutely." Two weeks later, McCain was back on the show and said that "there’s no doubt in my mind that we will prevail and there’s no doubt in my mind, once these (remaining terrorists) are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators."
But I digress. Clearly there is a concern among McCain's advisers that his ongoing displays of slavish loyalty to the Bush team could backfire with the moderate voters who liked him in the past. Yes he needs to prove his bona fides to the right-leaning activists who dominate the GOP, but no politician wants to be seriously out of sync with mainstream public opinion. Hence, the recalibrated straight talk. It's also noteworthy that it happened in Ohio, where support for Bush and the war has tanked, and where Republican Senator Mike DeWine (for whom McCain was campaigning) is ranked high on the list of endangered '06 incumbents.
And his outburst comes during the same week that the New York Times, clearly with the help or acquiesence of the McCain team, listed some of the foreign policy mavens who seem poised to join McCain's nascent brain trust. The names included a trio of Iraq war skeptics: Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to Bush's father; ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell; and Powell deputy Richard Armitage.
So is McCain tacking back toward true independence? Not necessarily. He has prominent neoconservative pals as well, notably William Kristol. The bottom line is that McCain is probably just hedging his bets, covering all bases, doing the pander while trying to protect his image and vice versa. That purported Straight Talk Express will need to chart many crooked paths on the road to power.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Signs of trouble: soldiers, Santorum, and Scarborough
Here's an announcement that is sure to underscore the public's general pessimism about the Iraq conflict, further complicate President Bush's efforts to regain his former popularity as a war leader, and discomfit congressional Republicans who are trying to win re-election in November:
The U.S. military, already severely strained by the war, is being forced to take drastic steps to put enough soldiers back in the field. The Marines have now decided to call up former active-duty members -- people now classified as reservists, who thought that their overseas service was over -- and ship them back to the war, because apparently there aren't enough volunteers anymore who want to risk their lives for Bush's "freedom agenda."
It is hardly the exclusive province of "Defeatocrats" (as the Bush political team now calls Democrats) to argue these days that the military is being stretched too thin by the administration's stay-the-course policies.
As referenced here, military expert Frederick Kagan at the conservative American Enterprise Institute says that the Marines' decision "is one of an avalanche of symptoms that the ground forces are overstretched by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan." Recently, meanwhile, a Pentagon study conducted by Army Lt. Col. Andrew F. Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concluded that the U.S. military is stretched into a "thin green line." In the spring of 2005, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a similar warning in congressional testimony, and, during the previous December, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, wrote a letter to colleagues expressing "deepening concern" about the readiness of his 200,000 solidiers, who were, in his words, "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force."
The political danger for Bush and the GOP is that these pressures on the military could further sour the mood of military families and friends -- in other words, people who normally would be inclined to support a wartime president and his party.
The biggest GOP fear this year is that its base will not motivated; it won't help the party if voters in military communities are frustrated. Meanwhile, the general public mood is already downbeat; in a new poll released last week, the Pew Research Center found record-high pessimisim about the war. Fifty-five percent now say the war isn't going well (that stat was 44 percent last January), and, by a margin of 52 to 41 percent, most Americans want to set a timetable for troop withdrawal. The Marines' decision certainly won't nudge those numbers in Bush's favor.
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Rick Santorum and Bob Casey Jr., combatants in the nation's marquee '06 Senate race (unless we count Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont), have agreed to debate at least four times, starting on Labor Day. Swell. There goes my holiday barbecue. But seriously, those events should at least help Pennsylvania voters figure out whether they really want to fire Santorum in November.
Democrat Casey for many months has hewed to a strategy of saying as little as possible, and saying it soporifically, with the apparent intent of keeping the spotlight on Santorum -- in the hopes that Santorum's devotion to Bush would be sufficient ammo. The debates will change that dynamic. Casey will have to show up on the same stage with an opponent who is far more verbally nimble than he is, and he will be pressed to thrust and parry in ways that thus far he has been able to avoid. This visual contrast might not work to Casey's benefit; the potential result could be a tighter race.
On the other hand, I generally wonder whether debates matter all that much. Santorum still has to battle against a mood that bodes ill for Republicans, and even the conservative Washington Times reports that his own base is restive and unenthused, and not just because of the GOP's high-spending ways on Capitol Hill. At home, Santorum's '04 support for Arlen Specter, at a time when that moderate senator was being challenged in a primary by a conservative upstart, still ticks off a lot of conservatives. The Washington Times quoted Charlie Clift, a longtime Santorum supporter in suburban Philadelphia:
"'I still feel the knife in my back from (2004),'" Mr. Clift said. 'We worked very hard for Pat Toomey. All [Mr. Santorum] had to do was keep his mouth shut, and we'd all be fat, dumb and happy supporting him right now. I won't lift a finger to help him....I'm not pulling the Santorum lever this time. I'll write my own name in before I'll vote for him.'"
-------
And speaking of restive conservatives, let's check in with former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC show host who infuriated the White House last week by running a segment entitled, "Is Bush an Idiot?" And he wasn't kidding, as evidenced by this new Salon interview that was posted today. The key excerpt:
"A lot of Republican loyalists are unhappy. But again, the only thing I did was ask publicly what a lot of conservatives have been saying privately since Katrina and the Harriet Miers nomination....staying in power is (deemed to be) more important than staying true to the values that put you in power in the first place. Again, there are more and more conservatives behind the scenes that are voicing concerns, but most of them are afraid to say anything publicly, because they know if they do they'll be branded as traitors to the cause."
The question is, will these concerns be reflected in the voting (or non-voting) on election day? Control of Congress may well hinge on that.
The U.S. military, already severely strained by the war, is being forced to take drastic steps to put enough soldiers back in the field. The Marines have now decided to call up former active-duty members -- people now classified as reservists, who thought that their overseas service was over -- and ship them back to the war, because apparently there aren't enough volunteers anymore who want to risk their lives for Bush's "freedom agenda."
It is hardly the exclusive province of "Defeatocrats" (as the Bush political team now calls Democrats) to argue these days that the military is being stretched too thin by the administration's stay-the-course policies.
As referenced here, military expert Frederick Kagan at the conservative American Enterprise Institute says that the Marines' decision "is one of an avalanche of symptoms that the ground forces are overstretched by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan." Recently, meanwhile, a Pentagon study conducted by Army Lt. Col. Andrew F. Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concluded that the U.S. military is stretched into a "thin green line." In the spring of 2005, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a similar warning in congressional testimony, and, during the previous December, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, wrote a letter to colleagues expressing "deepening concern" about the readiness of his 200,000 solidiers, who were, in his words, "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force."
The political danger for Bush and the GOP is that these pressures on the military could further sour the mood of military families and friends -- in other words, people who normally would be inclined to support a wartime president and his party.
The biggest GOP fear this year is that its base will not motivated; it won't help the party if voters in military communities are frustrated. Meanwhile, the general public mood is already downbeat; in a new poll released last week, the Pew Research Center found record-high pessimisim about the war. Fifty-five percent now say the war isn't going well (that stat was 44 percent last January), and, by a margin of 52 to 41 percent, most Americans want to set a timetable for troop withdrawal. The Marines' decision certainly won't nudge those numbers in Bush's favor.
-------
Rick Santorum and Bob Casey Jr., combatants in the nation's marquee '06 Senate race (unless we count Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont), have agreed to debate at least four times, starting on Labor Day. Swell. There goes my holiday barbecue. But seriously, those events should at least help Pennsylvania voters figure out whether they really want to fire Santorum in November.
Democrat Casey for many months has hewed to a strategy of saying as little as possible, and saying it soporifically, with the apparent intent of keeping the spotlight on Santorum -- in the hopes that Santorum's devotion to Bush would be sufficient ammo. The debates will change that dynamic. Casey will have to show up on the same stage with an opponent who is far more verbally nimble than he is, and he will be pressed to thrust and parry in ways that thus far he has been able to avoid. This visual contrast might not work to Casey's benefit; the potential result could be a tighter race.
On the other hand, I generally wonder whether debates matter all that much. Santorum still has to battle against a mood that bodes ill for Republicans, and even the conservative Washington Times reports that his own base is restive and unenthused, and not just because of the GOP's high-spending ways on Capitol Hill. At home, Santorum's '04 support for Arlen Specter, at a time when that moderate senator was being challenged in a primary by a conservative upstart, still ticks off a lot of conservatives. The Washington Times quoted Charlie Clift, a longtime Santorum supporter in suburban Philadelphia:
"'I still feel the knife in my back from (2004),'" Mr. Clift said. 'We worked very hard for Pat Toomey. All [Mr. Santorum] had to do was keep his mouth shut, and we'd all be fat, dumb and happy supporting him right now. I won't lift a finger to help him....I'm not pulling the Santorum lever this time. I'll write my own name in before I'll vote for him.'"
-------
And speaking of restive conservatives, let's check in with former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC show host who infuriated the White House last week by running a segment entitled, "Is Bush an Idiot?" And he wasn't kidding, as evidenced by this new Salon interview that was posted today. The key excerpt:
"A lot of Republican loyalists are unhappy. But again, the only thing I did was ask publicly what a lot of conservatives have been saying privately since Katrina and the Harriet Miers nomination....staying in power is (deemed to be) more important than staying true to the values that put you in power in the first place. Again, there are more and more conservatives behind the scenes that are voicing concerns, but most of them are afraid to say anything publicly, because they know if they do they'll be branded as traitors to the cause."
The question is, will these concerns be reflected in the voting (or non-voting) on election day? Control of Congress may well hinge on that.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
A conversation with Chris Dodd
Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, a former national Democratic chairman and prospective ‘08 presidential candidate, stopped in Philadelphia yesterday to stump for some House candidates and seed some terrain for himself. His people asked if I was interested in a sitdown, and I said sure. With Democrats trying to run this fall as strong national security stewards, even while being undercut by independent hawk (and Dodd colleague) Joe Lieberman, it seemed worthwhile to sit on a hotel terrace and kick this stuff around.
I asked whether he thought that his friend Lieberman would complicate the Democrats’ task this fall by messing with the party message. Lieberman, in the early days of his independent bid to retain his Senate seat, has been echoing the Bush-Cheney argument that liberal Democrats are soft on terrorists. Isn’t Dodd concerned about that?
“Not at all,” he said, which is what we would expect him to say. Yet he did appear genuinely confident that Lieberman and his new best friends are on the wrong side of the issue, given the fact that the ongoing woes in Iraq have nearly erased the traditionally lopsided GOP advantage on national security. Dodd said, “If I was advising Joe, I’d say, ‘This (Democrats are softies charge) is not a good argument to make. Get back to talking about being a good senator, and having good constituent services.’” He thinks that Lieberman’s embrace of the Bush administration line is “politically dangerous.”
Dodd made these remarks, however, shortly before the release of the latest USA Today-Gallup poll that suggests a Bush bounce in the aftermath of the terrorist arrests in London. The survey reports that 55 percent of Americans like the way Bush is handling the terrorism issue, with 43 percent dissenting. And 67 percent say they have a great deal or moderate amount of confidence in the Bush administration’s ability to protect Americans from future attacks. Today I spoke to one Republican pollster who is somewhat wary about those rosy numbers, yet it’s also true that, in recent weeks, CBS News and Newsweek polls have both reported that Republicans are still (narrowly) preferred over the Democrats as protectors of the homeland.
The wiretap issue is also a potential Democratic vulnerability. It’s noteworthy that most prominent Democrats were mute last week when a federal judge ruled that Bush’s warrantless surveillance program was in violation of the U.S. Constitution and statutory law. Only two ‘08 hopefuls, John Kerry and Russ Feingold, praised the ruling. Clearly there’s a fear that standing up for civil liberties is a loser on the stump, especially when pitted against visceral concerns about personal safety.
I asked Dodd about that fear. He said: “It takes several sentences to explain to people what the Democratic position is” -- and that’s an eternity in today’s sound bite politics. Dodd explained that, yes, Democrats think that wiretaps are essential in the war on terror, but that, no, they should not to be conducted without warrants or without approval from the special federal court established by law in 1978...“See, I’ve already taken several sentences to explain it to you,” he said. “That’s one reason why Democrats aren’t anxious to jump on that issue.” He suggested that perhaps it’s preferable to just let the judge’s ruling speak for itself. As Dodd sees it, “Sometimes the best sermon is not to say anything.”
But, in reality, saying nothing is probably not an option. The GOP message machine is already road-testing one of its autumn accusations -- that Democrats are wimps who won’t use all the necessary tools to combat terrorists -- and that will warrant a response. So how would Dodd, as an ‘08 hopeful trying to earn IOUs in ‘06, boil down those sentences?
Dodd replied: “Begin the conversation by saying, ‘We’ll do everything to be secure, but the idea of letting the president do whatever he wants to is dangerous.’ Maybe I’m being naive, but I don’t think so.”
Actually, there are tougher issues for Dodd right now, most notably some of his bona fides as a prospective presidential candidate. The shorthand goes like this: Why would the Democrats want to nominate another New England liberal senator, just two years after John Kerry tanked? And why indeed would they want to nominate a senator at all, given the thousands of floor and committee votes that are ripe for GOP cherry-picking, and given the fact that only one sitting Democratic senator (JFK in 1960) has ever captured the White House?
Dodd, a Senate denizen since 1981, thinks that, post-9/11, voters want to see experience and a track record; therefore, “the liability becomes an asset in this window (of time).” As for his Connecticut pedigree, he thinks it’s unfair to penalize a northerner: “We’ve done Jimmy Carter and Al Gore (losers in 1980 and 2000, respectively), yet I don’t hear people saying we shouldn’t have another southerner.”
He argues, “People don’t lose because of where they’re from. They lose because they don’t connect with (voters)...The voter wants to know, ‘does this individual know what I’m going through?’..You either have that (empathy) or you don’t.” A presidential campaign, he said, “is not just rational, it’s primal...If people don’t like you, they won’t care what your ideas are.”
Those remarks can easily be read as knocks on Kerry and Gore; neither of those guys would ever win the award for Mr. Warmth. Nor would Hillary Clinton be a contender for Ms. Warmth; on this score, she lacks her husband’s skills. Dodd, by reputation a more garrulous people person, clearly thinks he can better connect with the average citizen’s hopes and pains (notwithstanding his 31 years on Capitol Hill). He tried an historical analogy, telling the story about how a mourner for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 had remarked, “I didn’t know him, but he knew me.” (House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi uses the same story in speeches.)
But the ‘06 campaign takes precedent for now, and that brought me back to the Joe Lieberman factor. Here’s a guy who is not only using the Bush-Cheney message, but, in his active trolling for Republican votes in Connecticut, he has just hired, as his pollster, the veteran Republican Neil Newhouse, whose top clients include Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum. So I asked the devil’s advocate question: What are the Democrats going to do about that? If Lieberman wins re-election, why would you Senate Democrats allow him to caucus with you?
Because, he essentially replied, winning power takes precedence over holding grudges, and pragmatism trumps purity. If Lieberman’s presence in the caucus gives the Democrats the one-vote margin for taking power in the Senate, then nothing else matters.“Hey, we used to want (pro-Bush Democrat) Zell Miller to caucus with us,” said Dodd. “If we can get a Senate majority, then I get to be chairman of the Banking Committee...And then we can really slow those (Republicans) down.”
I asked whether he thought that his friend Lieberman would complicate the Democrats’ task this fall by messing with the party message. Lieberman, in the early days of his independent bid to retain his Senate seat, has been echoing the Bush-Cheney argument that liberal Democrats are soft on terrorists. Isn’t Dodd concerned about that?
“Not at all,” he said, which is what we would expect him to say. Yet he did appear genuinely confident that Lieberman and his new best friends are on the wrong side of the issue, given the fact that the ongoing woes in Iraq have nearly erased the traditionally lopsided GOP advantage on national security. Dodd said, “If I was advising Joe, I’d say, ‘This (Democrats are softies charge) is not a good argument to make. Get back to talking about being a good senator, and having good constituent services.’” He thinks that Lieberman’s embrace of the Bush administration line is “politically dangerous.”
Dodd made these remarks, however, shortly before the release of the latest USA Today-Gallup poll that suggests a Bush bounce in the aftermath of the terrorist arrests in London. The survey reports that 55 percent of Americans like the way Bush is handling the terrorism issue, with 43 percent dissenting. And 67 percent say they have a great deal or moderate amount of confidence in the Bush administration’s ability to protect Americans from future attacks. Today I spoke to one Republican pollster who is somewhat wary about those rosy numbers, yet it’s also true that, in recent weeks, CBS News and Newsweek polls have both reported that Republicans are still (narrowly) preferred over the Democrats as protectors of the homeland.
The wiretap issue is also a potential Democratic vulnerability. It’s noteworthy that most prominent Democrats were mute last week when a federal judge ruled that Bush’s warrantless surveillance program was in violation of the U.S. Constitution and statutory law. Only two ‘08 hopefuls, John Kerry and Russ Feingold, praised the ruling. Clearly there’s a fear that standing up for civil liberties is a loser on the stump, especially when pitted against visceral concerns about personal safety.
I asked Dodd about that fear. He said: “It takes several sentences to explain to people what the Democratic position is” -- and that’s an eternity in today’s sound bite politics. Dodd explained that, yes, Democrats think that wiretaps are essential in the war on terror, but that, no, they should not to be conducted without warrants or without approval from the special federal court established by law in 1978...“See, I’ve already taken several sentences to explain it to you,” he said. “That’s one reason why Democrats aren’t anxious to jump on that issue.” He suggested that perhaps it’s preferable to just let the judge’s ruling speak for itself. As Dodd sees it, “Sometimes the best sermon is not to say anything.”
But, in reality, saying nothing is probably not an option. The GOP message machine is already road-testing one of its autumn accusations -- that Democrats are wimps who won’t use all the necessary tools to combat terrorists -- and that will warrant a response. So how would Dodd, as an ‘08 hopeful trying to earn IOUs in ‘06, boil down those sentences?
Dodd replied: “Begin the conversation by saying, ‘We’ll do everything to be secure, but the idea of letting the president do whatever he wants to is dangerous.’ Maybe I’m being naive, but I don’t think so.”
Actually, there are tougher issues for Dodd right now, most notably some of his bona fides as a prospective presidential candidate. The shorthand goes like this: Why would the Democrats want to nominate another New England liberal senator, just two years after John Kerry tanked? And why indeed would they want to nominate a senator at all, given the thousands of floor and committee votes that are ripe for GOP cherry-picking, and given the fact that only one sitting Democratic senator (JFK in 1960) has ever captured the White House?
Dodd, a Senate denizen since 1981, thinks that, post-9/11, voters want to see experience and a track record; therefore, “the liability becomes an asset in this window (of time).” As for his Connecticut pedigree, he thinks it’s unfair to penalize a northerner: “We’ve done Jimmy Carter and Al Gore (losers in 1980 and 2000, respectively), yet I don’t hear people saying we shouldn’t have another southerner.”
He argues, “People don’t lose because of where they’re from. They lose because they don’t connect with (voters)...The voter wants to know, ‘does this individual know what I’m going through?’..You either have that (empathy) or you don’t.” A presidential campaign, he said, “is not just rational, it’s primal...If people don’t like you, they won’t care what your ideas are.”
Those remarks can easily be read as knocks on Kerry and Gore; neither of those guys would ever win the award for Mr. Warmth. Nor would Hillary Clinton be a contender for Ms. Warmth; on this score, she lacks her husband’s skills. Dodd, by reputation a more garrulous people person, clearly thinks he can better connect with the average citizen’s hopes and pains (notwithstanding his 31 years on Capitol Hill). He tried an historical analogy, telling the story about how a mourner for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 had remarked, “I didn’t know him, but he knew me.” (House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi uses the same story in speeches.)
But the ‘06 campaign takes precedent for now, and that brought me back to the Joe Lieberman factor. Here’s a guy who is not only using the Bush-Cheney message, but, in his active trolling for Republican votes in Connecticut, he has just hired, as his pollster, the veteran Republican Neil Newhouse, whose top clients include Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum. So I asked the devil’s advocate question: What are the Democrats going to do about that? If Lieberman wins re-election, why would you Senate Democrats allow him to caucus with you?
Because, he essentially replied, winning power takes precedence over holding grudges, and pragmatism trumps purity. If Lieberman’s presence in the caucus gives the Democrats the one-vote margin for taking power in the Senate, then nothing else matters.“Hey, we used to want (pro-Bush Democrat) Zell Miller to caucus with us,” said Dodd. “If we can get a Senate majority, then I get to be chairman of the Banking Committee...And then we can really slow those (Republicans) down.”
Allen upbraided, Romney absolved
A couple quick and telling observations about GOP '08 hopefuls George Allen and Mitt Romney, courtesy of the conservative media:
1. On the Wall Street Journal website today, Brendan Miniter tackles Allen's "macaca" misadventure (which I have written about here and here), and explains why it's politically important that Allen poked fun at a dark-skinned man standing in an all-white crowd, calling him a name that is a synonym for a monkey. Miniter sees the incident as an important character issue:
"(Virginia senator) Allen's problem is neither that he is a vicious campaigner nor that he is a modern-day George Wallace. Rather, it is that for more than two decades in state and federal office, he has displayed a dismaying indifference to his adoptive state's racial history. And it is this political tone-deafness that is now weighing down his political future with Southern baggage....A legacy of the South's long struggle with racism is that today its elected officials must take a stand on racially sensitive issues. What Mr. Allen is finding out is the same thing Trent Lott learned a few years ago: that Southern politicians who don't appreciate the sensitivity of race issues may pay a political price."
Allen has also slid in the polls since this incident occurred. His '08 prospects appear damaged.
2. On a lighter note, Kate O'Beirne of the National Review came up with his factoid about Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. It's a twist on what I reported here, about the Christian conservative discomfort with Romney's Mormon faith. Note the irony at the close of O'Beirne's item:
"The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Governor Mitt Romney's great-grandfather had multiple wives, and two great-great grandfathers had 10 wives each. The article allows that Romney 'is a confirmed monogamist of nearly four decades and polygamy has been absent from his family going back two generations.' While some might note the upside of generously sharing those handsome Romney genes in the past, current history is noteworthy. Should Mitt Romney join a 2008 race that included John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and George Allen, the only guy in the GOP field with only one wife would be the Mormon."
1. On the Wall Street Journal website today, Brendan Miniter tackles Allen's "macaca" misadventure (which I have written about here and here), and explains why it's politically important that Allen poked fun at a dark-skinned man standing in an all-white crowd, calling him a name that is a synonym for a monkey. Miniter sees the incident as an important character issue:
"(Virginia senator) Allen's problem is neither that he is a vicious campaigner nor that he is a modern-day George Wallace. Rather, it is that for more than two decades in state and federal office, he has displayed a dismaying indifference to his adoptive state's racial history. And it is this political tone-deafness that is now weighing down his political future with Southern baggage....A legacy of the South's long struggle with racism is that today its elected officials must take a stand on racially sensitive issues. What Mr. Allen is finding out is the same thing Trent Lott learned a few years ago: that Southern politicians who don't appreciate the sensitivity of race issues may pay a political price."
Allen has also slid in the polls since this incident occurred. His '08 prospects appear damaged.
2. On a lighter note, Kate O'Beirne of the National Review came up with his factoid about Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. It's a twist on what I reported here, about the Christian conservative discomfort with Romney's Mormon faith. Note the irony at the close of O'Beirne's item:
"The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Governor Mitt Romney's great-grandfather had multiple wives, and two great-great grandfathers had 10 wives each. The article allows that Romney 'is a confirmed monogamist of nearly four decades and polygamy has been absent from his family going back two generations.' While some might note the upside of generously sharing those handsome Romney genes in the past, current history is noteworthy. Should Mitt Romney join a 2008 race that included John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and George Allen, the only guy in the GOP field with only one wife would be the Mormon."
Monday, August 21, 2006
Today's shootout at Credibility Gap
President Bush held a press conference this morning, and more verbal adventures ensued. The spirits of Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) and Joseph Heller (Catch-22) are alive and well.
While seeking to promote his "freedom agenda" for Iraq and the Middle East, he again repeated his favorite talking point (also heard in 2003, 2004, 2005, and at other times in 2006) about how he was inspired to invade Iraq because of what happened in America on Sept. 11, 2001. As he put it this morning, "The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East."
Suddenly, a journalist from the reality-based community asked a question. Here's the exchange:
Q: "What did Iraq have to do with it?"
BUSH: "What did Iraq have to do with what?"
Q: "The attack on the World Trade Center."
BUSH: "Nothing..."
Well, that's very interesting...given the fact that Dick Cheney and other Bush war planners repeatedly and publicly sought to convince Americans that Iraq was very much involved. Cheney went on Sunday morning TV with his claim (long since disproved by intelligence officials) that one of the terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Center was seen meeting in Prague with a Saddam Hussein agent. Cheney and company were so successful with their rhetorical linkage that, according to the polls, more than 40 percent of the public wound up thinking that Hussein had helped plan the attacks.
But let's return to what Bush said today. Here's his entire answer:
"Nothing. Except it’s part of -- and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a -- Iraq -- the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq."
Nobody's ever "suggested" it? Another stunner. Bush himself has "suggested" it on many occasions. For instance, during a press conference on the eve of the war, while talking about Saddam, he reportedly invoked Sept. 11 eight times.
The conclusion is inescapable: By accident or design, Bush is now issuing factually-challenged denials about his previous factually-challenged assertions. His credibility woes, as consistently measured by the polls over the past year, aren't likely to improve in the wake of such behavior.
Meanwhile, one noteworthy sidebar on the press conference: At another point, while discussing Iraq, Bush said, "Sometimes I'm frustrated...War is not a joy."
Oh, so now he is frustrated?
Poor Tony Snow. Last week, after press reports circulated that the president had conveyed frustration about Iraq in a private meeting with foreign policy experts, press secretary Snow rushed into the breach to insist that the president was not frustrated at all (a word that might convey a sense of doubt, even weakness); rather, he said the president was determined (stronger word, more resolute).
Well, so much for last week's flackery. It can't be fun to have the boss hang you out to dry.
While seeking to promote his "freedom agenda" for Iraq and the Middle East, he again repeated his favorite talking point (also heard in 2003, 2004, 2005, and at other times in 2006) about how he was inspired to invade Iraq because of what happened in America on Sept. 11, 2001. As he put it this morning, "The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East."
Suddenly, a journalist from the reality-based community asked a question. Here's the exchange:
Q: "What did Iraq have to do with it?"
BUSH: "What did Iraq have to do with what?"
Q: "The attack on the World Trade Center."
BUSH: "Nothing..."
Well, that's very interesting...given the fact that Dick Cheney and other Bush war planners repeatedly and publicly sought to convince Americans that Iraq was very much involved. Cheney went on Sunday morning TV with his claim (long since disproved by intelligence officials) that one of the terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Center was seen meeting in Prague with a Saddam Hussein agent. Cheney and company were so successful with their rhetorical linkage that, according to the polls, more than 40 percent of the public wound up thinking that Hussein had helped plan the attacks.
But let's return to what Bush said today. Here's his entire answer:
"Nothing. Except it’s part of -- and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a -- Iraq -- the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq."
Nobody's ever "suggested" it? Another stunner. Bush himself has "suggested" it on many occasions. For instance, during a press conference on the eve of the war, while talking about Saddam, he reportedly invoked Sept. 11 eight times.
The conclusion is inescapable: By accident or design, Bush is now issuing factually-challenged denials about his previous factually-challenged assertions. His credibility woes, as consistently measured by the polls over the past year, aren't likely to improve in the wake of such behavior.
Meanwhile, one noteworthy sidebar on the press conference: At another point, while discussing Iraq, Bush said, "Sometimes I'm frustrated...War is not a joy."
Oh, so now he is frustrated?
Poor Tony Snow. Last week, after press reports circulated that the president had conveyed frustration about Iraq in a private meeting with foreign policy experts, press secretary Snow rushed into the breach to insist that the president was not frustrated at all (a word that might convey a sense of doubt, even weakness); rather, he said the president was determined (stronger word, more resolute).
Well, so much for last week's flackery. It can't be fun to have the boss hang you out to dry.
The Dems' message to New Hampshire: what makes you so special, anyway?
As a scribe who has weathered the winter indignities of New Hampshire during the last four presidential primary seasons, I can vouch for the storied charms of the Granite State, and especially its flinty citizens, who take quite seriously their longstanding responsibility of getting up close and personal with the White House hopefuls, right at the starting gate.
It's a fair bet that many of my colleagues feel much the same way about the state's traditional first-in-the-nation status, although admittedly we also have a selfish interest in saying so. New Hampshire is a great place for a journalist working on the ground. Most of the campaigning takes place in the populous southern zone, around cities like Manchester and Concord and Portsmouth, which means that (weather permitting) most events are generally no more than 45 minutes away from each other, and that often translates into plenty of time to file a story and still hit Manchester at a decent hour for a decent dinner.
Maybe this is why columnist Willam Safire, a decade ago, referred to the New Hampshire primary as "a media-saturated joke," and its citizens as "overexposed, overpolled." No matter. We kept coming anyway, because the candidates kept coming. And because it was fun to have impromptu reunions at the Wayfarer Hotel bar.
Neverthleless, it's beyond debate that, demographically speaking, New Hampshire does not reflect the diversity of America. Roughly 0.8 percent of the population is African American, and another 2.1 percent are Hispanic. The state boasts about 1.2 million residents, and that's about the same number who live just in the city of San Diego.
And for Democrats in particular, the state's demographics are truly problematical. It's not just the low percentage of blacks and Hispanics. It's also the fact that traditional blue-collar and working-class voters are becoming more scarce in a state that has been trending toward white-collar, high-tech, service-worker affluence. How can Democratic presidential candidates prove their national appeal to blue-collar voters when, in New Hampshire, they first have to tailor their appeal to upscale, well-educated, latte-sipping suburban Volvo drivers?
Which brings me to the decision announced this past weekend by the Democratic National Committee to dilute New Hampshire's starting-gate status by crowding the early '08 primary calendar with early events in Nevada and South Carolina. Nevada is increasingly populated by working-class and lower-middle-class Hispanics; many are also union members, whereas unions are relatively weak in New Hampshire. As for South Carolina, a huge percentage of the likely Democratic primary electorate in that state -- perhaps 40 percent -- is African American.
New Hampshire is already squawking about this blow to its honor, and its secretary of state is now threatening to move the '08 primary date perhaps into 2007, so that it can be alone without the interlopers crowding it. (Ego is not the sole reason, of course. Money talks, too. If fewer candidate entourages and fewer journalists show up, the state's economy takes a hit. In the 2000 primary season, New Hampshire reportedly raked in $264 million from its visitors.)
What the state's promoters generally don't like to acknowledge, however, is that, aside from the demographic issues, an important myth about the New Hampshire primary has been shattered in recent elections. In the old days, it used to be said that nobody gets elected president in November without first winning New Hampshire back at the starting gate. Not true anymore. Bill Clinton finished second in the '92 Democratic primary, but won the presidency. George W. Bush finished second in the '00 GOP primary, losing by 18 percentage points, but won the presidency. Other candidates have lost the New Hampshire primary and still won their party's nomination; witness Democrats George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984.
So the Democratic National Committee sought this weekend to put New Hampshire in a more realistic perspective. Whether they have done so in the most rational fashion, however, is another issue entirely. By crowding those early weeks with two extra contests -- now there will be four, including the unrepresentative Iowa caucuses -- the Democrats have merely further "front-loaded" the calendar, thereby putting even more pressure on the candidates to raise exorbitant amounts of money, this year and next, just to buy into the accelerated process, with its farflung geography. That format is a serious threat to New Hampshire's best asset: its retail politics, as exemplified by the "town hall" events where voters get to quiz the candidates in detail.
In the best of all possible worlds (to quote Candide), the parties would pick out one demographically representative state and put the first primary there. I nominate Missouri -- the classic swing state of the heartland. It's 26 percent blue collar, 11 percent black, big cities, small towns, and since 1900 it has voted for the winning presidential candidate in every single election except for one time (1956). Granted, it's population is only about two percent Hispanic....Well, no wonder the Democrats still can't figure out how to come up with the ideal calendar. Who can?
It's a fair bet that many of my colleagues feel much the same way about the state's traditional first-in-the-nation status, although admittedly we also have a selfish interest in saying so. New Hampshire is a great place for a journalist working on the ground. Most of the campaigning takes place in the populous southern zone, around cities like Manchester and Concord and Portsmouth, which means that (weather permitting) most events are generally no more than 45 minutes away from each other, and that often translates into plenty of time to file a story and still hit Manchester at a decent hour for a decent dinner.
Maybe this is why columnist Willam Safire, a decade ago, referred to the New Hampshire primary as "a media-saturated joke," and its citizens as "overexposed, overpolled." No matter. We kept coming anyway, because the candidates kept coming. And because it was fun to have impromptu reunions at the Wayfarer Hotel bar.
Neverthleless, it's beyond debate that, demographically speaking, New Hampshire does not reflect the diversity of America. Roughly 0.8 percent of the population is African American, and another 2.1 percent are Hispanic. The state boasts about 1.2 million residents, and that's about the same number who live just in the city of San Diego.
And for Democrats in particular, the state's demographics are truly problematical. It's not just the low percentage of blacks and Hispanics. It's also the fact that traditional blue-collar and working-class voters are becoming more scarce in a state that has been trending toward white-collar, high-tech, service-worker affluence. How can Democratic presidential candidates prove their national appeal to blue-collar voters when, in New Hampshire, they first have to tailor their appeal to upscale, well-educated, latte-sipping suburban Volvo drivers?
Which brings me to the decision announced this past weekend by the Democratic National Committee to dilute New Hampshire's starting-gate status by crowding the early '08 primary calendar with early events in Nevada and South Carolina. Nevada is increasingly populated by working-class and lower-middle-class Hispanics; many are also union members, whereas unions are relatively weak in New Hampshire. As for South Carolina, a huge percentage of the likely Democratic primary electorate in that state -- perhaps 40 percent -- is African American.
New Hampshire is already squawking about this blow to its honor, and its secretary of state is now threatening to move the '08 primary date perhaps into 2007, so that it can be alone without the interlopers crowding it. (Ego is not the sole reason, of course. Money talks, too. If fewer candidate entourages and fewer journalists show up, the state's economy takes a hit. In the 2000 primary season, New Hampshire reportedly raked in $264 million from its visitors.)
What the state's promoters generally don't like to acknowledge, however, is that, aside from the demographic issues, an important myth about the New Hampshire primary has been shattered in recent elections. In the old days, it used to be said that nobody gets elected president in November without first winning New Hampshire back at the starting gate. Not true anymore. Bill Clinton finished second in the '92 Democratic primary, but won the presidency. George W. Bush finished second in the '00 GOP primary, losing by 18 percentage points, but won the presidency. Other candidates have lost the New Hampshire primary and still won their party's nomination; witness Democrats George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984.
So the Democratic National Committee sought this weekend to put New Hampshire in a more realistic perspective. Whether they have done so in the most rational fashion, however, is another issue entirely. By crowding those early weeks with two extra contests -- now there will be four, including the unrepresentative Iowa caucuses -- the Democrats have merely further "front-loaded" the calendar, thereby putting even more pressure on the candidates to raise exorbitant amounts of money, this year and next, just to buy into the accelerated process, with its farflung geography. That format is a serious threat to New Hampshire's best asset: its retail politics, as exemplified by the "town hall" events where voters get to quiz the candidates in detail.
In the best of all possible worlds (to quote Candide), the parties would pick out one demographically representative state and put the first primary there. I nominate Missouri -- the classic swing state of the heartland. It's 26 percent blue collar, 11 percent black, big cities, small towns, and since 1900 it has voted for the winning presidential candidate in every single election except for one time (1956). Granted, it's population is only about two percent Hispanic....Well, no wonder the Democrats still can't figure out how to come up with the ideal calendar. Who can?
Friday, August 18, 2006
Remember "freedom is on the march?" How's that working out these days?
So there I was yesterday, trolling through a New York Times story about the current state of play in President Bush's Iraq democracy project, and after I had digested all the latest statistics about the expanding sectarian violence, the record-high number of roadside bomb attacks on U.S. soldiers, the soaring number of U.S. injuries, and the growing pessimism of defense intelligence officials -- after all that, I reached the most important info, down around the 20th paragraph. Here's how the article closed:
Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not survive.
"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy," said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. "Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect...but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy."
Naturally, the White House moved late yesterday to knock down that little news nugget, telling conservative commentator Rich Lowry that no such consideration of alternatives is being contemplated, and Lowry spread the word on the National Review website. But I think the Times item signals a lot of unrest and concern within the Bush administration about their chosen war; even the official White House line is that we still face "huge challenges" in Iraq. And the willingness of a White House briefee to leak this to the administration's number one enemy news outlet is also a signal that not everyone who deals with the White House feels obligated anymore to echo the company line on Iraq. Particularly when factual reality conflicts with that company line.
It's also impossible to imagine that the White House would officially confirm its strong concern for the viability of its Iraq democracy project on the eve of an election season. That would hardly buoy Bush's ratings, since only three weeks ago he was still voicing his dream of a "free and democratic Iraq." Nor would it help the imperiled Republican congressional candidates (particularly in Northeast swing districts) who are already burdened by the war. And an admission that the democracy project is in deep trouble would also put the squeeze on Bush's favorite independent/Democratic hawk, Joe Lieberman, who is trying to hang onto his Connecticut Senate job with Bush's virtual blessing; it was Lieberman, after all, who wrote last December that "the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation...to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood."
On the other hand, even if the White House was to openly acknowledge that it is exploring "alternatives other than democracy," would that be such a big deal? After all, back when Bush was trying to sell the idea of invading Iraq, he didn't say it was part of any grand vision to build a democracy in the heart of the Middle East. The main rationale for war was not Woodrow Wilson idealism; it was the (now discredited) argument that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed because he was poised to strike America with WMDs. As Rich Lowry himself told me in a conversation we had several years ago, a democracy project would have been too tough a sell. No, Bush didn't start to stress the neoconservative dream about a democratic Iraq until his postwar woes began to pile up, when the search for WMDs came up empty -- and when it was clear that he would have to frame a new rationale.
Which means that, yes, an admission that the Maliki government might fail, that the democracy project itself might fail, would indeed compound Bush's political problems at home. And worse yet, such an admission might not be necessary. The new violence statistics, the news reports of spreading civil war tensions, and the impending release this autumn of a military study that will pinpoint U.S. failures in Iraq ("the results won't be pretty," one author says) -- all of these will enable '06 voters ( particularly the much-wooed "security moms") to draw their own conclusions, regardless of what the White House chooses to say.
And that seems to be happening already. As Republican pollster/strategist David Winston told the Washington Post today, married women in particular seem more concerned about Iraq than about the general terror threat. He said that, while many still support the mission, "they are increasingly unwilling to sustain the sort of sacrifices that we have to make over there."
Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not survive.
"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy," said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity. "Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect...but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy."
Naturally, the White House moved late yesterday to knock down that little news nugget, telling conservative commentator Rich Lowry that no such consideration of alternatives is being contemplated, and Lowry spread the word on the National Review website. But I think the Times item signals a lot of unrest and concern within the Bush administration about their chosen war; even the official White House line is that we still face "huge challenges" in Iraq. And the willingness of a White House briefee to leak this to the administration's number one enemy news outlet is also a signal that not everyone who deals with the White House feels obligated anymore to echo the company line on Iraq. Particularly when factual reality conflicts with that company line.
It's also impossible to imagine that the White House would officially confirm its strong concern for the viability of its Iraq democracy project on the eve of an election season. That would hardly buoy Bush's ratings, since only three weeks ago he was still voicing his dream of a "free and democratic Iraq." Nor would it help the imperiled Republican congressional candidates (particularly in Northeast swing districts) who are already burdened by the war. And an admission that the democracy project is in deep trouble would also put the squeeze on Bush's favorite independent/Democratic hawk, Joe Lieberman, who is trying to hang onto his Connecticut Senate job with Bush's virtual blessing; it was Lieberman, after all, who wrote last December that "the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation...to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood."
On the other hand, even if the White House was to openly acknowledge that it is exploring "alternatives other than democracy," would that be such a big deal? After all, back when Bush was trying to sell the idea of invading Iraq, he didn't say it was part of any grand vision to build a democracy in the heart of the Middle East. The main rationale for war was not Woodrow Wilson idealism; it was the (now discredited) argument that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed because he was poised to strike America with WMDs. As Rich Lowry himself told me in a conversation we had several years ago, a democracy project would have been too tough a sell. No, Bush didn't start to stress the neoconservative dream about a democratic Iraq until his postwar woes began to pile up, when the search for WMDs came up empty -- and when it was clear that he would have to frame a new rationale.
Which means that, yes, an admission that the Maliki government might fail, that the democracy project itself might fail, would indeed compound Bush's political problems at home. And worse yet, such an admission might not be necessary. The new violence statistics, the news reports of spreading civil war tensions, and the impending release this autumn of a military study that will pinpoint U.S. failures in Iraq ("the results won't be pretty," one author says) -- all of these will enable '06 voters ( particularly the much-wooed "security moms") to draw their own conclusions, regardless of what the White House chooses to say.
And that seems to be happening already. As Republican pollster/strategist David Winston told the Washington Post today, married women in particular seem more concerned about Iraq than about the general terror threat. He said that, while many still support the mission, "they are increasingly unwilling to sustain the sort of sacrifices that we have to make over there."
Thursday, August 17, 2006
She ruled against Bush? She must be insane, senile, and Democratic
Now it's Anna Diggs Taylor's turn to be painted as a friend of terrorists and enemy of America.
Taylor, a federal judge in Michigan, decreed in a milestone ruling today that President Bush, by sanctioning and defending his warrantless domestic surveillance program, has managed to violate a congressional resolution, the separation-of-powers doctrine in the Constitution, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and federal statutory law. As she acidly argued, "the office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America..."
Taylor's court becomes the second federal judicial body to declare that Bush cannot simply do whatever he wants; as I wrote here back on June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court made the same argument when it ruled that Bush's special military tribunals for terrorist suspects violated both U.S. law and the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The high court said, in its Guantanamo case, that Bush didn't have a "blank check" to limit the legal rights of the accused, when laws and treaties said otherwise. Taylor echoed this kind of reasoning today, when she ruled that Bush's warrantless surveillance of Americans "indisputably" and "obviously" violated the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
Anyway, there's no point in spending much time on Bush's latest judicial slapdown, not with all the breathless cable-friendly developments about Jon Benet in play today. Suffice it to say that, even though the plaintiffs against Bush included Larry Diamond (a former adviser to Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq) and writer Christopher Hitchens (a war hawk who recently called Iraq "a war to be proud of," Bush's defenders have quickly dismissed Taylor's message -- by focusing instead on the messenger.
Notwithstanding the fact that Taylor followed the general reasoning of the Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo (in which 3 of the 5 majority judges were GOP appointees); and the fact that, in support of her ruling, she cited the reasoning of a federal district judge appointed by the senior George Bush; and the fact that, to support her ruling, she frequently quoted a key opinion by the late high court justice Lewis Powell, another Republican appointee -- despite all that, the Bush defenders have checked her bio and found what they wanted:
1. Taylor was named to the federal bench in 1979...by President Jimmy Carter.
2. Also, she used to be married (until 1971) to a Democratic congressman.
Meanwhile, she is being dismissed elsewhere in the Bush-friendly blogosphere as "senile" (she is 74), as possibly insane, and as having written an opinion that echoes "the rhetoric of the moonbats."
This is what happens these days when a judge tries to defend the Constitution. At the very least, this ruling will refuel conservative activists' efforts to place more like-minded judges on the federal bench.
Taylor, a federal judge in Michigan, decreed in a milestone ruling today that President Bush, by sanctioning and defending his warrantless domestic surveillance program, has managed to violate a congressional resolution, the separation-of-powers doctrine in the Constitution, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and federal statutory law. As she acidly argued, "the office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America..."
Taylor's court becomes the second federal judicial body to declare that Bush cannot simply do whatever he wants; as I wrote here back on June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court made the same argument when it ruled that Bush's special military tribunals for terrorist suspects violated both U.S. law and the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The high court said, in its Guantanamo case, that Bush didn't have a "blank check" to limit the legal rights of the accused, when laws and treaties said otherwise. Taylor echoed this kind of reasoning today, when she ruled that Bush's warrantless surveillance of Americans "indisputably" and "obviously" violated the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
Anyway, there's no point in spending much time on Bush's latest judicial slapdown, not with all the breathless cable-friendly developments about Jon Benet in play today. Suffice it to say that, even though the plaintiffs against Bush included Larry Diamond (a former adviser to Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq) and writer Christopher Hitchens (a war hawk who recently called Iraq "a war to be proud of," Bush's defenders have quickly dismissed Taylor's message -- by focusing instead on the messenger.
Notwithstanding the fact that Taylor followed the general reasoning of the Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo (in which 3 of the 5 majority judges were GOP appointees); and the fact that, in support of her ruling, she cited the reasoning of a federal district judge appointed by the senior George Bush; and the fact that, to support her ruling, she frequently quoted a key opinion by the late high court justice Lewis Powell, another Republican appointee -- despite all that, the Bush defenders have checked her bio and found what they wanted:
1. Taylor was named to the federal bench in 1979...by President Jimmy Carter.
2. Also, she used to be married (until 1971) to a Democratic congressman.
Meanwhile, she is being dismissed elsewhere in the Bush-friendly blogosphere as "senile" (she is 74), as possibly insane, and as having written an opinion that echoes "the rhetoric of the moonbats."
This is what happens these days when a judge tries to defend the Constitution. At the very least, this ruling will refuel conservative activists' efforts to place more like-minded judges on the federal bench.
Dual loyalty is the American way
I have spoken on occasion about American politics to groups of foreign visitors, and they're always astounded to hear some of the bizarre factoids about our imperfect democracy.
Recently, for instance, somone asked me, "I hear that, in America, the state officials who supervise elections are actually partisans who have close ties to political parties. Is that really true?" To which I said, "Absolutely. In fact, some of these supervisers even work for the candidates who are running in the elections that they are supervising!" Looking aghast, the guy refused to believe my explanation of the dual loyalty tradition. I assured him that it was true.
I saw it confirmed last week in Connecticut, when the entire '06 state Democratic ticket assembled for a unity pep talk, and Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz (a Democratic candidate herself) was up there nodding and applauding all the anti-Bush rhetoric. Nobody in attendance, including the local press, seemed to think there was anything wierd about that.
I recalled all this today while reading this piece by Jill Lawrence of USA Today. She highlights an underreported story: Because, in our democracy, secretaries of state are openly identified as partisan Republicans or Democrats, and indeed because they get elected while wearing partisan labels, they have increasingly become political footballs. In the wake of charges that Katherine Harris in Florida and Ken Blackwell in Ohio both aided the GOP on ballot issues in 2000 and 2004 respectively (while both were holding positions in the Bush campaign), a number of Democratic groups are pushing hard this year to tilt the future playing fields by helping to finance secretary of state candidates in key battleground states. Those states include Iowa, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada (all pro-Bush in 2004), as well as Michigan and Minnesota (pro-Kerry).
The article quotes '08 presidential prospect Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa: "There's a growing concern about whether votes are cast and if, so, whether they're properly counted. We have to restore people's confidence in the system." Meanwhile, John McCain reportedly has been aiding GOP secretary of state candidates in Michigan, South Carolina, and New Mexico (the latter went narrowly for Bush in 2004, and narrowly against him in 2000).
New Mexico was a battleground in 2004, because the state GOP charged at the time that the secretary of state -- a Democrat -- was aiding her party by pushing rules that made it too easy for newly registered voters to participate. The Democratic secretary of state in Iowa was also hit with GOP complaints that he was bending absentee voting rules to drive up the Democratic vote. On the other side of the coin, I recall that the Republican secretaries of state in Nevada, Arizona, and Misouri were openly active in Bush's re-election campaign. In Ohio, Blackwell had two jobs: chief election official, and co-chairman of Bush's state campaign.
Maybe Blackwell was just being professional that year when he insisted that new voter registrations should not be accepted unless they were submitted only on paper stock of a certain weight. Or maybe not. The point is, secretaries of state with partisan labels are bound to rouse suspicions, particularly in a highly polarized environment. The perception problem is inescapable, and it will grow as national campaigns further their efforts to target those jobs for political gain.
Not long ago, a bipartisan group offered these comments: "We cannot build confidence in elections if secretaries of state responsible for certifying votes are simultaneously chairing political campaigns....To minimize the chance of election meltdown and to build public trust in the electoral process, nonpartisan structures of election administration are very important, and election administrators should be neutral, professional, and impartial....States could select a nonpartisan chief elections officer by having the individual subject to approval by a super-majority of two-thirds of one or both chambers of the state legislature. The nominee should receive clear bipartisan support. This selection process is likely to yield a respected consensus candidate or, at least, a nonpartisan candidate."
So concluded the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired last autumn by Republican James Baker (the famed Bush family fixer), and Jimmy Carter (the famed Democratic one-termer). It's also worth pointing out (as noted here) that the nonpartisan election supervision model is employed by Canada, Spain, most emerging democracies...and Afghanistan. But in Washington, blue-ribbon reports are generally destined for oblivion. The current targeting of secretary of state races is evidence of that.
Recently, for instance, somone asked me, "I hear that, in America, the state officials who supervise elections are actually partisans who have close ties to political parties. Is that really true?" To which I said, "Absolutely. In fact, some of these supervisers even work for the candidates who are running in the elections that they are supervising!" Looking aghast, the guy refused to believe my explanation of the dual loyalty tradition. I assured him that it was true.
I saw it confirmed last week in Connecticut, when the entire '06 state Democratic ticket assembled for a unity pep talk, and Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz (a Democratic candidate herself) was up there nodding and applauding all the anti-Bush rhetoric. Nobody in attendance, including the local press, seemed to think there was anything wierd about that.
I recalled all this today while reading this piece by Jill Lawrence of USA Today. She highlights an underreported story: Because, in our democracy, secretaries of state are openly identified as partisan Republicans or Democrats, and indeed because they get elected while wearing partisan labels, they have increasingly become political footballs. In the wake of charges that Katherine Harris in Florida and Ken Blackwell in Ohio both aided the GOP on ballot issues in 2000 and 2004 respectively (while both were holding positions in the Bush campaign), a number of Democratic groups are pushing hard this year to tilt the future playing fields by helping to finance secretary of state candidates in key battleground states. Those states include Iowa, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada (all pro-Bush in 2004), as well as Michigan and Minnesota (pro-Kerry).
The article quotes '08 presidential prospect Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa: "There's a growing concern about whether votes are cast and if, so, whether they're properly counted. We have to restore people's confidence in the system." Meanwhile, John McCain reportedly has been aiding GOP secretary of state candidates in Michigan, South Carolina, and New Mexico (the latter went narrowly for Bush in 2004, and narrowly against him in 2000).
New Mexico was a battleground in 2004, because the state GOP charged at the time that the secretary of state -- a Democrat -- was aiding her party by pushing rules that made it too easy for newly registered voters to participate. The Democratic secretary of state in Iowa was also hit with GOP complaints that he was bending absentee voting rules to drive up the Democratic vote. On the other side of the coin, I recall that the Republican secretaries of state in Nevada, Arizona, and Misouri were openly active in Bush's re-election campaign. In Ohio, Blackwell had two jobs: chief election official, and co-chairman of Bush's state campaign.
Maybe Blackwell was just being professional that year when he insisted that new voter registrations should not be accepted unless they were submitted only on paper stock of a certain weight. Or maybe not. The point is, secretaries of state with partisan labels are bound to rouse suspicions, particularly in a highly polarized environment. The perception problem is inescapable, and it will grow as national campaigns further their efforts to target those jobs for political gain.
Not long ago, a bipartisan group offered these comments: "We cannot build confidence in elections if secretaries of state responsible for certifying votes are simultaneously chairing political campaigns....To minimize the chance of election meltdown and to build public trust in the electoral process, nonpartisan structures of election administration are very important, and election administrators should be neutral, professional, and impartial....States could select a nonpartisan chief elections officer by having the individual subject to approval by a super-majority of two-thirds of one or both chambers of the state legislature. The nominee should receive clear bipartisan support. This selection process is likely to yield a respected consensus candidate or, at least, a nonpartisan candidate."
So concluded the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired last autumn by Republican James Baker (the famed Bush family fixer), and Jimmy Carter (the famed Democratic one-termer). It's also worth pointing out (as noted here) that the nonpartisan election supervision model is employed by Canada, Spain, most emerging democracies...and Afghanistan. But in Washington, blue-ribbon reports are generally destined for oblivion. The current targeting of secretary of state races is evidence of that.
New Allen defense: He's poop, not a monkey
From the man who would be president, it just gets better.
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Virginia senator and GOP White House hopeful George Allen has been trying to defend himself after singling out a Democratic worker in the audience, and twice calling the young Indian-American "macaca," which is (a) a synonym for monkey, and/or (b) a common European racial slur. Allen followed this up by telling the guy, "Welcome to America," not knowing that he was a native Virginian. I said yesterday that Allen was basically blaming the press (surprise!) for his predicament.
But now we have a new defense, and this is not a parody:
Allen wasn't trying to call him a monkey or to racially slur him at all; rather, the senator was only trying to say that S. R. Sidarth was the equivalent of the doggy doo that you scrape off your shoe.
From the respected National Journal Hotline: "According to two Republicans who heard the word used, macaca was a mash-up of mohawk, referring to Sidarth's distinctive hair, and caca, Spanish slang for excrement." According to this explanation, members of Allen's entourage coined this nickname for Sidarth, who has been tracking Allen's speeches on behalf of Democratic opponent James Webb, and Allen picked it up. Therefore, it wasn't a racial putdown at all; as one Republican close to the campaign explained to the Hotline, Allen was trying to tell his overwhelmingly white audience that the dark-skinned man in their midst was really just "a s--thead."
Gaffes like this can dog a candidate; columnist Margaret Carlson takes the broader perspective here. After all, even if we accept the contention that Allen aides made up a word that coincidentally is a real synonym for a rhesus monkey...this still leaves us with Allen's best defense: That what he really meant to say was, "Welcome to America, s--thead!"
As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Virginia senator and GOP White House hopeful George Allen has been trying to defend himself after singling out a Democratic worker in the audience, and twice calling the young Indian-American "macaca," which is (a) a synonym for monkey, and/or (b) a common European racial slur. Allen followed this up by telling the guy, "Welcome to America," not knowing that he was a native Virginian. I said yesterday that Allen was basically blaming the press (surprise!) for his predicament.
But now we have a new defense, and this is not a parody:
Allen wasn't trying to call him a monkey or to racially slur him at all; rather, the senator was only trying to say that S. R. Sidarth was the equivalent of the doggy doo that you scrape off your shoe.
From the respected National Journal Hotline: "According to two Republicans who heard the word used, macaca was a mash-up of mohawk, referring to Sidarth's distinctive hair, and caca, Spanish slang for excrement." According to this explanation, members of Allen's entourage coined this nickname for Sidarth, who has been tracking Allen's speeches on behalf of Democratic opponent James Webb, and Allen picked it up. Therefore, it wasn't a racial putdown at all; as one Republican close to the campaign explained to the Hotline, Allen was trying to tell his overwhelmingly white audience that the dark-skinned man in their midst was really just "a s--thead."
Gaffes like this can dog a candidate; columnist Margaret Carlson takes the broader perspective here. After all, even if we accept the contention that Allen aides made up a word that coincidentally is a real synonym for a rhesus monkey...this still leaves us with Allen's best defense: That what he really meant to say was, "Welcome to America, s--thead!"
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
The Allen defense: I blame the press for my not knowing that I had called him a monkey
This is what I have always cherished about politicians: Whenever they screw up and embarrass themselves, they try to blame it on the media.
The latest is George Allen, the Republican senator from Virginia who is mapping an '08 presidential bid (see last Friday's post). His contribution to the art of scapegoating goes something like this: While stumping for re-election to the Senate the other day, he singles out a young guy in the overwhelmingly white crowd who is known to be working for his Democratic opponent. This guy, S.R. Sidarth, is dark-skinned, of Indian descent. Allen says, "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is...Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia." It turns out that macaca is a common term for a type of monkey; alternatively, it's a common racial slur. Allen later protests that he doesn't know what the term meant. Allen is also informed that his "welcome to America and the real world of Virginia" was a tad off base -- given the fact that the guy he singled out was an American born in Virginia.
So what did Allen say about all that? In a statement released yesterday, he absolved himself, saying that his comments "have been greatly misunderstood by members of the media."
This incident isn't likely to sink Allen's re-election bid; he's far ahead of Democrat James Webb, and his aw-shucks Reaganesque style is popular with the conservative base in Virginia (as is media-bashing). And let us not forget that Democratic Sen. Joe Biden got in trouble recently for his quip about not being able to go into a 7-11 without hearing an Indian accent. But I've often heard that, politically speaking, George Allen is not the sharpest knife in the GOP drawer, and this macaca incident may well underscore that perception.
You can watch this incident, via YouTube (Allen's remarks were captured by Sidarth, who follows Allen around and records him -- a standard practice these days that all campaigns employ). The web posting, in itself, is noteworthy. Not too many years ago, political observers were saying that, because C-Span seemed to be everywhere on the campaign trail, there was no way anymore for candidates to screw up or misspeak or just have a bad day without the world knowing about it. But C-Span is horse and buggy technology when compared to the Internet. Candidates beware, there is no place left to hide.
-------
On the other hand, even we folks in the dead-tree media sometimes manage to record some doozies. What follows is perhaps the most entertaining candidate exchange of the year (as well as fresh evidence that the quality of our political dialogue continues to degenerate), courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Last week, the paper covered a radio debate between former U.S. Attorney J. B. Van Hollen and a county district attorney named Paul Wucher. They're competing for the GOP nomination for state attorney general.
OK, gentlemen:
"Will you ever listen? That's why you suck, Paul, because you only listen to people who agree with you."
"I don't suck. I resent that."
The latest is George Allen, the Republican senator from Virginia who is mapping an '08 presidential bid (see last Friday's post). His contribution to the art of scapegoating goes something like this: While stumping for re-election to the Senate the other day, he singles out a young guy in the overwhelmingly white crowd who is known to be working for his Democratic opponent. This guy, S.R. Sidarth, is dark-skinned, of Indian descent. Allen says, "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is...Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia." It turns out that macaca is a common term for a type of monkey; alternatively, it's a common racial slur. Allen later protests that he doesn't know what the term meant. Allen is also informed that his "welcome to America and the real world of Virginia" was a tad off base -- given the fact that the guy he singled out was an American born in Virginia.
So what did Allen say about all that? In a statement released yesterday, he absolved himself, saying that his comments "have been greatly misunderstood by members of the media."
This incident isn't likely to sink Allen's re-election bid; he's far ahead of Democrat James Webb, and his aw-shucks Reaganesque style is popular with the conservative base in Virginia (as is media-bashing). And let us not forget that Democratic Sen. Joe Biden got in trouble recently for his quip about not being able to go into a 7-11 without hearing an Indian accent. But I've often heard that, politically speaking, George Allen is not the sharpest knife in the GOP drawer, and this macaca incident may well underscore that perception.
You can watch this incident, via YouTube (Allen's remarks were captured by Sidarth, who follows Allen around and records him -- a standard practice these days that all campaigns employ). The web posting, in itself, is noteworthy. Not too many years ago, political observers were saying that, because C-Span seemed to be everywhere on the campaign trail, there was no way anymore for candidates to screw up or misspeak or just have a bad day without the world knowing about it. But C-Span is horse and buggy technology when compared to the Internet. Candidates beware, there is no place left to hide.
-------
On the other hand, even we folks in the dead-tree media sometimes manage to record some doozies. What follows is perhaps the most entertaining candidate exchange of the year (as well as fresh evidence that the quality of our political dialogue continues to degenerate), courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Last week, the paper covered a radio debate between former U.S. Attorney J. B. Van Hollen and a county district attorney named Paul Wucher. They're competing for the GOP nomination for state attorney general.
OK, gentlemen:
"Will you ever listen? That's why you suck, Paul, because you only listen to people who agree with you."
"I don't suck. I resent that."
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
George hearts John, Bill disses Joe, Katherine trashes Katherine
What's next, hell freezing over? First the Red Sox win the World Series, and now George Will is praising John Kerry.
The mind reels. In his latest column, the veteran conservative columnist opines that the '04 Democratic candidate was actually correct during the last campaign when he insisted that effective law enforcement should be a key facet of the war against terrorism -- and that he has been proven correct by the British-Pakistani police work that uncovered the latest airplane plot.
As many of you may recall, Kerry was ridiculed by the Bush campaign for having what it called "a pre-9/11 mindset," and for generally being a girly man because he was insisting that military clout was not the only potential tool in the box. As Kerry himself contended early in 2004 (in a line approvingly quoted by Will), the war on terror is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world.''
An excerpt from Will's column: "The London plot against civil aviation confirmed a theme of an illuminating new book, Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The theme is that better law enforcement, which probably could have prevented 9/11, is central to combating terrorism. F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England. Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry's belief..."
Then he proceeds to fillet the Bush administration for continuing to assail Democratic "weakness" on the terror war and for continuing to assail Kerry's law-enforcement argument in particular, even in the wake of the British arrests. He views the administration's attitude as "delusional."
I await the vice president's charge that George Will is aiding and abetting the "al Qaeda types."
-------
Amid all the words I have expended on the Joe Lieberman situation, none have addressed the fundamental horserace equation: Will he actually win this autumn as an independent, beating the official Connecticut Democratic candidate?
Here's the Yes argument: He keeps his primary voters, picks up the independent swing voters who either respect his seniority or respect his stubborness on the war, and picks up Republican voters who don't like the underwhelming GOP candidate (Alan Schlesinger, a guy with a documented history of gambling problems). Result: Lieberman gets more votes than Democrat Ned Lamont.
Here's another version of the Yes argument, from Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown, who has been closely tracking the Connecticut race: "Lamont, despite all the sound and fury, only won the group most likely to go his way -- Democratic primary voters -- by 4 percentage points, or 10,000 votes. It is important to remember that more than 20,000 independents switched their registration to Democratic in the weeks before the primary in order to vote in it. The betting is that the vast majority of them were anti-war folks backing Lamont. Therefore, the most likely independents for Ned are already included in the primary Lamont vote. The remaining independent pool is more likely to like Lieberman than might ordinarily be the case."
But the No argument has some merit. I certainly think it has some merit: Lamont wins a strong majority of the Democratic voters, as well as a pivotal share of independent voters -- most of whom (if the polls are accurate) are now seriously opposed to the Iraq war that Lieberman has long defended.
Paul Janensch, an associate journalism professor at Quinnipiac University, emailed me about this scenario the other day: "Lieberman and Schesinger...split the 'stay the course' vote, while Lamont draws independent and moderate Republican voters unhappy with the Bush administration, and wins." That's an interesting point about GOP voters. Why assume that they'll overwhelmingly back Lieberman or their own guy? Connecticut Republicans, like their counterparts elsewhere in the northeast, are not known for being lockstep neoconservatives.
Also, it's worth noting the closing passage in Robert Novak's column yesterday. The conservative pundit says that loyal Bush Republicans (there are still a few in Connecticut) might not necessarily be inspired to abandon Schlesinger for Lieberman, because Lieberman, while still inclined to defend Bush on the war, has nevertheless felt compelled to acknowledge various Bush mistakes in execution (in the hopes of at least drawing some Democrats). Conceivably, that kind of positioning -- coupled with his 90 percent Democratic voting record -- could limit his appeal to GOP voters.
-------
And it appears that Lieberman can forget the idea of his old pal Bill Clinton bailing him out. Clinton stumped for his fellow Yalie during the primary, but this morning he severed the bond. On ABC, Clinton basically cast Joe into the enemy camp, contending that "almost no Democrats...agreed with his position, which was 'I want to attack Iraq whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction.' And his position was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld position."
So let's review: During the primary, Lieberman needed Clinton to validate his standing as a Democrat. What does he do now, with the ex-president defining him as a Bush toady?
(Of course, one can also ask the question: If Clinton thinks that Lieberman's Iraq stance is the Bush stance, why did he go up there to campaign for him in the first place?)
-------
Speaking of Lieberman, I was repeatedly amused while in Connecticut to hear politicos describe his losing primary campaign as "the second worst in America" this year.
I'd always ask, who has the worst-run campaign? And the answer always came back: Katherine Harris.
The same Katherine Harris who helped buoy George W. Bush at the finish line in Florida six years ago. She's currently running for the Senate in Florida...and, after three campaign managers and 25 departed staffers, she finds herself trailing her Democratic opponent by a whopping 35 points. Federal investigators are probing her relationship with a defense contractor who has pleaded guilty to bribing a congressman. Oh, and one other thing: Harris' current travel aide and personal assistant is an ex-jailbird who's currently on probation for having stolen money from an ex-employer.
This is why nonpartisan Washington analyst Stu Rothenberg rates the Harris campaign as "an utter, unabashed disaster" that "hasn't gotten off the ground and isn't likely to, this century."
If you want the total personal dish about the Harris meltdown, this piece is delicious.
-------
I erred yesterday on this blog, when I quoted 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Kean as telling Newsweek that Dick Cheney was wrong to paint Connecticut's Lamont voters as aiders and abetters of terrorism. An alert reader points out today that Cheney was actually rebuked by former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge. Right quote, wrong Tom. I have corrected that reference in yesterday's post.
The mind reels. In his latest column, the veteran conservative columnist opines that the '04 Democratic candidate was actually correct during the last campaign when he insisted that effective law enforcement should be a key facet of the war against terrorism -- and that he has been proven correct by the British-Pakistani police work that uncovered the latest airplane plot.
As many of you may recall, Kerry was ridiculed by the Bush campaign for having what it called "a pre-9/11 mindset," and for generally being a girly man because he was insisting that military clout was not the only potential tool in the box. As Kerry himself contended early in 2004 (in a line approvingly quoted by Will), the war on terror is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world.''
An excerpt from Will's column: "The London plot against civil aviation confirmed a theme of an illuminating new book, Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. The theme is that better law enforcement, which probably could have prevented 9/11, is central to combating terrorism. F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England. Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry's belief..."
Then he proceeds to fillet the Bush administration for continuing to assail Democratic "weakness" on the terror war and for continuing to assail Kerry's law-enforcement argument in particular, even in the wake of the British arrests. He views the administration's attitude as "delusional."
I await the vice president's charge that George Will is aiding and abetting the "al Qaeda types."
-------
Amid all the words I have expended on the Joe Lieberman situation, none have addressed the fundamental horserace equation: Will he actually win this autumn as an independent, beating the official Connecticut Democratic candidate?
Here's the Yes argument: He keeps his primary voters, picks up the independent swing voters who either respect his seniority or respect his stubborness on the war, and picks up Republican voters who don't like the underwhelming GOP candidate (Alan Schlesinger, a guy with a documented history of gambling problems). Result: Lieberman gets more votes than Democrat Ned Lamont.
Here's another version of the Yes argument, from Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown, who has been closely tracking the Connecticut race: "Lamont, despite all the sound and fury, only won the group most likely to go his way -- Democratic primary voters -- by 4 percentage points, or 10,000 votes. It is important to remember that more than 20,000 independents switched their registration to Democratic in the weeks before the primary in order to vote in it. The betting is that the vast majority of them were anti-war folks backing Lamont. Therefore, the most likely independents for Ned are already included in the primary Lamont vote. The remaining independent pool is more likely to like Lieberman than might ordinarily be the case."
But the No argument has some merit. I certainly think it has some merit: Lamont wins a strong majority of the Democratic voters, as well as a pivotal share of independent voters -- most of whom (if the polls are accurate) are now seriously opposed to the Iraq war that Lieberman has long defended.
Paul Janensch, an associate journalism professor at Quinnipiac University, emailed me about this scenario the other day: "Lieberman and Schesinger...split the 'stay the course' vote, while Lamont draws independent and moderate Republican voters unhappy with the Bush administration, and wins." That's an interesting point about GOP voters. Why assume that they'll overwhelmingly back Lieberman or their own guy? Connecticut Republicans, like their counterparts elsewhere in the northeast, are not known for being lockstep neoconservatives.
Also, it's worth noting the closing passage in Robert Novak's column yesterday. The conservative pundit says that loyal Bush Republicans (there are still a few in Connecticut) might not necessarily be inspired to abandon Schlesinger for Lieberman, because Lieberman, while still inclined to defend Bush on the war, has nevertheless felt compelled to acknowledge various Bush mistakes in execution (in the hopes of at least drawing some Democrats). Conceivably, that kind of positioning -- coupled with his 90 percent Democratic voting record -- could limit his appeal to GOP voters.
-------
And it appears that Lieberman can forget the idea of his old pal Bill Clinton bailing him out. Clinton stumped for his fellow Yalie during the primary, but this morning he severed the bond. On ABC, Clinton basically cast Joe into the enemy camp, contending that "almost no Democrats...agreed with his position, which was 'I want to attack Iraq whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction.' And his position was the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld position."
So let's review: During the primary, Lieberman needed Clinton to validate his standing as a Democrat. What does he do now, with the ex-president defining him as a Bush toady?
(Of course, one can also ask the question: If Clinton thinks that Lieberman's Iraq stance is the Bush stance, why did he go up there to campaign for him in the first place?)
-------
Speaking of Lieberman, I was repeatedly amused while in Connecticut to hear politicos describe his losing primary campaign as "the second worst in America" this year.
I'd always ask, who has the worst-run campaign? And the answer always came back: Katherine Harris.
The same Katherine Harris who helped buoy George W. Bush at the finish line in Florida six years ago. She's currently running for the Senate in Florida...and, after three campaign managers and 25 departed staffers, she finds herself trailing her Democratic opponent by a whopping 35 points. Federal investigators are probing her relationship with a defense contractor who has pleaded guilty to bribing a congressman. Oh, and one other thing: Harris' current travel aide and personal assistant is an ex-jailbird who's currently on probation for having stolen money from an ex-employer.
This is why nonpartisan Washington analyst Stu Rothenberg rates the Harris campaign as "an utter, unabashed disaster" that "hasn't gotten off the ground and isn't likely to, this century."
If you want the total personal dish about the Harris meltdown, this piece is delicious.
-------
I erred yesterday on this blog, when I quoted 9/11 Commission co-chairman Tom Kean as telling Newsweek that Dick Cheney was wrong to paint Connecticut's Lamont voters as aiders and abetters of terrorism. An alert reader points out today that Cheney was actually rebuked by former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge. Right quote, wrong Tom. I have corrected that reference in yesterday's post.
Monday, August 14, 2006
SPECIAL REPORT: Can the Dems steal the security issue?
(Note to readers: We're trying something a bit different today. I originally wrote the column below for the newspaper, but we decided to post it today directly on Philly.com. What follows is the most complete version, with some web links and extra material woven within. A somewhat more modest version might run in print tomorrow.)
Stung by incessant bad news from Iraq, and mindful that a restive electorate might sink the congressional GOP in November, the Bush administration and its political lieutenants are trying to recoup by reviving their old charge that the Democrats are national-security sissies who should not be trusted with power.
Republicans cite the defeat in Connecticut last Tuesday of hawkish Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, who fell in a party primary to Iraq critic Ned Lamont. Vice President Cheney says Lieberman’s defeat is proof that Democrats are soft on “al-Qaeda types.” GOP chairman Ken Mehlman says Democrats have adopted an “isolationist, defeatist, blame-America-first philosophy.”
And Republican strategists believe that the foiled terrorist plot in Britain will buttress their political argument, and convince wavering voters that, at this critical hour, President Bush’s party is more credible on the issue of keeping us safe. As Bush spokesman Tony Snow contended the other day, Democrats on the “extreme left” are waving “a white flag in the war on terror.”
But will this traditional GOP message, which worked so well in 2002 and 2004, pack the same punch in 2006? Not necessarily.
John Zogby, the independent pollster who closely tracks public opinion on Bush and the Iraq war, said Friday: “The old Republican charge still has some traction, and, frankly, it’s maybe the one ace in the hole that Republicans potentially have this year. But the public’s mood has changed a lot since 2002 and 2004, and that’s why attacking the Democrats that way could be very, very risky.”
Today, unlike in previous election seasons, both Bush and the war are broadly unpopular. Indeed, there is strong polling evidence that antipathy toward the war has severely undercut Bush’s standing as a credible prosecutor of the war on terror.
Bottom line: Opposing Bush and the war is not an “extremist” position. Rather, it has become the centrist position in American politics, as evidenced by all the polls. And Democrats, mindful of the majority sentiment, are previewing an autumn campaign that seeks to paint Bush as a president whose conflict in Iraq, with its $300 billion price tag and its drain on military assets, has actually weakened our global battle against terrorism.
Consider a new Democratic ad, which debuted today. The party clearly believes it can discredit the GOP on its traditionally strongest issue. The ad talks of failures in Iraq ("not enough body armor, Humvees..."), the undiminished threats of Iran and North Korea, and gaps in homeland security (only six percent of port containers are inspected). The tag line: "Feel safer? Vote for change."
But Republicans operatives believe they can still triumph by labeling Democrats as "cut-and-run" wimps who would embolden the terrorists by simply pulling out of Iraq; meanwhile, the GOP has apparently decided that "stay the course" is a rhetorical loser. The new slogan, unveiled by Mehlman yesterday, is "adapt to win."
And Lieberman, now running for reelection as an independent with White House encouragement, is echoing the GOP line. He argued last Thursday that if the Lamont troops-out stance prevails, "it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England."
Here's the hitch, however: The latest polls signal that Lieberman and the GOP are not the centrists in this debate:
1. Early last week, an ABC-Washington Post survey reported that, for the first time, Bush is faulted more than he is praised for his handling of the war on terror. Fifty percent of those surveyed view him negatively, 47 percent positively. Also, when people were asked which party they favored to fight that global war, 46 percent cited the Democrats, 38 percent the Republicans. (Only 18 percent of the respondents described themselves as liberals.)
2. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll, released Friday, reported that Bush’s job-approval rating now stands at 33 percent. In the South, normally the GOP’s strongest and most militarily oriented region, his approval rating is 34 percent. Nationwide, 19 percent of those who voted for Bush in 2004 now intend to back Democratic congressional candidates in November.
3. A CNN poll released Wednesday reported that 61 percent of all respondents want to begin troop withdrawals from Iraq or pull them all out. Fifty-seven percent want to set a timetable.
4. And another poll, released Thursday, reported that 61 percent of swing-voting independents dislike Bush’s job performance; also, 60 percent of independents want the troops out either immediately or within a year, while only 29 percent of independents back Bush’s “stay the course” policy. All those findings come from the pollsters...at Fox News.
Other evidence undercuts the GOP contention that Lieberman’s loss is evidence of a broader plot by intolerant liberals and bloggers to “purge” the party of its tough-on-terror hawks. If such a plot exists, other Senate Democrats who voted yes on the war would have been targeted. Yet no major primary insurgencies were launched this year against reelection candidates Hillary Clinton in New York, Bill Nelson in Florida, Ben Nelson in Nebraska, or Maria Cantwell in Washington.
Nor can it be factually argued that Lamont’s win signals a Democratic takeover by (in the words of conservative analyst Michael Barone) “socialist intellectuals” who don’t root for America. A CBS-New York Times exit poll showed that Lamont won because his anti-Bush, antiwar message resonated beyond his base. He won 39 percent of self-described moderates, and even 35 percent of conservatives.
All told, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid argued during a Friday conference call with journalists: “Anyone who suggests that the people of Connecticut, by voting for Lamont, were somehow supporting terrorists — I don’t think that’s credible.” Reid is seconded in his opinion by Tom Ridge, the ex-Homeland Security chief and ex-GOP governor; in the latest issue of Newsweek, Ridge says of Cheney's attempt to paint antiwar voters as soft on al-Qaeda types, "That may be the way the vice president sees it, but I don’t see it that way, and I don’t think most Americans see it that way.”
Suzanne Nossel, a Democratic security analyst and former aide to U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, asserted the other day that, as evidenced by the polls, “liberals need not fear that Lieberman’s loss will … paint the party as spineless.” Rather, she views his defeat as a warning to any incumbent who simply wants to “stay the course.” She thinks that restive voters will respond to those Democrats who demand “more effective diplomacy, more robust homeland security, and an end to failed (Iraq) policies.”
Chuck Schumer, the New York senator who is helming the Democratic bid to take the Senate, tested a political message Friday during that phone chat with the press: “Are we better off or worse off than we were five years ago, in terms of safety?” For instance, in the wake of the British terror arrests, the Democrats noted that the nonpartisan 9/11 Commission last winter awarded Bush an F for failing to improve airline-passenger prescreening, and low marks on other security issues.
Neverthless, Republicans still believe that they have potent arguments, that they can assail Democrats for opposing what they call crucial terrorist-fighting weaponry, such as the Patriot Act and domestic surveillance. Expect that to be a top GOP theme this autumn. Hence GOP chairman Mehlman’s assertion last Wednesday, in pivotal Ohio, that Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown doesn’t favor “giving our intelligence community every tool it needs to find terrorists wherever they are hiding.” He spoke in a similar fashion yesterday on NBC, contending that Democrats want "to weaken the tools and surrender the tools that are critical to keeping Americans safe."
One caveat: the GOP's vulnerability on Iraq remains, and its spinner know it. Today, Mehlman's people sent out an email which purported to show that various foreign policy experts are feeling more kindly to Bush these days. They cited Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, who said in a July 17 Newsweek column: "In his second term, Bush has made some efforts to change the debate on Iraq by publicly acknowledging new facts." Well, I just looked up the column. It turns out that Nye's central point was that Bush has a hard time accepting factual reality. Here's what Mehlman's people did not quote: "Bush's impatience hinders learning....That impatient temperament also contributed to the organizational process Bush put in place that discouraged learning....His case remains open, but he is running out of time."
Perhaps Democrats are right to feel confident, and right to believe that Bush’s failures in Iraq will diminish his security credentials in the runup to the November elections. Perhaps the Democrats will be able to withstand all GOP efforts to equate the Lamont Democrats with the George McGovern forces who lost 49 states in 1972. But, for the Democrats, one cautionary lesson of ‘72 was that even though most Americans were fed up with war (in that case, Vietnam), they were still wary about simply bringing the troops home. Richard Nixon, touting his incremental "peace with honor" policy, won re-election in a landslide.
Pollster Zogby said: “It won’t be enough for Democrats to exploit the fact that, in the eyes of most voters and the world, Iraq has weakened us in fighting the war on terror. Democrats still need to offer more clarity. Voters want to know, ‘OK, troops out, we agree, but what would you do besides that? What’s your credible exit strategy?'
"People are ready to listen," he said. "The center of gravity in America has shifted. Opposing the war is good centrist politics.”
Stung by incessant bad news from Iraq, and mindful that a restive electorate might sink the congressional GOP in November, the Bush administration and its political lieutenants are trying to recoup by reviving their old charge that the Democrats are national-security sissies who should not be trusted with power.
Republicans cite the defeat in Connecticut last Tuesday of hawkish Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman, who fell in a party primary to Iraq critic Ned Lamont. Vice President Cheney says Lieberman’s defeat is proof that Democrats are soft on “al-Qaeda types.” GOP chairman Ken Mehlman says Democrats have adopted an “isolationist, defeatist, blame-America-first philosophy.”
And Republican strategists believe that the foiled terrorist plot in Britain will buttress their political argument, and convince wavering voters that, at this critical hour, President Bush’s party is more credible on the issue of keeping us safe. As Bush spokesman Tony Snow contended the other day, Democrats on the “extreme left” are waving “a white flag in the war on terror.”
But will this traditional GOP message, which worked so well in 2002 and 2004, pack the same punch in 2006? Not necessarily.
John Zogby, the independent pollster who closely tracks public opinion on Bush and the Iraq war, said Friday: “The old Republican charge still has some traction, and, frankly, it’s maybe the one ace in the hole that Republicans potentially have this year. But the public’s mood has changed a lot since 2002 and 2004, and that’s why attacking the Democrats that way could be very, very risky.”
Today, unlike in previous election seasons, both Bush and the war are broadly unpopular. Indeed, there is strong polling evidence that antipathy toward the war has severely undercut Bush’s standing as a credible prosecutor of the war on terror.
Bottom line: Opposing Bush and the war is not an “extremist” position. Rather, it has become the centrist position in American politics, as evidenced by all the polls. And Democrats, mindful of the majority sentiment, are previewing an autumn campaign that seeks to paint Bush as a president whose conflict in Iraq, with its $300 billion price tag and its drain on military assets, has actually weakened our global battle against terrorism.
Consider a new Democratic ad, which debuted today. The party clearly believes it can discredit the GOP on its traditionally strongest issue. The ad talks of failures in Iraq ("not enough body armor, Humvees..."), the undiminished threats of Iran and North Korea, and gaps in homeland security (only six percent of port containers are inspected). The tag line: "Feel safer? Vote for change."
But Republicans operatives believe they can still triumph by labeling Democrats as "cut-and-run" wimps who would embolden the terrorists by simply pulling out of Iraq; meanwhile, the GOP has apparently decided that "stay the course" is a rhetorical loser. The new slogan, unveiled by Mehlman yesterday, is "adapt to win."
And Lieberman, now running for reelection as an independent with White House encouragement, is echoing the GOP line. He argued last Thursday that if the Lamont troops-out stance prevails, "it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England."
Here's the hitch, however: The latest polls signal that Lieberman and the GOP are not the centrists in this debate:
1. Early last week,
2. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll, released Friday, reported that Bush’s job-approval rating now stands at 33 percent. In the South, normally the GOP’s strongest and most militarily oriented region, his approval rating is 34 percent. Nationwide, 19 percent of those who voted for Bush in 2004 now intend to back Democratic congressional candidates in November.
3. A CNN poll released Wednesday reported that 61 percent of all respondents want to begin troop withdrawals from Iraq or pull them all out. Fifty-seven percent want to set a timetable.
4. And another poll, released Thursday, reported that 61 percent of swing-voting independents dislike Bush’s job performance; also, 60 percent of independents want the troops out either immediately or within a year, while only 29 percent of independents back Bush’s “stay the course” policy. All those findings come from the pollsters...at Fox News.
Other evidence undercuts the GOP contention that Lieberman’s loss is evidence of a broader plot by intolerant liberals and bloggers to “purge” the party of its tough-on-terror hawks. If such a plot exists, other Senate Democrats who voted yes on the war would have been targeted. Yet no major primary insurgencies were launched this year against reelection candidates Hillary Clinton in New York, Bill Nelson in Florida, Ben Nelson in Nebraska, or Maria Cantwell in Washington.
Nor can it be factually argued that Lamont’s win signals a Democratic takeover by (in the words of conservative analyst Michael Barone) “socialist intellectuals” who don’t root for America. A CBS-New York Times exit poll showed that Lamont won because his anti-Bush, antiwar message resonated beyond his base. He won 39 percent of self-described moderates, and even 35 percent of conservatives.
All told, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid argued during a Friday conference call with journalists: “Anyone who suggests that the people of Connecticut, by voting for Lamont, were somehow supporting terrorists — I don’t think that’s credible.” Reid is seconded in his opinion by Tom Ridge, the ex-Homeland Security chief and ex-GOP governor; in the latest issue of Newsweek, Ridge says of Cheney's attempt to paint antiwar voters as soft on al-Qaeda types, "That may be the way the vice president sees it, but I don’t see it that way, and I don’t think most Americans see it that way.”
Suzanne Nossel, a Democratic security analyst and former aide to U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, asserted the other day that, as evidenced by the polls, “liberals need not fear that Lieberman’s loss will … paint the party as spineless.” Rather, she views his defeat as a warning to any incumbent who simply wants to “stay the course.” She thinks that restive voters will respond to those Democrats who demand “more effective diplomacy, more robust homeland security, and an end to failed (Iraq) policies.”
Chuck Schumer, the New York senator who is helming the Democratic bid to take the Senate, tested a political message Friday during that phone chat with the press: “Are we better off or worse off than we were five years ago, in terms of safety?” For instance, in the wake of the British terror arrests, the Democrats noted that the nonpartisan 9/11 Commission last winter awarded Bush an F for failing to improve airline-passenger prescreening, and low marks on other security issues.
Neverthless, Republicans still believe that they have potent arguments, that they can assail Democrats for opposing what they call crucial terrorist-fighting weaponry, such as the Patriot Act and domestic surveillance. Expect that to be a top GOP theme this autumn. Hence GOP chairman Mehlman’s assertion last Wednesday, in pivotal Ohio, that Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown doesn’t favor “giving our intelligence community every tool it needs to find terrorists wherever they are hiding.” He spoke in a similar fashion yesterday on NBC, contending that Democrats want "to weaken the tools and surrender the tools that are critical to keeping Americans safe."
One caveat: the GOP's vulnerability on Iraq remains, and its spinner know it. Today, Mehlman's people sent out an email which purported to show that various foreign policy experts are feeling more kindly to Bush these days. They cited Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, who said in a July 17 Newsweek column: "In his second term, Bush has made some efforts to change the debate on Iraq by publicly acknowledging new facts." Well, I just looked up the column. It turns out that Nye's central point was that Bush has a hard time accepting factual reality. Here's what Mehlman's people did not quote: "Bush's impatience hinders learning....That impatient temperament also contributed to the organizational process Bush put in place that discouraged learning....His case remains open, but he is running out of time."
Perhaps Democrats are right to feel confident, and right to believe that Bush’s failures in Iraq will diminish his security credentials in the runup to the November elections. Perhaps the Democrats will be able to withstand all GOP efforts to equate the Lamont Democrats with the George McGovern forces who lost 49 states in 1972. But, for the Democrats, one cautionary lesson of ‘72 was that even though most Americans were fed up with war (in that case, Vietnam), they were still wary about simply bringing the troops home. Richard Nixon, touting his incremental "peace with honor" policy, won re-election in a landslide.
Pollster Zogby said: “It won’t be enough for Democrats to exploit the fact that, in the eyes of most voters and the world, Iraq has weakened us in fighting the war on terror. Democrats still need to offer more clarity. Voters want to know, ‘OK, troops out, we agree, but what would you do besides that? What’s your credible exit strategy?'
"People are ready to listen," he said. "The center of gravity in America has shifted. Opposing the war is good centrist politics.”
Friday, August 11, 2006
GOP presidential contestants, come on down!
Hey, TGIF and all that, so let's keep it light. (Or as light as this particular blog permits.)
I have an interesting memo here from Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster/messagemeister/marketer/focus group maven who has basically worked with just about everybody in the GOP camp. He goes on for 28 pages about the 2008 Republican presidential hopefuls, and it makes for fun reading, if only because he is summarizing the views of participatory Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire.
These folks gathered in focus groups. Luntz put them in a room, chatted them up about what they're looking for in a candidate, then showed them various TV clips (C-Span, Sunday talk shows, speeches) and gauged their responses. The upshot is that it's clear the GOP race is wide open -- not just because there is no obvious Bush heir in the wings, but also because voters are extremely suspicious about politicians these days, even about those who possess the traits deemed to be most desirable.
So, from the memo, here's the thumbnail rundown:
1. Virginia Senator George Allen. Great conservative soundbites ("The strategy in this entire war on terror needs to be 'we win, they lose..."), coupled with a Reaganesque affability and speaking style. But because he's so polished, some focus-groupers dismissed him as too slick, and hence too "political." Some participants said, "I wonder if he's just saying what I want to hear?" Also, Allen's macho manner (he's the son of a famous football coach) turned off the women. One of them said, "He reminded me of an old boyfriend...and there's a reason we're no longer together."
2. Tennessee Senator Bill Frist. Good conservative soundbites, but he's a snore. Remember, the guy's a doctor. A participant said: "I really like what he had to say, I just hated the way he said it. It's hard to believe him because he lacks aggression. There's no passion there." And Luntz concluded that "In a political age where image matters so much, Frist has a lot of work ahead of him before primary voters will warm up to his medicinal style....(H)is halting delivery was definitely an irritant...And candidate discomfort leads to voter discomfort."
(None of this surprised me. I've seen Frist in "action," up in New Hampshire last year. If he runs, I can already envision his mid-February announcement that he is "suspending" his campaign.)
3. Rudy Giuliani, the so-called America's Mayor. The Luntz crowd loved it when he conversed about 9/11, his whole rap about how the dead were 80 nationalities, "rich or poor, white or black..." One participant sounded like a movie ad: "Giuliani is inspirational, idealistic, and a visionary. I like him!" Another said, "He speaks with conviction...this man could sell meat to PETA." However, this was all before Luntz told them that Giuliani was pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and pro-gun control. At that point, Luntz writes, "his support melted away like butter on a warm dinner roll." In other words, he flunked the GOP primary litmus tests. Forget it, Rudy, stick to the lecture circuit.
4. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. This was interesting: his Mormon religion was fine with the New Hampshire participants, but the Iowa folks, particularly the women, had a real problem with it. No surprise, in a way. The GOP Iowa caucus electorate is heavily Christian conservative, whereas New Hampshire Republicans tend to care a lot more about economic issues. The problem for Romney is that Iowa is the first stop on the primary trail. If the Iowa focus group reaction is typical, it means he won't have real cred as a GOP candidate unless he can win over the conservative base on the religion issue, right at the starting gate.
5. Newt Gingrich. He charmed them all with his big-picture futurist rap, which is basically the opposite of your standard political sound-biting. The participants liked the fact that he doesn't sound like other politicians. Most importantly, writes Luntz, he contrasts well with President Bush: "Support for the president is wide, but that doesn't mask the disappointment with his inability to articulate a deeper philosophy about the war, and a greater commitment to small government and less spending. And that's exactly where Gingrich is strongest." However, the participants had misgivings about his strong personality. They thought that he tried too hard to convince people of how smart he is. Also, Iowa folks thought he was too combative; in Luntz's words, they felt he was "a little too angry and defensive."
6. John McCain. Finally, the big enchilada. The participants liked his strong national security credentials, his strong criticisms of big-spending pork-barrel Washington, and the way that he acknowledged mistakes in Iraq but still felt it was important to hang in there and succeed. They also liked his flashes of wit, which seemed to humanize him. However, while they liked his obvious "passion," it still made them uneasy. One voter said: "Wow, it looks like he is just going to pop his top any second." Luntz concludes: "McCain is just too intense. His greatest asset is his greatest weakness. Even when he addresses his anger issues, he loses voters; they're afraid of him."
7. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. I know, who cares? He's interested, but are Republicans going to nominate a guy who's chief claim to fame is that he lost 100 pounds? Luntz writes, "Personal stories won't carry a candidate in this election." Participants noted all the nice things that Huckabee said he has done in Arkansas, but they judged him as too relaxed, not enough fire. Also, he's from Arkansas, and participants didn't go for that. Luntz recalls, "We were told repeatedly that Arkansas is not America." And, as Luntz notes, remember who else was from Arkansas.
8. Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback. He may be a favorite of the organized religious right groups, but not even the Iowa participants liked his incessant references to his Christian faith. It's clear that even the Philadelphia Phillies will go to the World Series before this guy goes to the White House. Luntz concludes, "Republicans want a president, not a pastor...Republicans surely want their leaders to have a deeply held sense of faith, but they don't want it explained in every detail."
9. Jeb Bush. Just kidding; Luntz didn't test Jeb. That might have been a good barometer on the state of GOP opinion toward the House of Bush. If only.
So there you have it: Frist is judged to have too little personality, Gingrich too much. McCain is judged to have too much passion, Huckabee too little. Allen is polished as he sound-bites the right issues, but they don't trust the polish. Giuliani is less polished, but he has the wrong issues, and they don't trust that, either.No wonder it's wide open. I'm surprised Luntz didn't record massive outbreaks of Ronald Reagan nostalgia.
Anyway, it's the weekend. Party on.
I have an interesting memo here from Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster/messagemeister/marketer/focus group maven who has basically worked with just about everybody in the GOP camp. He goes on for 28 pages about the 2008 Republican presidential hopefuls, and it makes for fun reading, if only because he is summarizing the views of participatory Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire.
These folks gathered in focus groups. Luntz put them in a room, chatted them up about what they're looking for in a candidate, then showed them various TV clips (C-Span, Sunday talk shows, speeches) and gauged their responses. The upshot is that it's clear the GOP race is wide open -- not just because there is no obvious Bush heir in the wings, but also because voters are extremely suspicious about politicians these days, even about those who possess the traits deemed to be most desirable.
So, from the memo, here's the thumbnail rundown:
1. Virginia Senator George Allen. Great conservative soundbites ("The strategy in this entire war on terror needs to be 'we win, they lose..."), coupled with a Reaganesque affability and speaking style. But because he's so polished, some focus-groupers dismissed him as too slick, and hence too "political." Some participants said, "I wonder if he's just saying what I want to hear?" Also, Allen's macho manner (he's the son of a famous football coach) turned off the women. One of them said, "He reminded me of an old boyfriend...and there's a reason we're no longer together."
2. Tennessee Senator Bill Frist. Good conservative soundbites, but he's a snore. Remember, the guy's a doctor. A participant said: "I really like what he had to say, I just hated the way he said it. It's hard to believe him because he lacks aggression. There's no passion there." And Luntz concluded that "In a political age where image matters so much, Frist has a lot of work ahead of him before primary voters will warm up to his medicinal style....(H)is halting delivery was definitely an irritant...And candidate discomfort leads to voter discomfort."
(None of this surprised me. I've seen Frist in "action," up in New Hampshire last year. If he runs, I can already envision his mid-February announcement that he is "suspending" his campaign.)
3. Rudy Giuliani, the so-called America's Mayor. The Luntz crowd loved it when he conversed about 9/11, his whole rap about how the dead were 80 nationalities, "rich or poor, white or black..." One participant sounded like a movie ad: "Giuliani is inspirational, idealistic, and a visionary. I like him!" Another said, "He speaks with conviction...this man could sell meat to PETA." However, this was all before Luntz told them that Giuliani was pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and pro-gun control. At that point, Luntz writes, "his support melted away like butter on a warm dinner roll." In other words, he flunked the GOP primary litmus tests. Forget it, Rudy, stick to the lecture circuit.
4. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. This was interesting: his Mormon religion was fine with the New Hampshire participants, but the Iowa folks, particularly the women, had a real problem with it. No surprise, in a way. The GOP Iowa caucus electorate is heavily Christian conservative, whereas New Hampshire Republicans tend to care a lot more about economic issues. The problem for Romney is that Iowa is the first stop on the primary trail. If the Iowa focus group reaction is typical, it means he won't have real cred as a GOP candidate unless he can win over the conservative base on the religion issue, right at the starting gate.
5. Newt Gingrich. He charmed them all with his big-picture futurist rap, which is basically the opposite of your standard political sound-biting. The participants liked the fact that he doesn't sound like other politicians. Most importantly, writes Luntz, he contrasts well with President Bush: "Support for the president is wide, but that doesn't mask the disappointment with his inability to articulate a deeper philosophy about the war, and a greater commitment to small government and less spending. And that's exactly where Gingrich is strongest." However, the participants had misgivings about his strong personality. They thought that he tried too hard to convince people of how smart he is. Also, Iowa folks thought he was too combative; in Luntz's words, they felt he was "a little too angry and defensive."
6. John McCain. Finally, the big enchilada. The participants liked his strong national security credentials, his strong criticisms of big-spending pork-barrel Washington, and the way that he acknowledged mistakes in Iraq but still felt it was important to hang in there and succeed. They also liked his flashes of wit, which seemed to humanize him. However, while they liked his obvious "passion," it still made them uneasy. One voter said: "Wow, it looks like he is just going to pop his top any second." Luntz concludes: "McCain is just too intense. His greatest asset is his greatest weakness. Even when he addresses his anger issues, he loses voters; they're afraid of him."
7. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. I know, who cares? He's interested, but are Republicans going to nominate a guy who's chief claim to fame is that he lost 100 pounds? Luntz writes, "Personal stories won't carry a candidate in this election." Participants noted all the nice things that Huckabee said he has done in Arkansas, but they judged him as too relaxed, not enough fire. Also, he's from Arkansas, and participants didn't go for that. Luntz recalls, "We were told repeatedly that Arkansas is not America." And, as Luntz notes, remember who else was from Arkansas.
8. Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback. He may be a favorite of the organized religious right groups, but not even the Iowa participants liked his incessant references to his Christian faith. It's clear that even the Philadelphia Phillies will go to the World Series before this guy goes to the White House. Luntz concludes, "Republicans want a president, not a pastor...Republicans surely want their leaders to have a deeply held sense of faith, but they don't want it explained in every detail."
9. Jeb Bush. Just kidding; Luntz didn't test Jeb. That might have been a good barometer on the state of GOP opinion toward the House of Bush. If only.
So there you have it: Frist is judged to have too little personality, Gingrich too much. McCain is judged to have too much passion, Huckabee too little. Allen is polished as he sound-bites the right issues, but they don't trust the polish. Giuliani is less polished, but he has the wrong issues, and they don't trust that, either.No wonder it's wide open. I'm surprised Luntz didn't record massive outbreaks of Ronald Reagan nostalgia.
Anyway, it's the weekend. Party on.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Joe, Chris, Bailey's ghost, and assorted refutable stats
Consider these items as footnotes to my print column today on the aftermath of Joe Lieberman's stunning defeat.
1. I mentioned how difficult the Connecticut situation has become for Lieberman's senior colleague, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, because now he has to defend his party - and his party-endorsed Senate candidate, Ned Lamont - from the Lieberman charge that the Lamont forces are national security weenies. But, actually, Dodd's exasperation goes much deeper than that.
As friends of Dodd explained to me, even though the two senators get along, Lieberman has actually been a stone in Dodd's shoe for a long time. Dodd is a skilled political player, a former national Democratic party chairman, and he was a U.S. congressman back when Lieberman was just a state senator voting on bills about Sunday blue laws and recyclable bottles. In other words, Dodd has long nursed presidential ambitions, and seemed to have the seniority to go first.
But then junior senator Lieberman was plucked by Al Gore to be his running-mate in 2000 (largely because Lieberman had dissed Bill Clinton in a Senate floor speech during the Lewinsky scandal), a move that catapulted Lieberman ahead of Dodd in the national sweepstakes. After Gore-Lieberman faltered at the finish line, Dodd thought about running against President Bush in 2004 -- but again had to stand down because of Lieberman, who launched his own candidacy...a candidacy that went nowhere, because (as a preview of what happened this week in Connecticut) liberal primary voters who had no interest in nominating a pro-war, Bush-friendly Democrat.
Now we come to the present day. Dodd is now exploring the possibility of running for president in '08, planting some seeds with the Democrat grassroots by stressing his anti-Bush, antiwar credentials (he voted Yes on war authorization, but has since expressed regrets for having done so), and hoping to demonstrate his own clout at home by framing an antiwar message that the House Democratic candidates in his state can use successfully. Yet, again, the Lieberman stone is in his shoe, because the guy refuses to go away.
As one Dodd friend said to me, "This (Lieberman) thing is just killing him."
2. I mentioned, at the close of my print column, that in the old days of Connecticut politics, Democratic boss John Bailey would have cracked heads and told a loser to give it up in the name of party loyalty. The irony is that one of Joe Lieberman's longtime heroes was...John Bailey. (Indeed, much of Lieberman's losing vote tally on Tuesday night came from the remnants of the old Bailey party apparatus, in the rusting industrial towns of the Naugatuck Valley.)
Lieberman even wrote a couple books about Bailey, who died in 1975. I have one of them right here -- The Legacy, published in 1981. In the last chapter, there is an interesting passage. Notwithstanding Bailey's reputation for enforcing party loyalty, Lieberman writes this:
"He hated primaries...because he could never be certain that a primary would produce a candidate who could win an election. As he said colloquially of the candidates he disdained, 'These guys do good in a primary, but then in an election they don't do much.'"
Perhaps that explains in part why Lieberman declared, on Tuesday night, with reference to Ned Lamont's primary victory, "I cannot, I will not, let this result stand."
3. And perhaps Lieberman's independent Senate bid is overrated. In my print column, I mentioned that conservative analyst Byron York, at the National Review website, is skeptical that Lieberman can win. Now I also see that liberal analyst Bruce Shapiro, at The Nation website, thinks that Lieberman is actually "in free-fall...'Stay the course' is not a winning strategy in Iraq and not a winning strategy in Connecticut."
4. It was amazing yesterday to see Chris Matthews, on Hardball, lobbing softballs at Lieberman campaign manager Sean Smith, acting as if the Lieberman camp had pulled off some kind of miraculous comeback. Matthews asked, "How did you close the gap?....How did you close so near to overtaking (Lamont)?"
This was a reference to the fact that Lieberman lost by four percentage points, in contrast to a poll last week that showed Lieberman trailing by 13. But the more pertinent opening question would have been: "Sean, how is it possible for a three-term senator, who has always won his races by 2-1 margins, and who, more importantly, was leading in the polls just 13 weeks ago by 46 points against a guy that nobody had ever heard of -- how do you explain the fact that your boss wound up the loser?"
I can answer that, since Sean Smith has now exited the Lieberman camp:
Incumbent hubris.
5. Lastly, there seems to be a move afoot, among some Lieberman fans in the conservative media, to delegitimize Lamont's victory, to simply explain it away. Case in point: the fact-challenged essay by political analyst Michael Barone, appearing today on that most Lieberman-friendly piece of real estate, the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
While trying to advance his argument that Lieberman is a proud Democrat in the JFK tradition, he wrote that, in Tuesday's primary, Lieberman "carried by and large the same cities and towns that John F. Kennedy carried" in the 1960 election.
Well, that statement badly needs to be amended. JFK carried Hartford and New Haven. Lieberman lost both.
But here's the major stuff: Barone, who co-authors the Alamanac of American Politics, the purported bible of the political class, sought to dismiss Lamont's win by offering these two points: (a) "less than one-sixth of the registered voters took the trouble to cast their ballots in this contest," and (b) "Lamont thus got the votes of less than one-tenth of Connecticut voters."
The problem is, these stats don't hold up under scrutiny.
The first point (less than a sixth equals roughly 16 percent) would have been accurate only if all registered voters (2,086,000) were allowed to vote in a Connecticut Democratic primary. But the fact is, the party primary is only open to Democrats. So the eligible pool was only about 700,000. And since Lieberman and Lamont drew about 282,000 voters, that translates into a turnout percentage of 40 percent. The highest in Connecticut primary history.
So the facts foil Barone's second point. Since it was a closed primary, it's irrelevent to say that Lamont got the votes of "less than one-tenth (under 10 percent) of Connecticut voters." In reality, his total (146,000) was actually one-fifth (20 percent) of the eligible voters.
And if that still seems underwhelming consider this: George W. Bush, whom Barone generally defends at every turn, achieved his big breakthrough in 2000 by drawing 301,050 votes in the pivotal South Carolina GOP primary. That winter, roughly 2,100,000 voters could have participated in that open primary (the entire state electorate was eligible). Translation: Bush won one-seventh -- 14 percent -- of all eligible voters, thus greasing his path to the nomination.
That's less representative than Lamont's win, but you'll look in vain to find a Barone column that sought to delegitimize Bush's win.
1. I mentioned how difficult the Connecticut situation has become for Lieberman's senior colleague, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, because now he has to defend his party - and his party-endorsed Senate candidate, Ned Lamont - from the Lieberman charge that the Lamont forces are national security weenies. But, actually, Dodd's exasperation goes much deeper than that.
As friends of Dodd explained to me, even though the two senators get along, Lieberman has actually been a stone in Dodd's shoe for a long time. Dodd is a skilled political player, a former national Democratic party chairman, and he was a U.S. congressman back when Lieberman was just a state senator voting on bills about Sunday blue laws and recyclable bottles. In other words, Dodd has long nursed presidential ambitions, and seemed to have the seniority to go first.
But then junior senator Lieberman was plucked by Al Gore to be his running-mate in 2000 (largely because Lieberman had dissed Bill Clinton in a Senate floor speech during the Lewinsky scandal), a move that catapulted Lieberman ahead of Dodd in the national sweepstakes. After Gore-Lieberman faltered at the finish line, Dodd thought about running against President Bush in 2004 -- but again had to stand down because of Lieberman, who launched his own candidacy...a candidacy that went nowhere, because (as a preview of what happened this week in Connecticut) liberal primary voters who had no interest in nominating a pro-war, Bush-friendly Democrat.
Now we come to the present day. Dodd is now exploring the possibility of running for president in '08, planting some seeds with the Democrat grassroots by stressing his anti-Bush, antiwar credentials (he voted Yes on war authorization, but has since expressed regrets for having done so), and hoping to demonstrate his own clout at home by framing an antiwar message that the House Democratic candidates in his state can use successfully. Yet, again, the Lieberman stone is in his shoe, because the guy refuses to go away.
As one Dodd friend said to me, "This (Lieberman) thing is just killing him."
2. I mentioned, at the close of my print column, that in the old days of Connecticut politics, Democratic boss John Bailey would have cracked heads and told a loser to give it up in the name of party loyalty. The irony is that one of Joe Lieberman's longtime heroes was...John Bailey. (Indeed, much of Lieberman's losing vote tally on Tuesday night came from the remnants of the old Bailey party apparatus, in the rusting industrial towns of the Naugatuck Valley.)
Lieberman even wrote a couple books about Bailey, who died in 1975. I have one of them right here -- The Legacy, published in 1981. In the last chapter, there is an interesting passage. Notwithstanding Bailey's reputation for enforcing party loyalty, Lieberman writes this:
"He hated primaries...because he could never be certain that a primary would produce a candidate who could win an election. As he said colloquially of the candidates he disdained, 'These guys do good in a primary, but then in an election they don't do much.'"
Perhaps that explains in part why Lieberman declared, on Tuesday night, with reference to Ned Lamont's primary victory, "I cannot, I will not, let this result stand."
3. And perhaps Lieberman's independent Senate bid is overrated. In my print column, I mentioned that conservative analyst Byron York, at the National Review website, is skeptical that Lieberman can win. Now I also see that liberal analyst Bruce Shapiro, at The Nation website, thinks that Lieberman is actually "in free-fall...'Stay the course' is not a winning strategy in Iraq and not a winning strategy in Connecticut."
4. It was amazing yesterday to see Chris Matthews, on Hardball, lobbing softballs at Lieberman campaign manager Sean Smith, acting as if the Lieberman camp had pulled off some kind of miraculous comeback. Matthews asked, "How did you close the gap?....How did you close so near to overtaking (Lamont)?"
This was a reference to the fact that Lieberman lost by four percentage points, in contrast to a poll last week that showed Lieberman trailing by 13. But the more pertinent opening question would have been: "Sean, how is it possible for a three-term senator, who has always won his races by 2-1 margins, and who, more importantly, was leading in the polls just 13 weeks ago by 46 points against a guy that nobody had ever heard of -- how do you explain the fact that your boss wound up the loser?"
I can answer that, since Sean Smith has now exited the Lieberman camp:
Incumbent hubris.
5. Lastly, there seems to be a move afoot, among some Lieberman fans in the conservative media, to delegitimize Lamont's victory, to simply explain it away. Case in point: the fact-challenged essay by political analyst Michael Barone, appearing today on that most Lieberman-friendly piece of real estate, the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
While trying to advance his argument that Lieberman is a proud Democrat in the JFK tradition, he wrote that, in Tuesday's primary, Lieberman "carried by and large the same cities and towns that John F. Kennedy carried" in the 1960 election.
Well, that statement badly needs to be amended. JFK carried Hartford and New Haven. Lieberman lost both.
But here's the major stuff: Barone, who co-authors the Alamanac of American Politics, the purported bible of the political class, sought to dismiss Lamont's win by offering these two points: (a) "less than one-sixth of the registered voters took the trouble to cast their ballots in this contest," and (b) "Lamont thus got the votes of less than one-tenth of Connecticut voters."
The problem is, these stats don't hold up under scrutiny.
The first point (less than a sixth equals roughly 16 percent) would have been accurate only if all registered voters (2,086,000) were allowed to vote in a Connecticut Democratic primary. But the fact is, the party primary is only open to Democrats. So the eligible pool was only about 700,000. And since Lieberman and Lamont drew about 282,000 voters, that translates into a turnout percentage of 40 percent. The highest in Connecticut primary history.
So the facts foil Barone's second point. Since it was a closed primary, it's irrelevent to say that Lamont got the votes of "less than one-tenth (under 10 percent) of Connecticut voters." In reality, his total (146,000) was actually one-fifth (20 percent) of the eligible voters.
And if that still seems underwhelming consider this: George W. Bush, whom Barone generally defends at every turn, achieved his big breakthrough in 2000 by drawing 301,050 votes in the pivotal South Carolina GOP primary. That winter, roughly 2,100,000 voters could have participated in that open primary (the entire state electorate was eligible). Translation: Bush won one-seventh -- 14 percent -- of all eligible voters, thus greasing his path to the nomination.
That's less representative than Lamont's win, but you'll look in vain to find a Barone column that sought to delegitimize Bush's win.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Talk among yourselves
A long election night without much sleep. A morning that will require a lot of shoe leather in downtown Hartford. Then an afternoon flight, and another print column to write.
In other words, no blogging today. I would offer, instead, my print analysis of Joe Lieberman's historic loss in Connecticut.
And who knows, tomorrow I might even find something to say about another topic entirely.
In other words, no blogging today. I would offer, instead, my print analysis of Joe Lieberman's historic loss in Connecticut.
And who knows, tomorrow I might even find something to say about another topic entirely.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
My Harry Bosch moment
I'm a big fan of mystery novels, especially when they leave clues in plain sight and I still never manage to see them. This happens all the time in Michael Connelly's books, when detective Harry Bosch sits around, staring at all his accumulated evidence, and suddenly something that seemed innocuous 200 pages earlier smacks him between the eyes.
By now you're wondering where I'm going with this, so let me explain:
I was staring yesterday at a five-page, single-spaced handout from the Joe Lieberman campaign, up here in Connecticut. Senator Lieberman, as I noted at length in print this morning, is in deep trouble with Democratic voters, who will decide in today's state primary whether to strip him of the party label because of his staunch support for the war in Iraq and the Republican commander-in-chief who put us there. Mindful of that possibility -- perhaps too late -- Lieberman on Sunday night contended in a hastily arranged speech that he's really a lot more "anti-Bush" than people think. As he argued that night, "I have openly and clearly disagreed with and criticized the president" on the war.
I deconstructed one key passage from that speech, concerning his views about dissent, on this blog yesterday. Now I want to address that handout, which was circulated on Sunday night. The campaign had assembled a list of 27 Lieberman criticisms of the Bush war effort, in an attempt to buttress his argument that he's not a lockstep Bush enabler. At first glance, it looked impressive -- hey, the guy did say all these things (Example: "The divisive and unilateral foreign policy that the Administration has followed has borne bitter fruit"). Could it therefore be true that everybody has read Joe wrong?
There was something wierd about the handout, but I couldn't figure out what it was. And then late in the day, when I was no longer absorbed in campaign events, when I was no longer peeking at the sheet while stuck at traffic lights, the obvious truth smacked me between the eyes. It was my Harry Bosch moment:
I circled the dates appended to each of the 27 "anti-Bush" remarks on the war. It turned out that 21 were uttered back in 2003.
This means, of course, that his campaign can't come up with hardly anything more recent. But, beyond that, ask yourself this question: Why was Lieberman seemingly so critical of Bush in that single year, 2003? Why, for instance, did he call for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's removal in October 2003, whereas we have hardly heard him say it since?
Again, the answer jumps out: Back then, Lieberman was eyeing a presidential bid, and he had to get himself more in sync with liberal Democratic voters.
In 2003, he doing spadework for the '04 Democratic presidential nomination, preparing for the early winter primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. And the people who vote heavily in those primaries are liberals with a strong aversion to Bush.
So, mea culpa. I missed the obvious clue. And it's doubtful that most Connecticut voters will learn anything about the '03 caveat, because Lieberman's new TV ad, which excerpts the Sunday night speech, certainly doesn't mention that most of his clear and open disagreements were uttered three long years ago in the service of his higher ambitions.
"I have always leveled with you," he told voters Sunday night, "and I'm not going to stop now." Well, he's hardly the first politician to amend that kind of pledge. And it's entirely possible he will survive this primary anyway, no matter what the polls say. The closing paragraph of my print story says it all.
By now you're wondering where I'm going with this, so let me explain:
I was staring yesterday at a five-page, single-spaced handout from the Joe Lieberman campaign, up here in Connecticut. Senator Lieberman, as I noted at length in print this morning, is in deep trouble with Democratic voters, who will decide in today's state primary whether to strip him of the party label because of his staunch support for the war in Iraq and the Republican commander-in-chief who put us there. Mindful of that possibility -- perhaps too late -- Lieberman on Sunday night contended in a hastily arranged speech that he's really a lot more "anti-Bush" than people think. As he argued that night, "I have openly and clearly disagreed with and criticized the president" on the war.
I deconstructed one key passage from that speech, concerning his views about dissent, on this blog yesterday. Now I want to address that handout, which was circulated on Sunday night. The campaign had assembled a list of 27 Lieberman criticisms of the Bush war effort, in an attempt to buttress his argument that he's not a lockstep Bush enabler. At first glance, it looked impressive -- hey, the guy did say all these things (Example: "The divisive and unilateral foreign policy that the Administration has followed has borne bitter fruit"). Could it therefore be true that everybody has read Joe wrong?
There was something wierd about the handout, but I couldn't figure out what it was. And then late in the day, when I was no longer absorbed in campaign events, when I was no longer peeking at the sheet while stuck at traffic lights, the obvious truth smacked me between the eyes. It was my Harry Bosch moment:
I circled the dates appended to each of the 27 "anti-Bush" remarks on the war. It turned out that 21 were uttered back in 2003.
This means, of course, that his campaign can't come up with hardly anything more recent. But, beyond that, ask yourself this question: Why was Lieberman seemingly so critical of Bush in that single year, 2003? Why, for instance, did he call for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's removal in October 2003, whereas we have hardly heard him say it since?
Again, the answer jumps out: Back then, Lieberman was eyeing a presidential bid, and he had to get himself more in sync with liberal Democratic voters.
In 2003, he doing spadework for the '04 Democratic presidential nomination, preparing for the early winter primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. And the people who vote heavily in those primaries are liberals with a strong aversion to Bush.
So, mea culpa. I missed the obvious clue. And it's doubtful that most Connecticut voters will learn anything about the '03 caveat, because Lieberman's new TV ad, which excerpts the Sunday night speech, certainly doesn't mention that most of his clear and open disagreements were uttered three long years ago in the service of his higher ambitions.
"I have always leveled with you," he told voters Sunday night, "and I'm not going to stop now." Well, he's hardly the first politician to amend that kind of pledge. And it's entirely possible he will survive this primary anyway, no matter what the polls say. The closing paragraph of my print story says it all.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Joe slogs through the quagmire of his own Iraq remarks
Greetings from Connecticut, where beleaguered Joe Lieberman has only 36 hours to save his tuchis.
For those of you unfamiliar with Yiddish, I'm sure you can guess the synonym. But if you're more familiar with football, let's put it this way: With fourth down and 30 at his own 10 yard line, the hawkish Democratic senator has to throw a successful Hail Mary pass in order to score a miracle finish and thus save his own...ass.
The Connecticut Senate Democratic primary is tomorrow, antiwar challenger Ned Lamont is on top in the polls, and this has indeed prompted Lieberman to throw that Hail Mary. He did it last night. He would have preferred, like all candidates, to finish his campaign with one of those affirmative, upbeat cliches about his ongoing desire to work his heart out for working families all over his great state -- and thus say as little as possible about his ongoing support for the war in Iraq. Instead, and apparently amidst great internal debate within his campaign, he decided to confront the war, to explain and defend himself on the issue that threatens to sink his career.
Clearly he is still sensitive about the charge (widely believed in this state) that he has been a toady for President Bush on the most critical issue of our time, a Democrat whose idea of "bipartisanship" was to back Bush on the war without getting anything in return. So, in his speech last night (which was hurriedly added to his stump schedule), he mentioned that he has at times faulted Bush for not having a postwar plan, not putting enough troops on the ground, and not enlisting enough international allies. He said, "I know as well as anyone we have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq, and we have suffered more casualties than we should have..."
But a lot of Democratic senators, including Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize that war, yet they haven't been similarly targeted by antiwar opponents. The grievances against Lieberman go deeper. Last November, for instance, he wrote on the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page that Democratic dissenters on the war run the risk of undermining the commander in chief. This admonition infuriated Connecticut war critics, who for some reason view dissent as a free exercise of the First Amendment.
This is the war issue that Lieberman especially tried to address last night. But I don't think that, in his argument, he succeeded in defusing the antiwar ire, and here's why:
After declaring, "I not only respect your right to disagree or question the President, I value it," he contended that his Wall Street Journal remark "has been widely misconstrued." He stated: "I did not suggest that the President or anyone else, including me, should be immune from criticism...The point I was trying to make was about how we disagree. My concern was, and remains, that if opponents or supporters of the war go beyond disagreeing, to exploiting the war for partisan political purposes...we could lose more than an election. We could put our mission in Iraq, the lives of thousands of American soldiers carrying it out, and our national security at risk. That is what I care about, and that is what I will not let happen."
But his Wall Street Journal remarks did not draw any such distinctions. The full context of what he said last November reads like a blanket warning to Democrats about any kind of dissent: "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander-in-chief for three more critical years and that, in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."
The Journal remarks imply that any Democratic dissent will hurt Bush's credibility -- whereas, in reality, the factual record demonstrates that it is Bush and his war planners who have hurt their own credibility. Lieberman did not acknowledge that point in November, nor did he address it last night.
And with reference to his comments last night about how nobody should use the war "for partisan political purposes": Again, that can be read as a general admonition against discussing the war in the context of elections. Elections are, by definition, partisan and political. Elections are also the place where issues are aired and elected leaders are held accountable (or not) by the voters who elect them. It is inevitable that controversial wars will become issues in partisan elections. Certainly that's what happened with Vietnam -- as Lieberman well knows, because he was active on the antiwar side...during the highly partisan elections of 1970.
So I doubt that Lieberman's eleventh-hour explanations will sway many of the Democrats who are determined to punish him for the war. And any time a politician has to spend the closing hours of a campaign saying things like "the point I was trying to make," it's not a good sign. When a pol is playing defense, he is not on offense. If he's not on offense, he's flirting with defeat.
But what magnitude of defeat? The polls are all over the place, because nobody here knows how to measure the intensities of a dog-days-of-August primary electorate -- who will show up, and who won't, and why. The Quinnipiac University poll released last week had Lamont beating Lieberman by 13 percentage points. This morning, the same poll has Lamont up by six. I can't explain that. The ultimate question for tomorrow is this: Can the passion for saving Joe match or exceed the passion for punishing Joe?
For those of you unfamiliar with Yiddish, I'm sure you can guess the synonym. But if you're more familiar with football, let's put it this way: With fourth down and 30 at his own 10 yard line, the hawkish Democratic senator has to throw a successful Hail Mary pass in order to score a miracle finish and thus save his own...ass.
The Connecticut Senate Democratic primary is tomorrow, antiwar challenger Ned Lamont is on top in the polls, and this has indeed prompted Lieberman to throw that Hail Mary. He did it last night. He would have preferred, like all candidates, to finish his campaign with one of those affirmative, upbeat cliches about his ongoing desire to work his heart out for working families all over his great state -- and thus say as little as possible about his ongoing support for the war in Iraq. Instead, and apparently amidst great internal debate within his campaign, he decided to confront the war, to explain and defend himself on the issue that threatens to sink his career.
Clearly he is still sensitive about the charge (widely believed in this state) that he has been a toady for President Bush on the most critical issue of our time, a Democrat whose idea of "bipartisanship" was to back Bush on the war without getting anything in return. So, in his speech last night (which was hurriedly added to his stump schedule), he mentioned that he has at times faulted Bush for not having a postwar plan, not putting enough troops on the ground, and not enlisting enough international allies. He said, "I know as well as anyone we have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq, and we have suffered more casualties than we should have..."
But a lot of Democratic senators, including Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize that war, yet they haven't been similarly targeted by antiwar opponents. The grievances against Lieberman go deeper. Last November, for instance, he wrote on the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page that Democratic dissenters on the war run the risk of undermining the commander in chief. This admonition infuriated Connecticut war critics, who for some reason view dissent as a free exercise of the First Amendment.
This is the war issue that Lieberman especially tried to address last night. But I don't think that, in his argument, he succeeded in defusing the antiwar ire, and here's why:
After declaring, "I not only respect your right to disagree or question the President, I value it," he contended that his Wall Street Journal remark "has been widely misconstrued." He stated: "I did not suggest that the President or anyone else, including me, should be immune from criticism...The point I was trying to make was about how we disagree. My concern was, and remains, that if opponents or supporters of the war go beyond disagreeing, to exploiting the war for partisan political purposes...we could lose more than an election. We could put our mission in Iraq, the lives of thousands of American soldiers carrying it out, and our national security at risk. That is what I care about, and that is what I will not let happen."
But his Wall Street Journal remarks did not draw any such distinctions. The full context of what he said last November reads like a blanket warning to Democrats about any kind of dissent: "It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander-in-chief for three more critical years and that, in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."
The Journal remarks imply that any Democratic dissent will hurt Bush's credibility -- whereas, in reality, the factual record demonstrates that it is Bush and his war planners who have hurt their own credibility. Lieberman did not acknowledge that point in November, nor did he address it last night.
And with reference to his comments last night about how nobody should use the war "for partisan political purposes": Again, that can be read as a general admonition against discussing the war in the context of elections. Elections are, by definition, partisan and political. Elections are also the place where issues are aired and elected leaders are held accountable (or not) by the voters who elect them. It is inevitable that controversial wars will become issues in partisan elections. Certainly that's what happened with Vietnam -- as Lieberman well knows, because he was active on the antiwar side...during the highly partisan elections of 1970.
So I doubt that Lieberman's eleventh-hour explanations will sway many of the Democrats who are determined to punish him for the war. And any time a politician has to spend the closing hours of a campaign saying things like "the point I was trying to make," it's not a good sign. When a pol is playing defense, he is not on offense. If he's not on offense, he's flirting with defeat.
But what magnitude of defeat? The polls are all over the place, because nobody here knows how to measure the intensities of a dog-days-of-August primary electorate -- who will show up, and who won't, and why. The Quinnipiac University poll released last week had Lamont beating Lieberman by 13 percentage points. This morning, the same poll has Lamont up by six. I can't explain that. The ultimate question for tomorrow is this: Can the passion for saving Joe match or exceed the passion for punishing Joe?
Friday, August 04, 2006
Congress' message to workers making $5.15 an hour: rich people should keep more of their money
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.
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.
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