While some have noticed that there is no Southerner on either ticket, what's more interesting to me (and less remarked on generally) is that both Republicans are from the West. Reagan's style was at least partially derived from his region and we're likely to see, win or lose, a different Republican party emerging from this race.
After reading about the Democrat's delegate dilemma, this proposal by Senator Ben Nelson (D) seemed to strike almost the right chord:
Meanwhile, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Clinton supporter, raised the possibility of seating his state’s delegates based on the January vote — which Mrs. Clinton won 50 percent to 33 percent — but awarding each Florida delegate only half a vote at the August convention. That would mean that Mrs. Clinton would narrow the delegate gap with Mr. Obama by a net of 19 delegates, rather than the 38 she would have gained under the January result. She trails Mr. Obama by more than 100 delegates, according to most counts.
But why 1/2 a vote? Why not give the Floridian's a little more, let's say 10% more. Giving them 3/5ths a vote would have the added benefit that the DNC could sell access to a unique pay-per-view event, the press conference where reporters ask Barack Obama whether he's ok with counting delegates on a 3/5ths basis. Proceeds could go to a worthwhile charity, say the United Negro College Fund? It would be a train wreck of epic proportions, one that any political junkie worth his salt couldn't look away from.
People are people and the Dems already count too many delegates as less worthy of full voting rights. Either you're in the club and have the vote or you're out. This fractional voting idea is nonsense and historically insensitive nonsense at that.
RealClearPolitics provides the raw numbers on the delegates. After subtracting Florida and Michigan, there are 2642 Pledged Delegates in the pool. There are 795 Super Delegates as well for a total of 3437 seated delegates. You need 2025 to carry the nomination apparently (both RealClearPolitics and ABC News agree). This sets up a very strange situation where you need 58.9% of the seated delegates to get the nomination. At present time, with only 52 of Texas' 193 delegates assigned, there are only 752 delegates left to win and Obama has only 1280 Pledged delegates. If he gets all of them, he'll have 2032 delegates, 8 more than he needs to win the nomination. With Texas being called for Clinton, it's highly unlikely tonight that he'll get the nomination absent superdelegate votes and by morning it will be mathematically impossible as there will be only 611 Pledged Delegates left and Obama's not going to have 1414 Pledged Delegates come morning. He only has 1280 right now.
Absent the DNC lowering the 2025 figure or seating Michigan/Florida which puts 366 mostly Clinton delegates on the convention floor, the Democrat Party presidential nomination will be decided by the Super Delegates. The political junkies wet dreams will come to life this summer. The smoke filled rooms are back.
Well, I don't regret supporting Fred Thompson but I certainly hoped that he'd stick things out longer. The Republican party needed him and he folded. The country needed him too and his withdrawal leaves us with unappealing candidates all around.
It's going to be a very sad 4 years.
Now that I've got a job, I just donated to Fred Thompson. You should too. Here's a Fred donation link to make it easy.
This was my first political donation. It felt good. It also inflicted serious budgetary pain, but Fred's worth it.
The Democrats have been hauling out hoary cliches about this or that war being "another Vietnam" for years. Now Bush is ramming it right back down their throats and saying "welcome to the next 20 years in the political wilderness" as the GOP prepares to saw the McGovernite limb off as the Democrats have climbed too far out there to scamper back to mainstream credibility.
The Democrat "another Vietnam" move has always been about making the american people lose faith in the military to get the job done and lose heart and abandon the war and the war party, the GOP. This riposte telegraphs the upcoming GOP campaign for the american people to once again lose faith in the Democrats to lead on national security for another generation.
In short, this has very little to do with foreign affairs and everything to do with electoral politics. For a different view, you might try here, where Dr. Barnett takes a domestic politics free look at Bush's VFW speech. He's right, in a sense. Bush's speech doesn't serve the country well if what he's talking about is foreign policy. Fortunately Bush isn't.
Ultimately, I think will stick out Iraqification much as we stuck out Vietnamization and the new government will have a crucial advantage over the post-withdrawal S. Vietnam government. Their oil will provide them with enough funds to buy weapons sufficient for their defense no matter how craven and spiteful the US Congress becomes. That may be the Democrats' best hope to salvage their national security credentials going forward. Once we train the Iraqi military sufficiently, the Democrats won't be able to betray our friends to our enemies much as the net roots will want them to.
The July 30th death of Ayatollah Ali Meshkini is going to be an early indicator whether Rafsanjani's reputed strong majority in the 4th Assembly of Experts actually will vote together. Up for grabs is the Chairman's seat and a level of operational control of the chamber that will pick the next Supreme Leader of Iran. They'll be gathering sometime after August 23.
Are Senators crazy? This is the thought that occurs after reading Tony Blankley's latest. The US electorate is piling on in one direction and the US Senate is piling on in the opposite direction.
This is a recipe for electoral suicide and US Senators are not notable for senseless acts of political suicide. So why are they doing it? The Senate and House have amply shown that presidential leadership on an issue does not bring an automatic assent. The Dubai Ports World explosion shows that.
So why do it? This is where Blankley is really falling down on the job. He doesn't even ask the question because to ask the question is to answer it. What bad outcome is viewed as likely to happen if Mexico and the rest of Latin America doesn't have its unemployment woes significantly addressed by liberal US immigration policies? What kind of turmoil is brewing south of the border if we don't have a guest worker program? What bad effects are going to happen in the USA if the inevitable political instability of another 5 million mexicans get shoved back over the border (almost certain to be unemployed) leads to regime change in Mexico? Are these countries really that unstable?
It seems that 3/4ths of the Senate thinks that they are and are willing to risk their careers to avoid that bad outcome. This is a rare bit of political courage, especially since few seem to be willing to point out how humiliating it is for Mexico that they can't create enough jobs to absorb their own population's workers. Pointing out that reality is also a recipe for instability.
The key threat to Iraq's cohesiveness has never been Kurdish separatism or Sunni insurgency. It has always been that the Shiites would maintain cohesiveness for too long and dominate the early government. When the Shia have a united front, they cannot be turned aside and that means that they don't have to engage in the give and take and decent treatment of minorities because they don't have the proper fear that tomorrow they will be in the minority. This dangerous period may soon be passing. We'll know for sure in a few days. If SCIRI bolts UIA it's dead, as dead as Poland's Solidarity is dead. Thank God for that. And this means that the new government is depending on Sunni votes, an entirely positive outcome which will hopefully accelerate the transition of Sunnis from out in the cold and shooting at the system to being players inside the system and fighting those who want to tear it down.
If UIA dies, Sadr has an important decision to make. Does he go in opposition or does he enter into a national unity government and get what power he can? Or does he go for the brass ring and go all the way outside with his military wing? The last would be an utterly foolish choice but his backers may not give him an option. It's always been a mystery to me how tightly Iran hold's Sadr's strings. Here's another opportunity to find out.
HT: The Fourth Rail
The New Yorker recently ran a puff piece on a new proposal for the direct election of the President of the US. It astonishes me how such a piece ignores the greatest problem with the system, the increased influence that corrupt urban political jurisdictions will gain in the proposed system and the increased incentives for everybody to cheat.
Corrupt city administrations that engage in vote stealing often don't much matter for federal elections. they uniformly go one party legitimately so they don't change the party balance in the Congress. They are located in states that vote reliably for one party or the other and thus don't affect the Electoral College. Thus, they've been left to fester, a problem for the gubernatorial races and local administration but an electoral nullity. With direct election, this all changes.
Every stolen vote becomes a stolen vote that matters. Every election glitch that causes votes to be lost becomes a crisis for the system. And if even one state decides to monkeywrench the thing, the whole system might come crashing down.
It's a disaster in a 50 state federation.
Charlie Cook says that Democrats might not want congressional majorities and thus modulate their efforts to try to get a gain but not enough to tip control of Congress. This may very well be right and Charlie Cook is famous as an electoral prognosticator for good reason.
The problem with the scenario is that electoral gains are not so easily calibrated. Both the Republican party and the people have a say as to how many seats the Democrats have come January. If the Democrats are so foolish as to not actually try their best, they may find that instead of a satisfactory gain that sets them up for 2008 majorities, President Bush's electoral reputation will get burnished again as he survives yet another mid-term without losing seats in Congress.
President Carter is either a complete partisan hack or he's gone senile judging from this article. You can maintain that the NSA wiretap program is legal or illegal in my book. I think there's a fundamental grey area and President Bush went up to the edge of it to gain advantage for the intelligence services of the US and to the detriment of our enemies, foreign and domestic.
It's been admitted by all the principals in Congress that this administration has regularly briefed Congress regarding this NSA program and did it from the beginning right up to the point the operation was blown by the NY Times. It's likely that secret briefings are still ongoing. Democrats as well as Republicans were briefed in accordance with the procedures that the Congress has set up for highly classified programs. The ranking members and chairmen of the Intelligence committees as well as majority and minority leaders of each congressional house were briefed. That's the way they did it In Jimmy Carter's White House too.
Unfortunately, Carter's either forgotten or he just doesn't care much for the truth. He's throwing cheap, partisan gasoline on the fire to gain advantage for his side. That's despicable. The only excuse would be senility and at that point, shame on his handlers to let him shoot his mouth off like that.
Well, Hamas won and now everybody has to deal with it. President Bush in today's press conference took the bull by the horns:
Q Mr. President, is Mideast peacemaking dead with Hamas' big election victory? And do you rule out dealing with the Palestinians if Hamas is the majority party?THE PRESIDENT: Peace is never dead, because people want peace. I believe -- and that's why I articulated a two-state solution early in my administration, so that -- as a vision for people to work toward, a solution that recognized that democracy yields peace. And the best hope for peace in the Middle East is two democracies living side-by-side.
So the Palestinians had an election yesterday, and the results of which remind me about the power of democracy. You see, when you give people the vote, you give people a chance to express themselves at the polls -- and if they're unhappy with the status quo, they'll let you know. That's the great thing about democracy, it provides a look into society.
And yesterday the turnout was significant, as I understand it. And there was a peaceful process as people went to the polls, and that's positive. But what was also positive is, is that it's a wake-up call to the leadership. Obviously, people were not happy with the status quo. The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find health care.
And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories. I like the competition of ideas. I like people who have to go out and say, vote for me, and here's what I'm going to do. There's something healthy about a system that does that. And so the elections yesterday were very interesting.
On the other hand, I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if you have a -- if your party has got an armed wing. The elections just took place. We will watch very carefully about the formation of the government. But I will continue to remind people about what I just said, that if your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace. And we're interested in peace.
I talked to Condi twice this morning. She called President Abbas. She also is going to have a conference call today about the Quartet -- with the Quartet, about how to keep the process on the road to peace.
Steve.
Q If I can follow up, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Are you cautioning Prime Minister Abbas not to resign? And --
THE PRESIDENT: We'd like him to stay in power. I mean, we'd like to stay in office. He is in power, we'd like him to stay in office. Sorry to interrupt. I knew this was a two-part question, so I tried to head it off.
Q Will this affect aid to the Palestinians? Will you be able to work with Hamas if they're -- assuming they take on a large share of the government?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I made it very clear that the United States does not support political parties that want to destroy our ally, Israel, and that people must renounce that part of their platform. But the government hasn't formed yet. They're beginning to talk about how to form the government. And your question on Abbas was a good one. And our message to him was, we would hope he would stay in office and work to move the process forward.
Again, I remind people, the elections -- democracy is -- can open up the world's eyes to reality by listening to people. And the elections -- the election process is healthy for society, in my judgment. In other words, it's -- one way to figure out how to address the needs of the people is to let them express themselves at the ballot box. And that's exactly what happened yesterday. And you'll hear a lot of people saying, well, aren't we surprised at the outcome, or this, that, or the other.
If there is corruption, I'm not surprised that people say, let's get rid of corruption. If government hadn't been responsive, I'm not the least bit surprised that people said, I want government to be responsive.
And so that was an interesting day yesterday in the -- as we're watching liberty begin to spread across the Middle East.
President Bush, short version, unless you want an aid cutoff, Hamas, merge your militia into the PA armed forces and change your charter so it doesn't mandate war.
The EU, not being unitary, is less organized but it seems to be lining up on a parallel course. If Hamas wishes to be able to pay government salaries or even continue its own charitable work, it needs Western aid. That aid will not be forthcoming without a renunciation of violence and a merger of the PA armed forces with the Hamas militia under the PA banner.
I'm reading Dalrymple's latest and was shocked at this section:
I noticed one day that his mood had greatly improved; he was communicative and almost jovial, which he had never been before. I asked him what had changed in his life for the better. He had made his decision, he said. Everything was resolved. He was not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he had previously intended. Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could.Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies—enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it—and hence were legitimate targets.
I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters—and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.
The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy.
Of course, as a practical matter, we have the technical capability to end things rather quickly. Even the emaciated militaries of W. Europe are quite capable of massive destructive acts far beyond anything that Islamists are capable of generating. The destruction of the entire world, for that matter, would be a targeting exercise doable over a long lunch in the US, and possibly Russia. If the target list were restrained to muslim nations, the UK, France, and the PRC would find themselves in that list.
Yet the Islamists universally ignore the danger that even a fraction of these technical capabilities will ever be used. They cannot imagine that the nice restrained kaffirs can ever revert back to the internecine warriors who for centuries would regularly make the streets run with blood and were the most accomplished and cruel butchers on the planet. They pretend that they can. In fact, they try to provoke overreaction in order to galvinize more muslims to their extremist variants of Islam. I sincerely believe that they do not understand the explosives that they are playing with.
I remember being in Bucharest, watching the images of 9/11 unfold, nightmarishly on the TV. A relative asked me what the US will do. I reacted instinctively, but truly. "The US will wake up, and the world isn't going to like it." I stand by those words to this day. The US has woken up, and the world hasn't liked it.
I have no such instinctive knowledge of France. I know enough to see the players. Given the right combination of factors, we could see an awakened France. The world would like it even less. An awakened France would not have the internal checks and balances that the US system has that have restrained our reaction more than most outsiders understand.
The next President will be elected in 2007. Chirac is out and Villepin is going to fight with Sarkozy for leadership of the Gaullists. If Villepin wins the internal struggle, France will have soggy (Gaullist) and soggier (Socialist) toast as its major party electoral choices.
This leaves Le Pen as the only alternative for those who believe that there should be no mini-3rd world autocracies in France. It would be better for Sarkozy to win and provide a major party option for law and order. The worst result would be for Villepin to not only win but purge Sarkozy and his faction, driving them into an alliance with Le Pen's National Front.
If the National Front makes the Presidential 2nd round again, its an earthquake that rolls across the entire EU. In the worst case, a Sarkozy fortified NF would have a good shot at winning.
I'm spinning the stuff of nightmares here. It's much more likely that the NF will continue its slow rise, or even fall if Sarkozy provides a more respectable outlet for the law and order impulse. I do wish I knew more about the internal politics of France. The French may soon start to matter in a way they haven't in decades.
it seems that a federalist Constitution has passed out of the Iraqi parliament on the exact day that the leading cleric in Iraq came out against federalism. This provides a great opportunity for observers of Iraq to see the influence of Sistani, of religion in general among the Shia, of the impulse to national solidarity versus sectarian centrifugal forces.
If this constitution fails because the Sunnis vote in large numbers against the constitution and the Shia split with secularists voting for it and religiously influenced Shia joining the Sunnis to tank the thing, the neat scenarios of Iraq will all come undone on every side. This is as it should be if Iraq is going to ever survive over the long haul. Coalitions must shift, no one man will ever be guaranteed to be in a persistent majority. So when you find yourself in a majority, you will be conciliatory and moderate, knowing tomorrow it will be you in the minority position. This is a recipe for a mess. It's also a recipe for a civilized, democratic, Iraqi republic.
It appears that Crown Prince (and now king) Abdullah set out a roadmap for Saudi democracy earlier this year in conversation with State Department Secretary Rice. This is not new news (the statement was June 20), but it is severely undercovered news. I do wonder what the Religious Policeman thinks of it all or even if he's heard.
In any case, 20 years is a reasonable time line for progressive reform acts to spread the number of posts subject to election and to create a cadre of politicians capable of running the country. It's likely that Abdullah won't make it another 15 years so the big question is whether his successor will sign on to the plan.
Just told my wife about the French "non!" and she immediately put herself in the French elite's shoes.
Oh no! What will we do? Our nation is not as mentally retarded as we thought. We didn't brainwash them enough.
It's possibly the most honest commentary I'll read about the referendum all week.
With the French voting no on the EU constitution, there's a great deal of speculation going on about what it means. Let me be one of the early ones to ask, how did French muslims vote, yes or no (and why)? I don't expect to have a quick answer.
Ken Salazar believes that we shouldn't delay important business in the Senate by talking about judges that are controversial and will be filibustered. I think it's disingenuous but there's a legitimate point buried in there somewhere. The Senate is not normally a 24/7 shop. Simply add an hour on to Senate operating hours for every hour the Senate debates judges. That way the Senate will not overly delay other business by considering judges. If there were a shred of legitimate concern in this complaint, this measure would relieve it. I don't think, in the real world, that anybody on the left would be particularly happy if this compromise were offered.
Well, it looks like the Democrats didn't plant the Schiavo "talking points" memo. As soon as the fellow confessed, he resigned. Good riddance. It's sad that Mel Martinez couldn't get competent staff straight out the gate but hopefully he'll pick himself up, dust off, and do better with Brian Darling's replacement in future. I would be very surprised to hear the name Brian Darling associated with Republican politics in the future.
Captain's Quarters is an excellent blog (and where I found the Schiavo memo story) and I recommend that anybody but Canadians look around for its excellent commentary on a wide variety of issues. Canadians should consult the Gomery Commission and their legal counsel before proceeding to view such jury pool tainting stuff.
[self-censorship note: I originally had a link to CQ's front page around the word "proceeding" but deleted it because it might be too provocative.]
I'm going through the Democracy Corps March 2005 polling where this ugly piece reared its head and bit me
But even before that, in our March survey, we showed Bush and the Republicans quite vulnerable to a serious challenge. As a start, the Clinton family defeats the Bush family on who should lead the country in the years ahead. In a race between Senator Hillary Clinton and Florida Governor Jeb Bush for president, the Democrat wins by 3 points, 50 to 47 percent. She runs particularly well with young voters, women, including white women, college and unmarried women, and even holds a narrow advantage in the rural areas. She beats Bush by 7 points among independents and takes 11 percent of Republicans (greater than Bush’s vote with Democrats).
A Power Line item on Terri Schiavo talking points has this update:
UPDATE: Jon Miners writes: "The reason the authenticity of the Schiavo memo is not in dispute, is because those in a position to know haven't disputed it."
The question that nobody seems to be asking is whether not protesting a fraudulent document is a legitimate tactic in the political arena. On the pro side, there's generally no obligation to speak up to denounce crime anywhere. It also breaks up the he said/she said dynamic in media coverage by not providing any "she said" rebuttal. The mainstream media are then either forced to do their own work to verify or run stories that are fundamentally unbalanced and risk their careers if they end up backing fraudulent documents. In the end, the risk to career will force independent verification to come back in style.
On the other side, not issuing a denial means you have to do an awful lot more work and some people will believe the lie far longer than otherwise. Increasing the number of deluded, conspiracy theory believing people is not generally healthy in any democratic republic.
So which rationale is more convincing? I'm tending toward the innovators in this instance, at least for now. The down side of having a hard core of true believers who buy into all those documentary lies will hopefully not express itself violently. I'm willing to entertain emails to the contrary.
Phil Carter is still on his we're going to have a draft kick. It's idiocy because it commits one of the cardinal sins in predicting the future, assuming that things will continue to move in a straight line. This is the "if we continue to do [x] at the current pace" fallacy.
We're a democratic republic. Our system is all about putting feedback loops in place that stop us from doing unnecessary harm to ourselves by making the pain of doing so a real impetus for party change and policy shift in the halls of government. I've yet to see any analysis that shows that this feedback process is broken. In other words we won't have a draft because we'll cut back on doing things with our military and take a breather before we have to impose a draft.
If that means that the Iraqis have to live with an insurgency for another two years over optimal, that's going to have to be the price paid to retain our own system's capacity to do another Iraq if necessary. In other words, we won't ruin a very good military manpower system in order to hurry a process that, while necessary for our own security, does not have a set "drop dead" date. Like every other time in our nation's history, the real world will see the voters and the political class continually making shifts in order to avoid doomsday scenarios. We've only really failed to do it once, over slavery, and I hardly think we're going to go to those extremes over the issue of shrinking the Gap.
Michael Barone provides an outline of Republican cultural failure in an examination of the trustfunder left. He doesn't quite put it that way, but it is a damning indictment. Republicanism, as an ideology, is pro success, pro-wealth, pro-opportunity to achieve. But once you've achieved, once you've made it, there seems to be little effective work done to stop the guilt machine of the left to work on the rich and their progeny to convince them to turn on the very ethic and morals that propelled them to the heights that they have achieved.
Essentially, modern conservatism and libertarianism are both feeding into the maw of trust funder leftism that dominates that demographic today. This dooms the GOP and the right in general in the US to eventual doom unless they figure out how to fix the institutions that lead to this "rich man's leftism". I suspect that eventually the code will be broken but until it's drawn starkly as an electoral time bomb, the party won't wake up to its peril.
Prof. Bainbridge goes the wrong way in this post regarding a Hillary 2008 run. Hillary will be elected or defeated on the fundamental basis of her vision for America and how it should go forward from 2009-2013 when her term would end mid-January. What here husband did in the 12th hour of his time in the White House will be of little interest to anybody but those who are already voting against her. Investigations are simply not in the cards and not good for her Republican opponent, or even her Democrat primary opponents.
Hillary Clinton is likely to be scary enough that she will be defeated but only if the Republicans campaign against her, the candidate, and her ideas and policy prescriptions, not on her husband's political dirty deeds. Republicans already went through a round of going down that self-defeating electoral cul-de-sac. They don't need to revisit defeat again.
Hillary Care is a legitimate topic of discussion because she did it. She ran that task force. It would be appropriate to ask her whether she'd do it all over again the same way and, if not, what she's learned in the meantime. Asking her how she would handle transparency, honesty, and openness issues differently than 1992-2001 when her husband was President is also fair game if personally uncomfortable for her just as the same issue was raised for President GWB with regards to his father's policies.
Please, Republicans, spare us politically minded investigations. They should have been done in 2001-2003 if they were to be done at all.
Iraq's election results will likely come out one day late as protests and recounts force further checks to ensure the integrity of the vote. Considering our own election problems, a day behind schedule isn't too shabby. There doesn't seem to be too much shouting going on about the delay but it's useful to note it. I do wish we had a better scorecard so we even knew the parties who were sure to be seated and the parties on the edge who were fighting for representation.
David Adesnik gets the date wrong when Social Security is going to go into crisis. He views it as a matter of accounting. It is not. Social Security will be changed, at the latest, when a majority of the electorate knows that during their retirement years, their lifestyle will take a drop during the 2042 cuts.
The argument runs something like this:
When you're old, tired, have worked a lifetime, and really can't work anymore, the current social security program is going to take a dump on your financial balance sheet and you're going to end up having to ask "you want fries with that", "welcome to Wal Mart", or some other such low paid job that your tired, worn out body will still be barely capable of doing and will fill the hole in your financial resources. When it happens is up to the growth level of the US economy over the next few decades but our best guess is that you, personally, will get nailed sometime during your "golden years" with the bill for not reforming now.
It looks like there are 5 provinces on the "not so good" list in Iraq right now.
Sever: Salah al Din, Al Anbar
Worrisome: Baghdad, Diyala, Ninewa (where Mosul is)
Ryan Lizza is learning all the wrong lessons from the Democrat defeat on health care reform in the Clinton administration:
Defeat breeds defeat. In Clinton's case, time brought not only a more organized opposition but also a crush of events--a bruising budget battle, political scandals, international crises--that sapped his political capital and distracted him from focusing on health care. The lesson for Democrats is obvious: The harder it is for Bush to pass other parts of his agenda, the harder it will be for him to pass his Social Security plan. Conversely, easy Bush victories on his budget, energy bill, tort reform, and judicial nominees will strengthen his hand on Social Security. At one point in 1994, Clinton believed a swift victory on what seemed like an easy-to-pass crime bill could serve as a springboard to revive health care. But, rather than hold their fire for the health bill, Newt Gingrich and his troops launched an all-out attack on the crime bill that caught the White House completely off guard. Similarly, today some Democrats believe that a fight over a highly polarizing Supreme Court nominee could be the magic bullet that saps the energy from Social Security.
The idea a little further on that the Democrats are about to emerge as reformers real soon now makes an appearance:
Many Democrats today argue that their route back to power depends on transforming themselves into a party of reform. Some of these Democrats are scared that mere opposition--and denying Bush's claim that Social Security faces a "crisis"--hampers their efforts. But Republicans faced the same challenge in the early '90s and found that the two goals were not mutually exclusive. They didn't just kill health care reform, they used its corpse as a platform to redefine themselves as a reform movement that swept away the Democratic majority.
Maybe a decade from now such an agenda will exist and the Democrats will come storming back. I doubt it will come so soon. The Democrats have yet to really face the reality that they're no longer the majority party and the Republicans have yet to grow in arrogance enough to need to be booted out.
The Chicago Tribune analysis of GOP implosion really lays out some of the major reasons why I've been nervous about returning to Illinois. With the GOP losing credibility on both wings, Democrat corruption on the march in Chicago, it's tough to see how the state is going anywhere but down over the long haul.
Depressing.
HT: watersblogged
Robert Kuttner must be living in some alternate dimension. In his world
There's a standard story about partisan gridlock: The American electorate is mostly middle of the road. The voters want the parties to work together and solve national problems. Both parties have become captured by extremists.As columnist David Broder has written, "Washington has become such a partisan cockpit, with constant sniping between the parties on Capitol Hill and gridlock in the House and Senate."
The voters have to be sick of partisan wrangling and worried about unsolved national ills. But everything else about this fable is wrong.
For starters, one party has indeed been captured by extremists, but the other one has moved steadily toward the center.
Radically reconstructing civil marriage through the courts instead of the legislature in this world turns into a kumbayah desire for tolerance "[o]nly on issues of tolerance -- gay rights, women's rights, rights of the disabled, affirmative action -- have Democrats continued to push democracy outward, and they have paid dearly." Perhaps they've paid dearly because a working majority of american voters understand that tolerance isn't what is being pushed here.
The parallel universe comparisons go on and on. Democrats won't ever gain power again without coming out of their alternate universes and gaining a better appreciation of the real one that we all live in. In the old days, you used to be able to get away with this sort of trickery because ordinary people had limited access to alternative story lines and news facts. That world is gone forever and good riddance.
If Abbas had been elected in the US, we'd already know how long his term was, and speculation would already be starting on who would be opposing him for reelection. Maybe it's just my tired brain but I can't even figure out how long his mandate is for. Anybody can have an election once. They can even have a new one at the death of the previous strongman but that's not democracy.
Jonathan Gewirtz graciously posts about one of my previous items something entitled Libertarian Clueless III wherein I take to task the go for broke all or nothing libertarians who seem so dominant in the LP today. While reading through the site further thoughts came to me on fixing the LP:
I do not agree that the LP is inevitably dead. With so few dues paying LP members, a committed band of reasonable libertarians can take over just about any party organ and run candidates who have a chance of winning. I think that a reasonable set of principles for candidates would sound something like this:1. I believe that Thomas Jefferson was right when he said that that government which governs least, governs best
2. I believe that we can do better at following his advice than our current crop of politicians are doing
3. I believe that improving our government by governing less will better meet the needs of all the people
4. I believe that forcing changes without first showing the happy ending of better government is short sighted and impractical. Small government is a habit which serves the people well and I pledge to work tirelessly to not only reduce government but create the societal consensus to make those changes stick.
5. I believe in humane transitions from the old to the new so that people are never sacrificed for principle.There is nothing in this statement of candidate principles that should be objectionable to a sane LP. Such a statement would be objected to because it would leave in place certain forms of coercion for a time until public opinion understood the solution and the coercive law or regulation would be removed. A second objection would be leveled at the extra coercively extracted expenses on transition costs. Both objections are in error and desire Bismarck's tasty sausage without the disturbing sausage making.
The problem for libertarians who want to actually affect policy is that the LP is the crazy uncle who you just can't get rid of. Every time you start to make headway you either have to hide your libertarianism or you have to deal with the fact that the LP has poisoned the well and turned off many of your potential partners. The LP must be fixed because the all or nothing libertarians won't ever let it die.
I think that the Washington election for governor provides an interesting opportunity for Republicans in 2006. With the mid-count judicially imposed rule change only affecting counties that had not certified their elections to that point, Democrats got a great bonus as the only county that had not certified by that point was King County, a Democrat stronghold. If a future statewide race shows a similar close result, it would be a great symbol for all the Republican county election officials to refuse to certify their own counties until the lawsuit had settled the rules. This would have the dual effect of dramatically publicizing Democrat attempts at voter disenfranchisement and actually eliminating the intended effect, that Republican counties vote under one set of rules while Democrat strongholds vote under a different set.
You read it here first.
The Liberals won the Romanian presidency
The preliminary official numbers are as follows:
Traian Basescu 51,75%
Adrian Nastase 48,25%
Prime Minister Nastase has conceded.
This means that the head of state is now Liberal while who will form the government and select a prime minister is still unclear with the Social Democrats having the right to try first. To make the math work, they need to get to 167 seats.
Their electoral alliance socialist/humanist got 132 seats. Add in the hungarian chauvinist party's 22 seats and they have 154, 13 shy. The only other available source of votes are the minority parties.
Romania's constitution gives 18 recognized minorities 1 seat each in the House of Deputies (lower house) and, for the first time under the current constitution, they're the power brokers. If the liberals can pull 6 of them to their side, the PSD can't form a government without going to the PRM, something that would absolutely kill Romania's chances for integration with the EU and guarantee a PSD defeat in 2008.
But taking on each minority deputy means taking on a different party's demands for patronage and policy input. If the PSD goes for the minimum number to form a government, they'll have a 16 party coalition. If they get all the minority parties in, they'll have a 21 party coalition.
Any student of parliamentary politics knows that this has very little chance to last the full parliamentary term. Early elections are all but foregone in that scenario.
The people who really run Romania in the smoke filled back rooms do not want early elections. They've never wanted early elections, seeing it as a nasty step backwards towards the post WW II Italian laughingstock model of politics.
The latest is that the humanists are talking of bolting the social democrats. The hungarian chauvinists are saying all bets are off if the humanists do that, and all of a sudden, a liberal government seems very possible.
The back rooms are still full of smoke and the deal makers are wheeling and dealing in an opera that would make Boss Tweed or Mayor Daley (either one) smile and nod in recognition of the very familiar rhythms of power ebbing and flowing among the people who really matter.
Some day, the bosses will be broken in Romania as Tammany Hall was broken, but not today, not today. That's going to be a generational fight, hopefully starting in 2008.
Fred Barnes has a few words to help out those who have stumbled the past few years in understanding George W Bush. GWB is:
Activist
Outsider
Press-Basher
Surpriser
Visionary
Barnes nails it and it's surprising how few in the mainstream have figured out Bush as well. The Presidency is the most powerful post in the world and everybody analyzes the President, no matter who it is or how long he'll serve. Bush constantly surprises but he's an open book if you just look the right way. It's not like any of these characteristics were hidden over the past four years.
Richard Nadler does excellent work debunking anti-immigration agitprop, specifically that somehow the Democrats, and the left in general, own the vote of Hispanics.
It turns out that where hispanic voters are actually presented with a Republican/conservative message in their local/spanish language media the vote shifts significantly over areas where such campaigns are not run. This means that there are significant opportunities for Republicans to become competitive in that vote and thus it makes sense to court them extensively. If the Hispanic bloc shifts from its current 2:1 Democrat tilt to a more balanced 1:1, or even better for Republicans, the Democrat party is going to have one more huge secular demographic trend going against them.
It's going to be an interesting next couple of decades in US political demography.
Russia should look to the UK/US relationship if it is serious about its need to maintain influence over Ukraine. The UK has good relations when it has an ideologically friendly party alignment (center-right Thatcher with center-right Reagan, center-left Blair with center-left Clinton) as well as opposite ideological tendencies (center-left Blair with center-right Bush).
If Russia could generate that sort of relationship, appeal both to western Ukraine as well as the more russified eastern section, it wouldn't have to put its thumb on the scales and spend so much political capital ensuring that "Russia's man" won the election. All the major parties would nominate people acceptable to Russia. This is going to be difficult because Russia has not been a good steward of Ukraine, dominating instead of partnering.
Russia has the same problem that the US has in Latin America where it has heavy handedly intervened in the past. You can get a lot of votes in Brazil by promising to spit in Uncle Sam's eye. That's always been the case. Spitting in Moscow's eye is always going to generate opportunity for Ukraine's political class. That's going to be the case until the first time Russia puts its thumb on the scales to prefer an honest pol coming out of Ukraine's west and figures out how that politician can be successful while Russia is happy in its essential interests.
Dr. Barnett has the question right when he addressed this issue. The only problem with his approach is that he seems to think that we're the ones who should be asking it. We should not. It's Russia's problem to solve and us butting our noses in that relationship infantilizes Russia and will inevitably cause resentment.
President Bush has got it about right. Electoral irregularities need to be adjudicated and settled by Ukrainian institutions before we, or anybody else, recognize one or the other candidates. Can you imagine if some country had recognized Gore during the recount phase in 2000? It wouldn't have been better if a country recognized Bush during that same period.
The situation in Ukraine is not settled, according to the law. If the courts find fraud, Russia should stay out. In fact, the best thing we should all do is to sit on our hands and let Russia be the first to recognize the official results. That would be a tremendous statement of respect and deference to Russia that would cost us absolutely nothing but could salvage honor and pride in the East.
Well, it looks like Romania's deadlocked its political system this election. For those not in the know, Romania has a French electoral system with both prime minister and president. Parties elect parliamentarians based on party lists and parties receiving less than 5% of the vote are out of the running.
The presidential race results are as follows
1. Adrian Nastase 38.07% (incumbent prime minister, neo-com)
2. Traian Basescu 35.46% (classic liberal)
3. Corneliu Vadim Tudor 11.97% (racist romanian)
4. Marko Bela 6.81% (racist hungarian)
5. Gheorghe Coriolan Ciuhandu 1.90% (christian democrat, late entry)
6. George Becali 1.83% (soccer entrepreneur)
7. Petre Roman 1.48% (social democrat/neo-com)
So we're off to the runoffs with Adrian Nastase and Traian Basescu facing off in two weeks. Basescu looks pretty good to win unless Nastase can make some pretty good deals for both sets of ethnic extremists, romanian and hungarian (hey, we're less chauvinist than France!).
The parliament seems deadlocked
House of Deputies
1. PSD + PUR 34.12%
2. PNL - PD 32.90%
3. PRM 12.50%
4. UDMR 8.08%
5. To be assigned 12.40%
There is little chance for a majority government forming. Even if the PSD & PUR went and partnered with PRM, an event that would make the Austrian Freedom party partnership look like a minor kerfuffle, they would only have 47.43% of the seats, not enough to make the pain worthwhile. Since the UDMR, a hungarian nationalist party that is every bit as chauvinist as PRM, can't stand the PRM, there's no available coalition except PSD&PUR + PNL&PD which would be suicidal for all concerned except PSD who get their vote like turn of the century ward politicians did in Boston, NYC and Chicago. They buy it.
The Senate vote is similarly split:
1. PSD + PUR 34.44%
2. PNL - PD 33.21%
3. PRM 13.11%
4. UDMR 8.15%
5. To be assigned 11.09%
Apparently, certain minor parties had slates for the lower house but not the upper which increased the major party vote in the upper house.
A small note on the neo-com label, which is short for neo-communist. This is not your father's communism. It has all the ideology, flag waving and other veneers stripped off and all that's really left is the hunger for other people's money and dishonesty. The neo-coms are largely supported by the opportunist class, a fickle group but the neo-coms know how to be good butt kissers.
HT: @rgumente
460 Diplomats sign protest letter arguing that the recent national elections were stolen. This is betting your professional career, and perhaps more, if the pro-Russia side of the current electoral strife ends up winning. Don't be surprised if there is a rash of political asylum applications if Yanukovych carries the day.
Some Democrats are advising a retreat to an urban only strategy. This is breathtakingly stupid for several reasons. The first is that the Republican party has an urban policy to go along with its policy for suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. You might or might not agree with it but Republicans have something to say about improving the lives of all of the people.
If Democrats cede that ground and become an "I don't care" party once you leave the urban core, they will not only get trounced in non-urban areas but will also come under pressure in some of their urban strongholds. An awful lot of people in urban areas want to move to the suburbs. An even greater number of them have parts of their families in suburbia, other parts in the urban core. Saying my party doesn't care what happens to your relatives is a good way to lose those voters.
Other problems are that urban areas are going through their own adjustments and it's not that friendly to Democrats. When did the last mayor leave NYC's Gracie Mansion? It was David Dinkins in 1993. NYC has had a decade of Republican rule. From what I understand, Republican registration has more than doubled during that time to the 20% range. How brain dead do you have to get to lose mayoral elections when you have 80% of the vote registered for your party?
Even as a liberal wet dream, the archipelago strategy of retreat and regroup in urban centers doesn't pass the laugh test. Unfortunately, I think it's likely to gain some adherents on the left.
They've set a date for Iraqi elections, January 30. By my count that makes it 70 days of hard, violent struggle until elections and finally we can start to see whether democracy will make a difference in Iraq. I think it will. I think that we will end up having a reprise of Afghanistan, a lot of apocalyptic talk, a lot of fear, even among the participants, who will get up and go vote on election day even though they think they might die of it.
For those in the US, 70 days seems like an awfully short campaign period. It's not, as a great many elections are run under just that sort of tight window in parliamentary systems around the world.
Remember the Wisconsin tire slashing incident where 20 Republican rental vans had their tires slashed to try to drive down the Milwaukee Republican vote? Arrests have been made and surprise, surprise, it's a Democrat hothead (the son of a congresswoman) and, surprisingly, a trucked in Democrat party official from Virginia.
I'm not too fond of dirty tricksters on either side of the political divide. At best, you get a cheap laugh and grudging admiration for a work of destructive art. Slashing tires is just mean and scary and I hope both parties in Milawaukee can keep things from spiraling to the next level in the campaign sewer.
The rumors about offering Agriculture to Sen Ben Nelson (D), if true, indicate a few things. Republicans both want to get as close as possible to 60 Senators in that house and Republican Agricultural policy under President Bush is either nonexistent or can adequately progress without the Secretary of the Department being a Republican.
I don't buy into the idea that there are no significant ideas inside the Republican party to improve agriculture so what gives? I think the answer comes in three letters, WTO. With the expiration of the "peace accords" on agriculture, we're going to be forced, step by step, down the road to reduced tariffs, liberalization of markets, and generally the small government approach.
This is going to occur regardless of who controls the Department so why not buy a Senate seat (a Republican governor would nominate Nelson's successor) with a Cabinet post and gain credit for a measure of bipartisanship while you're at it. Sure, you lose some patronage posts and boy do the Democrats need them, but the cost is well worth the gain. If Rove hasn't made such an offer, he should.
Dick Morris is right when he says that the election wasn't won on abortion but he obviously wasn't paying attention when he selected his example of unacceptable behavior on judicial nominations. Rehnquist votes pro-life so substituting Thomas for Rhenquist would not change the balance but neither would putting in a pro-life nominee to substitute for Thomas. The voting balance on abortion issues would not change a bit with Roe being defended and occasional regulatory measures passing SC scrutiny.
Morris really loses it on analyzing tax reform and Social Security. There is no possible way that any reform isn't going to be intensely scrutinized for Morris to say
Everybody knows Bush would rather die than raise taxes, so people will trust him to make the package at least revenue-neutral.
Morris' Social Security idea of indexation to a fixed average retirement benefit is vulnerable in the out years to exactly the sort of pandering that has got us in the current mess. Seniors will likely vote for somebody who adds a year to the average retirement benefit in good times and will severely punish those who want to subtract a year when the economic burden starts choking growth. It's this one way ratchet effect that is at the heart of the social welfare conundrum faced all over the free world. By shifting towards a market based system, we escape the ratchet effect.
Morris should have dipped into his reserves and submitted an evergreen reserve column. He embarrassed himself with this one.
In a multi-post symposium over the future of libertarianism (I’d link but there is no search box) comes this gem
Secondly, and lastly, the commenter asks me how I can find the federal government too incompetent to deliver the mail, yet trust it to spread democracy. Well, I am all for postal privatization, but, you know what -- the mail, ultimately, does get delivered.
The government is more than willing to provide solutions. They might be inefficient, provide precedent for all sorts of long-term threats to our liberty, might even be counterproductive when examined more closely but when you have something and you’re trying to compete with it by offering nothing, nothing will lose most every time.
That’s a real challenge to libertarianism because while the reality is that the replacement is not “nothing” in the libertarian system, it very much is “nothing political” with private action substituting for public. With private action and public action fully bifurcated, this reasonably translates into “nothing” in the public mind because work in the public interest done by private groups is not generally connected to the political work necessary to avoid government crowding out private action. How to make that connection in the public mind is one of libertarianism’s greatest challenges at the moment.
For those of us who have our heads out in the sunlight (instead of stuck in an orifice) who believe that smaller government would be better for society, we inevitably come to a big problem. Big government solutions will always have an attractiveness to politicians because, unlike small government solutions, they can be readily identified with a party, with a politician, can be packaged into a brochure that says "I did this, reelect me". Aside from any ideological positions a particular pol may have, all politicians deeply desire the ability to say such things because they are the fundamental, bedrock argument for reelection and a continuing career for the politician. Personal interest must be taken into account.
The small government advocate's cupboard of accomplishments is always going to be less well stocked than his big government brethren's. The problem is easily illustrated by President Bush's father President GHWB with his thousand points of light. A charity is started, does GHWB get the credit for it? The practical answer is generally not, even though his creating a space for that charity might have been crucial in the decision for it to be called into existence. Another charity increases its activities, is GHWB credited? Again, no, as it might have done so anyway.
The social good that a small government politician does is only partially captured by current mechanisms while the social good that a big government politician does is counted and counted again as it's the gross good, not the net that gets credited to him. Indirect, negative private effects are seldom linked unless they are very obvious and such negative effects often take many years to show up as Atlee in the UK and Wagner in NYC played to their benefit.
This is an insight that, unfortunately I don't have a definitive answer for. Perhaps someone will suggest something in comments.
Bush enlarged his catholic vote from 47% to 52% while Kerry saw Catholic support drop from Al Gore's 50% to 47%. The Catholic vote for Other drops from 3% to 1%. But who were these voters? The exit poll service attendance numbers tell the tale.
Bush rose only marginally (1%) in service attendees who go at least weekly. His great increase in religious voters were in the nominally religious who go monthly or less often (3%-4%). I would guess that in the nominal group, we're disproportionately talking about "christer" Catholics, a priestly term for those who show up CHRISTmas and eastER and are no-shows throughout the rest of the year. This does not jibe very well with the "jesusland" critique launched by many on the left. A crusading army of twice a year Catholics is just not something that most people worry much about and, hopefully when serious election analysts point this out, Democrat partisans will drop the jesusland meme in quiet embarrassment.
But what is it that drove occasional Catholics into Bush's arms? It likely was the hierarchy for many of them. Any voter literature left at church would have been unread, any social group inside a parish would most likely target the guys who showed up on a regular basis. The only factors that a generally non-attending Catholic would pick up would be episcopal announcements and Kerry's heresy trial in Boston and the heresy trial was kept very, very quiet and inside baseball.
That pretty much leaves the bishops in the drivers seat, able to shift significant numbers of nominal Catholics and likely to be gearing up for a continuation of their strategy to improve the Catholic conscience in ways that secular vote counters will ignore at their peril. The Bishops seem to be out to create a true Catholic vote. Both parties need to take notice or become a permanent minority.
Available here, it provides a wealth of information (if it's accurate, I'm still waiting to find out the facts on the early exit poll debacle). Here are a few important stats that the professionals will be chewing over for the next couple of months.
George W Bush carried the senior vote 54%-46%. Social Security reform is a go!
If you earned more than $50k your income group was pro-Bush, the higher you earned, the more this was true.
GWB got about 40% of the union household vote, 38% of the actual union vote. My understanding is that this is historically high for Republicans, you usually get about a third of the union vote.
Kerry continues the odd Democrat party trend on education. Democrats do well with the super-educated and the badly educated while Republican voter education stats look more like the conventional bell shape.
Republicans have pulled even in party ID. If Zogby doesn't go into the tank and change his methodology, he (and all the other pollsters who use party ID screens from the most recent presidential race) should be getting more Republican tilting polling results for the next four years.
There was a 7% point difference between those who think Kerry attacked unfairly (67%) and Bush attacked unfairly (60%).
Surprisingly, Kerry did his best on terrorism among people who were very worried about terrorism (56%-44%) while Bush did best among those who were somewhat worried about it (56%-43%). The somewhat worried group is over twice as large as the very worried group.
Now that the election is over, we can find out whether the right wing moonbat theories about George Soros manipulating oil to influence the US election had any basis in reality. If we've got $30 oil in 3-6 months, there are going to be a great many forensic accountants looking into things to see how much political manipulation was going on. I hope this bit of conspiratorialist talk on the right turns out to be false but look for it to be, quietly, followed up on.
Maybe the international observers should have headed to S. Dakota where Tom Daschle attempted to get Republicans barred from monitoring to prevent fraud at polling stations on indian reservations. Supposedly, they were rolling their eyes and making faces, which intimidated people from voting.
I'm sorry, elections are an adversarial process and you have poll watchers from both sides to keep things honest. That's just the facts of life. To try to remove observers in precisely the zones held under greatest suspicion of pro-Democrat voter fraud in the tight senatorial election of 2002 doesn't come close to passing the smell test.
What do they make american indians out of in N. Dakota, two parts cowardice, three parts servility? The idea that somebody rolling his eyes at me are enough to drive me away from voting is insulting. If I were the subject of such a lawsuit to "protect" me, I would feel humiliated that I wasn't considered to have a strong enough character to exercise my rights under anything but hothouse conditions.
For shame, Sen. Daschle.
Reading about election day illegalities steams me. This article on Wisconsin problems has two knuckleheads blocking a Kerry campaign parking lot (removed but not arrested) and 30 GOP vans rented to help get out the vote had their tires slashed.
We're just at the beginning folks. It looks ugly.
Steven Den Beste has a rare update announcing some endorsements made by others regarding the 2004 US presidential election. I think it's pretty safe to say SDB's not a Kerry fan.
A new tape seems to have definitively answered the "is he dead" question in the negative. Bin Laden's alive, more than a bit grayer, and while not specifically endorsing Kerry, seems to clearly be an ABB (anybody but Bush) kind of guy (maybe he's a heartbroken Deaniac).
Vote accordingly.
Putting aside the presidential race for a moment a new poll has huge implications on the War On Terror (WOT).
Where the poll got interesting was on the war. 69% said the war on terror was a real war as opposed to a figurative war. The Republicans were most likely to feel that way at 87% and the Democrats least likely to feel that way at 56%. Independents were at 65%. Interestingly, this quesiton really captures the 9/11 mentality, I think. When asked if the war was being waged too aggressively, not aggressively enough, or just right, surprisingly 32% said not aggressively enough with 35% saying just right. Only 25% thought it was being waged too aggressively. When asked which candidate would "more aggressively fight the war on terrorism," 61% said George Bush and only 25% said John Kerry.The question in the poll that stood out was "do you think it is more important to win the war in Iraq or end the war in Iraq?" 46% said win and 46% said end. Republicans at 69% said win and only 23% of Democrats said win. Among Independents, 46% said win and 45% said end.
What I truly wish would be that this section of the poll gets expanded out and run internationally. The expansion would ideally detail both the consequences of WOT being a real war and answer the question of who started and who can stop this war.
Did the WOT start when George W Bush proclaimed it or did prior Al Queda attacks start it? If a new president stops fighting the WOT as a war and takes a law enforcement approach, does that mean that the war is over or do underlying facts have to change in our enemies before the war can be over? What has to happen, who has to give up for the war to end? And, most provocatively, do the people know and understand our enemies' war aims, what we would have to do for them to declare victory?
I suspect that if the poll were taken among the political elite and among the general population, a huge, yawning chasm would appear in their responses. In this bifurcated nation between the people and the powerful, it would be President Bush on the side of the people, with the powerful's champion being Senator Kerry.
For those who don't regularly check in to his site anymore, he's got a special item over at the USS Clueless that is positively brief, for him. It's very counterintuitive to think that Gallup's famously optimistic Bush September polling results were actually a plot to set up Kerry for an October comeback story line that would have Kerry cresting on election day and taking the presidency.
As always, a provocative item.
Apparently there's a draft Lileks for Senate movement and he's not in favor. He obviously doesn't know about one of the prime benefits of a Senator. You can say what you want, have it published in every library in the country within a week on the taxpayer's dime, and you are your own editor. Do you want to talk about recipes? I've seen an entire chapter of a book devoted to senatorial recipes read into the Congressional Record. Don't care to bother standing up and reading it? You can have it inserted without even showing your face in Washington. Do you regret some language you used on the floor of the Senate? You've got days to magically edit out all your blunders. It's a wordsmith's dream, I tell you.
Kerry's a classic liberal on affirmative action. It's nothing much new and it'll be more of the same.
Bush's response is pretty classic conservative, set up a fair environment and let people achieve. The benefit of reelection campaigning is that he's got statistics showing that it's working.
Wasn't this supposed to be the domestic policy debate? It's at least 1/3 foreign policy and Schieffer isn't coralling things to where they should be.
Schieffer should have done the work to at least find a formulation that wasn't quoting a Kerry talking point.
Kerry wants to double the special forces. If we actually could do it, I'd welcome that but they just can't seem to graduate more people through the programs without lowering standards. Lower standard special operators means more casualties.
But boy it sure sounds good.
Schieffer asks whether Bush would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Bush says there will be no litmus tests for his judges. Kerry says he will have litmus tests. What a difference in principle.
Kerry wants a $7 minimum wage saying 9.2 million women will benefit. How many of those people will actually have jobs he leaves out.
$0.76 on the dollar? Oh. My. God. Comparable worth will make a comeback under President Kerry? Ugh!
Bush is sticking to his guns on immigration reform and pitched temporary worker cards without amnesty.
The borders are more leaky today according to Kerry (next round he back tracked a bit). Kerry just came out in favor of both amnesty and employer immigration raids.
At least both of them agree that getting more people to work is what is going to fix the economy.
Thank God somebody finally said that doing nothing is the worst option.
Kerry's plan takes benefit cuts off the table and any changes other than raising social security taxes.
Wow, Kerry just went against Alan Greenspan on Social Security. That's going to give Rubin and the Wall Street boys heartburn.
Kerry's healthcare sales pitch sounds an awful lot like Bush's Social Security reform plan from four years ago. You aren't forced to do anything but it's going to be an awfully good offer.
Bush just played with a bit of fire by attacking "major news network" credibility. I wonder if Schieffer's going to get back at Bush over it.
Kerry's stepping badly by bringing up drug reimportation when the flu vaccine (made in the UK) is widely contaminated.
Unfortunately, Bush didn't take the opportunity to make the connection.
This is something of a "Kerry only" question. Bishops are condemning politicians who take positions like Kerry and what is Bush supposed to say? He's got a decent segway into talking in favor of the culture of life but there should have been more for him to grab hold of.
Bush professes that he's not sure whether homosexuality is a choice or inborn. Kerry's sure that it is not a choice. As far as I can tell the science is closer to Bush. I wonder who is going to slam Kerry for not waiting for the science?
Quick, somebody check to see if Kennedy's had a stroke. Bush just called Kennedy the "conservative Senator from Massachussetts".
It's nice to see the idea of automation as a source of job loss being addressed in the debate.
Did Kerry really just compare President Bush to Tony Soprano? Why yes, yes he did.
In a season where Republicans are being more vilified than any time since the 'Daisy ad' slammed Goldwater so vilely.
A bad round for Kerry? No extension on that round. Let's see if that pattern continues...
Kerry's babbling. He seems to have gotten flustered over the idea of explaining how he's going to pay for his programs.
Will the foreign policy wonks out there finally dig down and analyze the consequences of the fact that we're in a non-Westphalian war? I hope so, but I can't imagine why they'll start doing their job right now.
Bob Scheiffer's starting off badly. Are we going to be as safe as when we grew up? What kind of crack is he smoking? Returning to the era of duck and cover is nothing I want to return to.
One of the more malevolent influences on US jurisprudence has been the gargantuan 9th Federal Circuit Court. It's a huge monstrosity that sits in San Francisco and rules over much of the West. It is famously, the country's most liberal circuit court and also its most reversed. Today, the House of Representatives voted to split it by a vote of 205-194. The court is being split in three with the new 9th circuit being limited to only California and Hawaii.
Ding dong, the witch is dead! Now on to the Senate!
Seriously, this is a good proxy for party confidence in winning the executive. With the creation of two new circuit courts next year, there will be an unusual number of judgeships open for appointment. The party that is confident of winning the White House has a partisan interest in pushing this through while the party that believes it will lose has every interest in killing the measure. The prediction so far seems to be that the Democrats are going to try to kill the idea in the Senate.
HT: The Corner
Apparently, as President of the Senate, Vice President Cheney spends Tuesdays at the Senate. After almost four years of doing this, he finally met Sen. Edwards. That's just a sad commentary about Edwards' actual work habits in government.
Correction: It appears that outside Sen. Edwards' actual duties as Senator, they've met 1-3 times in the past, with the most solid contact being a national prayer breakfast. The larger point that Edwards doesn't do his actual job very well, doesn't seem much disturbed.
From The Corner
Seen on an Austin, TX street corner:
"BUSH: SAVING YOUR A** WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT"
Glenn Reynolds is questioning Kerry's patriotism and he makes a good case for it. Having a major player in the Kerry campaign call Allawi a Bush puppet because Allawi is saying some things that support the Bush narrative on Iraq is just beyond the pale and materially harms US foreign policy in Iraq to the point where some unknown number of extra people on the margin are going to get hurt/killed because of the support the Kerry campaign is giving to the insurgent narrative.
There are honest, honorable ways to fight an election in time of war, increasing our own casualty count by helping spread enemy propaganda is not one of them. Fire Joe Lockhart!
Al Hunt's got a recent article running under the headline "What If the Polls Are Wrong?" and laying out all the reasons for Democrats not to despair. Essentially, he's counting on a massive influx of new voters to turn the tide for Kerry. There may be some of that. But bad polls may be hiding a Republican trend as well. The key is how ashamed are 9/11 Democrats and Independents of their newfound Republican beliefs?
That 9/11 is going to change voting patterns was a given in 2001 but you don't here much about it in 2004 during the first presidential election since that disastrous day. How many 9/11 Democrats are out there is simply not known, for the simple reason that the Democrat party has worked, and worked hard and long, for defectors to feel ashamed. Voting for the GOP is not just a difference of opinion for core Democrats, it's a betrayal, a vote for evil, for grandma starvers, church burners, a vote for the lynch mob. But some number of people who have internalized all that political/cultural baggage are still going to go into the privacy of the voting booth and vote GOP because there's a war on and the Democrat party is too full of deluded appeasers who are going to get people killed, people who are close to home.
The nightmare scenario for Democrats is that they're going to be true to themselves in the voting booth but won't tell the truth to a pollster. The ground could be shifting under their feet and, because of the internal shame culture that the Democrat party has formed over long years of effort, they'll never know it until election eve, 2004 and possibly for some time beyond.
Like everybody else, I'm indebted to Powerline's ongoing account of the investigation into CBS' 60 Minutes bombshell documents purporting to demonstrate that President Bush did not properly complete his service and did not deserve an honorable discharge. The kicker for me is kerning, something that typewriters simply don't do but word processors have done for the last couple of decades.
Proportional font spacing is something that is being touted as another dead giveaway. Unless you really want to discuss the minutiae of 1960s/1970s technology I'd stay away from that one. IBM's famous Selectric typewriter is monospaced but IBM did make something called the Executive, which even had multiple fonts. It does not, however, appear to have been able to kern, nor is it clear that the Texas Air National Guard was in the habit of using such a high end, fancy machine to type ordinary memos.
Kerry's hunting faux pas came up again over at One Hand Clapping. While Kerry legitimately made a goof and it's important to the race, Kerry's actual mistake, talking about shotgun hunting for deer, isn't what people are talking about. Here's what I left in comments:
Actually Kerry's hunting faux pas isn't hunting deer with a shotgun. A quick round of googling will let you know that Massachusetts has a shotgun season for deer. His faux pas was that he had no clue how unusual that was and didn't preface his comments with a simple factual statement that Mass. has such a season and it happens to be his favorite.He may like to personally hunt but he's disconnected from the larger hunting culture. That sense of connection is the entire point behind a politician mentioning that he does certain things.
Apparently the bombers are getting out of jail recently and some have taken on organizing roles at the anti-RNC convention protests. I've been thinking that some of the worries on the right have been overblown regarding protests but the Weathermen were hard core violent. If they aren't drummed out of any role, if these hard line communists are acceptable coalition partners on the left, the unthinkable is starting to get thinkable.
Will serious violence happen? I hope not. The chance of the left being that kind of stupid is low. It's not as low as it was last week though.
Global Transaction Strategy is the title of an older Dr. Barnett article. There's lots of good stuff about how the world is shaping up and how it needs to continue for us to all survive this dangerous time. One of the neat things about broad thinkers is that you can go back and find nuggets that you didn't notice the first (or the fifth) time you read a piece:
In effect, emigration from the Gap to the Core is globalization's release valve. With it, the prosperity of the Core can be maintained and more of the world's people can participate. Without it, overpopulation and under-performing economies in the Gap can lead to explosive situations that spill over to the Core. One hopeful sign of the future: The Philippines has demonstrated that such flows can be achieved on a temporary deployment or "global commuting" basis without resorting to permanent emigration or generating increased xenophobia in host nations.
Business interests don't mind the current situation too much. Plenty of labor moves into the country in the current situation and they aren't hounded by 'la migra' as in the bad old days of mass immigration raids which shut down business and could decimate a workforce. A minor tweaking of some specialized skills categories would have made business pretty happy without rocking the boat too much.
It's only when you look at it as a national security issue, providing a safety valve while you thin out the infrastructure of illegal border crossing does this initiative make any sense and Bush apparently feels strongly enough about it to risk losing some of the immigration averse vote that he might otherwise have.
CSPAN has Kerry's full transcript of his testimony before the Senate in 1971 on Vietnam. As it's become relevant to all those puzzling over SBVT's 2nd commercial, if you haven't read it, read it. Furthermore, if you've read a bowdlerized version, with ellipsis chopping out relevant bits, go read it again and see who's been messing with your head and how.
The Kerry campaign is claiming that he was not making these accusations of horrible atrocities himself. It's a big stretch to say so at best. Here is the kicker:
I am here as one member of the group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony.
Here's more:
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
Let's play make believe for a minute here. John Kerry has demanded that George W Bush condemn the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads and demand that they be pulled off the air. Pretend for a minute that President Bush did just that and SBVT pulls the ad soon after. How soon do you think the lawsuits will start flying?
SBVT is a 527 organization, a group that cannot coordinate its political activities with a campaign. President Bush would have given an instruction and been followed. That's a pretty good case for coordination and a hefty FEC penalty for the Bush campaign as well as financial headaches for SBVT and its funders as the IRS gets involved.
Update: Well that didn't take long. It seems like the Kerry campaign decided to let fly with what they've got when the Bush campaign didn't take their bait.
The Annenberg Center's FactCheck.org site writes about the Swift Boat Veteran's for Truth ad and, unhappily, seems several days behind the facts:
Doesn't it embarrass you folks that George Elliot has been saying for days that the Boston Globe article you cite misquotes him and he stands by his Swift Boat Veterans for Truth affidavit while you make no mention of that fact? I don't expect you to run lockstep in spin or interpretation but I would expect an organization entitled Fact Check to keep up with the facts.Be fair and cite the August 6 Houston Chronicle article claiming his "retraction" hit the Boston Globe as a result of reportorial error. You can find the Houston Chronicle article on the web here:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/politics/2723352The press release denying the Boston Globe report went out the same day as the story (August 4). As of my writing, that's 4 days ago.
The Saudis have announced their election timetable for upcoming local elections:
The timetable for the elections has been divided into three phases. The first phase will be in Riyadh Province this coming November, just after Ramadan, the month-long Muslim fast. Elections in the four southern provinces and the Eastern Province will be in December, before the January 2005 Hajj season; and for the rest of the country, when the annual pilgrimage is over.
So good wishes to all the brave souls who will try to bring an independent presence to KSA governance. They're going to need it.
The Democrat lawyers have given us a splendid opportunity to test the truth claims of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. According to a letter circulated to TV stations Louis Letson is "a man pretending to be the doctor who treated Senator Kerry for one of his injuries" which is a clear statement of fact, that Louis Letson is not one of Senator Kerry's treating physicians for his wounds that resulted in his purple heart citations.
So who were his treating physicians? And what do they remember about Senator Kerry's wounds? Journalists should be following this up.
Another interesting aspect of the letter is that it lays the burden of verifying truth on the stations, stating that false and libelous charges by independent committees can expose stations to libel charges. This is a dangerous course for a campaign which is so heavily supported by independent expenditures.
Kerry's problem with the Swift Boat Veteran's for Truth as shown in the recent ad attacking his record is manifold. Some of it is about Kerry's well publicized about face after he returned from Vietnam. The ad script outlines thirteen charges. Three of those thirteen charges are crimes. They are
1. Louis Letson: "I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury."
2. Van O'Dell: "John Kerry lied to get his bronze star ... I know, I was there, I saw what happened."
3. Grant Hibbard: "He betrayed all his shipmates ... he lied before the Senate."
I'm not quite sure about the 10 other charges. I'm not even sure whether there are statutes of limitations that mean that these crimes are no longer prosecutable. I do know that if the first crime, lying about his first purple heart is true, Kerry is guilty of a further crime, relying on a false citation to get him out of Vietnam. Kerry once famously asked how do you ask the last man to die for a mistake (US operations in Vietnam). How did Kerry ask somebody else to serve 8 months of his Vietnam service if he got out illegitimately?
If Kerry had not run so heavily on his war record, it's likely that a lot of people would let old stories like this die out. But Kerry is running heavily on his Vietnam record, to the point of it crowding out his Senate record in Kerry advertising efforts. That means that his conduct during that period deserves extra heavy scrutiny. If Kerry's actions in Vietnam are his biggest qualification according to Kerry, we should not be judging a lie.
So Elliot Spitzer is warning Republicans about how they should exercise their free speech rights when they come inside his jurisdiction during the Republican National Convention. If Republicans step across the line of propriety, Spitzer threatened "we will not let you do it."
It was unclear from the press report whether he was speaking in his capacity as senior NY Democrat, NYS Attorney General, or both. But even if it were a purley party affair (as a quick phone call to the NY AG press office confirmed) can anybody imagine the furor if John Ashcroft spoke like that? It would be on page one of every major daily the next day. So while my little headline above might be over the top, it would have been par for the course if John Ashcroft had behaved in identical fashion.
HT: The Corner
After a night's sleep and a bit of reading, I think I know what the price will be for a Kerry success in making our traditional allies love us again. As I've noted in the past one of the major player factions on the global stage is a group of people who thrive on monopoly/monopsony profits, providing the spider thin controlled connectivity that most Gap states have to the Core in order to supply the elite's whims for expensive cars, jet setting travel, and PS2s.
The US has played along with this game in the past but the major unforgivable sin of this Bush administration in old Europe has been threatening all these sweet, cosy deals by wanting to open connectivity wide and bring in all the world's major players into these countries, bringing prosperity and freedom to the Gap while costing the established players their ultra-fat profits.
This is the heart of France and Germany's beef with us, the reason why they are so implacable in their enmity. Major contracts are threatened, established relationships would largely be rendered worthless, and a high amount of unpredictability would ensue with US firms winning an awful lot of those new opportunities. The problem is that Bush wants to bring too much competition, too much free market, too much rule of law into the Gap. Pace, Dr. Barnett this is not a neo-marxist critique but rather a very capitalist one.
Kerry has an opportunity to reestablish peaceful relations with Germany and France, Russia and the PRC by letting them maintain and expand their network of spider-thin connectivity webs, by running the GWOT as a war without Gap shrinking. Satisfy these established powers, don't force rule set resets in the Gap, and all will be right with the world. We will have glowing press releases. The UN will bless our military endeavors. All we have to give up is any hope of ending the war by appeasing the implicit villains.
We would end up in an Orwellian nightmare, 1984 writ more complex with a kaleidoscope of ever shifting enemies in the Gap, reaching out and striking us in unpredictable, bloody ways but with us unable to do much more than we did in the Clinton administration. The major difference
