January 31, 2004
John Kerry, Botox user? That's
the
rumor swirling
around.
I noticed just before Iowa that Kerry indeed
looks a lot different than he did a few months ago. He looks
like he's wearing more make-up in his tv appearances and his campaign
should remedy this. But it looks like there might be a little
more than that, too, and the Botox thing makes sense. Theresa Heinz
Kerry has actually admitted and advocated her own Botox use, which
lends some credence to the rumors.
I don't like Botox. It's a form of botulism,
isn't it? Very bad.
I'm slightly embarrassed to write about this
"issue" at all. It's ridiculous, especially in light of all the
important things happening in America and the world. But sadly,
gossipy nonsense like this can go a long way in shaping a national
campaign. I haven't seen any quantifiable analysis by a political
scientist on how much belittling rumors can negatively impact
a candidate's image, but I'd bet it can hurt a lot. And in Kerry's
case, this is a perfect rumor for Republicans to spread. First,
it feeds into an impression that many politicians and journalists
carry that Kerry is an exceptionally vain guy, and more importantly,
the Kerry campaign is painstakingly trying to establish a very masculine
image of Kerry just as the Bush/Cheney campaign races to define him as
a weak Massachusetts liberal who's soft on national security. The Bush/Cheney
campaign must love to see this little gossip turn into big gossip, and
I'm sure they'll do whatever the can to push it along.
It's sad that this kind of thing has come
to be a regular part of our national dialogue, but kind of funny,
too. Oh, well. I just hope that even those people that vote on very
limited information can weigh the lack of WMD found in Iraq as
a more important issue than whatever crap John Kerry may or may
not put in his foreheard.
January 30, 2004
The interesting moments
in last night's debate were few and far between. But some things
of note:
Howard Dean:
What we now
find out is that the Vice President Dick Cheney went to the
CIA on at least one occasion, and maybe more, sat with middle-
level CIA operatives and berated them because he didn't like their
intelligence reports.
Plenty of people have questioned if Cheney
put pressure on the CIA, but this is a very strong, direct
charge. After the debate, Dean told Chris Matthews that he's spoken
with a retired CIA agent who came forward to say he personally witnessed
Cheney berating CIA agents when he didn't get his desired responses
from them. It's not surprising, but its specificity makes it news.
Another interesting moment for Dean came
when he went to attack Kerry for the first time. He prefaced
it with,
"Now, Senator Kerry is the front-runner,
and I mean him no insult, but..." Boy, do you think Dean
is aware of how high his negative ratings are, and how much of that
comes from the perception that people think he's angry? He's neutered
himself, which really puts him in a box, because Howard Dean without
fangs is more likable but also more boring.
John Kerry didn't hit any
rhetorical home runs tonight, but he put in another very solid
performance. It was kind of surprising that nobody went after
him very aggressively, but in the few times they did he proved himself
an excellent counterpuncher. He directed a good line at Dean:
"Well, one of the things that you need to know as a president
is how things work in Congress if you want to get things done."
It doesn't read as well as it played – he delivered it so well
it got a nice laugh and turned Dean's "outsider" thing around on him.
Kerry had a legendary series of debates –
there were 9 total, I think – in his 1996 Senate race against
then Governor William Weld, who had been re-elected with 71% of
the vote. Many people thought the charming Weld, an excellent debater
himself, would outwit and out-like Kerry. By most accounts, it ended
up being the other way around.
Expect Kerry to be even more impressive as
a debater after the field narrows and he gets more time to
zero in on his opponent(s). There are already 3 debates scheduled
next fall between Bush and the Democratic nominee, and if it's
Kerry I imagine the Bush team will try to lessen that number and/or
make sure they don't last long. I can just hear Karl Rove telling the
debate commission, "You know, the President only has about 15 minutes
that night."
With that said, though, I think Kerry did
make himself vulnerable in one of his responses:
BROKAW:
Senator Kerry, let me ask you
a question. Robert Kagan, who writes about these issues a
great deal from the Carnegie Institute for Peace, has written
recently that Europeans believe that the Bush administration
has exaggerated the threat of terrorism, and the Bush administration
believes that the Europeans simply don't get it. Who is right?
KERRY:
I think it's somewhere in between.
I think that there has been an exaggeration and there has
been a refocusing...
BROKAW: Where has the exaggeration
been in the threat on terrorism?
KERRY:
Well, 45 minutes deployment of
weapons of mass destruction, number one. Aerial vehicles to
be able to deliver materials of mass destruction, number two.
I mean, I -- nuclear weapons, number three. I could run a long list
of clear misleading, clear exaggeration. The linkage to Al Qaida,
number four...
John Edwards pounced on this
response later – I'm sure Republican talking points will, too
– and he gives the response Kerry probably should have:
EDWARDS:
Can I just go back a moment ago
-- to a question you asked just a moment ago? You asked, I believe,
Senator Kerry earlier whether there's an exaggeration of the threat
of the war on terrorism.
It's just hard for me to see how you can
say there's an exaggeration when thousands of people lost
their lives on September the 11th.
I think the problem here is the administration
is not doing the things, number one, that need to be done
to keep this country safe, both here and abroad. And number two,
the president actually has to be able to do two things at once.
This President thinks his Presidency is only about the war on terrorism,
only about national security. Those things are critical for a commander
in chief. The President of the United States has to actually be able
to walk and chew chewing gum at the same time, has to be able to
do two things at the same time.
Edwards was good throughout, as usual. It's
going to be very interesting to see how the South Carolina vote
goes Tuesday, because it's possible those Southern voters will
reject Kerry (even as he's armed with the political machinery of
Rep. Jim Clyburn, aka "The Carolina Kingmaker"), which would give
a powerful new argument for Edwards' electability. That is, given he
wins and not Sharpton.
Al Sharpton was excellent
tonight, and it wasn't just because he was funny. He made several
direct appeals to SC voters – about half of whom are African-American
– to vote for him because he'll stand up for them all the way to
the convention. He hit them locally, like this:
I think that we cannot go quickly
past the president giving the wrong premise to the American
public to get support. Had he said, "We're going to war because
Saddam Hussein is a bad guy," the public would not have rallied
around that.
We were told, in the wake of 9/11, we were
in imminent danger with weapons of mass destruction. We cannot
allow him to change this now and say we were just after Hussein
because he was a bad guy. Everybody knows Hussein was a bad guy,
and there are other bad guys who we didn't go after, and we didn't
lie about it.
I preached the funeral of a young man, Darius
Jennings, who died shot down in a helicopter in Iraq. I preached
it right here in Orangeburg, South Carolina. His mother was told
he went to war to protect us from weapons of mass destruction. She
was not told he went to war because we have a bad guy over there, because
there's any number of bad guys. We should find a way to get rid of bad
guys, but lying to the American people is not the way you run a country,
and George Bush ought to be removed for that.
Sharpton may surprise people with how strongly
he shows in SC Tuesday. I don't think he'll win, but he could
come close, and he'll probably also take more votes from Edwards
than Kerry.
Wes Clark was much better
than he was last week. He was strong, clear and concise, but
he still can't weave a coherent argument for his electability into
his responses, and The Revived John Kerry, I think, has completely
undermined his reason for running – he seems almost invisible at
times. He's also proven too gaffe-prone to be our nominee, I'm afraid.
However, he's a sleeper right now, he's still got $$$, and he's
prepared to make his move in states like Oklahoma, New Mexico and
Arizona for a long time.
Kucinich actually sounded good to me a few
times tonight. I must be losing it.
Actually, "Joe-mentum" still sounded like
a jackass, so I must have something left.
January 29, 2004
John Cabrera has some good
questions:
I just read Edwards
is totally denying any chance that he'll
accept a
place on Kerry's ticket
as VP. He says he has no desire to be VP...
only President.
What are your thoughts? What's the history
of
statements like this?
Is this something where he needs to look as
Presidential as possible
going into South Carolina, and in essence
giving the voters there
an ultimatum that it's either him or Kerry,
not
both, increasing his chances
for a win?
My best answers...
The history of statements
like this could not be more clear: they're
meaningless. In fact, it's an old joke among political
reporters that any candidate who denies he wants the
VP nomination must be campaigning for it. And another
joke that anybody who actually claims he's interested
in the VP nod is immediately scratched off the list.
There's a long line of
Vice Presidents who loudly ruled themselves
out as VPs and then took the position anyway. For instance,
in 2000, Cheney was actually the head of Bush's
VP search committee, and he uncategorically ruled
himself out. After Cheney accepted Bush's nomination,
then, the campaign used the opportunity to say
something like, "Hey, he was hesitant, but Bush just kept
going back to him as the best guy for the job and Cheney
accepted dutifully for his party and his country." It's
typical stuff, it happens almost every election cycle,
and I think there's a real chance that's what will
happen with Edwards this year.
As for Edwards in particular,
I think the reason he's been so strong
in his denial of VP interest (as Clark has been, too)
is because he keeps getting asked about it and the last
thing a candidate needs is to be demoted on the
campaign trail while he's running for the top job.
I also can buy that Edwards has always been a
winner and tenacious fighter (even if he doesn't
look like it) and hasn't really spent much time pondering a
loss in this race. But I'd be very surprised if he'd reject
a VP nomination – Edwards is fast becoming the most
universally liked Democratic politician in recent
memory, but most of the Iowa and NH voters had reservations
about his experience. A term or two as VP would cure
that.
Don't count him out for
the top of the ticket, though, just yet.
As
usual, LA Times political
reporter Ron Brownstein does the
most
incisive job of dissecting why NH
voters went for John Kerry. While Kerry's
victory was again broad-based, this may be the
key paragraph:
But the [exit poll]
findings also hint that Kerry has not found an
agenda or message quite as attractive to voters
as his resume. As the race moves beyond his New England
backyard, that could leave him open to charges that he is
not as committed to change as many Democratic voters
would like.
Tonight's debate
in South Carolina is on MSNBC at 7pm EST. There
may be another debate Monday night in St.
Louis. DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe has indicated that only
candidates who have won state primaries or caucuses by
February 3 will be guaranteed participation in
future debates, and I hope he's right. These things
would be so much more meaningful if we could get
vain clowns like Lieberman, Sharpton, Kucinich, and
Dean off the stage (actually, I shouldn't put Dean in that
company quite yet – the Democratic Party needs to treat
him very delicately, too, because a Dean defection would
be catastrophic).
Representative Jim
Clyburn, hands down the most influential
African-American in South Carolina politics,
will endorse John Kerry this afternoon. African-American
voters probably will comprise about 50% of the SC vote
on Monday, so this particular endorsement could
bring Kerry an upset over Edwards and knock him
out of the race. SC Senator Ernest Hollings already
endorsed Kerry, and now Clyburn's fabled political machine
joins the effort as well. If Edwards still takes it,
he deserves all the credit in the world, and if he
did well in Oklahoma and Missouri, too, it would be
an indication he could turn this into a real race.
January
28, 2004
Reader Jack Hanna makes
an insightful observation:
I don't know why people
haven't made as much out of Joe-mentum saying
"They're calling it a THREE WAY TIE!!!!...for third."
That was hysterical–way funnier to me than Dean's speech
the week before. The dude got 33% fewer votes than
Clark and Edwards. What a bozo.
By the way... the
biggest surprise of yesterday? The fact that
Cold Mountain and Nicole Kidman didn't
get Oscar nominations. I bet Nic already had her
acceptance speech pre-printed on a napkin. She must be bummed.
New Hampshire Results:
1. John
Kerry 39%
2. Howard
Dean 26%
3. Wesley
Clark 12%
4. John
Edwards 12%
5. "Joe-mentum"
9%
5 Lessons I Learned
in New Hampshire
1. Right now, John
Kerry is The Man.
Slightly over 2 weeks
ago, John Kerry polled 10% in New Hampshire,
getting pummelled by Dean and Clark. In the last poll taken
in his home state of Massachusetts, Dean beat
him by 9%. He literally bet his house on an Iowa victory
(he took out a mortgage on his MA home, yielding
$6.3 million of badly needed campaign cash). Last
week, he and John Edwards lapped the field in Iowa.
He not only avoided making mistakes that could throw off his
momentum – a showing of extraordinary discipline
– but he won last Thursday's debate and performed impressively
in all his tv interviews. Tonight, he stands alone
as the overwhelming victor.
Both his Iowa and New
Hampshire victories show him with exceptionally
broad-based support from young and old, lower and upper
class, doves and hawks, beer and wine, etc...
As of last night, Kerry
undeniably sits atop the frontrunner perch.
He's got a slew of high-profile endorsements coming his
way, I'm sure. He looks to be in very good shape to possibly
wrap this thing up in a week or two, but you never
know how a candidate wears the frontrunner label until
he's got it. Kerry will take some hits, but he'll need
to take some very heavy blows to thwart all the positive
media coverage of his historic political comeback.
Plus, he's gonna raise a lot of internet $$$ in
the coming days.
2. Howard Dean's candidacy
may not be on life support, but it's headed
to the hospital.
Dean outspent Kerry in
Iowa and NH – nobody knows by exactly how much,
but 2 to 1 is a fair estimate. He's gotten very little
return on that investment. And if he can't win in New Hampshire,
where can he win? If New Hampshire didn't already
exist, Howard Dean would try to invent it; it neighbors
his home state, about 60% of its Democratic primary
voters are college-educated (a group which he seemed
to have locked up going into Iowa), and NH voters
have in the past shown a vindictive streak. But no,
John Kerry beats him by 13%, which is a blowout margin in any
political race.
Last week on
Inside
Politics, Bob Novak reported that Dean's
campaign was "out of money." That seemed highly unlikely
for a campaign that's raised over $40 million, but there
are indications it may be true. They spent $1.1
mil. this week on tv advertising alone in NH, and
they haven't been airing ads in South Carolina, Arizona,
or New Mexico.
Which state is he gonna
win next week? South Carolina? No. Missouri?
Nope. Oklahoma? No way. Arizona? Possibly, but polls before
Kerry's NH victory showed Kerry and Clark vying
for the top spot. New Mexico? I think Clark's doing
well there, too, and now Kerry, probably, so I don't
think he takes that one, either. Delaware? I doubt
it (by the way, based on what Delaware's senior
Senator, Joe Biden, has said about his leanings recently –
he likes Clark and Kerry more than the rest – I would
be surprised if he didn't endorse Kerry very soon).
Already, the Dean campaign
says they're gonna concentrate on Michigan
and Washington (February 7), which looks to me a little
like a plan for a February 3 failure.
3. John Edwards isn't
headed to the hospital, but he just got hit
by a bus.
Edwards finished only
1000 votes or so behind Clark, but that's
a really bad 4th place. I think he's got some hope in South
Carolina (he's said himself he MUST win there),
Oklahoma, and maybe even Missouri. Thursday's debate
in SC could make him or break him. There's still a
scenario where John Edwards becomes the alternative
to Kerry, but if he doesn't do it loudly and clearly
next week he's going to have a big $$$ problem.
I don't know exactly where
to throw Wes Clark in these musings, because
he was pretty well-positioned in the February 3 states
going into NH, but now Kerry's completely taken away
his reason for running. He still has a shot in Oklahoma,
Arizona, and New Mexico, though. Maybe. He'll
have to perform exactly 7,000,000X better than
he did this week. And he'll have to get himself off
Mr. Blackwell's worst-dressed list.
4. Joe Lieberman's
ego is unconquerable.
The biggest surprise last
night may be that Lieberman didn't drop
out. How can a guy from Connecticut finish 5th in NH and
continue? It's absolutely vainglorious. I imagine
him in his hotel room right now, wearing only underwear
and a cape and proudly, defiantly pointing one
of Saddam's old swords towards the sky.
5. A signifigant number
of New Hampshire voters DESPISE George W.
Bush.
DailyKos alerted me to
tonight's remarkable REPUBLICAN primary results:
Bush 57,670
Kerry 835
Dean 633
Clark 545
Edwards 541
That's 2,554 votes WRITTEN
IN by Republicans who can't vote in the Dem.
primary; essentially they're protest votes. I haven't
checked out previous vote totals to see what's typical,
but I assume that many is highly unusual.
[update: maybe
not so unusual after all – an informed reader
writes in, "In 1992, 1443 democrats wrote in george bush
as their candidate, so I don't think those numbers
from kos mean much."
]
More disturbing for G.W.
may be tonight's turnout for the Democratic
primary, which at around 200,000 shattered the previous high
of 168,000 in 1992. Over half of those voters described
themselves as "angry" at Bush.
Most disturbing for G.W.
may be that MSNBC reported that the "change
of party" table in NH's largest precinct, Londonderry,
was typically about 15 people deep throughout the day,
filled with Republicans and Independents switching
to Democrat.
You starting to get the
feeling someting very good's going on?
I don't know what
in the world was up with the bad exit poll leaks
today. DailyKos said he was getting info. from
both the media consortium exit poll that had
Kerry up by a just a few and from the
L.A. Times
exit poll that had Dean actually leading most of the day
and perhaps squeaking out a close victory. Drudge
and The National Review Online had it much closer
between Kerry and Dean, although they seemed to have
the closeness of the Clark-Edwards race right (even
if Drudge had a bogus story up at one point about Edwards
climbing way ahead). Then CNN and MSNBC, even after
they projected Kerry the winner, had commentators talking about
the race being closer than expected. Who came closest
to delivering the real results before the official tally
showed Kerry the lopsided winner? Well, there was some
dude named Ted who was blogging on Kerry's site,
and he swore that he had good information that Kerry
was up by about 14% over Dean. I know where to go to
get the most reliable information next time, eh?
January
27, 2004
As reported on Drudge , midafternoon
returns in NH show Kerry with 36%, Dean with 30%, and Clark
and Edwards deadlocked at 12%. Big caveat, though: who
knows what regions these polls represent?
Marcia Lieberman,
Joe's 89 year-old mother, said this to the
L.A.
Times yesterday about her son:
"He's such a good man. I don't know why he
didn't catch on." This while Joe was working
his way through deeply chilly New Hampshire, repeatedly telling
small crowds, "I've got Joe-mentum!"
I don't know what's
gonna happen today. All the polls show Kerry leading,
but with margins that vary from 21% to 3%.
Most also show Dean gaining steadily in the
last few days, with Clark and Edwards battling it out for
3rd and 4th. One poll even had "Joe-mentum!" in 3rd. So
who knows what the hell is gonna happen. I'll be
silly by making a prediction: Kerry wins over Dean
by about 4%, with Edwards finishing a strong 3rd
and Clark and Lieberman a distant 4th and 5th, respectively.
But I'm very worried that Dean will benefit from
both a strong ground organization and a media backlash,
and NH voters will put him over the top. That would be a nightmare,
virtually erasing all the Iowa voters good, pragmatic
work.
The only site I know of
that sometimes posts early exit poll results
is
Drudge
– as with everything on Drudge, though, I wouldn't accept
them as gospel.
Check this out:
Bill Clinton sent a grand total of 2 emails during his Presidency.
Life without email seems pretty hilarious
to me now – it's almost like hearing about a
guy who makes all his calls from a party line.
David Kay – recently
the CIA's chief weapons inspector – is
telling
us as full a story as we can get right
now about the search for Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction. A few memorable highlights:
1. No
stockpiles of WMD were found, and probably
won't be.
2. He doesn't
think they're in Syria or anywhere else,
but that they were gradually destroyed in the 90s.
3. The
airstrikes authorized by Clinton in '98 probably
wiped out their chemical capabilities.
4. Saddam
is completely delusional, and repeatedly
got ripped off by his own scientists – they'd show him
fake plans for advanced weapons programs, he'd pay them
to develop, and they'd spend it on themselves.
5. The
CIA and the Bush administration have some
serious explaining to do.
Of course, this is a huge
story that should and will be getting a
lot, lot more attention.
Dick Cheney may be
as delusional as Saddam Hussein.
This New
York Times editorial does a pretty
good job explaining why. He continues to
push his own fantasies ahead of what's now very
solid, public intelligence. It's really weird, and it's about
time he resigned.
January
26, 2004
After last Thursday's
debate, Republican pundit Bill Bennett
criticized John Edwards for segueing in one
of his answers to "this little thing about poverty." Bennett
fancies himself a keeper of traditional Catholic
values, but by my standards anybody who'd criticize
a Presidential candidate for putting a spotlight
on poverty is a moral ignoramus and a lousy Catholic.
I just saw a clip
of John Kerry giving a speech in New Hampshire and
noticed Michael Moore and his camera hidden
behind some bodies. Moore's supporting Wes
Clark – well, at least he claims to support Clark, but
if there's anything clear about Michael Moore it's that
the only person he truly supports is Michael Moore
– so I bet he's working on some kind of a hit piece
on Kerry.
By the way, I wonder how
Moore squares these two statements (brought
to my attention by
The New Republic):
"I'm sorry to personalize
[the bombing in Kosovo] in this way, but
this slaughter is being conducted in your name and
mine, and I'll tell you, this is blood I don't want on my hands.
We will all have to answer for this some day, and
I would like to be able to say that I did not sit by
silently while this was being done." – Moore in an
April 15, 1999 letter about the Kosovo war
"My vote for Clark
is one of conscience. I feel so strongly
about this that I'm going to devote the next few weeks of my
life to do everything I can to help Wesley Clark
win." – Moore in a January 14, 2004 letter endorsing
Clark, the man who teamed with Madeleine Albright and
Richard Holbrooke to make the war in Kosovo happen,
a war which prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of Kosovar Albanians
In a new Newsweek
poll, John Kerry beats George W. Bush head to
head 49% to 46%. I don't think this poll has
any predictive value, but Kerry can use it
to make the "electability" case, which seems to be Democratic
primary voters' top concern this year.
January
25, 2004
On Friday's Crossfire,
Paul Begala asked John Kerry why
he shouldn't make George W. Bush's Vietnam
war record (or lack of it) an issue. This was Kerry's
response:
Paul, that's not the
ground I want to fight this campaign on.
You know, I'm very proud of my service and I'm glad I got
the experience I got, and I'm proud of the friendships
I have from it. But a lot of us decided many years
ago not to make the other choices people made an issue.
It was a very complicated time, a very difficult
time. What I want to talk about now is the future...
Translation: When
the heat was on, Bush chose to dodge the
draft, but those of us who made the right choice – to
sacrifice our lives for our country – forgive all those,
like Bush, who decided not to face the difficulty.
I was giddy as I heard
this response, and thought it was brilliant.
Kerry's really in the zone right now, and one of his great
strengths is his ability to hide a strong message in
political language. He spoke these words very naturally,
seemingly off the cuff and without pretense, but look
at his subtle insertion of the key words: fight, proud,
choices, difficult. He's proud to have fought for his
country, and George W. Bush didn't make the difficult
choice.
Also, don't miss
tonight's
60 Minutes segment on
Kerry.
Political journalist
Joe Klein believes that during Howard Dean's
interview with Diane Sawyer Thursday night,
he looked like a recovering addict whose addiction is adulation
of a crowd. I certainly get the feeling that a couple
months ago both Dean and his campaign advisors
started to believe their own best press; in fact,
one of the most interesting parts of the interview
was when Dean said one thing he's learned from all
this is that he's not a rock star.
Dean's big problem in
New Hampshire post-Iowa is that his unfavorable
ratings skyrocketed. In the Sawyer interview, Judy Dean
seemed like a genuinely decent person, and the
couple looks a little square together, and I think
those served the campaign's purpose of humanizing
him. Since it aired, his poll #s have stabilized,
with some even showing a slight uptick. His
Letterman
appearance probably helped him, too – it's always a great
idea for a candidate to join in on jokes that come at his
expense.
Still, the
Primetime
show established a recent pattern of Dean
flying off the handle, airing the footage of Dean yelling
at a guy to "sit down!" at an Iowa campaign rally and
condescendingly dressing down a group of reporters
as if he were their 6th grade teacher. The "sit
down" tape was apparently played A LOT on Iowa t.v.
stations – I've heard reports that the object of
his fire was an elderly man – and some pundits think
that hurt him big in "nice" Iowa. To me, he looked like a big
jerk in those tapes.
As colossal a blunder
as his Monday night "I Have a Scream" speech
(I don't know who first coined it that, but unfortunately
I can't take credit) was, the heat Dean's taken for it
has been so overblown that his campaign could use
it as a red herring to distract people from Dean's
other demonstrated ills. The truth is, though, that
the main reason he's a lousy general election candidate
for Democrats is that his unfavorable ratings nationally
and in several individual swing states were pretty
awful before the speech or a single vote in Iowa was cast, which
is particularly scary for a person who's not yet an established
national figure.
Predictions in this race
have proven dangerous, but I see John Kerry
winning New Hampshire, probably handily. Let's hope that
somebody else slips in front of Dean, too, so he can't
use Clinton's old trick of finishing second and
declaring himself the comeback kid, making it a victory.
Keep your eye on
John Edwards again in New Hampshire. NH isn't
vital to his success, but if he has another
stronger than expected showing, watch out. I just watched
him on
Real Time With Bill Maher, and he was
terrific, as usual. He's got both the crispest
message and the crispest speaking style of anybody
running, that's for sure.
January 24, 2004
The top 2 headlines
on
Yahoo!
News right now give a pretty good
snapshot of the state of the race in New
Hampshire:
headline #1:
One
Kerry Supporter Owes Life to Candidate
headline #2:
Dean
Alleges Dirty Attacks in Iowa
January
23, 2004
John Kerry didn't
just hold his own in tonight's
New Hampshire debate, he won it walking away. I went
back and replayed each of Kerry's answers on
my TiVo, and with the exception of the first question
on the Bush tax cuts – which he could have done more
with – he hit only home runs and triples. His
calm is such a nice contrast to all the questions
about Dean put in the forefront right now, and he's
bringing in his anti-war credentials with brilliant
subtlety.
Kerry's finest moment
– and the debate's – came when he was asked
a potential "gotcha" question from jerkoff
reporter John DiStaso of
The Union Leader (a publication
which I understand has a soft side for the Republican
right, just like Fox News, which broadcasted it
and saddled us with half-wit Brit Hume as moderator):
DISTASO: Senator Kerry,
if you were in the Oval Office, how would
you feel and how would you view a returning war veteran
who tossed his medals away?
KERRY: It would depend
on why he did it.
DISTASO: In protest.
KERRY: If I were Richard
-- well, given what we now know about Richard
Nixon and what he did think about it, he was deeply
disturbed by the veterans' movement that was a movement
of conscience.
And I could not be more
proud of the fact that when I came back
from that war, having learned what I learned, that I led thousands
of veterans to Washington – we camped on the Mall
underneath the Congress, underneath Richard
Nixon's visibility. He tried to take us to the
Supreme Court of the United States. He did. He
tried to kick us off. And we stood our ground and we said
to him, "Mr. President, you sent us 8,000 miles away to fight,
die and sleep in the jungles of Vietnam. We've earned
the right to sleep on this Mall and talk to our senators
and congressmen."
(APPLAUSE)
I can pledge this to the
American people: I will never conduct a war
or start a war because we want to; the United States of
America should only go to war because we have to. And
if you live by that guidance, you'll never have veterans
throwing away their medals or standing up in protest.
And while we're at it,
this president is breaking faith with veterans
all across the country. They've cut the VA budget by
$1.8 billion. There are 40,000 veterans waiting months
to see a doctor for the first time. Whole categories
have been eliminated from application to the VA.
And I'm not going to listen
to Tom DeLay or the president or anybody
else lecture the Democratic Party about patriotism when
the first act of patriotism is keeping faith with
people who wore the uniform of our country.
(APPLAUSE)
This man talks like you'd
want your President to be able to talk. And
he has the kind of experience that you'd like your
President to have. I've pointed out Kerry's weakness for
long-windedness at times, but when his material's
this good, wind away.
Wesley Clark was asked
the toughest questions in the debate, and I think
he may have hurt himself a little tonight.
I think he explained himself reasonably well,
but many voters won't see it that way.
First, Clark overcame
a stuttering problem as a child, but I've
noticed that when he's in these higher stakes debates –
that presumably make him a little nervous – his speech
patterns are much more halted than usual. I'm afraid
this is a real presentational problem for him, especially
when he's up against Edwards and Kerry, more polished,
confident speakers.
His answer on a question
about the Patriot Act was fantastic, and
he's not afraid to criticize Bush for not doing enough to
prevent 9/11 or future 9/11s, which makes people
uncomfortable, but is also the truth (just ask
9/11 Commission Chair Tom Kean, a Republican, who
said point blank that 9/11 "was preventable," which
we'll be hearing a lot more about in the next few months).
But most journalists won't
focus on any of Clark's positives – they'll
only criticize him for this exchange with Peter
Jennings:
JENNINGS: General Clark,
a lot of people say they don't you well,
so this is really a simple question about knowing a man
by his friends. The other day you had a rally here,
and one of the men who stood up to endorse you is
the controversial filmmaker Michael Moore. You said
you were delighted with him.
At one point, Mr. Moore
said, in front of you, that President Bush
-- he's saying he'd like to see you, the general, and President
Bush, who he called a "deserter."
Now, that's a reckless
charge not supported by the facts. And I
was curious to know why you didn't contradict him, and whether
or not you think it would've been a better example
of ethical behavior to have done so.
CLARK: Well, I think Michael
Moore has the right to say whatever he feels
about this.
CLARK: I don't know whether
this is supported by the facts or not. I've
never looked at it. I've seen this charge bandied
about a lot.
But to me it wasn't material.
This election is going to be about the future,
Peter. And what we have to do is pull this country
together. And I am delighted to have the support of a man
like Michael Moore, of a great American leader
like Senator George McGovern, and of people from
Texas like Charlie Stenholm and former Secretary
of the Navy John Dalton.
We've got support from
across the breadth of the Democratic Party,
because I believe this party is united in wanting to
change the leadership in Washington. We're going to run
an election campaign that's about the future. We're
going to hold the president accountable for what
he did in office and failed to do, and we're going
to compare who's got the best vision for America.
JENNINGS: Let me ask you
something you mentioned, then, because since
this question and answer in which you and Mr. Moore was
involved in, you've had a chance to look at the
facts.
Do you still feel comfortable
with the fact that someone should be standing
up in your presence and calling the president of
the United States a deserter?
CLARK: To be honest with
you, I did not look at the facts, Peter.
You know, that's Michael Moore's opinion. He's entitled to say
that. I've seen -- he's not the only person who's
said that. I've not followed up on those facts. And
frankly, it's not relevant to me and why I'm in this
campaign.
Believe me, I think Michale
Moore is a complete phoney so easy to discredit
that self-respecting liberals should go out of
their way to disown him. Moore tells a ton of lies, and
while coining Bush a "deserter" is typically overheated
language, it's not the baseless allegation
Jennings suggests. Let's be clear, since few journalists
got it right in the last election: GEORGE BUSH WAS
AWOL FROM THE NATIONAL GUARD FROM MAY 1, 1972 TO
APRIL 30, 1973. Here's a good condensed version of the facts
from
The Straight
Dope, which jives with my own research:
Here's the story as
generally agreed upon: In January 1968, with
the Vietnam war in full swing, Bush was due to graduate
from Yale. Knowing he'd soon be eligible for the draft,
he took an air force officers' test hoping to secure
a billet with the Texas Air National Guard, which
would allow him to do his military service at home.
Bush didn't do particularly well on the test – on the
pilot aptitude section, he scored in the 25th percentile,
the lowest possible passing grade. But Bush's father,
George H.W., was then a U.S. congressman from Houston, and strings
were pulled. The younger Bush vaulted to the head of
a long waiting list – a year and a half long, by some
estimates – and in May of '68 he was inducted into
the guard.
By all accounts Bush was
an excellent pilot, but apparently his enthusiasm
cooled. In 1972, four years into his six-year
guard commitment, he was asked to work for the campaign of
Bush family friend Winton Blount, who was running
for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. In May Bush requested
a transfer to an Alabama Air National Guard unit
with no planes and minimal duties. Bush's immediate
superiors approved the transfer, but higher-ups said
no. The matter was delayed for months. In August Bush missed
his annual flight physical and was grounded. (Some
have speculated that he was worried about failing
a drug test – the Pentagon had instituted random
screening in April.) In September he was ordered
to report to a different unit of the Alabama guard,
the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery. Bush
says he did so, but his nominal superiors say they never
saw the guy, there's no documentation he ever showed
up, and not one of the six or seven hundred soldiers
then in the unit has stepped forward to corroborate
Bush's story.
Instead of saying "I've
never looked at it," which makes him look
bad, Clark missed a golden opportunity to reopen a
case that should never have been closed: "Look, I'm not
running to bash George W. Bush, I'm running to replace
him. But facts are facts. George W. Bush was technically
AWOL from the National Guard from May 1, 1972 to
April 30, 1973. It was 2 years after I was shot and
returned from Vietnam, and I was at West Point at the
time. I know this is shocking to a lot of people, but
for some reason this wasn't reported widely in the 2000 election.
But I welcome you to look it up."
It would have been a very
risky thing for him to say (and, of course,
it might be even shrewder for him to say it tomorrow
when he comes under attack for it), but he might have
snatched many of Dean's angriest supporters right
there.
I have the feeling, though,
that Kerry – the war hero who's not involved
in the dispute but stands to gain from its
publicity – is gonna end up the beneficiary of any prolonged
controversy about this.
By the way, there's a
tremendous irony behind Bush's first day
AWOL being May 1, 1972. That's exactly 31 years from the exact
day that he danced around in that flight suit for
his famous "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard
the U.S.S. Lincoln.
I'll write about
some other performances tomorrow. I'll also
write about what I thought of Howard and Judy
Dean's
Primetime Live performance.
January
22, 2004
Tonight's New Hampshire
debate is very, very important; as many as half of NH voters
recently polled say they could still change their minds. You
can see the full 90 minutes on Fox News Channel at 5:00pm PST.
Kerry, Dean, Clark, and Edwards all stand to gain or lose
a lot, and Lieberman thinks he has something to gain or
lose (I'd bet my middle finger he'll be out of the race
by next Wednesday morning), so there will be a playoff
atmosphere.
People sure are
fascinated with Howard Dean, winner or loser, aren't
they? On
Thursday Primetime Live
on ABC at 10pm tonight, Diane Sawyer will interview
Dean and his wife, Judy. I agree with
The Scrum,
who gives a
very intelligent
take on the campaign's decision to
deliver Dean in this way.
Although I wouldn't
characterize myself in general as "anti-Dean,"
I certainly am 100% against him in the context
of this Presidential race. I hope his campaign
tanks as soon as possible so we can get a 3 man fight to the
finish between Edwards, Clark, and Kerry. But some
of the coverage to his infamous speech Monday night
has been so mean that I feel terrible for the guy.
I don't want to be sanctimonious – I laugh
at
some of
the dance mixes and other comedy that's been made of
it, and the man did choose to take all this on, of course
– but it's clear to me every time I see or hear that
speech that Howard Dean was an exceptionally anguished
man on Monday night. I'm picking up sympathy from
others, too – even Howard Stern, who's not a
very political guy and doesn't have a horse in this race
– this morning sounded like he sincerely felt compassion
for what's happening to Dean right now.
Dean could capitalize
on this sympathy, and use it to further
his credentials as a passionate outsider. I doubt he has the
political ability to do this – I think he's shown
his primary campaigning gift to be an ability to
harness anger and his primary campaigning detriment
to be that he usually comes off as pretty cold –
but I hope he has enough ability to reinforce some
of his positives so he can leave the race dignified
and proud of his extraordinary accomplishment. So
I'll be in a very awkward position watching the Sawyer interview
tonight – rooting like hell for him to destroy his
candidacy, but simultenously hoping that he can redeem
his current image as a national punchline.
One more thing – it's
also sad that Dean feels compelled to parade
his wife out there tonight. Something I really admired
about him was that he didn't play that game that most
other candidates do, pimping their wives and children
for the cameras to make themselves appear Rockwellian
(as in
Norman,
not
Rick).
January 21, 2004
I got a very insightful
email from a reader, who also happens
to be my sister Beth. I think it's really important:
just read your blog
and i wanted to rant for a moment over social security.
what many people don't seem to understand is that
the people who will lose most when/if SS is abandoned
are the middle class. last year alec and i
paid the maximum into SS. think i had other
things i could have done with that money, including start a
fund for retirement medical expenses? sure, but
it's not a bad idea for a society to make sure that
it cares for its elderly. however, if this
administration has its way, people of my generation
in the middle class are going to find themselves
without medicare benefits and without money to compensate.
just because they're too inept to figure out how to make it
work. the rich people will deal just fine and the
poor people will not have lost any money (although
they'll still be screwed for health care), and the young
will have their own earnings to compensate. to
me, this is just another way that the republicans perpetrate
the fraud that they are thinking of the middle class
when in fact they are taking the votes of the middle
class and then royally screwing them. it makes
me irate.
It makes me irate,
too. Furthermore, it reminds me of a conversation
I recently had with a young woman who had little
political interest or knowledge, but knew one thing for sure:
she was never going to see a social security
check. I had no idea that many people around my
age (31) just assume that they're not gonna see
their money back, but based on subsequent conversations
I've had, I think it's a fairly common belief. It's
totally unacceptable that Republicans policies seek
to reassign that money, and Democrats should make
this a much bigger issue with which to target and
court young voters.
When I was listening
to that robot in a President's suit delivering
all those meaningless sentences last night,
my mind drifted to a story about one of President Clinton's
State of the Union addresses – I think in the early
90s. It's a military guy's job to work the teleprompter
for the State of the Union speech, and for some
reason I think that guy screwed something up and the
previous year's speech came up on the teleprompter.
Clinton, of course, recognized immediately that it was a different
speech, but didn't panic at all. He just winged it for
8 minutes – or something like that – before they got
the right speech up. And this is supposed to be one
of the most important speeches the President gives
all year, one in which speechwriters and senior
advisors spend hours haggling over precise words and
concepts. Clinton enjoyed the challenge, and nobody really
knew the difference. I think his aides said after the speech
that what he recited from memory was exactly the same.
It's funny how brilliant Billy Jeff was. And unflappable.
I think George Stephanopoulos
gives a much more precise insider's account
of the incident in his book,
All
Too Human.
Now, can you imagine if
Bush's speech last year would have come
up on the teleprompter last night? He probably wouldn't have
noticed and tried to deliver the whole thing –
Colin Powell or Karen Hughes or somebody would have
to step up on the podium and interrupt him before he
could ask for yet another invasion of Iraq.
Basically, I thought
his speech tonight sucked. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup
poll shows that others were pretty unimpressed,
too. 45% had a "very positive reaction" to it, which is terrible
for a State of the Union Address – about the best
opportunity any President is gonna get to look
Presidential and throw out a bunch of tasty red
meat throughout the electorate. Tonight, he threw
a few cheeseburgers to Republicans, but nothing to
Democrats and Independents.
His trying to spin as
"compassionate" a proposal to constitutionally
ban gays who love each other from forming a public union
is a moral abomination.
Am I crazy, or is steroid
testing for pro athletes not one of the
bigger problems facing this country? But G.W. seems to think
it's much more important to mention than, say,
the rising totals of those
Americans
living in poverty.
He also said, "jobs are
on the rise." Technically, I guess that's
true, although with the last "Job Creation Act" administration
officials promised a couple hundred thousand
per month and you know how many jobs were gained
across the country in the last recorded month?
1000. A whopping 20 jobs per state.
By the way, a good traditional
indicator of a sitting President's electability
is how many jobs were produced by the end of the
2nd quarter of the election year. If things don't improve for
Bush here and we have a candidate whose last name doesn't
end in Dean, we'll probably beat him.
Also, isn't this a time
when it's imperative for us to repair the
breach with our European allies, and others in the UN? I
know that "we don't need a permission slip" to go to
war stuff might work as a political statement, but
what does it cost us in diplomacy, which has a direct
impact on security? People in other countries listen
to this speech. Bush is a moral buffoon.
He promised to bring honor and dignity to the White
House, but he proved last night he'd further aggravate overseas
relationships just to whore some political slogan.
And how about this hilarious
line:
"The Kaye Report identified
dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."
What does that mean?
Perhaps worst of all,
we've gone from Clinton's "save social
security first" State of the Union plea to Bush's "gut social
security now, because we don't have enough money
for it in about 20 years anyway." All that talk
about limiting discretionary spending is code for
privatizing social security and medicare, which
will hurt the least fortunate of us.
This President is a bad
guy.
January
20, 2004
Final Iowa tally:
Kerry 38%, Edwards 32%, Dean 18%, and Gephardt 11%.
This is not just one of
the most dramatic comebacks in political
history, it's two of the most dramatic comebacks in political
history! Kerry was looking like a sure loser up
until about 2 and a half weeks ago, and in the
same period Edwards climbed almost 30%. Absolutely
astonishing. And wonderful.
The Democratic Party
may have saved itself tonight. Howard Dean
is a poor general election candidate, and his devastating
loss in Iowa further supports that. I hope to see Dean's
precipitous decline continue so we can get down to
a race between Edwards, Clark, and Kerry – each, in
a different way, a formidable general election candidate
– and let the best man win. Gephardt's dropping out
officially tomorrow and Lieberman, after he gets cuckholded
in NH, won't be far behind. Of course, I don't want to
count out Dean – he could be "the comeback kid" in 8
days. BUT...
Among anti-war Caucusgoers,
the results were:
Kerry
34%
Edwards 24%
Dean
24%
others 18%
If I'm a Dean campaign
operative reading those numbers, I lose
hope. How can the guy who's become synonymous with being anti-war
lose that vote? I don't know, but it doesn't look
like he's got any base whatsoever.
The service unions endorsed
Dean, so you figure he'd have some juice
there, eh? Nope. He lost among union households, he lost
big among seniors, and he lost badly among voters whose
primary intent was to vote for somebody they thought
could beat Bush.
In short, unless Iowa
turns out to be a total aberration among
the states, Dean looks like a candidate with a lot of money
but no base, no positive message, and no compelling
personal history. While he could play his new underdog
status to his advantage (every pundit in the world
is gonna be beating up on him today, so watch out
if he does well in NH), I don't see how he's gonna
do it. I keep shaking my head because I've never
seen such a quick turnaround – just a week ago it still
looked like he might win Iowa fairly easily. It's a shocking
development that I think has completely reconfigured
this race.
Plus, Dean's concession
speech tonight is by far the worst I've
ever seen. He totally fed in to the worst things his critics
have been saying about him – that he's unstable, blustery,
angry, comically unPresidential. A lunatic. He actually
may have been having some kind of breakdown and was
overcompensating with a very strange enthusiasm. I'm
not kidding – there was a sadness to it. And he had
abolutely no coherent message, just a reminder that
he was organized in many, many different states (which
he wailed one by one, repeating a few). If enough NH
voters saw it or see clips of it next week, I think it may
kill his candidacy.
On top of it all, he
followed John Edwards, who gave a knockout
speech. Kerry did, too, although he went on for 28
minutes – much too long for a victory speech. Kerry's
biggest weakness as a politician, I think, is that
he tends to speak circuitously a lot, and he's improved
greatly over the last couple months but must improve
more.
70% of the Iowa delegates
went to Kerry and Edwards. That means they
got ALL of the undecided voters. ALL of them.
The entire rationale
of the Dean campaign in the last month or
so seems to be that they've built this unstoppable
grassroots movement – new voters who aren't easily polled.
Turnout, at 119,000, was huge, so maybe Dean's firebreathing
in earlier months did rope some of those people
in, but in the end it doesn't even look like a lot
of them voted for him.
January 19, 2004
51% reporting in Iowa:
John Kerry 37%, John Edwards 33%, Howard Dean
18%, Dick Gephardt 11%. Dean seemed to me already
to have conceded a 3rd place finish on Larry
King Live. Kerry and Edwards are kicking his ass –
Kerry's beating him 2 to 1. This is astonishing.
CNN is already reporting
that, based on preliminary entrance polls,
John Kerry is the solid first choice of Iowa Caucus-goers,
besting Howard Dean and John Edwards, with Gephardt
trailing. If that holds up, it's a political
earthquake.
James Carville,
the chief campaign strategist for one of
the all-time greatest political athletes, Bill Clinton,
emphatically made the following statement about
John Edwards on
Crossfire today:
"He is the single
best stump speaker I have ever seen run for President
in my life."
Wow.
It's a big day,
finally. Tonight we will have some concrete
answers. I'll analyze the results plentifully
later tonight or early tomorrow morning.
In the meantime, I was
struck by the difference in these seemingly
similar quotes by John Edwards and Dick Gephardt on the Iowa
campaign trail yesterday:
Edwards:
You must give
me a shot at George Bush. You give me a
shot at George Bush, I will give you the White House.
Gephardt:
My name is
Dick Gephardt: I'm going to win the Democratic
nomination and I'm going to beat George Bush.
Look at the subtle language
difference – Edwards is much more personal,
he starts out asking the voters for something
very specific and then promises them something in return. He
offers them a deal. Gephardt just tells the voters
first something they already know – his name – and
then makes a couple bold declarations. I'm sure more
than a few Iowa voters don't believe either man when
they say they're gonna beat G.W., but Edwards
invites them to be co-conspirators in a cause while
Gephardt just recites a goal. Seems small, maybe, but I think
it's the difference between a natural politician,
a quintessential salesman, and somebody just going
through the motions.
January 18, 2004
According to the latest
Des Moines Register poll,
John Kerry leads in Iowa with 26%, followed
by John Edwards with 23%, Howard Dean with
20%, and Dick Gephardt with 18%. Although professional
political observers tend to describe Iowa
polls as notoriously unreliable, there does seem to be the feeling
from almost every pollster and everybody on the ground
that Edwards and Kerry have garnered many of the
undecideds in the last couple weeks, Dean's been
flat if not dropping a little bit, and Gephardt's
in a lot of trouble. But Dean and Gephardt are also
regarded to have the best get-out-the-vote ground operations,
so nobody knows what in the world is gonna happen, and
all these prognostications will be meaningless after
we have the sure results tomorrow night.
Many people have asked
me lately how the Iowa Caucus works. I've
never been to it or any other caucus, but I do know the
following:
At 6:30pm CST tomorrow
night, Iowans will gather at 1,993 different
precincts. There are about 1.2 million Iowan Democrats and
Independents eligible to vote, and a huge turnout
would be anything over 120,000 people (in the 2000
Gore vs. Bradley primary, only about 61,000 people
showed up, but most experts I've heard seem to think
that total will be at least doubled). One of the things
that makes caucuses so difficult to predict is that there's
no poling model sophisticated enough to accurately gauge who's
gonna show up, and even the huge 120,000 would only
represent 10% of eligible voters.
In the individual precicts,
a precinct captain will take a collection
for the Iowa Democratic Party (beat Bush!) and then introduce
representatives for each of the campaigns who
will give a speech about why you should support their
candidate. Then people divide into groups for each
candidate. Here's the tricky part: if a particular
candidate doesn't have the support of 15% of the
people in the room, then their candidate is declared not "viable"
and they can either be considered undecided or pick
their second choice. (I understand in the past almost
everybody knows who they're going to go with when
they walk in, but there are still a remarkable
number of undecideds and not-firmly- committeds in
this race – maybe as many as 40%, so who knows what
kind of deals are gonna take place tomorrow). The other candidates'
supporters literally run at those people to plead
their case as to why they should join their side.
This is the other thing that makes these caucuses
so terribly hard to predict, because second choices
become so important and the persuasive powers of
the different constituencies really play a part. For instance,
if I were running a campaign and I knew I needed help attracting
men 18-29, I'd want to make sure that I had solid
support from every supermodel and hooker in Iowa.
After everybody has decided
which way they want to go, delegates are
assigned to each of the viable candidates based on the population
of the precinct's county. The whole thing usually
takes over a couple hours and figures are then reported
to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters, so we
should have results sometime around 8:30pm CST.
I'm going to overlook
my own warnings and make some stupid predictions:
Kerry 26%, Dean 24%, Edwards 21%, Gephardt 19%.
I would love nothing more
than Howard Dean to tank here and then in
New Hampshire, too, and I think there's a chance of
it. He's certainly got some really fervent supporters,
and many of those supporters may be hard to track
using conventional polls (for instance, pollsters
don't call cell phones, which many of Dean's young
supporters may be using as their main lines). On
the other hand, if he does have all that support from the
young, those voters have a pretty crappy track record of
showing up at the polls. So if nothing else, the
results tomorrow night will give an indication of
the size of Dean's unconventional support.
The more I consider Dean,
though, the more convinced I become that
he's a cold fish and terrible general election candidate.
Edwards, Clark, and Kerry are far superior options.
Speaking of John Kerry,
he was absolutely dazzling this morning on
This
Week with George Stephanopoulos; he was focused,
passionate, concise – by far the best I've ever seen
him. Reports of his demise, including my own,
may have been greatly exaggerated. Tomorrow night, he
may just rise from the dead, surer than Lazarus.
January
14, 2004
Check out the
winning
"Bush in 30 Seconds" ads from
moveon.org. The overall
winner and people's choice is an excellent issue ad, but the
animated ad is my favorite overall. I also think
"Hood Robbin'"
(bad title, good ad) is outstanding. Democrats will be
energized this election year – make no mistake
about it.
Today, General Wesley
Clark gave a
speech which outlines
what a war on terror would look like under
a President who actually spent a lot of time
thinking about it as something more than just a
political slogan. You should read all of it, but I think
it's an excellent proposal – one that would make this
country far safer if enacted.
I'll point out just 2
passages I found particularly interesting.
The first deals with Pakistan
and Musharaff:
"But there is no country
whose future will be more important in the
war against al Qaeda than Pakistan. Right now, we know
that the Taliban and al Qaeda are operating beyond
the rule of law in Pakistan. We know that Pakistani
laboratories are responsible for selling nuclear
weapons technology to Iran and North Korea. And
we know that many religious schools there, the
radical madrassas, are educating tens of thousands for Jihad
in Kashmir and against the United States.
We must present President
Musharaff of Pakistan with a clear choice:
either work with America and the civilized world to
defeat al Qaeda and stop the proliferation of nuclear
technology -- or become another outlaw nation. Recent
events indicate that Pakistani leaders may be ready
for a real break with the past, and I encourage
them to continue down that path.
Early in my Administration,
I will invite President Musharaff to Washington
to meet with me and with congressional leaders.
In those meetings, I will offer a dramatic multi-billion dollar
assistance program and a new relationship with
America.
But this new relationship
and new assistance will require real change
by the government. No longer will we turn a blind eye
to nuclear technology exports. No longer will we ignore
the religious schools that preach hate and justify
terrorism. And no longer will we accept weakness
as an excuse not to go into the outlying provinces
to root out al Qaeda and the Taliban."
Every foreign policy
expert thinks Pakistan sold North Korea their
nuclear technology, and everybody knows there are safe
zones for al Qaeda in Pakistan. In other words, the
Bush administration is really hypocritical – if
they were serious about a policy of pre-emption
or their expressed idea that we will not distinguish
between those who harbor terrorists and terrorists
themselves, then we'd have to wage war against Pakistan. Instead,
the Bush administration doesn't have any clear Pakistan
policy. You'd assume they're working behind the scenes
to root out al Qaeda and put pressure on Musharaff
to ensure non-proliferation, but the more I read
about this administration, the less convinced I am
that they're actually doing it, and if they are doing that,
Bush should tell the American people about it (without compromising
Musharaff's standing in his own country, of course).
Clark tells us exactly what he'd do, which is basically
bribe them with serious accountability standards
attached. It's tough, vital, common sense foreign
policy. Imagine that.
Another passage in Clark's
speech proposes a Joint Counter-Terrorism
Strike-Force:
"To address this problem,
we will ask NATO to create a combined Joint
Counter-Terrorism Strike-Force, composed of forces from
NATO members and nations outside the alliance, including
Arab countries like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates, as well as South Africa, Singapore,
and the Philippines. The Strike Force's number one
mission will be to seek out, capture and destroy
al Qaeda operatives and their associates. It will
be built using same combined joint task force concept developed
by NATO during the 1990s.
The first mission of this
new Joint Counter-Terrorism Strike Force
will be to take down Osama bin Laden. With help from Arab
countries, who may have intelligence and access
that Americans can't get, I will send that Strike
Force into the border areas of Pakistan and
Afghanistan where most believe bin Laden is holed
up and where he and his deputies continue to order terrorist
attacks. I will work directly with other countries and
our military to refocus our energies where they should
have been all along: on capturing or killing those
who committed the attacks on September 11 and making
sure they can never, never attack our country again."
This is a great idea,
too. It rightly defines terrorism as a
global problem in need of a collective response, it de-Americanizes
the problem, and it would have to be at least somewhat
public, allowing democracies some ability to
keep checks on it. If there's any equivalent right
now, it's covert, and it doesn't have to be. Clark's
a classic internationalist – the precise antidote
to the Bush administration's
Arrogant
Empire.
January
12, 2004
Former Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill goes on record with
a
number of revelations about how Bush
and his cabinet operate in Ron Suskind's
new book,
The
Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the
White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill,
currently the #1 book on amazon.com.
Rest assured Bush forces
will be doing everything they can to malign
O'Neill, who, after all, does have an ax to grind (he
was told to resign). But nearly everything O'Neill says
squares with stuff that's already public. O'Neill
describes Bush as being like "a blind man in a
room full of deaf people," and gives some insight into
what Bush's famed lack of intellectual curiosity
must feel like to a thinking person experiencing it
on the inside:
I wondered
from the first if the President didn't know
the questions to ask or if he did know and just
not want to know the answers? Or did his strategy
somehow involve never showing what he thought? But you can
ask questions, gather information and not necessarily
show your hand. It was strange.
Check this with what
Bush appointee
John
DiIulio told Suskind about the anti-intellectual White
House culture in late 2002 (DiIulio apologized
later for his remarks, but so what?):
The lack of even basic
policy knowledge and the only casual interest
in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions
by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were
talking Medicare; near instant shifts from discussing
any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political
communications, media strategy, et cetera.
O'Neill also talks about
this focus on politics, and contrasts this
White House with the previous two – Nixon
and Ford – he'd worked in by saying that "
our group
was mostly about evidence and analysis, and Karl (Rove),
Dick (Cheney), Karen (Hughes) and the gang seemed
to be mostly about politics. It's a huge distinction."
O'Neill and DiIulio,
both White House insiders, draw a consistent
picture of the Bush administration as intellectually
impoverished but politically focused.
To me, maybe the most
frustrating thing about Bush is that his
"decisiveness" can be seen by so many as such an asset
when he repeatedly shows – in fact, sometimes even
seems to embrace – that he has no depth of knowledge
in any foreign or domestic policy area on which
to base the decisions he makes. Has anybody, Republican
or Democrat, ever called George W. Bush an expert on
anything?
A complete nincompoop
is making the most important final decisions
on the most serious issues to face our country and our world,
and while it may be farcically funny in one sense,
it's also a terrible, terrible tragedy. The sheer
idiocy behind the bungling of pre-Iraq diplomacy
and post-Iraq reconstruction provides the most
serious evidence as to why a President must be able
to put often contrasting and sometimes unfounded advice from
his subordinates in some realistic perspective. This
President will never be able to do that, because
he doesn't know anything and he's not interested
in learning.
Yes, it's that simple.
The ACLU
has filed a motion on behalf of Rush Limbaugh.
Funny.
Speaking of Limbaugh,
how about Donovan McNabb's performance leading
the Philadelphia Eagles to victory over the Green Bay
Packers yesterday? After he made one of the best plays
I've ever seen to elude the Green Bay defensive
line and rifle a touchdown pass at the beginning
of the 4th quarter, I thought of Limbaugh. McNabb
rushed for more yards (107) than any quarterback
in NFL playoff history, but I suppose Limbaugh thinks such a
record should be put in context of McNabb's being black
and the media overrating black quarterbacks. But all
is right – McNabb's back in the NFC championship game for the
3rd straight year and Limbaugh is no longer able to
spread his idiocy Sundays on ESPN. I'm afraid during
all the controversy a few months ago, though, that
the baselessness of Limbaugh's comments – especially
about McNabb not being "any good from the get-go" –
might have been lost under their insensitivity.
We have a storied tradition
of stupid men in this country, but Rush
Limbaugh may just take the prize as the all-time moron
for the masses.
On its face, George
W. Bush's
immigration
reform proposal offers a reasonable starting point
for Congressional debate. However, considering
that we've currently got a House of Representatives
and a White House that are openly hostile
to workers' rights – and a Republican Senate not much
better – I don't see how we could get a deal that does
anything other than create a permanent, legal
underclass of vulnerable foreign workers whose viability
in the American systerm would be controlled entirely
by business managers. This, of course, is exactly
what Bush and Rove and DeLay want.
If you think I'm being
too simplistic or partisan
