Month: November 2002

The president has played the post-election game extremely well too. Bush was wise to stay low-key yesterday and give a press conference today that focussed on Iraq and Homeland Security. As I argued this morning, his main priority is the war on terror, which must include the disarmament of Iraq. I couldn’t think opf a smarter message than: “The election may be over but the terrorist threat is still real.” It’s not just good politics; it’s right. It looks as if we may have a workable U.N. resolution by Monday at the latest. Then we need to mobilize for war, ready for action within days of any Iraqi quibbles about inspection. I’m still leery of sending inspectors, but U.N. support is helpful in our campaign for greater international security. Bush gets this. And he gets the need for caution and prudence in the wake of this victory. My heart sinks at the thought of Trent Lott’s political instincts guiding the new majority. But so far, at least, it looks as if this result will give Bush essential control. And his instincts remain sound. Phew.

HEADS UP AGAIN: Tomorrow, from 8 am till 10 am EST, Hitchens and I will be taking calls on C-SPAN.

The totals are in. I think we can finally say that the election of 2000 is now over.

I’ve been reading with some disbelief all sorts of proposals for president Bush’s next two years. Here’s the only one that matters: win the war. If we can rid the world of Saddam Hussein and see Iran’s dictators pushed to the brink, then an entirely new set of circumstances prevails in the world. What the president needs to focus on now is disarming Saddam. This election wasn’t a mandate for tax simplification or welfare reform (however important those two things are). It was a vote of support for victory. If Bush lets Saddam wriggle through the gaping U.N. net, and lets al Qaeda off the hook, then he will deserve to be defeated in 2004. Getting the war right is paramount. Everything else will follow. Nothing else, in comparison, matters.

CNN’S “COUP D’ETAT”: “Around 1:30 a.m., White House spokesman Ari Fleischer announced that for the first time in U.S. history the president’s party gained seats in the House during the administration’s first midterm elections. He also noted that the same Republican coup d’etat was accomplished in the Senate.” – John King, CNN. But Saddam Hussein was elected.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Even as the bullets ricochet, it should be said there are some problems with this approach to international peacekeeping. For a start, it is illegal. The Yemen attack violates basic rules of sovereignty. It is an act of war where no war has been declared.” – the Guardian on the U.S.’s successful attack on al Qaeda leadership in the Yemen. No war has been declared? Were they alive on September 11, 2001?

THEY EVEN SPIN THE MAPS: Check out this New York Times map of the Governor’s races. It looks pretty good for the Democrats. But, as a liberal reader regrets to point out, there are five – count them – five errors. Georgia is simply left white, as if there had been no gubernatorial election. And Vermont, Maryland, New Hampshire and Minnesota are all colored as “wins” for the GOP, when they should be colored as “gains.” Now most of this is obviously just sloppy, as you’d expect from the Times these days. But it’s also true that every single error makes the Democrats look as if they did better than they did. Somehow, I’m not surprised. (I’ve got a saved copy of the map if they fix it by the time you read this.)

BOB SOLDIERS ON: Poor Bob Herbert. His column degenerates today into a final whimsical lament for the days of Lyndon Johnson. Before that, he argued that the Democrats need to be less timid, more full of hell-fire, less careful, or they face more losses. Then his first example of excessive timidity is the Wellstone rally. Huh?

As an after-note, I didn’t do too badly in the predictions stakes. I got 11 out of 13 right. I was too optimistic about Bowles and Shaheen.

THE BEST LEFT POST-MORTEM: For honesty, clarity and smarts, the award goes to the Nation’s David Corn.

Can anyone doubt that now? Bush would have a friendly governor in California in 2004 if the California Republican party hadn’t allowed itself to become captive to the hard right. The Dems are not the only people to learn lessons from last night. The Republicans need to internalize the fact that religious right conservatism, especially in places like California, is poison.

“Only the filibuster now stands between the nation and the unchecked rule of the most rightwing, xenophobic and belligerent administration in the nation’s history.” – Harold Meyerson, the American Prospect. They still don’t get it, do they?

Well, justice actually is served.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE I: “Why is Bush in free fall?
* Support for an invasion of Iraq has dropped from 72 percent to 62 percent in the past 14 days. Bush and his folks are so distracted by their diplomatic dance with France and Russia that they have fallen down on the job of convincing the American people that an invasion is needed.
* Bush has been hit with a continuous six-month fall in his ratings on “managing the economy” – from 64 percent approval on April 30 to 55 percent on July 2 48 percent on Oct. 22.
* By campaigning for Republican candidates around the nation, Bush seems to be undermining the case for a military emergency requiring immediate action against Iraq.” – Dick Morris, New York Post.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE II: “[T]hat question, known as a generic ballot question, is a measure of national sentiment, and does not necessarily reflect how Americans will vote in the governor’s races around the country and in the handful of close Senate and House races that will ultimately determine the control of Congress.” – The New York Times, spinning their 47 – 40 Republican-Democrat poll of last weekend.

I should have trusted my gut. We all should have believed the late polls. We don’t have the full results yet, but it seems clear, as I write, that the Republicans will gain in the House and win back the Senate. For a first term president who didn’t win a plurality to win in a mid-term election with a deeply troubled economy is, quite simply, an astonishing victory. I guess I’d been too busy telling others not to under-estimate Bush that I under-estimated him myself. Yes, local issues mattered. But the swing is too uniform to be interpreted solely by particulars. This was a vote for Bush, for prosecuting the war on terror, for the tax cut. More important, it was a vote against the hollow negativism, cowardice and mediocrity of the current Democratic Party. They have nothing to say; and that matters. Their predicament is deeper than this result suggests. Since Bush passed his tax cut and since September 11, the Democrats have been cornered. A purely defensive strategy – taking both issues off the table – led them to this result. An offensive strategy – against war and for raising taxes – would have delivered an even worse one. Or they could have come up with a tough but different anti-terror plan and a positive economic message. But they didn’t. So they lost. One other factor is the blandness and decrepitude of their leaders. Daschle and Gephardt are pathetic. McAuliffe is a nightmare. When the Dems needed new blood, they found Mondale and Lautenberg. This is not a party with self-confidence or much of a short-term future. Bush, because of what he did and what the Democrats did not do, now has a remarkable mastery over the polity. He has enormous leverage against Iraq; and this vote will deeply strengthen his position abroad. I hope he uses that mandate wisely and bravely. I also believe that that is part of the reason the Republicans did so well. People know we’re at war. They trust the president. They wanted to show him support. Many factors contributed to tonight’s historically rare event. But the president’s conduct of the war was surely the central one, as it will be for the foreseeable future.

NO MORE EXIT POLLS: Man, I loved their absence. Now we even have to think about why people voted the way they did. And election night itself was so much more enjoyable (even though I seem to be getting some sort of flu).

SEE? I told you Dick Morris always gets it wrong.

ODDS AND ENDS: I have to say I found the way that Chambliss defeated Cleland and Baucus bested Taylor to be dispiriting events. On the bright side, Mitt Romney was clearly the better candidate in Massachusetts; and voters in that liberal state also voted to support English immersion and came extremely close to abolishing the state income tax. Very encouraging. Townsend and Forrester were both terrible candidates who deserved to lose. I’m pleased the oleaginous Hutchinson in Arkansas got done in as well. I guess I’ll have to sleep some more before I hear about Mondale. But I’m still hoping …

THEY JUST DON’T GET IT, DO THEY? More embarrassment for the New York Times. The Johnny Apple piece of “news analysis” this morning is a classic of windy stupidity. The real news from yesterday will surely be the historic achievement of a Republican president seeing his own party gain seats in both the House and Senate. But for Mr Apple, it was all just depressing, listless, uninspired, boring. Of course it was:

Two years after the most bizarre presidential election in American history was decided by the Supreme Court, 14 months after the unspeakable horror of terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the nation voted yesterday in a mood of disenchantment and curious disconnection from the political system. The American public may be faced with a series of potentially life-altering issues, including the prospect of war with Iraq, the possibility of further assaults on national security at home, the reality of a prolonged slump in the stock market and the uncertainty of the economic outlook. But the campaign that led up to the balloting was notably lifeless and cheerless, with pep rallies devoid of pep and stump speeches that stirred few voters.

Just how can you be this out of touch? This follows the Times’ complete botch of their own poll, which predicted a clear Republican drift in the last days of the campaign. The Times buried their scoop, killing the news, in favor of their own partisan pabulum. If this is what the Democrats read in that political cocoon of theirs, no wonder they didn’t see what was coming. I’m beginning to think that Howell Raines is secretly part of Karl Rove’s masterplan.

KRISTOF CHANNELS SULLY: Eventually, the mindless bitterness that makes up the columns of Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman would have to appal even their fellow Democratic partisans. Nick Kristof’s column yesterday reads like a potage de Sullivan. Now what Kristof has to understand is that it’s exactly that shrill, dumb, negative leftism that helped Bush to such an historic victory. Just don’t count on it.

The latest Zogby polls.

Believe it or not, but Joe Conason nails it on the head. He’s wrong about Minnesota (I think Coleman will win) but right about the Democrats in general. Here’s what he says:

But there is no Democratic leadership willing to do more than look for weaknesses on the other side. If Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt have an alternative economic program, they have kept it well hidden throughout this campaign. What they have, at the moment, is a program of opposition. They are the opposition, so that’s fine. Such a program may sustain them through this election. But it won’t get them far over the next two years, when a new leader will emerge in the struggle for the Democratic presidential nomination. The old saying that you can’t beat somebody with nobody applies to policy as well. You can’t beat something with nothing – although you may be able to hold your own.

Of course, I think Conason understates the Democratic problem. The reason they will likely not win the House today is quite simply because they have provided almost no reason whatever to vote for them. On the war, they’re all over the map, with the center of gravity being an attempt to appear pro-war while privately being against it. On the economy, they have no clear program. They’re against the Bush tax cut, but they are not for reversing it. Then there’s warmed-over, Mondale soup – comforting but hardly exciting. What remains is simply a defense of certain entrenched interests – mainly the elderly and African-Americans. I’m not saying the Republicans are a whole lot better. I wish they had more imaginative economic proposals, more courage in their attempt to reform social security, more gonads in resisting the creeping socialization of America’s healthcare system. But at least we know they’re pro-war, pro-Bush, and anti-tax. That’s far clearer than the Democrats. Which is to say that, whatever happens, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans actually deserve to win. But the Democrats actively deserve to lose.

MY PREDICTIONS: This is a fool’s game. But I’m sure it will give enormous pleasure to many people if I am shown to be clueless. In 2000, I predicted a much more substantive Bush win than the final result. I also lamely predicted Hillary would lose. So I tried to resist my gut feeling this time (that we will soon have a Republican House and Senate) and gave Josh Marshall the following guesses: AR: Pryor D; MN: Coleman R; SC: Graham R; CO: Allard R; MO: Talent R; SD: Johnson D; GA: Chambliss R; TN: Alexander R; IA: Harkin D; TX: Cornyn R; LA: Landrieu (w/ runoff) D; NC: Bowles D; NH: Shaheen D. You do the math, since I always get it wrong, but I think that means no change in the Senate.

BAA BAA: Gay sheep have different-looking brains than straight sheep. And they have fabulous horns.

THE JESUITS RESIST: Good news from America Magazine, the journal for American Jesuits. The editorial in the upcoming issue (not online) firmly supports the continued ordination of gay priests. America recently published a debate on the matter in its own pages, but now has taken a stand of its own:

Ensuring that the church ordains only psychologically healthy priests is one answer to the sexual abuse crisis. Scapegoating healthy and celibate gay priests is not. Historically, the ministry of gay priests has represented a significant contribution to the Catholic Church. Preventing the ordination of gay men would deprive the church of many productive, hard-working and dedicated ministers and would, moreover, ignore the promptings of the Holy Spirit, who has called these men to holy orders.

Exactly. America has no ecclesiastical authority, but it is a good sign of where the Jesuits and other religious orders stand in this country. If the Vatican attempts to impose a purging of gay priests and/or seminarians, then the American church may well resist – or simply, quietly disobey.