Month: January 2004

If Howard Dean cannot win the anti-war vote, he’s a goner. It’s clear, however, that he has performed a great service for the Democrats. He was the vehicle for their rage; and he helped vent and dissipate it. That’s not to say Bush-hatred has died. The latest WaPo poll shows a higher number of strongly anti-Bush voters – 30 percent – than ever. But the Dems have obviously decided that it’s better to get even rather than mad. Dean’s implosion also strikes me as bad news for Wesley Clark. He was supposed to be the anti-Dean, but adopted Deanish rhetoric. Both positions are now somewhat redundant. The Iowa voters – not exactly centrists – picked Kerry and Edwards to be the anti-Dean candidate, and the shrillness of the Dean-Clark message (the shrillness that so appealed to Paul Krugman) was just as soundly rejected. Good news for the Dems – and the country.

HOW VIABLE IS KERRY? I’m still unpersuaded by John Kerry, although it seems his campaigning has improved markedly. For me, the big winner is Edwards. He’s always struck me as a Tony Blair figure – telegenic, personally appealing, centrist. His speech was the best of the bunch last night – and he exudes decency. That’s enormously important against Bush because the president’s most under-rated political virtue is his general likeability. If Edwards can pick off even a couple of Southern states, he has a critical advantage over his rivals. National security is obviously a huge problem. Maybe he can find a way to innoculate himself on the issue. How does a Kerry-Edwards or Edwards-Kerry ticket sound? In a word: Credible. The Dems don’t want to commit suicide after all. For the record, I’d back Edwards against any of the others currently running.

THAT NYT POLL: A seasoned Republican analyst emailed me this to explain the somewhat dismal polling for the president in Sunday’s NYT poll:

In the most recent Gallup poll, the party ID was 37 percent GOP and 37 percent Democratic. In the AP/Ipsos poll, the party ID was 42 percent GOP and 45 percent Democratic. And in the CBS/NYT poll on Sunday, the party ID was 34 percent GOP and 47 percent Democratic. Is it any wonder the numbers were what they were? This is more evidence, in my judgment, why you shouldn’t trust the NYT polls. (In their last poll, the NYT had a ten-point advantage for Democrats in the party ID.)

That strikes me as a pretty devastating indictment of the polling at the New York Times. Is the skewing deliberate? The Washington Post poll today shows some similar down-draft on domestic policies, but is far more favorable to Bush than the NYT’s analysis. Can we even trust the NYT polls any more? Over to you, Dan Okrent.

IN A PICTURE: Why he lost. Watching his concession speech last night was actually a little disturbing. His sore throat made his voice sound even more like a growl. And he was aggressive beyond belief. Compared to John Edwards’ moving tribute to Dick Gephardt, it was a disgrace.

ANOTHER FALSE ALARM: No blister gas bombs in Iraq. The absence of any WMDs in any usable form in Iraq is, to my mind, staggering. I’m still passionately pro-war, but you cannot sugar-coat this intelligence debacle. The pre-emption doctrine is practically speaking dead.

FIFTH COLUMN WATCH: An Anti-War.com writer pleaded guilty to federal weapons and explosives charges. He was planning to fight for “Muslim causes.”

NOT A DEAD PARROT: Churchill’s pet is still alive – and still using the f-word.

Another boo-boo.

THE DISCREPANCY: Dan Mitchell from the Heritage Foundation explains how the White House numbers for spending conflict with, er, reality:

The Bush Administration is measuring annual changes in budget authority (a form of hypothetical money that indicates how much a certain department or agency has in its hypothetical checkbook) while Heritage – and everyone else – measures annual changes in budget outlays (how much money actually is being spent).
Budget authority, I should mention, is not a fraudulent concept, but it does allow for fraudulent game-playing. You can shift budget authority between fiscal years. You can deliberately reduce budget authority in the short run even though you realize that your outlay trendline makes that untenable. etc, etc.
Outlays are where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. I will gladly defend the WH’s tax policy, but their spending policy is obscene.

Obscenity covered with obfuscation. Tax and spend is bad enough. Spend, borrow and spin is worse.

KERRY ON THE UPSWING: Now, the Concord Monitor is endorsing him.

“To be called an Uncle Tom is an honor. Like our foundational black thinkers, Uncle Tom is often invoked but rarely read. He is not who the Politburo says he is. He was a moral, religious man of dignity and duty who accepted his lot as a slave because he had no choice yet by his behavior transcended it. He was an ancestor of whom to be proud; how has it been overlooked that he chose torture and death rather than inform on two sexually abused female runaways? To follow the Politburo’s anti-intellectual, perverse construction to its logical conclusion, blacks should have cultivated no manners, created no art, pursued no knowledge, expended only the mimimum energy at their tasks, and avoided any kindness or heroism that could not have been confined to the black community. They should have actually been subhuman.” – Debra Dickerson, from her new, stimulating book, “The End of Blackness.”

What a hilarious period for punditry (and I include myself). I don’t know a soul who, only a couple weeks ago, predicted a four-way tie in Iowa. And yet the voters are making their minds up regardless of us media masturbators. What gall! What presumption! We talking heads already dismissed Edwards’ chances (even though, like many other conservatives, I’ve always liked him and his campaign). Mickey even had a contest for the best way for John Kerry to drop out a few weeks back – and now he’s the front-runner! Looking back, I think I made only one truly profound observation. The minute Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean, I instinctively opined that the Dean candidacy was finished. And, sure enough, as soon as Gore touched the Dean campaign, things began to go wrong. I should have trusted my instinct: Al Gore is always political death. Now all we need is to find out whom Johnny Apple thinks will win, and we’ll be all set. C’mon, Johnny. Put us out of our misery.

HOW BUSH COULD LOSE: I’m not sure what to make of the NYT poll yesterday. Obviously, I don’t trust NYT polls. But if this one is at all accurate, it’s grim news for Rove. The strategy of bankrupting the country to appease various interest groups hasn’t worked too well. Bush is still behind on prescription drugs for the elderly – despite a future cost of trillions directed to the wealthiest segment of the population. Despite booming growth and productivity rates, Bush still gets a net negative on the economy. It’s even stevens on Iraq. The president’s only real ace is national security – which, during the war on terror, is a big ace. (It’s certainly the sole reason I’m still giving the president the benefit of the doubt.) But here’s the thing: much of the national security advantage is retroactive. It refers to the admirable way in which Bush responded to 9/11. Looking forward, there’s a big opening for a Democrat who wants to say the following: “I want to do more to improve homeland security, put more emphasis on securing loose nukes in Russia and around the world, stay the course on Iraq – but also move to mend fences with old Europe and our other allies. Domestically, I’m going to improve our finances by raising taxes on the very rich, but cutting taxes on the middle class. And, above all, I’ll be a check on one-party government in the Congress, and prevent Bush from appointing extremists to the Supreme Court.” That’s a powerful message. My hunch is that the Democratic primary voters have begun to realize that they’ve sent their message of anger, but now realize they can win, if they find the right guy. For a cultural liberal, fiscal conservative like me, Bush’s only current advantage over a centrist Democrat is his conduct of the war on terror. What we’ll see in the next few weeks is if the Dems can see this. It’s grim news for Bush if they can.

THE IOWA MOMENT: My take on what the hell is going on.

Even their own political documentary department is saying the BBC went over the line during the post-war in Iraq. D-Day for Blair is January 28, when the Hutton report on his handling of the David Kelly affair will be released.

AXIS OF EVIL WATCH: What on earth is this? And why is it obviously French-driven?

WHY I CAN’T BACK CLARK: In a single picture.

The invaluable Mike Crowley is the first person to explain the surge with any persuasiveness.

THE SPENDING BINGE: Here’s the essential quandary for fiscal conservatives:

On Bush’s watch, the White House says non-military, non-homeland security discretionary spending has fallen from 15 percent to as low as 3 percent. But the conservative Heritage Foundation disputed those estimates calculating that discretionary outlays rose 13 percent in 2002, 12 percent in 2003 and will rise 10 percent in 2004.

That’s a massive discrepancy. If the Congress were in Democratic hands, it might be plausible. The White House could say that it has proposed tighter spending, but that the Congress over-ruled them. But the Republicans control both branches of government! Bush has vetoed not a single spending measure and keeps proposing even more spending. For me, the bottom line is that only divided government can control spending excess. If you’re a fiscal conservative, you’ve got to split the ticket if you want some restraint. The Republicans are no better and arguably worse than the Democrats at stiffing their own special interest groups. So in an era of Republican dominance in Congress, the case for a sane Democrat in the White House is getting stronger.

I’m immensely sorry this site experienced complete meltdown over the last day or so. I’m not a techie, but essentially our server exploded and our server company didn’t have a back-up available and needed to order a spare part, which took a day. 2004 has been jinxed. We’ve had sluggish, slow service for two weeks, then this. And the flu. We haven’t even had any reliable stats since before Christmas. It’s frustrating for you and infuriating for me. We’re working hard to make sure this won’t ever happen again. But there were no dirty tricks and no hacking – just horrible luck and miserable service. I’m sorry again. Stay tuned for what should be a memorable week – from Iowa nail-biting to another array of big spending special interest projects from the president on Tuesday.

It’s busy-busy for Josh Marshall in primary time. Not so long ago, he was arguing that although Howard Dean backed unilateralism in the Balkans, the “totality” of the situation was different then and so there’s no inconsistency. I think by “totality”, Josh means that a Democrat was president. (For the record, I backed the Clinton administration’s eventual intervention in the Balkans, and wanted him to intervene much earlier when it could have prevented tens of thousands of murders). Now it’s Clark’s turn. Marshall does the usual snooty put-down of Drudge and claims that the full context of Clark’s remarks to the Congress show indeed that Clark was always against the war. In fact, the testimony is a little more interesting than that.

CLARK’S SLITHERING: Reading Clark’s remarks, several things stand out. First, like everyone else, he believed that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons. Second, he believed that war should be an option, in fact, war should be clearly threatened by the United States:

I think it’s not yet time to use force against Iraq but it is certainly time to put that card on the table, to turn it face up and to wave it and the president is doing that and I think that the United States Congress has to indicate after due consideration and consulting our people and building our resolve that yes, this is a significant security problem for the United States of America and all options are on the table including the use of force as necessary to solve this problem because I think that’s what’s required to leverage any hope of solving this problem short of war.

I fail to see how that was in the slightest bit different than the Bush-Blair position. Clark emphasized the benefits of a broad coalition and U.N. support. In September, he cautioned patience and time:

I think you have to balance risks and I think that in balancing the risks it’s better to take the time now to line up as strong as possible diplomatic support and a military coalition before you have to take what looks like will probably be inevitable action, rather than rushing into something on the presumption that your intelligence is faulty …

(By faulty, he meant intelligence that was under-estimating Saddam’s weaponry.) Again, his position is identical to Bush-Blair. They spent much of the fall and winter of 2002 desperately trying to win over as much support as possible – but France was never, repeat never, going to budge. What about unilateralism? Here’s Clark’s answer:

I think the first thing is you have a very strong determination that’s out in public and supported by this body that says if we don’t get the assistance we need from the United Nations, as a last resort we will use force and we will solve the problem ourselves.

We also learn that Clark absolutely believed that there was a real chance of an al Qaeda-Saddam link, and that it was prudent to assume it had or would occur. The difference is that in the real world, we couldn’t get universal agreement; we had to make a difficult judgment about the threat; and so an easy decision was impossible. As soon as it got tough, Clark bailed, then, during and immediately after the war, praised the president and the allies, then bailed again. No wonder Marshall likes him. All this careful positioning, demands for a perfect world, support for threatening war as long as we would never actually deliver: classic Clintonian foreign policy. I guess you could defend it. But whatever defense you make of it cannot be that Clark was simply anti-war. He was pro-war until it was politically convenient for him not to be. He was pro-war, depending on what the meaning of “pro” is. All this is from a man who is now campaigning as Howard Dean with medals. The man is a colossal phony.

Ecstasy is falling rapidly in price and popularity in Britain, where it was recently ubiquitous. No addicts can be found.

LOST IN SPACE: Thanks for all your emails. I guess I should say I have no problem in principle with government-funded space exploration. But the full costs of this will explode in a decade or so, at exactly the same time that social security is cratering and Medicare is going bankrupt. If the president were proposing means-testing social security, raising the retirement age, restraining Medicare growth, ending subsidies for big agriculture and tackling corporate welfare, I’d be happy to go along with a new space program. But we don’t even have a sign that the president even intends to deal with any of this – in fact he has added vast new future liabilities in three short years. The word for that is irresponsible. I think you can defend his fiscal record in the last three years as a function of war and near-depression. But we can now see what he believes in. He has a Congress of the same party. He has to be held accountable for what is being done to the federal budget. He is a more extreme fiscal liberal than anyone we’ve seen since LBJ.

The nexus is growing.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “During the era of Clinton-centrism, I often heard acquaintances express their political leanings by saying they were “fiscally conservative, but socially liberal”. (In other words, “I’m a caring and tolerant person – fun, even! – but you can still trust me with your money.”) I liked to deadpan that I was actually the opposite: fiscally liberal, but socially conservative. (“I’m a heartless, intolerant stick-in-the-mud, and, what’s more, I’d spend your money with reckless abandon.”) No one took me seriously (then again, this was in California and New York, where people still think I’m kidding when I tell them I’m a Republican and that I plan on voting for Bush).
I would not have imagined it possible, but this Administration has made policy out of my joke.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

MY FEELING ENTIRELY: I spent a few seconds trying to figure out what exactly Paul O’Neill meant by saying that president Bush is like a blind man in a room of deaf people and then gave up. I mean, life is short, and all that. Leave it to Mike Kinsley to tease it out:

I’m sorry, but how is being uninterested in policy like being a blind man in a roomful of deaf people? Are blind people uninterested in policy? Or, more accurately, do blind people become less interested in policy when they find themselves in a room with deaf people? Does a blind man surrounded by deaf people talking policy issues think: “Oh, hell. These folks are going to go on and on and on about the problems of deaf people. Who needs that? I’ve got problems of my own.” Is that O’Neill’s point? And even if there is something about a room full of deaf people that makes a blind man disengage from policy issues, what does this have to do with President Bush and his Cabinet?

LOL.