Month: February 2004

But I laughed at this several times. If it’s a bad day at the office, enjoy. It could be worse.

“I’m reading through your fisk of Bush on MTP. Good job. About the president’s use of the word ‘Sure:’ I think he was using it not as a placeholder, but rather as an acknowledgement that he was expecting to hear this question and was ready to answer it (misleading as that answer might have been). I think that maybe, in the president’s head, the words “Can you explain…” were grafted onto the question. I don’t know if you saw the interview or just read it, but I got the impression from body language that the president had been prepped to some degree on all of these questions, and when TR asked them a little box in his head opened: ‘Sure, I know the answer to that.’
Or maybe not.” That might be true. But then it’s another Bush family tick – going meta on us. It’s like the classic: “Message: I care.” They keep thinking about the process rather than answering the question. It’s the nittiest of picks. But it’s still weird.

A fellow student and subsequent professor analyzes George W. Bush from the Harvard Business School perspective. It’s interesting reading. Money quote:

By reputation, the President was a very avid and skillful poker player when he was an MBA student. One of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W. Bush’s political career. He is not one to loudly proclaim his strengths at the beginning of a campaign. Instead, he bides his time, does not respond forcefully, a least at first, to critiques from his enemies, no matter how loud and annoying they get. If anything, this apparent passivity only goads them into making their case more emphatically.
Only time will tell, whether Saddam ever had any WMDs. Their non-existence has not been proven. Only time will tell whether or not Osama bin Laden (or his corpse) will be taken into custody by American Troops. Only time will tell whether or not Iraq will continue to make progress toward a transition toward a peaceful democratic government. George W. Bush knows much more information about these topics than his domestic political opponents do. At the moment, they are betting a lot of their chips on one side of these questions.
We will see by November who has the winning hand.

I guess we will.

My fisking of parts of the president’s MTP interview. Not encouraging, to say the least.

It’s Item One today. Fascinatingly diverse response, with many conservatives being highly disappointed. I reprinted one email yesterday from one of them. I didn’t watch the interview yesterday in its entirety. It was a gorgeous day in Southern California and I needed a breather. But all the clips struck me as Bush as he normally is: affable, accessible, often inarticulate, but on the basic points of the war (if nothing else) right. I thought, however, he seemed very tired. One aspect of the current administration that I think is overlooked is the simple exhaustion factor. They’ve been through an awful lot; they’re tired out; and it’s beginning to show. Anyway, here’s another view:

I disagree completely with just about every Bush policy and everything he stands for. Hell, I’d vote for Kucinich over Bush. But I have to say, having watched the entire interview, that I thought Bush fared pretty well with Russert. He is a lot more comfortable in his skin. He’s a lot more sure of himself, and he knows his stuff much better than he used to. This is the first time I can remember him not trying in an interview to “show” that he knows stuff by dropping names and committing the fallacy of the argument to authority — something he was still doing last fall in the Diane Sawyer interview. He just said what he thought. Sure, his answers on the economy were weak, but he has very little to work with. The economic numbers are all much worse than when he came into office, and the deficit is the huge elephant in the Oval office. But what choice does he have but to spin and downplay these problems? Russert went fairly easy on him — a lot easier than he went on Dean last week — but he asked some tough questions, and I thought it was particularly interesting that Bush seemed to welcome them and accept them as fair challenges. He was in command. He will be a much more formidable campaigner and debater this time than he was in 2000.

One the other hand, Peggy Noonan is doing her best not to say that the interview sucked. Money quote:

The president seemed tired, unsure and often bumbling. His answers were repetitive, and when he tried to clarify them he tended to make them worse. He did not seem prepared. He seemed in some way disconnected from the event. When he was thrown the semisoftball question on his National Guard experience–he’s been thrown this question for 10 years now–he spoke in a way that seemed detached. “It’s politics.” Well yes, we know that. Tell us more.

It occurs me to that, on this question, he might have nothing more to say. The criticism might well be right. Gulp.

ON DOMESTIC POLICY: On the budget, however, I have to say that a close reading of the transcript is somewhat alarming. I’ll be linking to a TNR fisking later today I did of the president’s completely out-of-it responses. He seems to think that the Medicare entitlement will help our long term fiscal health and that highway spending is an entitlement. I don’t think he even knows what his own administration has done to the nation’s fiscal health. I wasn’t so much outraged by his complete detachment from reality as unnerved. More later.

MY DEEPER WORRY: It’s about the war. During the part of the interview when Bush could have strongly supported his nation-building in Iraq, and linked it to tackling the deeper problems that gave us 9/11, he was defensive and almost apologetic. I wonder: does he actually regret being a nation-builder? Does he privately wish he’d never done this? We all know his position before 9/11. Nation-building was the last thing he wanted to do. Has he reverted to type? In this kind of enterprise we need conviction at the top. At least more conviction than we saw yesterday. My prediction: another small poll tumble.

The strange story of Michael and Janet Jackson – the offspring America both loves and hates. My latest Sunday Times column.

Some hopeful signs that the students are still determined to win some meager measure of freedom.

CLARK ON SADDAM: Just when you get frustrated by George W. Bush’s difficulty answering simple questions with coherent answers, you hear Wesley Clark on CNN. Here he is on Saddam Hussein:

And, Wolf, the second point is, Saddam Hussein may well have been a bad guy. But since when does the United States go to war with people because we don’t like them? There’s any number of bad people around the world. Why did the president choose this particular man to go to war with? We’ve never done this before, that I know of, in American history. We picked the guy out, we made him a villain. We had him contained. We went to war with Iraq, despite the fact there was no imminent threat to the United States, no connection to 9/11. The diplomatic options were not exhausted. We didn’t have a plan as to what to do when we got to Baghdad. We didn’t have the forces to do it with. It looks to me like reckless and poor leadership, and that’s what I call it.

Almost everything in that quote is wrong. There simply aren’t many national leaders who are also mass murderers who have used chemical weapons to commit genocide, who have invaded two countries, broken the conditions of a truce with the United States, violated any number of U.N. resolutions and tried to assassinate the president of the United States. Maybe Clark could tell me who else is in that category. No one claimed that Saddam was an “imminent threat” for the umpteenth time. And, most glaring of all, the United States did not “make” Saddam a villain, no more than the U.S. “made” Milosevic a villain. That kind of crap belongs at an ANSWER rally, not in a presidential candidate. Thank God he’s losing this race badly.

On the budget, this president is frighteningly unaware of the reality of his own legacy and policies. That’s the only conlclusion you can draw from his answers on Tim Russert. Either that, or he really is lying. Josh Claybourne explains why.

“I happened to be in favor of the war in Iraq. I also think you’ve selected a quotable piece of the President’s interview in which he tried to defend his actions in taking the country to war, even in the absence of evidence that Iraq possessed WMD at the time the war was launched. That said, I sense that you did not watch the President’s full interview on Meet the Press. It was the single worst performance by an elected official on that show that I’ve ever seen. The President was inarticulate in the extreme; he avoided answering almost every semi-difficult question, repeatedly asking permission to “step back” as a way to provide a canned statement about how he’s had to make tough decisions during times of war (i.e., don’t second guess any decision I made regarding Iraq); and he often seemed to fail to grasp the meaning of various questions, pausing awkwardly for long periods of time before giving non-responsive answers. Not exactly the type of performance that breeds confidence in your commander in chief. On the issue of the huge debt/deficit, he simply noted that the economy was heading into a recession when he started, that his tax cut was responsible for improving the economy, and he seemed to try to blame Congress for a failure of political will when it comes to spending, as if he’d sent Congress a plan for balancing the budget. It was utter nonsense.” The reader is correct. I’ve only seen clips and will try and see the whole thing later. Of course, most people will only see the clips as well, so maybe the whole impression won’t matter. But the impression I get from readers who saw the whole thing is that Bush seemed completely out of his depth. Even on Fox News, the juxtaposition of Bush’s folksy chatter and Kerry’s booming voice must have the White House worried.

“He had used weapons.- He had manufactured weapons.- He had funded suicide bombers into Israel.- He had terrorist connections.- In other words, all of those ingredients said to me:- Threat. The fundamental question is:- Do you deal with the threat once you see it?- What- in the war on terror, how do you deal with threats?- I dealt with the threat by taking the case to the world and said, Let’s deal with this.- We must deal with it now.” – the president on NBC’s Meet The Press. It’s his best self-defense yet. And I liked his modest way of putting it. In the campaign he can make the case more forcefully, but I’m relieved that on this central question, the White House has belatedly realized it has to make the case again, and explain, and defend itself. It has nothing to be ashamed of, and a huge amount to be proud of, in the battle against terror.