Month: October 2004

One reason some people might get over their fiscal concerns about Kerry is that most observers seem to agree that the Congress is likely to stay Republican after November 2. That means that Kerry is unlikely to be able to afford his big healthcare package and may be forced, like Clinton, into getting serious about deficit reduction. One thing we do know is that unified Republican government means vast new spending increases, and the collapse of fiscal discipline. I’d be just as terrified by unified Democratic government, mind you (although we wouldn’t have to deal with excrescences like the FMA). Divided government, in other words, is perhaps the only real mechanism we have – apart from a constitutional amendment to balance the budget – to restrain the politicians in D.C. from spending even more of our money. My advice: if you’re voting Bush, think seriously about pulling the Dem lever for the House and Senate; vice-versa for the Kerry backers. The last thing we want is to give either of these guys the carte blanche Bush has had for four fiscally ruinous years.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “If we were to sum up where we have ended up after four years of the Intifada, [we would find that] there are three opinions: the first opinion is that after the killing of 1,000 Israelis in the Intifada, Israel would collapse, as would Sharon; the second opinion is that the armed Intifada would liberate the homeland; the third opinion is that the Intifada would bring the settlements to a halt. An examination [of the matter] shows that Sharon did not fall. On the contrary, he has become the most popular [leader] in the history of Israel, after having been subjected to condemnations in Israel. On the same note, all of the Palestinian lands are now occupied and vulnerable, and the settlements have nearly doubled. We damaged our relations with the Americans and with Israeli public opinion; the latest statement from the Quartet is an additional indication of what has become of us.” – former Palestinian Authority prime minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen).

GAYS N GUNS: Glenn has an interesting post. I’m basically against gun control and for gay rights – for much the same reason. Liberty, and all that.

This time, of Iraqis. The doomsayers will argue that any drop in the number of people saying they are “very likely” to vote in the January elections is a bad sign. But 62 percent is still good news to me. More worrying: “More than 55 percent said people in their city did not support the authority of the Iraqi police. A similar proportion had little faith that the Iraqi army could maintain security during the elections.” It’s security, stupid. Without it, as Hobbes observed, civil life can hardly begin, let alone prosper.

A LETTER FROM FRIST: RightThinking.com’s Lee is unimpressed.

BUSH’S SERVICE RECORD: The Onion gets to the bottom of it.

IDOLIZING DEMOCRACY: How Simon Cowell could bring freedom to the Middle East.

South Carolina Republican Senate candidate, Jim DeMint, has now reached another anti-gay low. His was the campaign that accidentally sent out an email using the word “dike,” and now he’s declaring that gays should not be allowed to teach in public schools:

DeMint, a Greenville congressman, said the government should not endorse homosexuality and “folks teaching in school need to represent our values.” Tenenbaum, the state education superintendent, called DeMint’s position “un-American.” DeMint said after the debate that he would not require teachers to admit to being gay, but if they were “openly gay, I do not think that they should be teaching at public schools.”

It’s interesting to remember that, two generations ago, Ronald Reagan specifically opposed a California initiative to bar gays from teaching. But today’s Republican party is not Reagan’s party any more. It’s Santorum’s.

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HOW UNDECIDEDS VOTE: A great primer from a great new blogger, MysteryPollster, with encouraging news for Kerry. Every presidential challenger against an incumbent tends to do better in the final result than in the final polls – because undecideds break decisively for change. Bottom line: keep your eye on Bush’s approval number. If it’s appreciably below 50 percent, he’s in trouble. My own view is that the first debate was deeply damaging to Bush because it mainly confirmed people’s view that this is a president who doesn’t merit re-election. That’s much more significant than anyone’s views of the challenger.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “This morning after church services, I sat with several of the older ladies who are faithful members of my congregation. The conversation turned to the Bush-Kerry debate. And I was amazed at the hostility expressed towards Bush! Of the six women at the table — four over 70, all over 65 — only one had previously been so outspoken. Today, all of them expressed serious doubts about Bush and five indicated their support of Kerry. To a person, they voiced concern about the war in Iraq and how we are in trouble there.
One of them, born in Canada, but now naturalized, has never voted — “it didn’t seem to matter” — but is so motivated that she is registering this week for the first time precisely so she can vote for Kerry, against Bush.
What’s the difference from the previous week? Frankly, it’s their boldness in speaking against Bush. My congregation leans Republican, and many Democrats have been reluctant to speak up, intimidated by the general feeling that criticizing the President is unpatriotic and unsupportive of our troops. But no more. The debate changed their mood. They watched Kerry raise reasonable doubts about Bush’s conduct of the war. They watched Bush unable to speak articulately about his conduct of the war. His stumbling emboldened them.
This matters. The prevailing mood of “criticizing the President is unpatriotic” has been crumbling for some months in all parts of the culture, including polite church ladies having coffee after worship on a Sunday morning. When the crumbling reaches this level, a mainline Protestant congregation in a small midwest manufacturing town, something has indeed changed in the debate.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

The re-taking of Samarra by American and Iraqi forces is not the end of the story in the restless Sunni town, but it’s reason enough for celebration. It must surely help relieve the Allawi government, and make the task ahead in Fallujah and the rest of the Sunni Triangle seem more manageable. The question now, of course, is how the insurgents will regroup and challenge the new authorities in the city, and whether the Iraqi army is capable of holding the town by itself. That’s the real test – and we won’t know for a while. Meanwhile, even the Weekly Standard realizes it has to have a response to the worsening situation in Iraq. Reuel Marc Gerecht provides a sobering – and damning – assessment of the botched occupation so far, and argues that our current softly-softly Iraqification policy is insufficiently aggressive to prevent the country from veering off course. He wants the Samarra success to be a prelude to far more aggressive attempts to wrest back control of Sunni cities. There’s just one problem:

The odds of a massive November surprise offensive, after the U.S. elections, aren’t high given how thinly spread American combat forces are across the country. Also, Secretary Rumsfeld’s remark about partial elections may indicate that the secretary, who has consistently looked askance at deploying more troops, has little intention of adopting counterinsurgency tactics requiring a lot more manpower (for example, simultaneous or even sequential house-to-house offensives in Falluja, Ramadi, Baquba, Mosul, or the worst sections of Baghdad). The president could order thousands of Marines from East Asia and the United States to Iraq fairly quickly. But such an offensive in November or December would be essentially an all-American affair: Even the most expedited deployment of Iraq’s new, American-made army would likely be too late for an all-out assault in 2004.

Rummy, again: “Just Enough Troops To Lose.” I wonder if president Bush will rethink the current strategy before November, if he thinks it might make him lose at home as well. Maybe Samarra is a test-case. Here’s hoping.

CRAWFORD AND LOWELL: So the president’s home-town paper endorsed Kerry. Look what the Lowell Sun in Massachusetts has just done. Money quote:

John Kerry … has all the attributes of the shape of water when it comes to telling us what he believes and what he’d do for America. Like incoming and outgoing tides, Kerry is content to go with the flow. In a dangerous world infested with sharks, Kerry would be chum at America’s expense. We in Massachusetts know John Kerry. He got his first taste of politics 32 years ago in the cities and towns of Greater Lowell. In his 20 years in the U.S. Senate, Kerry, a Navy war hero, hasn’t risen above the rank of seaman for his uninspiring legislative record.

A great and ornery country, or what?

My summary of Bush’s debate crumple; and why outing is still wrong.

HOPE IN KABUL: Meanwhile, John Simpson, a sternly anti-American BBC reporter, sums up the new conventional wisdom about Afghanistan. It’s beginning to look like a success:

But could the Taliban ever come back, I asked Mr Noori as I sat in his dark shop, surrounded by piles of carpets and drinking green tea. I have always found his political judgment very shrewd. “Never,” he says. “They only succeeded because so many people helped them.” Everyone else I have spoken to here agrees. The Taliban captured Kabul because in the mid-1990s they looked like winners, and large numbers of warlords went over to them even though they found the Taliban’s religious extremism distasteful. But when the Northern Alliance, with the help of the US Air Force and American special forces soldiers, threw the Taliban out of Kabul in November 2001, they looked like winners no longer. They have been harried and hunted ever since; and the only weapon they can use now is the car bomb.

Remember all those who said this couldn’t happen? But if you have a successful military intervention, a swift transfer of power, and elections, then even the most troubled Muslim societies can learn to breathe free. However badly the past year has been bungled, it must also still be possible in Iraq.

A great interview with Hitch by Johann Hari. Norman Geras comments.

DISSING BLOGS: Why does the NYT ignore blog scoops of major stories while always crediting other mainstream newspapers? Steve Clemons wants to know.

A VERTICAL LINE: Kerry’s headed up in the poll of polls. And the Iowa markets seem to have had a change of heart as well. I’ve no doubt that the dynamic of this race just changed dramatically – and that it will change again.

NOW, SPAIN: It’s no longer big news that another country is adopting equal rights for gay couples. Almost every civilized country has done so or is about to do so, apart from the U.S. But Spain’s adoption of marriage itself strikes me as a big deal. Spain is an historically Catholic country, however secular it has become. For gay equality to have arrived in the land of Franco is a sign of how profound the social revolution has become. And how irreversible.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN: Another week of travel and talk. Tonight, I’m giving a talk on the current election at Lawrenceville School, New Jersey, at 7.30 pm in the Kirby Arts Center. Tuesday, I’ll be making the case for equal marriage rights at Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, in the Olin auditorium, at 7.30 pm. Wednesday, I’ll be giving a talk on the spiritual dimensions of friendship at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan. The talk will be at 7 pm in the McNally auditorium. Thursday lunchtime, at 1.15 pm, I’ll be speaking abou the election at the Looms Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. Friday, I’ll be checking into a spa. Just kidding about that last bit.

Here’s what Tom Brokaw had to say about the web fact-checking Dan Rather’s bottom: “What I think is highly inappropriate is what going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad … that is quite outrageous.” You know what I hear in that moronic statement? Cold, white-knuckled fear.

Here’s the Newsweek poll. The debate result? Over to Hugh Hewi –, sorry, Newsweek:

Among the three-quarters (74 percent) of registered voters who say they watched at least some of Thursday’s debate, 61 percent see Kerry as the clear winner, 19 percent pick Bush as the victor and 16 percent call it a draw. After weeks of being portrayed as a verbose “flip-flopper” by Republicans, Kerry did better than a majority (56 percent) had expected. Only about 11 percent would say the same for the president’s performance while more than one-third (38 percent) said the incumbent actually did worse that they had expected. Thirty-nine percent of Republicans felt their man out-debated the challenger but a full third (33 percent) say they felt Kerry won.

And this has changed judgments of the candidates at a deeper level. If I were Karl Rove, I’d be panicking a little:

In fact, Kerry’s numbers have improved across the board, while Bush’s vulnerabilities have become more pronounced. The senator is seen as more intelligent and well-informed (80 percent, up six points over last month, compared to Bush’s steady 59 percent); as having strong leadership skills (56 percent, also up 6 points, but still less than Bush’s 62 percent) and as someone who can be trusted to make the right calls in an international crisis (51 percent, up five points and tied with Bush). Meanwhile, Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to below the halfway mark (46 percent) for the first time since the GOP convention in late August.

My own view is that Bush’s critical problem is the last year in Iraq – and his arrogant, Pollyannish response to it. What happened Thursday was that for the first time, the public saw the president confronted with these issues directly and saw that he had no real answer. Worse, they saw him visibly angry at being called to account at all. Out of it and pissy. Not a great combination.

And it helps with the gay vote as well.

The new slogan for Fox News’ Carl Cameron. Well, at least they apologized. But doesn’t this incident prove that Cameron is, er, biased?