The Dish

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.

She thinks Coleman won. Money quote: “The entire debate will come down to a handful of sound bites on the news in Minnesota tonight. I think the impression voters will come away with is this: Shaky and irritable old lion tries to cuff rising young tiger; young tiger respectfully stands his ground without resorting to viciousness.”

Dick Morris thinks they’re going to do well in the Senate. Given Morris’ track record in Congressional predictions, this is not a good sign for Tom Daschle.

USA Today gets exactly the same result as the New York Times in their latest Congressional generic poll – a sudden shift toward the Republicans. The difference is: USA Today’s editors aren’t so biased as to bury their story.

U.S. News’ John Leo sees the issue behind the sniper profiling. And he adds something I’d missed:

Even after John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo were identified, the New York Times said authorities were exploring their possible connection to “skinhead militias.” (This was deleted after the early editions of October 24, perhaps when some alert Times editor figured out that black men are not likely to join skinhead groups.)

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“I do not like fundamentalism of any kind. Let us find a way to resist and fight fundamentalism that leads to violence – fundamentalism of all kinds, in al-Qaeda and within our own government. Our resistance to this war should be our resistance to profit at the cost of human life because that is what these drums beating over Iraq are really all about.” – Tim Robbins, speaking at an anti-war rally in Boston.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: “North Korea, in a series of statements issued to the New York Times, last week said it was open to negotiation with the US. Ambassador Han Song-ryol told the newspaper North Korea was willing to shut down the alleged enriched uranium programme and to allow international inspections of its uranium facilities. ‘There must be a continuing dialogue. If both sides sit together, the matter can be resolved peacefully and quickly,’ he said.” – BBC News again. Wouldn’t Orwell be amused by a totalitarian willingness to shut down an alleged uranium program? More forgiving of totalitarianism than the North Koreans – that’s our BBC! (By the way, a reader points out that in the BBC’s other Raines Award nomination today, there was another error. The alleged “massacre” at Jenin took place in April, not March. March was the month when over 120 Israelis were killed in suicide attacks.)

MORONIC CONVERGENCE: Streisand signs on to the Ted Rall conspiracy theory about Paul Wellstone.

BROKEN LINK: Here’s the perfect Christmas prezzie for your homophobic uncle.

This is crunch week – and I’m not talking about the elections. At some point very soon, the administration is going to have to make a hard decision about the U.N. Do we keep talking even as Chirac subtly but powerfully undermines international security for the sake of France’s Great Power aspirations and lots of lucre? Or do we force a resolution, even if it’s one we don’t want. I say: stop letting the French drag us around by our noses. France’s delaying tactics, as Bob Kagan pointed out yesterday, have now gone beyond a diplomatic dance. They are designed to achieve one thing: a reprieve for Saddam and a humiliation of the United States. That’s why it’s past time we put an end to them. Besides, if we go on like this much longer, the delay will be fatal. I’ve long believed that some kind of U.N. mandate would be very helpful in waging what will be a difficult and unpredictable war and occupation. I even think that inspectors aren’t completely useless, as long as they are genuinely allowed to operate without conditions and we can interrogate Iraqi scientists outside the country and give their families amnesty to protect them. Perhaps we’ll have such inspections at the same time as the U.S. and the allies prepare for invasion: the best of both worlds. But it seems vitally important to me not to give Saddam another year for weak inspections, and then plan on war in 2004. In that scenario, we seem weak; we lose momentum; we invite a counter-attack; and Saddam has even more time to play defense shrewdly and well. The Iraqi dictator knows the game. He even knows that his best friends in maintaining his brutal rule are the anti-war members of Anglo-American left and far right. And he understands that time is on his side. We need to reverse that equation soon – or more lives will be lost to the dictates of the terrorists.

THE MORE WE KNOW: The big, unsettling, unavoidable issue of the next few decades is going to be how we reconcile what we want to be true with what science ineluctably shows us. At some point, we will know much, much more about the complex biology of sexual difference, for example, which is bound to have a huge impact on the debate about sexual equality and/or equivalence. And we’ll find out about the biological and genetic components of intelligence, in ways that will undermine notions about educational policy and technique and the roots of social inequality. And then we will simply have the emotional impact of seeing images such as these, which show what it is we abort. Given what we’ve found out in the last decade from science, it seems to me inevitable that our current notions on a whole range of issues will require radical re-thinking. The question is simply whether our culture will be open-minded and, in the best sense, liberal enough to rethink at all.

HEAVEN: A new New York Times poll. These are always great articles because you actually get to see the editors wrestling with real data. Sometimes the data actually conflicts with the editors’ left-liberal beliefs (even though they’ve done their best to avoid that by loading the questions). So the Rainester either a) ignores the data; b) invents the data; or c) spins the data. Sunday’s poll seems to be a case of a) and c). I agree with Mickey that the headline and lede are almost laughably Rainesian. There are two statistics that leap out from the poll: the Republicans are reported to have a 47 – 40 percent lead in the generic Congressional question, with a margin of error of 5 points. That’s much bigger than anything I’ve seen elsewhere (and I’m not sure I believe it). When you read the actual poll results, you find an even more striking story: in the first week of October, the generic question led to 43 percent Republican – 46 percent Democratic split. So a 3-point Democratic lead has reversed into a 7 point Republican lead in a month. That’s big news to me. But it’s buried. Why? Wouldn’t that be a racier headline than a Lehrer-esque thumbsucker about everyone being worried about everything and no-one really loving either party? The Times writers even seem to recognize this aspect of the bleeding obvious. Never fear, dear reader:

[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.

Phew, says the confused Times reader. And that’s true as far as it goes. But doesn’t a sudden big lead by one party after a neck-and-neck race for months tell you something?

ONE MORE THING: Here’s a hilarious “Times-ism” from the poll story. It’s the headline: “In Poll, Americans Say Both Parties Lack Clear Vision”. For the sake of argument, lets say that a sudden lead by Republicans in the Times generic Congressional poll isn’t that interesting. What’s the actual evidence for the actual headline? The question asked was “Do the Republicans/Democrats have a clear plan for the country if they regain the Congress?” In the case of Republicans, 42 percent said yes, with 39 percent saying no. In the case of Democrats, 31 percent said yes, and almost half said no. So one party has a net positive rating of 3 and one has a net negative rating of 18. Would that lead you to infer that both parties are equally panned? Call me crazy, but if you were looking at this poll and asking genuine, open questions, wouldn’t you infer that a) the Republicans seem to have jumped ahead and b) there’s a clear gap between GOP and Dems on whether they’ve made a clear case or not? Don’t get me wrong: I’m not sure I buy this poll. But that’s irrelevant. Polls can sometimes be wrong; sometimes right. But the spin endures.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: “In March, 2002, General Mofaz sent thousands of troops into the West Bank, repeating the exercise three months later after a spate of deadly suicide attacks by Palestinian militants. As chief-of-staff, General Mofaz directed some of Israel’s most controversial military operations. These included: The March 2002 assault on Jenin, where Palestinians claim a massacre took place – though UN officials later denied this.” – BBC News, in an article on the new Israeli Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz. Check out the classic avoidance of journalism. Did the “massacre” take place? No reputable authority says it did; even the U.N. denies it happened. So why the absurd formulation? Except, er, as pure pandering.

GAY AWAY: You have a homophobic uncle? Here’s the perfect Christmas present. (SORRY: Somehow, I left the link off this last night.)

THE McAULIFFE PARTY: Two polls from Minnesota show clear anti-Dem backlash in Minnesota. The most encouraging poll for Mondale, in the Star-Tribune, gives him a 5 point edge. But that very poll has some disturbing news as well:

Poll results show the backlash from the service, which was broadcast live on radio and TV, may make its mark on the election’s outcome. Nearly a quarter of the 929 likely voters said the service made them more likely to
vote for Coleman, while 16 percent said it made them more likely to vote for Mondale. An additional 53 percent said the service will make no difference in how they vote.

For a quarter of the voters to be swayed this way is big news in a very tight race. The St Paul Pioneer-Press and Minnesota Public Radio poll shows a Coleman lead of 6 points. The rally, it seems, wasn’t only gross; it was dumb. I can’t think of two better adjectives for the sleazeball now running the Democrats, Terry McAuliffe. With this race, he may finally have done himself in. Which in the long term, paradoxically enough, is bad for Bush.