In the final days before a big election there's a sudden digging in for final advantage that you can start to see everywhere you look. A friend told me this evening about a mailing the Kerry campaign is sending out --- a pretty glossy, done-up thing, it seems --- attacking Wes Clark on several fronts, including his work as a lobbyist and his past support for Republicans.
I saw what might be another example of that when I went by the new Volunteer Operations Center the Dean campaign just set up to coordinate canvassing and get out the vote efforts for the campaign.
In the words of the campaign …
Dean volunteers in Manchester will now be exclusively organized from the brand new Volunteer Operations Center at 1111 Elm Street. Dean volunteers will continue to be the best organized in the Granite State because they remember why they started working for a little known Governor from a small state with no money and the odds stacked against him: He brought hope. And still does.
I stopped by at around 6:30 this evening in the rapidly falling temperatures here and walked into one big, cavernous room filled with tables, a bar haphazardly stocked with miscellaneous food <$NoAd$>for volunteers and of course mountains of signs and posters and flyers, with all the paraphernalia of the last minute canvassing push: boxes of rubber bands, pencils, folders, stacks of clipboards, inches thick stacks of flyers. When I stopped by there were maybe thirty people on the premises --- a pretty sparse crowd. But I think the center had just disgorged a multitude to head over to the state Democratic party function tonight in Nashua.
But one thing I did see there gave a sense of some last minute bare-knuckles fighting that may be afoot under the radar.
Taped to the wall at the Operations Center, near stacks of other flyers and hand-out materials, was a red-meat-laden flyer headlined “Could Kerry Beat Bush in November?: Please ask the hard electability questions before it is too late.”
Unlike the labeled Dean for America hand-out flyers I saw lying around, this one had no label identifying who put it together or who sponsored it. It listed, in half a dozen or so categories, a bill of particulars about why Kerry would be a disaster for the Democratic party and why he’d get creamed by George W. Bush.
Kerry's been labeled “haughty, effete, phony, aloof [and] patrician," read the flyer. How could he ever connect with “wage earners and minorities"?
In any election Kerry would be cast as the “privileged, entitled Aristocrat that so many of his Massachusetts constituents consider him to be.”
At another point, the flyer asked whether Kerry’s “attempt to run on his military background [could] so offend the Peace-nik wing of the party that we end up with Nader II” and later lambasted Kerry for being -- along with both Presidents Bush -- a member of Skull & Bones, “ultra elitist secret society” at Yale University.
The stacks of flyers I saw on the table in front of me were all 'Women for Dean' flyers about an event tomorrow in Manchester and another which was essentially a letter from the candidate with a last minute pitch for support.
I saw no stacks of the flyer taped to the wall.
As long time readers of this site know, I've written before about the way campaigns use unlabeled attack flyers in the final run-up to election day. So seeing this thing posted in front of the Dean campaign's canvassing bank three night's before election day certainly raised my suspicion. On the other hand, the Manchester volunteer office struck me as a pretty chaotic, free-for-all sort of environment, so it's certainly possible that some over-eager supporter just taped this thing to the wall a half-hour before I got there.
This evening I contacted Dean for America's New Hampshire office and spoke to state Communications Director Dorie Clark. In our first conversation, Clark told me that neither she nor anyone else at the campaign was familiar with such a flyer but assured me that "the campaign has never printed or distributed anything like that."
Clark told me that a campaign worker she had contacted at the office told her that there was no flyer such as I'd described. And she asked me to tell her just where I'd seen it, which I went on to do.
A short time later Clark called me back and told me that they had indeed found it.
She went on to explain that this was “something that a volunteer produced and put up and that we now took down immediately. We have and will continue to emphasize to our volunteers that we are runnig a positive campaign. More than 500 volunteers went through our office today. And so it was frenetic. As soon as we were notified [i.e., by TPM] we removed it”
--Josh Marshall
I drove home from Newcastle late this afternoon and stopped at the Merrimack restaurant for a quick dinner. A film crew from Comedy Central was there filming a tongue-in-cheek interview with the proprietress of the place. And one of the questions the guy asked was what each of the candidates ate when they came into the place. Edwards? Club sandwiches. Kerry? Fettuccini Alfredo!
I expect a press release from Edwards headquarters before the night is out.
--Josh Marshall
I’m here at Howard Dean’s Saturday Town Hall meeting at a holiday resort hotel on the small sliver of shoreline that New Hampshire manages to eke out between Massachusetts and Maine. This place is so New England you could lop it off in blocks, pack it in dry ice, and ship it out west for a hundred dollars a shot. The meeting hall is relatively small. I’d say there are a couple hundred people here with a few dozens more of press. A lot of young people, and a lot of graying liberal-looking folks. CNN’s Jeff Greenfield and Bill Schneider are milling around here and there.
Some of the late polls show Dean stopping his slide going into the weekend, but having lost a lot of support since Iowa. This morning’s ARG poll says the deterioration of his support has ended. But they also have him down at 15% support.
Kerry remains miles ahead and still seems to be picking up steam.
When I came in, a Fox News reporter, Major Garrett was doing a live shot, telling his viewers that the Dean spin points to the fact that polls show that they have the highest number of supporters who say they’re sure they’re going to vote for their candidate.
But that sounds like a bright spin on a hard fact. Those are the sort of percentages you would have if you’d spent the last five days shedding all but your most ardent supporters.
One of the peculiarities of this final weekend of reporting is that Dean remains the big story, even as his support falls off and his chances of outright victory in New Hampshire seem to fade. Whether he’s on fire or just burning to a cinder, he still has most of the gravity --- at least for news coverage.
I think this may also be providing an advantage for Kerry. He’s got the momentum and the frontrunner standing. But to a degree he’s not yet the big story. Or at least he’s sharing billing with Dean. And that’s keeping some of the traditional frontrunner scrutiny off him. There's only so much media oxygen to go around.
The chatter among Dean's traveling press is that he bottomed out on Thursday -- in terms of the mood and size of his crowds, and his as well -- and that he's been regaining his footing since then.
At the moment Dean is running about a half hour late and I’m crouched in amidst a small forest of video-camera-bearing tripods on an elevated platform at the back of the hall. Up on the stage are about eight New Hampshire voters on each side of the stage and four big American flags smack in the center against the back curtain.
...
The show got under way with a series of testimonials from Dean supporters. The first is a young woman who introduces herself as a former “member of the disaffected youth you've heard so much about." She met Dean at a Meet-Up in New Hampshire last year and that changed everything. She's followed by a middle-aged man whose son, a school teacher in the reserves, has just been deployed to Kuwait. He's followed by a Vermonter who got a heart exam which may have saved his life because of Vermont's generous health care policies.
Dean gave what seemed like a solid presentation. He has a good mix now of a positive setting forth of his positions with focused criticisms of his opponents. In addition to his opposition to and Kerry's support of this gulf war, he's now adding that he supported the last one while Kerry opposed it.
Dean says he was right twice and Kerry was wrong twice.
He also has a few good laugh lines at his own expense ("Thank you so much. You made me so happy I could scream.") that went over well. At least within the four walls of this town hall meeting, there's no sense that this isn't a campaign that's on its game and looking for a solid result in three days.
At the press conference after the event Dean had what was one of the best one-liners I've heard about Bush administration foreign policy: the president promised a humble foreign policy. What he gave us was one not of "humility but one based on humiliation."
--Josh Marshall
We had some server problems <$NoAd$>yesterday afternoon and last evening (in part due to especially heavy readership for the primary) that kept me occupied for much of yesterday and made it impossible to travel up to Keene for Dean's townhall meeting. What I heard from reporters who were there, though, was that Dean seemed very much back on his game and had a very large, overflow crowd.
I wasn't able to shake free of the server problem until less than an hour before Dean's event. And since it was just a tad more than 60 miles away in some traffic I went instead to see Clark at a similar event in Derry.
Clark was pretty good. He's gotten down doing a basic stump speech. But there's a certain lack of intimacy in his presentation. Bluntly, in such large settings, he yells a lot of his speech. Through the event I wasn't quite sure whether I was just too close to the speaker. But I think I had it right. There were also some true advance work follies, which I'll touch on when I write it up later.
Now I'm off to see Dean at another Town Hall shindig in New Castle.
If all goes according to plan, I'll be writing each of these events up (Kerry and Clark from yesterday, Dean today) later this afternoon.
--Josh Marshall
I think there’s no question that Wes Clark didn’t do a great job fielding that question about Michael Moore’s calling the president a ‘deserter’ in the debate a couple nights ago. But I was somewhat mystified by Peter Jennings rather prejudging the question by saying there was no factual support for the charge.
Jennings said, “Mr. Moore said in front of you that President Bush, he was saying he'd like to see a debate between you, the General, and President Bush, who he called a deserter. Now, that's a reckless charge not supported by the facts.”
Now, desertion has a specific meaning. It refers to people in the military who take off with the intent never to come back or who abandon their post at some moment of danger or critical importance.
Given that, it seems pretty clear that a charge of desertion doesn’t apply. But Jennings seemed to imply that the president's military record was beyond question.
Right after ‘desertion’ in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (article #85) comes the lesser charge of ‘Absence without Leave.’ And Jennings must know that during the 2000 election there was quite a lot of reporting from in papers like The Boston Globe among others that the president was repeatedly AWOL during the time he served in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s.
Nor was calling the president out on this seem as beyond the pale. Just before the 2000 election, referring to a six month period in which Bush failed to show up for required drills because he was off working on a campaign in Alabama, Senator Daniel Inouye said “At the least, I would have been court-martialed. At the least, I would have been placed in prison.” Former Senator Bob Kerrey charged Bush (Boston Globe, Nov. 1, 200 “KERREY BLASTS BUSH ON SERVICE SAYS CANDIDATE 'AWOL' IN '70S.”) with repeatedly going AWOL.
Now, as I say, ‘deserter’ seems to be the wrong charge. And it’s certainly provocative. But it’s also pretty clear what Moore was referring to. And being AWOL is a pretty serious offense too. I’ve already said that much in the debate struck me as laughably tilted toward criticism not so much of the particular candidates as criticism of simply being Democrats. But this question signaled a certain hypersensitivity about criticizing the president at all.
--Josh Marshall
I went to a Kerry town hall meeting today in Manchester. Later, I’ll discuss in more length, but for now a quick update. Kerry’s delivery and ease on the stump (or I guess we don’t have stumps anymore, barely even lecterns) has become much better. I don’t think there’s any denying this. Success breeds success and confidence breeds ease and a relaxed manner. Both are evident here.
The event got underway about a half hour late --- a few hundred supporters in a basketball gym, with a platform in the center, atop which sat or stood Kerry, former Senator Max Cleland, Senator Fritz Hollings, and a veteran who served under Kerry’s command in Vietnam. Again, there was the saturation coverage of things military and particularly points related to veterans. Only at the end of Kerry’s brief talk was there an oblique reference to domestic policy.
There’s a shadow boxing game going on here. The campaign isn’t so much talking to these voters about Kerry’s military background as it’s signaling (or trying to signal) that this is a candidate against whom President Bush won’t be able to play the patriotism card. Everything here is about who can beat Bush --- either directly or indirectly.
I’m off to a Dean event. More later.
--Josh Marshall
One note about Kerry's strength in this state. As you know, Kerry's been running for a long time. And long before things started heating up in the second half of 2003 Kerry had this place wired. He had lots of the state's Democratic activists lined up on his side. He had former Governor Jeanne Shaheen on his side. And an experienced campaign staff.
Now, after he started to drift in the polls in the face of Dean's surging numbers, all that organizational muscle didn't seem to count for much. But since voters themselves in the state began giving him a second look that organization has played a very important role helping him capitalize on post-Iowa momentum and it seems quite likely to help him harvest those votes very effectively on Tuesday.
In short, Kerry had a lot of latent strength in the state even when he seemed dead in the water. He had a very big sail ready to catch the wind out of Iowa.
And along the lines of establishments and organization, we'd all gotten accustomed to thinking that Dean destroyed the Democratic establishment in the Fall when he rocketed ahead of their candidates, developed a new way of fundraising, and bashed them silly for their feeble opposition to the president. But maybe that's wrong. Perhaps when he really delivered that establishment a fatal blow was in the winter when he got all of them (Gore, Bradley, Carter sorta, Harkin, McGreevey, Kamarck -- yes, we saw Elaine, we saw!) to endorse him and then, with them in tow, drove off a cliff.
--Josh Marshall
Various campaigns send out rapid-response emails to journalists during and after debates. I got six tonight from the Lieberman campaign. Two were pushing Lieberman's strengths; four were hitting other candidates. And all four of those hits were hits at Clark.
--Josh Marshall
The Plame case is before a DC grand jury. The case progresses. And on the inside they're worried about this one? Just a supposition? No.
--Josh Marshall
I was late to get my credentials for tonight’s debate. So I spent the second half of yesterday and the first half of today haggling with Julie at ABC media relations over whether or not I could get a seat at the filing center for the big event. She was nice enough. But she kept me hanging till the end about whether she’d have a place for me when I got there or whether I’d be relegated to the spin-room --- the place where everybody goes after the festivities are over to be spun in circles by the several candidates’ handlers or the occasional candidate who doesn’t have anything better to do.
In any case, I didn’t want to trek out only to find I wouldn’t have a place to set up and write out notes while the event was afoot. But that really wasn’t the issue. There was something deeper motivating me. Covering these debates almost always involves me in an odd process of denial. The ugly truth is that I think the best place to cover a debate is probably from your hotel room. A hard to face fact; but, I believe, a reality.
Seeing it in person would certainly add something to one’s reportage. But you never see it in person. Generally how it works is this: You’re in a big complex and there’s one large hall set aside for the actual debate. In that room you have the candidates, a few of their handlers, the moderator/questioners and the audience. Oftentimes you’ll have a tiny handful of journalists there too --- but only ones from the highest echelon of the elect. Maybe a Koppel or a Mitchell --- folks like that.
Everyone else is in a big room somewhere nearby with a bunch of long school room tables arranged as they might be for an SAT test in high school. And space after space at those tables is occupied by journalists with laptops open, a phone at each station, perhaps some other paraphernalia nearby or a parka, watching the debate on a series of big TVs.
In other words, they’re watching the debate on TV just like you are. Only they’re doing it in a big room with all the other journalists.
Now, this can be kind of fun, because you get to see a lot of other people you know, and a number you haven’t seen in a while. And you get a very good sense of how other reporters think everybody did. But that can be a pretty skewed view, an echo chamber in the making in ways you can probably imagine, even if you don’t spend much time talking to the really egregious above-it-all conventional wisdom types.
So, like I said, sometimes it seems to me that it’s best just to watch it on TV --- since that is, after all, how the real audience, people at home, see it.
But, as I said, that’s a hard truth to face. So what to do? I decided I’d watch it at some public place and watch people's reactions. Since each of the campaigns chooses one restaurant or pub for their supporters to watch at I figured I’d go to one of those, and I ended up at Kerry’s event at a place called the Black Brimmer (who knows?) on Elm Street in Manchester.
My little experiment didn’t turn out to be any better really than watching the whole thing on TV. The Kerry debate watching party turned out to be … well, a party, and sort of a loud one at that, with occasional calls for everyone to pipe down when Kerry got asked a question. They weren’t there to see the debate, but to see Kerry, who was scheduled to show up for a victory party of sorts after the debate.
There was one thing that made it worthwhile: Carole King. She’s up here supporting Kerry: I think she did some sort of benefit concert for him a couple days ago. In any case, before things got under way, and against my better judgment, I went over and told her what a fan I was, to which she responded graciously. But once that was over, figuring my dignity probably couldn’t withstand any more hits like that in one evening, I found a place to sit down and watch the debate.
Now, again, it was a raucous affair. So I couldn’t hear perfectly. And there were the periodic turns back over my shoulder at King for the occasional swoons. But, those distractions aside, I thought everyone did more or less fine.
I didn’t think anyone stole the show. Nor did I think anyone did badly. (Though wasn’t that Sharpton Federal Reserve question a bit awkward?) Dean was fine. Edwards was fine. Clark seemed basically fine --- though he was thrown questions which kept him on the defensive.
Kerry, I thought, did a bit better than fine. He seemed to have down the practice of looking past the other candidates, literally and metaphorically, and throwing down the gauntlet at the president. It wasn’t perfect. But he was laying claim to the status of presumptive nominee and no one else on the stage really even tried to knock him off that game.
In part I was surprised that Dean didn’t do anything more than he did or try in any way to shake things up. But I think that’s the difficulty of his position. In the last week Dean has essentially switched places with Kerry in the polls. And he seems still to be falling.
He desperately needs to shake up the dynamic of the race in time to recover some ground before Tuesday. And yet his people have decided he needs to be on his best behavior to arrest his downward slide in the minds of the state’s voters. So it’s virtually impossible for him to do anything to shake things up. As I said before, I think he’s painted himself into a corner.
More broadly, everybody basically did fine and no one made any bad mistakes. And since Kerry has the momentum and is rallying support, that means the debate was a win for Kerry, perhaps a big one.
A few other observations.
It’s certainly not a representative sample. But of the people near me watching the debate at the Kerry event, the only candidate they seemed to heckle or make snide remarks about was Clark.
Another point: what was with the line up of moderators? You had one questioner who is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, another who is the head political writer for a fiercely conservative newspaper, another who was a soft-soap local anchor man, and Peter Jennings. That tilt gave the questioning an unmistakable skew. Next time there’s a Republican primary debate I’m hoping they’ll take the same approach and have the questioners be, maybe, Tom Oliphant, Molly Ivins, Matt Lauer and Tom Brokaw.
After the debate ended I felt like I’d had enough and didn’t need to stick around for Kerry. So I drove back to my hotel, unloaded my stuff, watched a few minutes of chat shows until I became too disgusted to watch any more and then headed over to the Wayfarer Inn, the hotel bar which some journalistic worthies --- probably Broder or something --- decided decades ago is where reporters covering the primary go to hang out and kibbitz. Or at least it used to be the place to go. I had a late dinner there last night with a couple friends and it’s been remarkably dead this time. So tonight, finding no one I felt like talking to, I sat down at the bar with my notebook, ordered a beer, and started jotting out some notes for future posts.
A short time later Mickey Kaus walked in to the bar and came up to me and asked, “Where were you? I was sitting next to a seat with your name on it. But you weren’t there.”
Apparently Julie had come through for me after all.
--Josh Marshall
Compare and contrast this piece in the Boston Globe about Senate Republican snooping into Democratic staff memos and this one in Friday's New York Times. The further decline of a great paper.
I'm too swamped with campaign coverage at the moment. But I'll try to follow up on this. For now, look closely at the discrepancy in the accounts of just what the Democrats were told.
--Josh Marshall
TPM hard at work, typing away on the laptop, at the Clark event on Tuesday in Durham, New Hampshire. Pictures from the AP.
--Josh Marshall
ARG's latest daily tracking poll has Kerry 31%, Clark 20%, Dean 18%. That means that from January 19th to January 22nd Dean fell from 28% to 18%. In fact, from yesterday to today he fell 4 percentage points.
Remember, a tracking poll like this combines three days of calls together. So this evenings numbers are the first which don't include any calls from before caucus night in Iowa. Pulling that last batch of the pre-Iowa numbers out of mix probably accounts for that rapid four point fall.
Meanwhile, the other tracking poll out tonight from the Boston Globe and WBZ-TV has Kerry 34%, Dean 19%, Clark 14%, Edwards 11%. The big difference there is a much sharper deterioration for Clark.
Late Update: Friday morning's Zogby numbers show the same story for Kerry as ARG, but a less acute fall for Dean, a continued slide for Clark, and no movement for Edwards.
--Josh Marshall
There is an extreme mood of expectation about this Democratic primary debate tonight. 'The debate' -- and there's always one post-Iowa New Hampshire debate -- is always a big deal for the campaigns and reporters up here. I was up here four years ago, when there was one between Gore and Bradley. But this is a little different. Journalists always have an incentive for saying races are wide open, even when they're not. But this one is truly wide open.
It's not just that it's wide open, whatever that might mean. But the dynamic also seems very fluid. John Kerry has rocketed into the lead here. But that support is clearly soft. It could either solidify with a solid performance or be blunted or even reversed. And the same of course applies to the other candidates.
We haven't yet seen a debate in which Kerry was even close to being the frontrunner. So it'll be interesting to see how the other candidates choose to take up the fight against him.
Early this evening I spoke to Dick Bennett of ARG, the outfit that's been running a daily tracking poll here for a few weeks) and he sees the distinct possibility, perhaps even the probability, of a deterioration for Dean in New Hampshire as bad or perhaps even worse than the one he experienced in Iowa.
Between Clark and Kerry, says Bennett, the gender breakdown (with women favoring Kerry over Clark) remains salient. And the events of the last few days have hurt Dean disproportionately among women. His big strength now, says Bennett, is with young men.
(Bennett says he'll have new numbers out late this evening.)
I would not have imagined that the fall could be nearly that steep. But my own gut sense of the race right now is similar to what Bennett is getting from his numbers. I think Dean is in very bad shape. The issue isn't so much, or isn't exclusively, the loss in Iowa or the whole business with his speech. Rather, I have the sense that he's neutered himself in the final stretch. He obviously took a big punch Monday night. But after the concession speech which, rightly or wrongly, got so much attention, he came into New Hampshire presenting himself, sans red meat, as the successful governor of a small state with success in balancing budgets and expanding health care reform.
That's not a bad message. But it's also not a particularly exciting one, and not at all one that seems energizing enough to turn around the bad momentum he's had all week. They clearly felt they had to make that turn on Tuesday, giving the run of bad press they'd been getting. But I sense it's painted them into a corner.
To get away from being the exciting, offensive candidate, they've made him into the anodyne, boring candidate, just at the moment when he needs a real second wind.
(Along these lines, look at the latest data from the Iowa Electronic Future Markets, where you can invest -- or rather gamble -- on future political outcomes.)
One other thing. Last night Wes Clark had a conference call with a slew of former Gephardt staffers from Iowa, making the pitch that they should sign on to his campaign to head off to various post-New Hampshire states and start organizing for him. The campaign netted about twenty-five of them last night, or roughly a quarter of the folks that Gephardt had working for him in the state.
I had heard from some quarters that the issue might have been money. Another campaign had made a strong pitch for these folks, but simply didn't have the resources the Clark campaign was able to mobilize, and thus lost out. But after talking to various people involved in and knowledgeable the situation my sense is more that Clark's campaign -- not taken up so much with the final fury of campaigning in Iowa -- was more ready to reach out to these folks as soon as the last tears on their cheeks had dried. And that seems to have made the difference.
On Tuesday night, the leaders could be grouped closely enough together that first, second and third place finishers could each really still be viable. So lots of attention, albeit behind the scenes, will be going into shoring up organization and support in post-NH states.
--Josh Marshall
This story in today's Boston Globe should <$NoAd$>knock everything else off the front page. It's an amazing story, a huge scandal. Read the lede ....
Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.
So the law-breaking and dirty tricks were systematic and of long standing. And I suspect it's much more widespread than even what is described in this article. It's creeping DeLayism. No rules -- only power.
--Josh Marshall
As you may have seen already, Drudge has a hit on John Edwards this morning, fresh -- no doubt -- from RNC oppo research. The claim is that Edwards now says no to putting Social Security funds in the stock market whereas in 1998 he supported the idea.
I sometimes wonder what point there is in trying to knock down this stuff from such an unreliable source. But so many in the media run with his arguments. So let me just briefly address this.
Investing any Social Security funds in the stock market looks like much less of a good idea today in the post-bubble world than it did in 1998. And any money -- even the small amount Edwards seems to have supported -- invested then probably would not have done so well over the next few years. So that's a reasonable point of criticism against Edwards.
But Republicans' point here is a charge of inconsistency or flip-flopping. They can't really be attacking the idea of putting Social Security money into the stock market, after all, since it's central to their policy.
But there's a basic point here that Drudge (or rather his liaison at the RNC or the White House or whomever) is intentionally obscuring. The debate over Social Security is about whether risk is pooled or whether it's individualized. Are there guarantees? Or do you invest your money and take your chances on your own? As one friend of mine said a while back, if it's not Social, it's not Security.
What Edwards was supporting in 1998 was taking a small portion of aggregate funds and investing them in the market, not creating individual accounts. And for those who are big Social Security policy wonks that makes all the difference in the world.
In any case, this is a detailed policy argument, over which people of course disagree. But the relevant point for the moment is that what the GOP operatives are trying to point to as a flip-flop here is really a matter of comparing apples and oranges. Not that that's stopped them before, of course, but ...
--Josh Marshall
ARG's Dick Bennett seems to think that Dean is falling quickly into third place in New Hampshire. Today's numbers are Kerry 27%, Dean 22%, Clark 19%. But a further breakdown of the numbers, provided on ARG's site, shows steeper deterioration for Dean and some uptick for Clark.
--Josh Marshall
As noted in the earlier post, we went tonight (this was written Wednesday evening) to see a John Edwards town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A few days ago I saw James Carville say that Edwards was the best stump speaker he’d ever seen, even better than Clinton, or something to that effect. So I wanted to see what all the commotion was about.
I had a mix of reactions and opinions. Or, really, I had an arc of opinions over time.
For most of the time Edwards was doing his presentation, putting on his show, I hadn’t the slightest question what Carville was talking about. While I was watching, in the moment, that is, I also didn’t have much question that Edwards would be the eventual nominee. He’s that good.
His comfort level with a crowd, his ability to roll with and into their moods and reactions, and his ability to craft his talk into a resonant story (a narrative, as we used to say) is simply light years beyond what Kerry or Clark can manage. (Dean is sort of in a whole different category --- he tries for something different.) He’s down-to-earth, gesticulating all over the place, with folksy aphorisms and punch lines all put in the right spots, but in an unforced, uncontrived matter.
He’s funny and folksy, in a campaign sort of way.
With most politicians in these sorts of settings I watch and see the disjuncture between what they are doing and what they should be doing, what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s something like their discomfort quotient, or perhaps the way you can see into their grasping for what the right way is to connect with the crowd or a given voter. With Edwards there’s none of that. He’s a natural. His ease seems total --- and you can easily see the echoes of years of working juries in the court room.
When you hear his talk about ‘the two Americas’ (with one living in perpetual insecurity and another ‘having whatever they need whenever they need it’) you think: Yes, he explains it all exactly right, in a way that would cut right into the president’s deepest political vulnerabilities.
When I watch these guys one of the things I also watch for, either semi-consciously or quite deliberately, is, how will the Republicans go after this guy --- either on substance or on tone and demeanor and life story? With some of the contenders it is painfully obvious. But watching Edwards I had a pretty clear sense that he’d scare the president’s political advisors --- a lot. They talk up the trial thing. They make that clear. But I’ve never thought that would get them much traction.
And yet, an hour or so later, after his presentation and after and Q& A, I had a bit of a hard time remembering quite what I was so dazzled by. It put me in the mind of one of those old clichés about light Asian food: filling at the time, but a few hours later you’re hungry again.
These are just quick impressions from observing one event. I wanted to write a post which conveyed --- in as unmediated a fashion as possible --- my immediate impressions of watching Edwards work a room for the first time. The above isn’t intended as a blanket judgment about a whole campaign and a whole candidate. But in this one case I did have the experience of being truly wowed and then, later, feeling that the whole thing was somehow a bit thin.
--Josh Marshall
I'm dumbfounded. The Washington Post's Dan Balz refers to 'bloggers' and their role in political coverage in his headline campaign story in Thursday's paper.
--Josh Marshall
Alex and I are here at the VFW Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for what's billed as John Edwards 100th Town Hall Meeting. In other words, we're here to see if Edwards is really the all-out, all-time master of the universe when it comes to working a crowd with his homespun, personal touch, stump-speech speaking style. You know, mixing his personal story with policy chat. So far the one thing I can see is that at an Edwards event everyone is pretty like Edwards. Maybe it's all the Lands End, L.L. Bean clothes?
Late Update: Some people misunderstood this post. It seems pretty clear to me. But lest there be any confusion, 'pretty like Edwards' means 'attractive like Edwards', not that they look a lot like Edwards.
--Josh Marshall
I keep hearing that Kerry has stolen John Edwards talk of there being 'two Americas.' Maybe so, but Edwards got it from Benjamin Disraeli.
--Josh Marshall
Here's the story I'd like to see someone write.
Who really has what level of organization in what state?
Monday night Eli Segal, Clark's campaign chairman, told a group of us that Clark, unlike Kerry, had organizations and lots of support in the states that come right after New Hampshire. Is that true? Or, to put it a different way, does he have a lot more than Kerry? And how about Dean? He's been pouring money into post-New Hampshire states for a while. Where is he in Arizona and the rest of those states? And how about Edwards, who's always banked a lot on hitting his stride in the South?
One hears a lot of general comments about this stuff. But I haven't seen any solid reported pieces in a while that bring it all together.
This becomes increasingly important because the candidate who comes out of New Hampshire strong may face others who've done a lot more work on the ground in those states than he has. If it's Kerry, is Segal right? Will he lack money and organization on the ground to fight against what still might be a crowded field? Consider for instance that we could see Kerry winning but with Dean, Clark and Edwards all near him in vote totals.
Another issue here is money. Clearly Dean and Clark have the most on hand. But I've always thought that the Internet funding model which Dean spearheaded and Clark picked up, changes the dynamic in a fundamental way. In the past the problem was always that longshot candidates would do well in New Hampshire and come out of the state with tons of momentum. But they just didn't have the time to translate newfound support into political giving and they got worn down over the following weeks by better funded and better organized candidates. That happened to Hart in 1984 and to an extent to McCain in 2000.
With Internet fund-raising I don't think it works quite that way any more. I think it creates a much more frictionless universe of political giving where a big rush of support could be quickly harvested in the form of political cash.
--Josh Marshall
One of the challenges of covering any campaign, especially when you’re on the ground and in a small geographical area like New Hampshire, is not allowing yourself to get too distracted or overly influenced by the buzz and the hype of momentum. Of course, there’s an extra complication: much of the buzz or the hype is real. Or perhaps, better to say, perception (X is on fire, Y’s campaign is collapsing) becomes the reality if enough people perceive it as such.
Let me bring this down from abstraction and Latinate words. Since Monday night, everything has been Kerry and Dean. Kerry’s rise and Dean’s fall. Clark suddenly seems like an out of the way story. And that perception is heightened by a small drop in the polls for him.
Is there any reality to this? Is Clark any less likely to do well here than he was a week ago? In the echo chamber we’re it’s not easy to tell.
My sense at the moment is that Clark really has his work cut out for him. It’s not because he’s done anything wrong exactly as that Kerry has just charged right into the main selling points of his campaign.
Last night at Kerry’s event (the ‘chili feed’ I discussed last night) Kerry’s chat was drenched with military references. (I think the first thing he said was to ask if there were any vets in the audience.)
So he’s got the military stuff and the foreign policy credentials. Or at least that’s his argument. And suddenly coming out of Iowa he seems to have the electability issue on his side (one of Clark’s main issues) --- or at least that’s the spin the Kerry campaign is pushing.
(On Kerry's resurgence and a possible pitfall, see my new column in today's edition of The Hill.)
My sense of this campaign is that there are really two and a half dynamics at work now here in New Hampshire.
The big fight is between Clark and Kerry. They’re after the same voters. And their pitch to the voters here is similar. Those voters are moderate-ish Democrats, people for whom the electability pitch is an important one, people who warm, for various reasons, to the candidates’ military credentials. So that’s the big fight.
Dean is in another category. His main issue is himself. If he can hold on to who he has right now and get back some of the people who’ve left him then he can probably win. And at this point I don’t think he needs to win big. He just needs to win. To show he can take a punch and that Iowa wasn’t a fatal blow. (Remember a number of guys who became president lost Iowa and even came in third.) But I don’t have the sense --- and this is just a gut sense --- that the folks Kerry and Clark will be fighting over are the ones Dean’s after or really can get, at least not for the most part.
The half dynamic is Edwards, who might slip through to a high showing if Kerry, Clark and Dean bloody each other sufficiently in the next week. I’m going to an Edwards event this evening so maybe then I’ll know more.
(One more note about Edwards. He's already been to South Carolina and back since arriving in New Hampshire yesterday morning.)
As I was writing the above, I was sitting in an auditorium at the University of New Hampshire, where Clark was giving a speech on what he would do in Iraq. The bullet points of the speech were: a) the deadline for turnover is a bad idea in that it encourages all the players to game that deadline against us, b) he wants to abolish the CPA and create some sort of new international organization to manage the rebuilding and return to sovereignty in Iraq, and c) under his plan, John Abizaid, the head of Centcom, would report to the NATO Council.
On the personal level, his constant refrain was that he’s done whatever it is that’s needed at various levels of the process. He’s built coalitions, fought wars, worked with diplomats, etc.
Now a few observations about Clark’s speech.
There wasn’t any applause through the entire thing. Not until the end. The issue though wasn’t so much that the audience was nonplused as that Clark didn’t really give them a chance. This was a pretty dense policy speech. And the few lines that seemed like they might have been written as applause lines Clark plowed right through.
The first few minutes seemed a bit tight. It was ably delivered, if a bit rapid. But then maybe about seven or eight minutes in he started to hit his stride. His interest level in what he was saying seemed to bump up. He was a bit looser. And though he was still delivering a prepared speech you could tell that these were more his words, stuff he’d thought about and wrestled with.
And then it hit me. He’s a lot less interested in this campaign than he is with the war-fighting, coalition-building, international relations stuff. This is what animates him. He cares more about his issues than the campaign.
Is that a good thing politically or a bad thing? I think you can play it both ways. Certainly, as I’ve presented it here, it’s a good thing: the candidate who cares more about solving problems than being a politician. But in practice it’s not necessarily so clear. Politics is about interaction with people and audiences. The politicians who do well are generally those who relish it.
If you remember, Monday night I told you that on his “voter calls” at Clark HQ he seemed to be talking to the people on the other end of the line about stuff in the Balkans, things he did the Army and so forth.
So there’s a thread here that you can see when you watch his campaign.
--Josh Marshall
Along the lines of last night's post about what I see as Dean's poor post-Iowa strategy, see the post on the front page of his website this morning. The first half of it reads more like a history or an obituary of the campaign than a promo for it.
--Josh Marshall
Not unexpectedly, John Kerry has <$NoAd$>made a big jump in this morning's ARG tracking poll. The Numbers: Dean 26%, Kerry 24%, Clark 18%.
The poll analysis reads ...
While Howard Dean has a 2 percentage-point lead over John Kerry in the 3-day average, Kerry has a 1 percentage-point lead in the 2-day average (sample size of 508 likely Democratic primary voters) and Kerry has a 5 percentage-point lead in the one-day sample on January 20 (the sample size of 302 likely Democratic voters, theoretical margin of error ± 6 percentage points). Also, from January 19 to January 20, Wesley Clark is up 1 percentage point and John Edwards is up 3 percentage points. There is no change for Joe Lieberman.
Zogby is also running a tracking NH tracking poll now and his numbers (Dean 25%, Kerry 23%, Clark 16%) are broadly similar.
--Josh Marshall
We are extremely pleased this morning to bring you TPM's interview with George Soros, which was conducted last Friday morning. We had initially intended to bring it to you yesterday. But certain logistical issues tied to reporting here from New Hampshire made that impossible. Yet, I think today is actually more appropriate, since it comes as a sort of rebuttal to points set forth yesterday evening in the president's State of the Union address.
Most of you are probably already quite familiar with Soros. He was born in Hungary in 1930, then emigrated to the UK in 1947 and finally to the US in 1956. He had an extremely successful and lucrative career running an investment fund. And beginning in 1979, and increasingly so after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he founded a series of foundations "dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society."
Recently, Soros has turned his attention to US politics, putting a good deal of money into the effort to turn President Bush out of office in this November's election. And he's authored a new book entitled The Bubble of American Supremacy, which is a critique of Bush administration foreign policy and particularly the 'Bush Doctrine.'
Soros has also agreed to field questions from TPM readers who've read his book, in a sort of moderated dialogue. And we'll be posting more details about that shortly.
For now, the interview, which was conducted last Friday ...
TPM: Let's get started. I've obviously read your book and have been following it. But for our readers who haven't, what is the essential problem that you see with the Bush Doctrine, both as a doctrine and how it's been practiced over the last two years now?
SOROS: Basically it asserts American supremacy, particularly military supremacy. It does so by combining two – it’s built on two pillars: One, that the United States must preserve and maintain its unquestioned military supremacy both globally and in any particular region. Two, the United States has a right to preemptive action. Each of these points on their own have some validity. It is desirable that we should have such military superiority, and under some circumstances it may be necessary to engage in preemptive action. But if you combine the two, it really establishes two classes of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the United States, which is sacrosanct and not subject to any international constraint, and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the Bush Doctrine --- preemptive action by the United States.
So it is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm. You know, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. And this is in contradiction of the values that have made America great. It is basically one of the belief in inequality. And it is unacceptable --- cannot possibly be accepted --- by the rest of the world, as demonstrated by the allergic reaction to the first practical application of this doctrine in Iraq.
TPM: There are a number of questions that I want to ask, but let me start with this one: There's obviously an ongoing debate about how the Iraq war took place, about how the lead-up to the UN happened, and comparisons with the Balkans, and so forth. And that conversation sometimes gets down to almost a fetish of the words "unilateral" and "multilateral." And we get into conversations about, you know, how large coalitions need to be before U.S. action becomes legitimate and so forth. It's like what that Supreme Court justice said about pornography -- you know it when you see it --- that is, whether you have a coalition that in some sense expresses some unity of will in the international community. But how do you codify this or create some sort of model, comparing our actions in the Balkans, which you supported in the '90s, to Iraq, and looking forward? Obviously, we didn't have UN sanction in Kosovo. What's the line? When does legitimacy come into our actions or not?
SOROS: As you say, you know it when you see it, and so, you know, legitimacy is in the eyes of the beholder. Nevertheless, you can make some theoretical case and I develop such a case in the book. The problem is this: That sovereignty, the principle of sovereignty, stands in the way of intervening in the internal affairs of individual countries. Yet, in some circumstances, it is necessary to do so. To decide when it is necessary and legitimate, we have to re-examine the concept of sovereignty, because sovereignty is really an anachronistic concept. It goes back to kings and subjects.
And then, in the French Revolution, the king was deposed and sovereignty was taken over by the people. That made it more modern. So really sovereignty belongs to the people. But, in many cases you have got rulers that actually abuse the people over whom they rule. In these cases, there is a need for justification for external intervention. And this principle has now been recognized in the proposal--is it called, [The] Responsibility to Protect? This is a report submitted to Kofi Annan …
TPM: Right--I know which one you're referring to.
SOROS: The Canadian thing. The Responsibility to Protect. And that, I think, is the principle on which one can base intervention. But then, the question is: where do you find the legitimacy of the intervener, the international community? What constitutes the international community? Obviously, the United Nations has that legitimacy. And, whenever possible, the action should be through the United Nations. But it isn't always possible because you've got some countries with vetoes. And they may stand in the way.
In these cases, you can have a coalition of open societies, of democracies, that could constitute a source of legitimacy. In the case of Kosovo, NATO did constitute such a body, because Kosovo is in Europe, and NATO is basically an alliance of European countries. In the case of Iraq, NATO would not be sufficient, because Europe is no more legitimate than the United States as an intervener in the Middle East.
So you would need a broader coalition of other democracies --- developing countries, in Latin America, South Africa, India, and possibly some of the neighboring countries. That would constitute a legitimate source of intervention in the case of Iraq, in case the United Nations would not have been willing because of a French veto.
TPM: Now, and I'll use this as a sort of a general description, the neoconservatives--or just perhaps the hawks--in this administration, I think, would say that in some ways, their argument is closer to yours than the realists, who want to build an international state system where sovereignty is sort of the glue that holds everything together. And they are about overthrowing dictatorships and expanding democracy and so forth. But in the case of Iraq, well … I think that they would argue that the bordering states had selfish interests, let's say, for not wanting to upend the status quo in Iraq.
SOROS: Yes, and therefore you could have done it without the bordering states, if you had Latin America, South Africa, other African countries, and India, for instance, on your side. And in fact, you're also right in saying that, let's say, I have more in common in some ways with the hawks who do want to intervene than I have with the geopolitical realists, who are only concerned with the more narrow national self-interest. So I share some of the proselytizing zeal of the neocons--of the hawks. That is exactly why I'm so upset with them. Because I think that they are acting dishonestly and using the concern with tyrants, you know, that we can't tolerate tyrants, as an excuse for asserting American supremacy. And basically in promoting open society, they forget the first principle of open society: namely, that we may be wrong. That is my main concern.
TPM: In your book you talk about the hawks' vision of international statecraft and also American conservatives' ideas of how our domestic polity should be organized as a crude sort of neo-Social Darwinism, informing both. Can you elaborate on that? Particularly on the international stage.
SOROS: I think that the reliance on military power is sort of an excess of this Social Darwinist point of view. I had been opposed to market fundamentalism as a philosophy or as an ideology. Namely, that life is a struggle for survival, and the struggle manifests itself mainly in competition. And the competition is, who is stronger? And the survival of the fittest is basically the survival of the strongest in competition. But, in actual fact, survival also requires cooperation. And there is a need for having rules to which everybody agrees for us to survive. And there are also problems like the environment, that can only be … and maintaining peace in the world, that can only be achieved through cooperation. So there's a misinterpretation of the Darwinist theory of survival of the fittest --- that achieving power over others is the goal. And that is not really the basis of our civilization.
TPM: Well, it sounds almost like there's sort of a neo-Hobbesian view --- where the U.S. government is the Leviathan over the whole --- to create order through the world.
SOROS: Basically, as I say in the book, the ideology is that international relations are relations of power, not law. That law merely serves to ratify what power has achieved and accomplished. And this is not totally wrong, in the sense that, in fact, international law is very weak. It's certainly much weaker than the rule of law that prevails in the United States. However, this ideology is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if the strongest power in the world decides that it's power that rules and not law, then in fact that's what happens. And that is, in my view, a retrograde step. It is contrary to what has made us prosper.
TPM: Let me ask you: I've obviously read your book and seen you interviewed a number of times on this topic. And you have explained your involvement in this election cycle partly by pointing to the importance of this next election as a referendum on the Bush Doctrine. And if the president is turned out of office, it will, this last few years will seem like sort of an aberration--in part, the shock of 9/11, and so on and so forth.
My question is this, though: Clearly, as we've seen, in a direct military sense, we can overthrow a government like Saddam Hussein's. Again, in a pure military sense, we can occupy it, we can at least in the short-to-medium term fund this occupation. And NATO may be strained, but it hasn't collapsed. And one could say similar things about our alliances in different parts of the world. And the reason I bring up the point about this coming election is that the argument I think that people like yourself have made --- and probably people like myself --- is that the consequences of what we are doing now probably won't be clear in their totality in the next year. They'll be clear five years from now, ten years from now. To the extent that you can, assuming President Bush is re-elected --- what do you see those consequences as being? When do they become tangible? People who are on the hawk side I think would say, yeah, there's a lot of opposition around the world to what we're doing, but, you know, so what?
SOROS: First, let me say that the consequences are already clear. It's only a question of recognizing it. Just today, the U.S. is turning to the UN to help in legitimizing the creation of an Iraqi government --- that’s today’s news. Which means that under the duress of the coming elections and the need to, let's say, correct the mistakes that we have made in Iraq, that we are now recognizing that we can't do it on our own.
I've been arguing this all along. It's now being admitted. Now, this administration will never admit that it has made a mistake. But anybody who looks at it can see that they are actually even trying to correct the mistakes that they have made by turning to the UN now.
So that's the first thing: the fact that their ideology of power and dominance is false. It actually doesn't work. That's number one. Secondly, it's profoundly un-American, because we have, you know, a belief in the equality of opportunities and the very principles of America are not ones of dominance. We don't believe in, you know, we fought the Civil War to abolish slavery. So, secondly, it's really un-American; it's a break with American values.
And there is another aspect that is coming into sharper focus to me, even since I wrote the book. That is that this administration has no compunction in misleading the people. It has no respect for the truth. This, I think, is a real danger. It is the danger of an Orwellian world. It's not new, because obviously, Orwell wrote about this fifty years ago. But what he wrote in 1984, you know, the Ministry of Truth being the Propaganda Ministry, the use of words meaning the opposite of what they are meant to mean. The Fox News, "Fair and Balanced," the "Clear Skies" Act for permitting pollution, the "Leave No Child Behind" [that] provides no money for the legislation. All these things I think pose a real danger to our democracy if they succeed in misleading the electorate. And there is only one remedy: an intelligent and enlightened electorate that sees through it.
Now, I find myself in a peculiar position, because having grown up or been exposed to the Nazi regime and the communist regime, I am very sensitive to this kind of propaganda. And the American people, not having been exposed to quite the same extent, seem to be more easily misguided. And that is something that I have been trying to say. And, as a result, I have been accused of calling Bush a Nazi. And that, to me, is itself a demonstration of how this propaganda machine works. That is a real danger, and I think that we really have to somehow become more sensitive to it, and reject it. So, I focused on rejecting the Bush Doctrine. But really behind it is this conviction that we must reject Orwellian Doublespeak. And that, in a sense, was why Dean had such great appeal because, he said, ‘what I say is what you get.’ He's losing some of that now that he's the front runner. But this is what people are really hankering after.
TPM: Let me ask you another question, sort of along these lines. I obviously follow politics very closely. And from what one can glean about public opinion from polls and so forth--and I know you follow politics very closely as well. A few months ago, say, September, October of last year, I think everybody would say that in terms of perception, at a minimum, things were at a nadir for how people were seeing the president, seeing Iraq, seeing the economy. And you could see that the President's poll numbers went down and so forth. And yet they never went really below 50 percent, even when things seemed to really be falling apart in Iraq. And I’ve asked myself this and I wonder what you've come up with--does it say something about the direction that this country's going in, its own culture, its own politics, that there's the kind of sufferance of the policies that we've been discussing?
SOROS: Yes it does. And I focus my ire on Bush. And I hope that we can pin the shortcomings of our culture and of our attitudes on Bush. And that would be a wonderful way out, because we could have blamed Bush for it. And it was an aberration and we rejected it.
But the fact is, maybe we don't reject it. Maybe we are complicit. Maybe the general distrust and resentment of the United States is more justified than I would like to see it. So there is a real danger here. Now, September 11th has a lot to do with this, because after September 11, the Bush administration very cleverly used the terrorist attacks and the war on terror as a patriotic rallying cry, when it became totally unacceptable to be critical of anything that the administration did. You have the quote from Ashcroft, "Anybody who opposes the USA Patriot Act is giving aid and comfort to the terrorists." You have Bush saying, "Those who are not with us are with the terrorists."
And that, temporarily, stilled any kind of criticism of the president. It was practically impossible for a politician to be critical. Then, in the absence of critical process, the administration abused its mandate by attacking Iraq. And that became obvious. And that sort of led to a breakdown of the taboo. It became legitimate to criticize, because the deception was just too obvious. And there was a rising criticism. And that's when Bush started sinking. But the propaganda machine is fabulously well-functioning. It's really very successful. And Karl Rove is a superior strategist. And so the Bush administration has regrouped and is now again, I think, managing to deceive the people. And that's what's happening.
TPM: You've obviously been involved in democracy-building of a non-military sort in Central and Eastern Europe for, I guess, almost fifteen years now. And now you've become directly involved in politics in the United States. And this has been written about and you've talked about it and so forth. But, can you explain, what is your experience of direct political involvement been thus far? You're writing a book, you're funding various organizations and so forth. What is jumping into the fray? How have you experienced it?
SOROS: Well, this is a novel experience for me. I've never had this before. And I can't say that I'm particularly successful or comfortable in doing it. But, I feel that I have an obligation to do it. A sense of obligation or responsibility, because I believe that really, we are going in a very dangerous direction and, because the United States is so powerful, it endangers the prospect for the world and for our civilization.
TPM: How does it--I mean, obviously you've been on the receiving end of attacks of various sorts. How does--
SOROS: How does it feel?
TPM: Yeah.
SOROS: I'm quite human and I'm not a politician, so it doesn't leave me unaffected. I'm affected by it. But it actually strengthens my resolve. Because, I'm in a rather unusual position to be able to take it. However, it does intimidate, I think, others. And I think that one of the objectives is to intimidate others from joining me.
TPM: Let me jump back for just a last question about what we spoke about before. You have spoken about as a child and an adolescent living, sort of experiencing firsthand the two great power ideologies of the last century: Nazism and Communism. And you've spoken about the echoes you sense of that. There's a new book out by Chalmers Johnson where he lays out a whole argument that is similar, in some ways, to yours. He talks about the nexus between the sort of power ideology that he sees as embodied in the Bush Doctrine, and deception. That it's not a coincidence that these two come together, and operate together: ideologies of power, and the need for systematic deception.
SOROS: Who is it?
TPM: Chalmers Johnson. It's called 'The Sorrows of Empire.' It's new out. It's been out for a month or two, or something like that.
SOROS: Unfortunately, I don't have time to read; I only have time to write. Anyhow, I'd like to see it.
TPM: But what do you make of that?
SOROS: Look, open society is always endangered. But the dangers are different in character. So, it was endangered by Nazism, it was by fascism, it was endangered by Communism. And now it is endangered in a very unusual, in a very unexpected way, from a very unexpected quarter, which is the United States. I have never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be standing up to defend the principles of open society, which are in the core of American history and tradition, in America. But, it doesn't mean that the threat that is present today is identical with the threat that came from Nazism or Communism. By saying what I'm saying, I'm not comparing Bush to a Nazi. I'm not calling Bush a Nazi. I want to make it very, very explicit that I'm not. And I don't think that the comparison is helpful. In fact, I think it's harmful.
It's a different threat. And it's actually a very strange, unexpected [threat]. If you go back to this Doublespeak and the threat of deception, the Goebbels propaganda machine had a total monopoly of the media. The Soviets had such control that they could actually erase people from history, airbrush out leaders who fell, who were disgraced. The deception in America is practiced while you do have pluralistic media. You do have, you know, different channels that are available. Nevertheless, something is going on in the way of managing the interpretation of reality that is actually successful and poses a danger to open society. And it has been spearheaded by the conservative movement. But, it's not confined to the conservative movement. In other words, it's a cultural phenomenon. And it permeates, let's say, the Democratic primaries as much as it does the propaganda of the Bush administration.
TPM: Can you expand on that? Are we talking about demagogy?
SOROS: There is a cultural phenomenon --- an unscrupulous pursuit of your cause with disregard to truth. And because of that … I mean, you always had adversarial relations, and, you know, it's not a new phenomenon. But it has lost its anchor because of the disregard of the truth.
TPM: OK.
SOROS: It comes back to my theory of boom, bust, and bubbles, where the process gets out of hand. And I think that the political process, and political debate, has gotten out of hand in the United States. You had a similar phenomenon in the financial markets, where you had a boom, where it wasn't a matter of what the earnings were, but how they could be dressed up. So you had these excesses of deception and shenanigans and cheating. But that came a cropper. That has been corrected. But the political arena, it hasn't been corrected.
TPM: Final quick question: are you optimistic about this election coming up?
SOROS: I'm hopeful. And I think that right now, right this minute, things don't look so good, because you don't have a Democratic candidate. But I think that will change once you have a candidate, and you have a real debate between two sides.
END OF INTERVIEW
As usual, we will soon be posting a .pdf version of the interview for convenient downloading.
--Josh Marshall
Let me note a few more thoughts about Howard Dean's speech this morning.
Dean led off his speech with the following analysis and it seems now to inform a good bit of his strategy, or at least the packaging of his post-Iowa campaign.
What Dean said was that when he got into the race (actually part of the reason he got into the race) was that the other Democrats weren't willing to confront Bush administration or stand up for the values and policies Democrats believe in. But now the other candidates, he says, have come around to his position. They're confronting the White House and standing up for those values and policies and so forth. So now he (i.e., Dean) needs to go back and focus on policy prescriptions, his experience as an executive, and his record in Vermont.
(One of the subthemes the campaign seemed inclined to advance was that with the other candidates coming around to Dean's sort of combativeness, he didn't stand out as much, or his message was muted.)
This strikes me as a really counterproductive approach.
Doesn't it amount to his conceding a good bit of the raison d'etre of his campaign?
If you concede the premise that he has pushed the other candidates in this direction (and there's certainly an argument to be made), then it almost reads like saying he's acheived his historical purpose (pushing the Dems to confront the Bush) and now, well, what's the point? Maybe he pushed them in that direction, but he's not the best one to actually run against Bush. And if Kerry and Clark or Edwards have now adopted Dean's approach, why do you need Dean?
It's almost like he's painting himself in advance into a corner as the Gene McCarthy of the race, a la 1968.
Needless to say, you could flesh out his point in different ways. But what I'm trying to point to is that this doesn't seem like a point Dean can really concede. As it is, the rest of his speech was focused on his role as a governor, what he'd accomplished in the state, and how executive experience sets him apart.
Now, those are all good things. He did accomplish a lot as governor of Vermont. But are those the sorts of themes that are going to propel him through the next week?
It doesn't seem so to me.
--Josh Marshall
Because of the rush of events up here in New Hampshire, we're running a tad late on the George Soros interview. But we should have it to you a little later this evening.
--Josh Marshall
Another quick update. This evening after the Kerry event I hung around as various voters asked Kerry questions of this sort and that. One came up and said simply that he liked him but was still trying to decide who to vote for. What could Kerry tell him to convince him?
Two things. One: Kerry said he has both the decades of experience in foreign policy as well as decades of experience with domestic policy issues. Two: He's been fighting this fight or fighting these interests for thirty five years. Both answers struck me as addressed to Clark. Nothing addressed to Dean.
One other thing: Kerry's voice. In the same informal questioning and answering, toward the end he kept stumbling over coughs that came more and more frequently. And they were agonizing coughs that trailed off into some sort of vaguely high-pitched sound that was somewhere between a high whine and a wince. Toward the end several people half-begged him not to answer any more questions and to lay off his voice.
--Josh Marshall
Here at Kerry’s first major event of the day. He came into New Hampshire overnight or in the morning. I think he basically hit the sack for most of the day and now we’re at a ‘chili feed’ at a school in Pembroke, I think about a dozen miles north of Manchester. A good crowd, three or four hundred people.
Right now we’re in the Q & A. At about 6:40, a woman stands up and starts her question. “I think you’re qualified to be president. But there’s one other candidate who I think is qualified…” And who is it? Is she torn between Kerry and Dean? Is it between Clark and Kerry? ‘fraid not. It’s between you, John, and Lyndon LaRouche.
Uggh. Actually it wasn’t as bad as you might expect: a human story tied in with her LaRouchism. Kerry heard her out, though he didn’t touch her request to throw out the “real devil in the White House.”
--Josh Marshall
A quick update from the morning after in Iowa.
This morning my friend Alex and I went to see Howard Dean in his first big event in New Hampshire. I’m here now. Dean is taking questions. We’re at the Holiday Inn in downtown Manchester.
More analysis later, but for now a few thoughts.
It’s a fairly small venue, a smallish ballroom. There are two or three hundred supporters. Perhaps more. I’m not good at estimating crowd sizes. After looking around I was struck that most of the people sitting in the audience looked like they were in their forties or fifties.
If you thought Dean in New Hampshire would be anything like his full-throttle speech last night, you’d be mistaken. The crowd is getting a bit more lively now that he’s taking questions and loosening up. But he started the speech calmly, either listless or measured depending on your interpretation.
He said there’d be no red meat (his words), and that he wanted to give a policy speech. He said it would be a “different kind of speech.” And it certainly was.
He didn’t talk much about the war. It was mainly balanced budgets, health care, etc. He seemed to be working at least in part from prepared remarks. It was nothing like the speech I saw down in DC a few months ago, a raucous rally.
It was hard to call it a rally. It was, as Dean said, a policy speech.
Dean's rationale for this was as follows: he said he got into the race because he thought Democrats weren't standing up for Dem principles, that they weren't taking the fight to President Bush. He said his opponents are now doing that -- something he took credit for. So he'd go back to discussing policy issues, what he did in Vermont, what he'd do for America, etc.
This was the event I was most interested in seeing today. I wanted to see if Dean --- and just as much his supporters --- could take a punch. Last night was one helluva punch.
Can he and his supporters maintain their energy and organization? Will they lose morale? The flip side of bringing in new blood is that they may not have a lot of campaign experience. They may not be able to keep up their focus when things get rough. Just think what it was like to keep working away for Kerry six weeks ago ...
(Now Joe Trippi is standing next to me. A quick look. Now he’s gone.)
This is just one event. But from sitting here it seems like a pretty low energy affair. It’s not at all the kind of event where the supporters seem charged.
One other thing: barely a mention of the campaign in New Hampshire as a campaign. What they have to do to win. We need to do this, we need to do that, etc. Some hits at his opponents for not having the right position on the war. But not by name and not much more than that.
Things are picking up now a bit. And it's coming from questioners. And Dean is feeding a bit off them.
Just now a woman got up and asked a question attacking Fox News (“an embarrassment to this country”). She hopes that all Fox News employees lose their jobs. Dean picks up the riff and notes how Fox News viewers have the highest rate of believing that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Late Update: Dean definitely picked up steam toward the end of the Q & A with the audience. Now we're waiting for his press availability.
--Josh Marshall
Check out Fareed Zakaria's Tuesday column in the Washington Post. The issue is legitimacy. And what's happening in Iraq. Zakaria touches upon some issues that I'll be getting into in my review essay about empire, which will be coming out shortly.
--Josh Marshall
Before the results came out this evening, I went to one campaign event --- one at the Clark campaign. The other choice was Lieberman. But, given the direction things seem to be going in, I thought that might just be too painful.
Clark spent the day in South Carolina. And the premise of the event was that at 7:45 PM he was coming back from the airport with a stack of pizzas for his hardworking staffers and volunteers.
Anyway, I thought it was supposed to be a rally of some sort. But by the time I got there at about 8:00 PM it seemed to be pretty much campaign workers and a slew of traveling press. Calm, more or less. A phone bank. A bunch of people milling around. Some volunteers whipping up signs with magic markers.
The Clark campaign headquarters is several rooms of computers and desks and one main central room where there’s a phone bank. And there --- with a bunch of reporters, a few cameramen, and a sound boom or two hovering over him --- was Clark chatting up a series of New Hampshire voters. I hunted up a space where I could crouch down and listened and watched some typical campaign theater --- Clark chatting on the phone, seeming oblivious to the dozen or so reporters scribbling into their notebooks with that typically awful reporters’ handwriting.
One thing that struck me as odd is that Clark wasn’t talking about the campaign really. He seemed to be talking about the Kosovo campaign or his military career, or something like that, and going on at some length.
After a while I realized there was no point in listening to this. So I started milling around, talked to a couple friends and then made my way into a back room where E.J.Dionne and Al Hunt (luminaries who weren't in Iowa!) were chatting up Eli Segal, who’s the campaign chairman for Clark.
(Matt Bennett, the communications director, was hovering around in the background, answering the occasional question.)
These little chat sessions are classic moments of campaign kabuki theater. We’re asking Segal questions. But we’re not really asking questions --- as in asking questions in the sense that we think we’re going to hear what he thinks.
What we’re doing is tossing out questions so that Segal can tell us what the campaign’s spin is. Everybody has a wink in their eye because everyone knows what the deal is.
So people asked this question and that. Segal defended the decision not to contest Iowa. And then I piped up with the question I wanted to ask. What about Kerry? He’s rising as fast as you guys were a week ago, I said, and now he’s going to come out of Iowa with tons of momentum.
(This was before the results came out, say about 8:30 PM.)
Segal gave the standard answers, one campaign at a time, etc., etc., etc. But his real answer came at the end. He pointed to money and organization after New Hampshire, arguing that Kerry doesn’t have the ground organization in those states or the money to play everywhere at once in those later contests. Segal already seemed to be planning for the possibility of a Kerry resurgence in New Hampshire -- setting up the argument that maybe he could sustain coming in behind Kerry?
(Tonight's ARG poll has Kerry ever so slightly in second place again (Numbers: Dean 28%, Kerry 20%, Clark 19%.)
A bit later Clark was on Larry King Live. And they set up an impromptu studio with Clark set in front of the phone callers as a sort of a backdrop.
At this point we didn’t know what the results would be. And we could not hear Larry or whoever else was interviewing Clark. But we could hear Clark reacting. And it became clear fairly quickly from Clark's responses that Kerry and Edwards were big winners.
This went on a bit longer. Clark finished. His volunteers cheered and went nuts. I talked to a few more people. Grabbed a slice of pizza at the Clark campaign’s expense and then hit the road.
--Josh Marshall
Just a thought.
I wrote the first iteration of this post about 6 pm this evening when it wasn't clear where he'd come in. But I've been struck for a while by something that happened after Gore endorsed Dean.
First, there was Gore's endorsement. Then Bradley. Then Harkin. And then just recently, kinda sorta, Carter.
It had sort of the feel to me of Gore's campaign circa mid-1999, when he was sitting on his lead, running a top-heavy campaign and relying heavily on endorsements by big-time Dems. It's too early to say now.
But I'm curious what the strategy was rolling out the endorsements like that. Certainly, at some level he was reaching out from his core of support, trying to bring in party regulars by getting the endorsements of high-profile Dems. But it communicated some sort of passivity, I think. Some aspect of playing on the defensive. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, like people, campaign's not busy being born are busy dyin'.
--Josh Marshall