This evening the Post has an article reporting that the <$NoAd$> White House has decided to support an independent probe of the intelligence failure over Iraqi WMD.
Here are the key grafs (emphasis added) ...
The details about the commission are not yet firm, including how much authority it would have to investigate not just the intelligence gathering apparatus but also how the administration used the intelligence it was given.By joining the effort to create the commission rather than allowing Congress to develop its framework on its own, Bush will likely have more leverage to keep the focus on the CIA and other intelligence organizations rather than on the White House. Democrats have asserted that Bush exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq to justify going war, a theory that was boosted by recent allegations from former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill that Bush had been contemplating the ouster of Hussein long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
There it is. They want to wall off the investigation so it only scrutinizes their political enemies at the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community.
--Josh Marshall
From a story on CNN yesterday evening: "Amid calls for an independent probe into prewar intelligence failures, Vice President Dick Cheney has called key lawmakers to say the administration is open to a range of options, sources tell CNN."
Why is the White House scrambling to get out ahead of these calls for an investigation and contain the potential investigation being called for?
Three data points framed as questions ...
1. Did the White House play fast and loose with the truth about the Iraq threat?
2. Are people in the Intelligence Community likely to know just how they played fast and loose?
3. Do people in the Intelligence Community feel ill-used by this administration?
Add them up.
And one other thing: how credible will an inquiry be if it covers the CIA but not the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Vice President?
--Josh Marshall
There’s just so much to say about this new bubbling-up of the WMD controversy. And I plan to say a lot of it. But, for the moment, let’s see if there’s any way to get the media and various other members of the capital's elect to avoid another round of self-administered bamboozlement.
For months we have known with increasing degrees of certainty that there were, contrary to expectations, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Yet the fact that David Kay has now stated this baldly has suddenly put this reality at the center of the national debate in a way it wasn’t only a couple weeks ago.
He has also said two other things.
First, he’s said that the CIA was not pressured to reach its erroneous conclusions. Second, he has said that rather than the president owing an explanation or apology to the American people, the CIA owes an explanation or apology to the president.
As to the first point, how would he know?
To the best of my knowledge, Kay wasn’t involved in any of the relevant inter-agency processes and he hasn’t investigated this question after the fact. So how would he know? I think the answer is clear: he doesn't.
The second point is a classic example of that phenomenon we’ve become so familiar with in the Bush years: up-is-downism.
Let me explain.
First, a stipulation. There’s no question that it was widely believed within the US intelligence community that Iraq had on-going weapons of mass destruction efforts and probably had at least a chemical and probably a biological weapons capacity.
Clearly, that assumption was wrong.
There is a subsidiary issue here. Intelligence assessments like this often include worst case scenario or pessimistic case scenario judgments based on incomplete evidence. And a lot of the misjudgments seem to have been of that sort --- a point which we need to get further into. But for the moment let’s stipulate that the US intelligence community got some major facts wrong and that we need to find out why and make improvements.
Having said that, let’s outline the ridiculousness of Kay’s judgment.
We didn’t go to war because Iraq had mustard gas or nerve gas or even anthrax. The threat, as presented by the White House, went far beyond that. All WMD are not created equal. Indeed, the catch-all phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ obscures much more than it clarifies. It groups together things like mustard gas, which is really a battlefield weapon, with nuclear weapons, which really are weapons of mass destruction.
The White House was well aware of this. And for that reason it repeatedly pressed the argument that Iraq was close to creating nuclear warheads --- a point over which there was very real disagreement within the Intelligence Community. The other component of the argument for war was Iraq’s supposed ties with international terrorist organizations like al Qaida. It was this nexus between illicit weapons and connections to non-deterrable terrorist organizations that was the essence of the White House’s case for war.
On the question of ties to al Qaida one can’t say there was a great deal of disagreement within the Intelligence Community, because the White House had real difficulty finding any intelligence professionals who believed that this was true. This, after all, is why administration officials at the Pentagon set up their own intelligence analysis shop --- because most people in the Intelligence Community didn't buy their argument about the connections between the Iraqi regime and al Qaida.
Now, Kay is saying, in essence, that the CIA sold the president a bill of goods. And they owe him an explanation.
But let’s review what we know.
We know that after 9/11 there were intense battles pitting the Intelligence Community against political appointees in the administration and that those battles were over almost every aspect of the Iraqi threat: nuclear weapons capacity, ties to terrorism, whether Saddam would use his arsenal against the United States, degrees of certainty about the state of Saddam’s chemical and biological programs, everything.
To the best of my knowledge there is not one single instance we know of in which any portion of the Intelligence Community pressed for a more ominous view of the threat in the face of skepticism from the political appointees at DOD, the Office of the Vice President, the White House or anywhere else in the administration. Not one.
We know of many points of controversy. And, to the best of my knowledge, every last one involved administration politicals pressing for more extreme and ominous interpretations of the Iraqi threat against skeptical members of the Intelligence Community. Every last one.
This is hardly even a controversial point. The hawks themselves made the same argument endlessly. They only stopped when the evidence came in and they were shown to have been wrong in almost every particular.
An internal review at the CIA conducted by Richard J. Kerr, a retired senior CIA official, has now also concluded that there is no evidence the CIA shaded its estimates to support the administration's case for war. But even if we grant the accuracy of that judgment it really doesn't get at the true question.
Why? Because we know that there were numerous cases in which people in the Intelligence Community tried to stop the White House from making various hyperbolic or unsubstantiated claims, precisely because they were not supported by the Intelligence Community's consensus estimates.
What we have here is a serious intelligence failure, but one that in itself would almost certainly not have led to war, at least not on the grounds of there being an imminent threat to the United States. Recognizing that it was an insufficient casus belli the White House then hyped it up with all manner of unsubstantiated mumbo-jumbo.
And for this the Intelligence Community owes the president an apology?
Just as the president did last summer when he forced an apology from George Tenet over the Niger-uranium claims and then tried to put the matter to rest without firing Tenet or asking for any kind of investigation, he now wants to pocket the blame being heaped on the Agency (because it absolves him politically) without having any sort of investigation to get to the heart of what happened.
Why? Simple. Because any truly independent investigation of how this all unfolded would expose the administration's systematic exaggeration of what we knew about the threat Iraq posed and, almost certainly, its willful deception of the American people.
--Josh Marshall
Friends, a brief personal and house-keeping note. As I wrote when I arrived in New Hampshire a couple weeks ago, I wasn't able to send email, only receive it. I eventually came up with a work-around that allowed to send a few time-sensitive emails. But sending that way was complicated and time-consuming. So lots of emails went unanswered. And, with all the rush of running from one campaign event to another, a backlog of unread emails numbering upwards of a thousand built up too.
In any case, I'm not going to be able to respond to all of these. But I will read them all and respond to as many as I can. So if you've asked some question and haven't heard back from me yet, please bear with me for a few days while I'm working through the backlog, which I'm going to try to do this weekend.
Also, some of you have noticed that we've been having intermittent server problems going back a week or so. In most cases this has just been slow downloading. But in a few cases on one day over the weekend the site was, albeit briefly, almost totally inaccessible.
Part of this is due to some egregiously bad service by our Web hosting provider. Some has been due to the spike in traffic during the last week before the primary (if we're lucky I think we'll have a bit over 400,000 individual readers this month). But the big issue is that the hosting set up that worked when we were dishing out six or seven hundred page views a day two or three years ago just isn't up to the task of managing the sixty or seventy thousand page views per day we're serving up now.
We didn't want to make a switch to an altogether new set up while I was reporting from New Hampshire because when you make such a switch-over there's always a chance that the site can go down entirely or various other glitches can come up. As it happened, there was quite enough mixing of two worlds for my taste, sitting down for a quick meal at the Merrimack restaurant, trying to find my way out of my oversized parka, and yelling into my cell phone to the tech support dudes down in Georgia about why a guaranteed 72 hour turn-around for getting my site fixed (three days before the primary) really didn't strike me as a satisfactory answer.
In any case, we're going to be working on finding a robust set-up that will be able to grow with the site. So a new faster-loading TPM should be on the way soon.
--Josh Marshall
Roy Neel has a message up on the Dean blog introducing himself and giving a status report to the campaign's supporters. It's worth a read. And I think he strikes the right note -- to some extent just by communicating in this fashion.
None of this changes my view that the outlook for the Dean campaign is bleak. (I think the window of opportunity is closing. And if Dean doesn't even contest the Feb. 3rd contests and doesn't place well, titanic forces will come into play that will be all but impossible to turn back.) But I admire their pluck. And who knows? Stranger things have happened. In fact, one just did. Two months ago, Kerry's campaign looked like a sinking ship and today he's probably on the way to the nomination.
Also of interest, Lisa DePaulo's new piece on Joe Trippi is available on the GQ web site.
--Josh Marshall
Drats! There I go again, giving Mr. Perle too much credit. In my last post I told you how Richard Perle is in another controversy after giving a speech at a fundraiser for an organization the United States government classes as a terrorist group.
But a reader just pointed out to me that I seem to have gotten one detail a bit off.
I said that Perle had told the Post that his speaking fee was going to the Red Cross, and that Perle was surprised when the Post reporter told him that the Red Cross had decided not to accept any monies from the event.
But that's not quite what it says he said. The article quotes Perle telling the Post that "all of the proceeds [from the fundraiser] will go to the Red Cross."
But he says nothing about his speaking fee going to the Red Cross.
In fact, the article doesn't say explicitly that Perle even received a speaking fee, though it clearly implies that he did.
The article reports that "Perle declined to say how much he received." Later, the article has Perle explaining that the speech was arranged by something called the Premiere Speakers Bureau. Now, speakers' bureaus generally set up paid speeches. Not always, I suppose. But it's a good indication. Also, if he did the speech gratis why would he decline to say how much he got? Why not say he did it gratis and avoid any question or controversy?
As I say, we don't know, but the logic of the Post's piece points strongly toward the conclusion that Perle was paid to give this speech at a fundraiser for a terrorist organization. And if he got one, there's no indication he's given that fee back or given it to some other charity.
Should an advisor to the Pentagon be pocketing a fee for helping to raise money for a terrorist organization?
--Josh Marshall
Useful Idiot? Isn’t that the phrase we use for well-meaning enthusiasts who get duped into supporting front-groups for bad-acting causes?
As you’ve probably seen already, The Washington Post today has a piece about how Richard Perle gave a speech last weekend to a group that US law enforcement and intelligence suspects is actually a front for a terrorist group, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK). According to the Post, US law enforcement had debated whether they had the authority to shut the fundraiser down. And on Monday the Treasury Department froze the assets of the event's main sponsor, Iranian-American Community of Northern Virginia.
Perle told the Post that he wasn’t aware of the MEK’s involvement in the event, believing instead that it was intended to help the victims of the Bam earthquake. He also said his speaking fee was going to the Red Cross. When the Post reporter told him that the Red Cross had already ruled out receiving any monies from the event, he said he didn’t know that either.
Perle says he didn’t know about any of this. But, as this fella points out, the capitol hill newspaper The Hill reported last Wednesday (“Terrorists plan D.C. fundraiser,” Jan.21st) that House Administration Chairman Robert Ney (R-Ohio) asked John Ashcroft to investigate the fundraiser for its ties to terrorists.
Now, as it happens, I’m not sure that Perle was just another in that long line of wide-eyed do-gooders whose humanitarian impulses are darkly preyed upon by the dregs of the world's dustbin-bound ideologies.
The MEK is a terrorist organization (recognized as such by the US government since 1997) fighting the Iranian government. For years it’s worked out of an enclave in Iraq with most of its support coming from Saddam Hussein. Other than these facts the group is best known for violence and its mélange of bizarre beliefs.
Since the war there’s been an-going battle within the administration over whether to root out the MEK or, if not quite sponsor them, then at least tolerate their continued battle against the mullahs of Iran.
Perle and his faction, not surprisingly, have been on the side pushing for sorta-kinda sponsorship.
--Josh Marshall
Of my essay this <$NoAd$>week in The New Yorker Andrew Sullivan writes …
I read it yesterday and then re-read it. Josh manages to write about the Clinton era "soft-imperialism" and the Bush era "hard imperialism" with nary a mention of a certain even that occurred on September 11, 2001. Maybe I missed something. I doubt if his editors noticed the lacuna. Why should they? For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen.
I’ll let readers judge whether the essay really ignores 9/11 and the effect it’s had on the country --- an interpretation which strikes me as rather strained. But as to the particular point, yes, I think he did miss something.
After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.
And in case there’s any unclarity, when I referred to September 11th, I was referring to the terrorist attacks that happened on that day. And in the previous sentence when I referred to 'terrorist attacks' I was referring to the hijacked airliners that were flown into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the field in central Pennsylvania.
Andrew is of course right that I don’t see Bush administration foreign policy as simply a logical and unavoidable response to 9/11. I see it as both a pretext for and a catalyst of the implementation of an approach which the architects of the administration’s foreign policy had supported long before they even considered al Qaida type terrorism much of a threat.
--Josh Marshall
During the time I was in New Hampshire, and especially in the last couple days, there was lots of chatter to the effect that the Dean campaign was all but out of money. There was (and is) really no other way to explain their decision to pull their ads down from all the post-New Hampshire contests unless they were facing an acute funding crisis. (After all, assuming a good showing in New Hampshire, they would pretty quickly need to start advertising in at least a few of those states anyway.) And this article in Thursday's Post pretty much confirms it.
Dean raised more than $40 million. And it's apparently almost completely gone.
According to the Post article, the Dean camp believes he can essentially hang back through the February 3rd contests "remain[ing] credible by picking up enough votes to win some delegates ... even without renewed advertising or a first-place finish."
He'll then make a push in Michigan and Washington, which come later in the week, banking on the fact that these caucus states give more advantage to organizational strength.
Frankly, I think we all know that these are the sorts of things campaigns say just a bit before they give up the ghost, focusing on 'winning delegates' rather than actually winning any contests -- sort of like the hapless dry goods salesman who loses money on every sale but thinks he's going to make it up in volume.
There are other problems with this approach too. The most recent poll of Michigan -- out earlier this week -- shows Kerry holding a 37% to 14% lead over Dean.
--Josh Marshall
I'm writing from a train zipping down the Northeast Corridor at the moment. But I just saw the AP story reporting the stunning news that Howard Dean has fired Joe Trippi as his campaign manager and replaced him with long-long-long-time Gore insider Roy Neel.
This has to be one of the most bizarre turns of events I've seen in Dem politics in a very long time.
In the context of Dean's campaign, Trippi is certainly not just a campaign manager. He was at least one of the chief architects of this path-breaking campaign model that we've been hearing so much about and talking so much about for months.
But the appointment of Neel is even weirder than the canning of Trippi.
I'm no purist in political matters, but isn't Neel a Washington lobbyist? An insiders' insider? I don't think that makes him a bad guy. But isn't it a little out of tune with the campaign Dean's been running?
Something very weird happened here.
All I can figure is that this all happened with no warning whatsoever. Gore is now in the mix. And in need of someone immediately they went to Neel. Is the next DC Meet-Up at The Monocle?
--Josh Marshall
A quick note before I try to make my way by car back to Boston. I don't know if it was clear from the news coverage. But there was not one speck of precipitation in this state -- at least not in the southern part of the state where I was most of the time -- for the last ten days. Not a drop or a flake. It only started snowing mid-morning today. And now, loooking out my window, everything is more or less white.
On reflection, I think my late evening primary night post was, if anything, too generous about the Dean campaign's future prospects. Each of the campaigns has a basic premise, an argument. Edwards and Clark are on something just shy of life support. But both can say that their premises -- basically the ability to play well in the South and among National Security voters -- haven't really been tested yet. I doubt they'll really get a shot at this point. But we don't know how Kerry will do in the South and Midwest. So maybe they'll get a shot.
Gephardt's premise was heavy labor mobilization and support from the industrial and post-industrial Midwest. He lost Iowa. Thus his premise was proven invalid. And he left the race.
Dean's premise has been mobilization of the base and grassroots mobilization and organizing. He's now contested the two states where those strengths should have helped him the most. And he's lost both times. I think it's pretty close to the point where you have to say his premise has been disproven as well.
Yet for all Democrats I think there are some very promising signs coming out of these two contests. There was a lot of talk for months about the divisions in the Democratic party. And certainly there was something to that. But that wasn't what was happening on the ground here. I heard most of the candidates repeatedly. And the differences between them are matters of mild shading. The important differences are retrospective rather than prospective.
There has also been the beginnings of a revolution in the way Democrats organize and raise money. It didn't start with Dean and I don't think it will end with him. But he and his campaign have played a huge part is catalyzing and accelerating it.
Look also at turnout. Iowa and New Hampshire both saw huge surges in turnout. A good bit of that is due to there not being a Republican contest. But not all of it. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are seriously energized and not just by their particular candidates but by their desire to turn George W. Bush out of office.
We'll be turning our attention now to the new funny-business over WMD, the Plame investigation, and the administration's desperate attempts to come up with any plan for Iraq that can be reconciled with the 2004 election calendar.
--Josh Marshall
In this new piece in The American Enterprise, James Glassman does some party-liner due-diligence on George Soros. The financier has a "monstrous hatred" of George W. Bush and is a threat "to our truly open society..."
--Josh Marshall
I was here at the Dean election night party site, arriving a bit before 8 PM, in time to catch the excited reactions to the early projections of a close race. The event room was a cavernous basketball court that held probably more than 600 people (I’m just not a good judge of crowd size). For most of the evening, until Dean hit the stage, the crowd rested somewhere between disappointment and dejection. “Somnolent” was the word I jotted down in my notebook.
Many watched the four wide-screen TVs where John Kerry’s double-digit lead just wouldn’t go away. No catcalls, no upset looks, no nothing --- just taking it in.
Later, a group of us stood on one of the risers twenty or thirty feet away from Dean as he spoke to his crowd of supporters.
I don’t know how it seemed on television (you have me at a disadvantage on that one). But in person he seemed strong and commanding, hitting each of the key points he’s been working over the last week. And though the crowd seemed subdued for most of the evening, they were electrified by Dean, with shouting and cheering and foot-stomping all through his speech.
When it was over, the reporter standing next to me, turned and said: "If he would have given this speech last week, this would be a very different story."
Without talking to everyone in the room you can’t know what people are thinking. And when you ask, as a journalist, you create a sort of Heisenbergian distortion that still keeps you from knowing. But the enthusiasm I saw in the crowd, when they were listening to Dean speak, seemed completely unrelated to tonight’s result. The excitement was all about them and Dean. Where the campaign would be in a week -- good or bad -- seemed like a secondary matter.
I think the excitement would hardly have been much different if his final vote total had been no larger than the number of people in the room with him tonight.
Over the course of the evening I saw various members of Dean’s core staff. And they seemed curiously unfazed by everything that had happened. They certainly weren’t jubilant. But they didn’t seem particularly disappointed either. They seemed like the whole thing went as they'd expected. And they were ready to move on to the next front.
I haven’t spent much of any time with these people. So I wouldn’t be the best judge. But that’s what it looked like to me.
Dean said that New Hampshire had “allowed our camp to regain its momentum” and that “we did what we needed to do tonight.” And I think that’s right. But just barely. I think they're in desperate shape. And I think they know it.
In isolation, this wasn’t such a bad result. Dean took a heavy blow in Iowa, collapsed in the polls, and then battled his way back to what he rightly called a “solid second.”
But Iowa and New Hampshire were his two best states. And now he’s going into seven states which should all be harder for him to win than these two. Some vastly more difficult.
What this race is now about is whether John Kerry can carry this momentum into the Midwest and the South. If he can -- and that's not at all clear -- then it's over.
More thoughts on the state of the race later this evening.
--Josh Marshall
It's about 6 PM. The sky is dark. And, before the sun dipped out entirely, that sky was looking pretty ominous. I'm heading out for the evening now and plan to spend most of it at the Dean party here in Manchester. It looks now like Dean will probably close much of the margin, yet not catch up to Kerry. But I figure that the Dean event is where the most interesting story will be found. Where does Dean place and how do his supporters react to that showing? Coming out of New Hampshire he goes deep into red state America, where the winds won't be favorable. He needs to win the press's judgment if not primary outright. The winter boots are on for the first time this week. The parka is zipped. Lights, camera ... eh, you know the rest.
--Josh Marshall
Yesterday, the day before the primary, my friend Kenny and I hit a final few events and went to a couple of headquarters to get spun once more before the voting starts. First it was a Dean Town Hall meeting at the Palace Theater in downtown Manchester -- this is the one where Al Franken helped take out a LaRouche protestor and, in the doing, got his glasses broken.
(Don't this place provide some decent street theater!)
This was actually a coordinated LaRouchie attack, with shouts, escalating into heckles and then blowing right through to blizzards of four-letter-words. It also seemed to show up some weaknesses in the Dean security detail. We were up on the theater's upper level and had one of the hecklers come down to the ledge, arms looping this way and that, screaming about Cheney, screaming at Dean, mostly just screaming.
He was the second string protestor or rather the second wave, after the first guy got tossed. Security at these sorts of events tends to be a 'C'mon, c'mon, you've really got to leave now' sort of affair. But as he was working up into full-froth a crew-cut three-hundred-poundish all-together not nice looking guy stomped out, extended his arm, grabbed the dude by the scruff of his neck, said a couple unpleasant things, and then proceeded to shake the guy around like a friggin' rag doll, all the while making clear that he really shouldn't have made such a scene.
Kenny and I looked at each other, thinking, "Sheesh, they're literally going to throw that guy out into the street." But a few moments later, as I'm watching Dean, scribbling in my notebook and comtemplating the fate of the LaRouchie in the hands of Dean's Rock'em, Sock'em Robot, suddenly I hear ... "Aga b'dada, yada! yada, Cheney Cheney #$%#@&, Dean Cheney, Beast Man! allooooooo, yiiiiiiigraaaaaahhhhh. Yada! Dean, who the $#@% do you think you ..."
He was back.
How did he get back in?
No idea.
Dean's talk and Q & A was relaxed and assured, though the crowd wasn't as boisterous as I expected. One marquee New Dem was a couple seats down from me, marveling at Dean's prowess and seemingly eager to climb on board.
"If you want to change the president," and this is a close to verbatim paraphrase from my notes, "vote for any of the candidates on the ballot tomorrow. They're all better than George W. Bush. But if you want to change America, vote for me."
He asked supporters to drag friends and associates to the polls to vote for him. "I need you to be draggers for Dean."
Bring everybody. "Bring your kids if they're old enough. And if they're not old enough, then move to Chicago and register them there, and move back."
There was much more on budget-balancing and extending health care then there was on Iraq, and Dean served up his devotion-stirring mix of off-the-cuff and idiosyncratic Q & A.
One moment he's condemning the president's "barbaric approach to stem cell research" and telling the crowd he doesn't "think science should be guided by religious ideology." A short time before he said that Jesse Helms' insistence on withholding dues from the UN -- which Dean said he opposed at the time -- probably did end up pushing the world body toward much-needed reforms.
Certainly, that was the only shout-out I heard to Jesse Helms this week.
After lunch we went to see Clark's brief stop in Manchester (he was hitting each of the state's ten counties, finishing up in Dixville Notch at midnight). We got there just after things were winding down and ran into a ragged crowd -- camera crews, supporters, family, campaign aides -- walking down Elm Street following Clark, who was shaking hands and glad handing from store to store. "I don't know but I've been told, yada yada, yada yada... sound off, sound off, etc." You hear this a lot at Clark functions.
As his crowd parked itself in front of the Merrimack Restaurant, where the candidate was making the rounds, they were confronted by a Kerry crowd at the other side of the intersection. (Kerry has an endless stock of potential volunteers just across the state line, remember.) In response to the Clarkies marching songs, the Kerry crew started chanting "Bring! It! On! Bring! It! On! Bring! It! On!"
It was, I guess, the reductio ad absurdum martial moment this week. Who says this party ain't down with the military?
Later, we headed over to get Lieberman HQ to see friends and get spun a final time. We heard about a new study out predicting that 50% of primary voters today would be independents, which held out some hope, we were told, of a break toward Lieberman, allowing him to slide into third. We'll know soon enough whether there was anything to that, of course. One thing though: You may think Lieberman is the corporate candidate. But his offices in Manchester are decidely ... well, uncorporate. I'd call the aesthetic neo-languid-frat-house, with pizza box accents.
A while later we were at Kerry headquarters, a big, buzzing affair, a hive of activity, with what seemed like about a million more people than at Liebermanville. We stopped in for a moment at one of the back offices for Kenny to reminisce with Bob Shrum about Gore 2000 and get the down-low on what's up with Kerry. Shrum and a Kerry speechwriter were scribbling over what looked like a speech draft. And everybody seemed to be mixing a relative confidence with a measure of finger-crossing. After a bit more milling around we were back to the Palace theater for Edwards' rally around dinner time.
Edwards' crowd seemed a bit bigger and a bit more pumped. But then this was after dinner when it would be much easier for people to come. So I'm not sure how much you can read into that.
I've written a couple times now about Edwards as performer. And on this last night before the voting began, his handlers seemed to be playing to that more than ever. (It was a theater, after all.) Usually some fellow pol or local dignitary will warm up the crowd and introduce the candidate. But this time it was just the disembodied voice of an emcee bellowing out: 'Welcome the next president of the United States, Johhhhhhhhhhn Ehhhhhhhhdwards." And then Edwards tumbles out, thumbs up, all smiles.
For whatever reason, Edwards seemed a bit off his game. He rushed through everything, though with pretty much the same lines throughout.
Edwards has these ridiculously hokey rhetorical questions that he lays on you which become more comical with each repetition. "If what you want is to eat $#%^, live on the streets for five days and comb your hair with a cheese grater, then ahhh'm not yahhhw candidate for president. But if you want ..."
You get the idea.
More to come.
--Josh Marshall
I'm finishing up a column now. So I won't have any posts until the early afternoon -- when, I hope, I'll be posting at some length about the events of yesterday. I've spent several days going to event after event trying to channel the New Hampshire primary gods for some poll-transcending insight into what the results tonight are going to be. But they've left me hanging. I figure it'll come up pretty much as the polls tell us: with Kerry in first, though not so far ahead as the polls showed at mid-week, Dean in second, Edwards in third, Clark fourth, Lieberman fifth. Third, fourth and fifth seem very much up in the air. An independent study that came out yesterday said that there would be a very high percentage of independents voting in the Dem primary this year. So that could introduce some real uncertainty into the poll numbers that we're seeing. One 'feel' I get -- and this is just a gut sense, from what I've picked up at events -- is that Clark may underperform his poll numbers and Edwards over-perform his.
--Josh Marshall
Regular readers will remember that several times over the last couple months I've mentioned that I was working on a review essay on the new literature of empire: the history of yesterday's empires, how we see them today, whether contemporary America is a neo-imperial power, whether that's a good or a bad thing. As you might expect, the essay turns heavily on the changes that have taken place in American foreign policy over the last three years.
I'm glad to say that it's finally out. Or at least it will be out tomorrow in the new issue of The New Yorker.
You can read it online here at their website.
--Josh Marshall
All the tracking polls yesterday showed Dean, at a minimum, stopping his decline and in most cases making up some lost ground. Now the movement seems clear. Tonight's ARG poll has Kerry 38%, Dean 20%, Edwards 16%, Clark 15%.
(ARG now also has tracking polls out for South Carolina, Arizona and Oklahoma.)
I heard Dean on the radio tonight as I was driving back to my hotel. And he sounded very much at ease and commanding -- frank, smart, quick on his feet. Earlier today, I was wondering just where he'd have to place on Tuesday to win in the media's expectations game. And it seemed to me that if Dean could manage a convincing second -- that is, with real distance between him and the third place finisher -- that he could play the comeback kid angle. He could argue, with some merit, that he took a huge hit, fell dramatically in the polls but was then able to fight back into contention by corralling a lot of doubting supporters back into the fold.
The problem for Dean is that none of the February 3rd contests strike me as natural Dean states -- with the possible exception of New Mexico. And a victory for Kerry in New Hamsphire would still mean that Dean had failed to win in two states which seem to play heavily to his strengths.
One more point: I haven't had a chance to write about it yet. But I was struck by the iffy advance work for the Clark event that I went to on Friday, and what I've heard about a few others. (The rally on Sunday was much, much better.) For all the money Clark's raised and the polished Internet presence, this is still a campaign that was cobbled together quickly and then had significant internal shake-ups in its first couple months. I don't want to judge on limited evidence -- which mine very much is. But it's just left me wondering whether it might be a sign of a broader problem.
--Josh Marshall
There’s nothing quite like speeding down a dark New England country highway, frigid outside the car and comfy <$Ad$>enough inside, hitting on just the right song on the radio and playing it really, really loud. And heading north tonight I was hitting them one after another. Sometimes ... well, sometimes Led Zeppelin is just more important than politics.
After hopscotching from event to event in Nashua I found a T-Mobile hotspot at a Borders Books in town and jotted down the events in the post below. After that, I hopped in the car and headed north to a public radio studio in Concord to do Chris Lydon’s The Blogging of the President 2004 show from 9 PM to 10 PM Eastern time (check local listing). I’m here in the studio about to go on the air. I'll be writing up more observations on the events of the day later this evening.
--Josh Marshall
I hopped from one rally to the next this afternoon, all in Nashua, separated by only a few miles. I saw Edwards, Clark and Kerry --- though I only saw portions of each event because they were bunched up on top of each other at 12 PM (Edwards), 1 PM (Clark), and 2 PM (Kerry).
My purpose in running from one rally to the next like this was to get as close as I could to an apples to apples comparison of the crowds the candidates are drawing, their level of enthusiasm, and how on their game the candidates seem. As you know, the primary gets underway in about thirty-six hours, so the charge in an Edwards audience, for instance, three days ago, just can’t be compared to a Clark audience today.
First on my list was an Edwards rally at a high school in Nashua. But, actually, before I get into that, let me make one thing clear: It’s really friggin’ cold up here.
It wasn’t until yesterday. And I spent most of my twenties living in New England. So it’s not like I’m not used to these winters. But it’s cold. Tonight it’s supposed to go below zero for the first time since I’ve been here. And with the wind chill I’m sure the air against my face will feel like it’s getting lapped by ice water just as it has today.
When I walked up to the Edwards rally there was a volunteer holding an Edwards sign, screaming “This is the man who can beat George W. Bush,” like a frosty John The Baptist heralding the Messenger or the end of time. On the inside the weird craziness of the final hours of the primary was on full display.
Edwards may have the niceness campaign. But his folks aren’t above showing off what brickbats the other guys’ are using. In the hall behind the forest of tripods and the underbrush of AV cables and knocked over chairs, an Edwards staffer was telling a reporter he could come by Edwards Headquarters if he wanted to view the attack mailing Kerry was sending out about Clark.
Right, Edwards will hook you with Kerry’s anti-Clark attack mailing.
The political tourists are here too. (Not that I’m making fun of them. I did the same thing in 1996.) A California Poli-Sci prof-cum-TV talking head was there yucking it up with the celeb journalists. And the celeb journos were getting quality time with each other as well.
A short time later I listened in on a reporter doing one of the ubiquitous voter interviews. Reporter: “What do you like better about Edwards?” Voter: “The others have higher negatives.” Reporter: “What do you mean by negatives?” Voter: “Like with Kerry, he’s got bad things about him.”
At this point the back and forth became a bit difficult to scribble down word for word. But the essence of it was that the guy turned to his friend next to him and explained how his friend’s wife was at St. Paul’s with John Kerry. And when she and Kerry were dating at the age of 16 or 17 or something like that, he didn’t … well, you know. Kerry didn’t. “If he doesn’t make moves on a beautiful blonde, how can he be president?”
(As I suspected, St. Paul's was all boys when Kerry was there. So at least some parts of the story don't add up.)
The crowd at the Edwards rally, by my count, was about 600 people, all very pumped up, with some undetermined number of others in an ‘overflow’ room somewhere else on campus. A campaign volunteer named Pauly Rodney was getting the crowd warmed up with a lot of razzmatazz that looked most like a high school rally before the basketball game, full of cheers, give me an E, gimme a D, gimme a W … foot-stomping, kids leading cheers, carefully-organized clean-fun exuberance. Showmanship seems to rub off on folks in Edwards’ orbit.
Rodney speaks with a lot of authority --- which I learned from personal experience when he rousted me out of the section set aside for dignitaries just before the show got underway.
Edwards' talk was exactly the same as the one I saw over in Portsmouth at his town hall meeting on Wednesday. This time he had Glenn Close in tow. And he had on a clipped-on mike which magnified the expressiveness of his presentation. Edwards, as nearly as I can tell, never utters a word without one or more hands gesturing in some significant, word-intensifying manner.
He railed at “that crowd of insiders in Washington and their lobbyists”, pumped his fists again and again, smiled again and again and told the audience about “the America we’re going to build.”
I’ve realized that it’s impossible not to believe Edwards is going to be the nominee while you’re actually watching an Edwards event. The certainty wears off a while later, of course. But while he’s got you in his crowd you’re under his spell. Tried. Tried again ... No, doesn’t work. There’s some sort of hypnosis. At least in the moment, he's that good.
The crowd was on fire and Edwards, the master, was wringing every drop of enthusiasm out of them, twisting and turning them, hands aflutter. It was getting near 1 PM so I was on my way to see Wes Clark at Daniel Webster College.
What the veteran journalists often say is that in the last couple days you watch the size and charge of the crowds more than the polls. That’s where the story is told.
When I was thinking of what I’d write this afternoon and this evening, and when I was driving to the Clark event, I had thought the story might be the surging Edwards' crowds and the more restrained and perhaps smaller ones for Clark. I thought this because of the Clark event I saw on Friday where everything seemed just a tad off key. But that’s not what I found.
Clark’s audience was in a similar-sized room with just as many people (roughly 600 we figured, with others in overflow) and, in their own way, just as charged as Edwards’. There was the same intensity, the crowd waves, the call and response, chants building up to fury and then lapsing away. The same intensity, but less organized --- and more boisterous --- or not so much directed by one person up on a stage. Everything Edwards is fine-tuned, like Edwards. If these were rival high schools this might have been the one on the wrong side of the tracks.
Clark had practically a whole cabinet of people there to warm up the crowd and introduce him: former Florida AG Bob Butterworth, Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, David Dinkins, Charlie Rangel, an Arkansas congressman and about half a dozen others.
The final introduction and testimonial was from a woman whose husband was one of the three killed in the convoy accident in Bosnia in 1995. This is the one in which one vehicle of three slid off a rain-soaked hillside killing everyone on board. Richard Holbrooke and Clark were in one of the vehicles that didn’t go over and after the one slid over the edge, Clark rappelled down the hill to attempt a rescue, but to no avail.
At the funeral a few days later Clark gave the dead man’s wedding ring (which presumably he had retrieved from the his body at the bottom of the hill) to his wife. It was a very affecting story.
When I saw Clark a few days ago his delivery struck me as a tad rushed. He yelled his presentation a bit, or something -- I'm not sure precisely what -- was just off key. But today was different. He connected with the crowd. He hit the war issue hard --- Bush is someone who “prances around on the deck of an aircraft carrier.”
If I’d expected to glean some clear message from the differences between the intensity and numbers and passion at the Edwards and Clark rallies, it didn’t turn out that way. Each was very different. Edwards is a bit like a high school rally: fun, loud, clean, exuberance, well-drilled. Clark’s event had no less intensity, but it was a bit more rough-edged, grittier somehow.
By now it was past 2 PM so I hustled off to see Kerry.
Kerry’s event was in a cavernous high school gym at another school in Nashua, a room at least twice the size of the other two I’d been to that morning and bisected by a massive Patton-like American flag, which made the backdrop for Kerry's speech. The visibility was such that I had a hard time getting a handle on exactly how many people were there. But it seemed like many more than either Edwards’ or Clark’s --- I wouldn’t be surprised if it were double the number.
As I noted above, I spent most of my twenties living in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. And looking around the crowd I noticed it was well seeded with political notables from both states --- several members of the Massachusetts House delegation in the audience, Ted Kennedy and his son Patrick (Congressman from Rhode Island) on the stage, Mark Green --- the Dems’ losing New York Mayoral candidate against Bloomberg, and a slew of others. It reminds you that Kerry was the front-runner last winter and spring, before the wagon got upended.
As it happens, though at least 40 minutes late, I made my way into the room (not easy as it was packed) just as Kerry was getting introduced by his wife.
As expected, it was the same speech as I saw in Manchester on Friday --- though with a few new flourishes. Mission accomplished gets turned on its head to talk about national security and domestic needs: “Is your mission accomplished?”
The national economy is about “people and products, not perks and privileges.”
Picking up on Bill Clinton’s recent line that people prefer "strong and wrong" to "weak and right" in times of national crisis, he said: “I bring to our party the ability to be strong and right at the same time.”
A bit prosaic, but to the point and somehow it sounded a bit better in the moment.
He’s also adopting the high presidential cant … “and so I say to you” … “in these final hours” … “stand with me and …”
More on all of this later this evening.
--Josh Marshall
I hit rallies for Edwards, Clark and Kerry this afternoon. A report is soon to follow. Tonight at 9 PM I'll be on this radio show discussing the primary and blogs.
--Josh Marshall
An update on the anti-Kerry flyer I saw last night posted at Dean's Volunteer Operations Center in Manchester. (See earlier post: the Dean campaign says it was posted by an errant volunteer, and not connected with the campaign.) Apparently, they were also leafletted on cars last night at the Democratic party's 100 Club Dinner in Nashua. Someone's handing these things out.
--Josh Marshall
A major backdrop to this contest in New Hampshire continues to be the fact that the two candidates with the most wind at their back -- Kerry and Edwards -- are also the ones who have the fewest resources in place to contest the primaries which will come rapidly, week after week, after next Tuesday.
Dean, of course, has spent the last couple months using all those Internet dollars to build up organizations and infrastructure in states across the country. And Clark, though to a lesser extent, has done the same.
As we reported here a couple days ago, Clark has snatched up a few dozen campaign workers from Gephardt's operation in Iowa and sent them off to post-New Hampshire states across the country. (In at least some of those cases Edwards was in competition for those operatives. But Clark had the money.)
The shorthand you hear from reporters is that Kerry has "nothing" on the ground in those states. And that can't be quite true. But after Kerry's town hall meeting in Manchester on Friday one of his top aides told us that he would probably not even compete in all seven of the states that vote on February 3rd. When asked which ones they'd contest, he told us they were "nowhere near figuring that out."
--Josh Marshall
At John Kerry’s Town Hall meeting on Friday in Manchester one of his high-profile supporters was retiring Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina. Hollings himself ran for president in, I think, in 1984. And for a man in his mid-80s he’s remarkably spry and able to work a crowd. His drawl isn’t as inscrutable as he often jokes about it being. But it is far deeper and more distant than anyone has from any part of the country who is under fifty --- a faint echo of an era when people, black and white, from places like the South Carolina lowlands spoke a dialect that would be all but impossible to understand to outsiders’ ears. He is one of the final representatives from an era when every Southern senator was written by William Faulkner.
Of course that old-timer-dom sometimes comes with a hint of a price, lapses from high-church political correctness which the audience on Friday was indulgent enough not to notice.
When Hollings was getting underway on the jobs theme he said that half of the furniture in the United States (or some such stat) was now made in China. At just that moment a startling, crashing pop! came out of one of the loudspeakers. Not missing a beat, Hollings said that there must be some “chinamen” over there who didn’t like that.
A few minutes later he was talking about “ole Suskind’s book” and how, as reported in Ron Suskind’s book about Paul O’Neil, the president had blanched at the idea of giving yet another tax cut to the rich, only to have Dick Cheney pipe in to steady his course.
In Hollings' retelling ...
“‘Haven’t we already given the rich a tax cut?’ the president said. And then ole’ Cheney said, ‘No, we want more.' He’s the Jesse Jackson of the Republican Party! He wants it all!’”
The Jesse Jackson of the Republican party?
You’d have to say that’s a bit off message for the contemporary Democratic party. But you could see the collective will of the audience for a moment awkwardly, and then decisively, opting to give the old guy a pass.
A while later when Kerry was giving his talk, and the speaker barked up again, he brought things back to the 21st century. “It’s that Chinese guy again …”
--Josh Marshall
Following up on last night's post, The New Republic's Ryan Lizza, on his new campaign blog, has copies of the anti-Clark and anti-Dean mailings the Kerry campaign has been sending out.
--Josh Marshall
