A thought about the follow-up on the Swift Boat ads.
Today at a rally, John Edwards said, among other things, "This is a moment of truth for George W. Bush. We're going to see what kind of man he is and what kind of leader he is. ... We want to hear three words: Stop these ads."
Okay for today. But no more of this.
We already know what kind of a man he is. He's got a track record.
I'm tempted to say, if we didn't, why run against him? But of course political differences between good men are more than adequate justifications for a presidential contest -- consider Clinton v. Dole in 1996.
But that's not the case here. So, to be frank, this line has some element of disingenuousness.
Far more important, it's whining. Begging. At a minimum, it can come off or be characterized that way. And it sounds weak. This is about hitting back, not flaunting high-mindedness.
If the president's behavior is really as bad as the Kerry-Edwards team is saying it is, then it's really past the point of asking him to do the right thing and redeem himself.
The excellent ad the Kerry campaign put out today -- the one with McCain confronting Bush -- ends with the line "America can do better."
It doesn't say, "George W. Bush, please stop" or "George W. Bush should do the right thing." It says "America can do better" or, in other words, he's shown us what kind of person he is and he shouldn't be president.
No need to be nasty. "America can do better" says all that needs be said. Drive that point home and move the debate back to the president's failed record at home and abroad.
Try "George W. Bush is back to his old tricks because he doesn't want to talk about X (his bad record on jobs), Y (his failed policies in Iraq), Z (you get the idea.)"
--Josh Marshall
A few days ago the Kerry campaign put together a new ad with Jim Rassman, the guy who Kerry plucked out of the water under fire three decades ago. Given all that's happened, it was probably necessary to put the eyewitness in front of voters to rebut the charges of the Swift Boat group. That said, I didn't find it a terribly effective ad. Okay, but not great.
That's certainly no fault of Rassman's or even necessarily the Kerry campaign. But to the extent that this whole bundle of issues has become an issue, it's not going to be won by divining whether there was hostile fire in the air when this one incident happened. It's necessary to validate Kerry's good faith recollection in order not to lose, but it's not sufficient to win.
Today, though, the Kerry campaign came out with a very powerful ad, one which in its tone and focus is exactly where the Kerry campaign needs to go.
It's called Old Tricks and the entire ad is a brief exchange from a debate from February 15th 2000 (which the political junkies among us probably remember) in which John McCain -- then in the thick of Bush's smears -- told Bush to his face to stop getting others to smear him over his war record. He ends by telling him he should be ashamed. The camera focuses on Bush and catches him not knowing how to respond, with what I think even his supporters would have to agree is a callow, trapped look on his face.
I say this is exactly where the Kerry campaign needs to go because it very powerfully captures a truth about President Bush -- namely, that he's a coward who truly lacks shame.
I don't say he's a coward because he kept himself out of Vietnam three decades ago. I know no end of men of that age who in one fashion or another made sure they didn't end up in Indochina in those days. (I quickly ran through both hands counting guys I talk to on a regular basis.) And they include many of the most admirable people I know.
He's a coward because he has other people smear good men without taking any responsibility, without owning up to it or standing behind it. And when someone takes it to him and puts him on the spot to defend his actions -- as McCain does in this spot -- he's literally speechless. Like I say, a coward.
As I said earlier, this is vintage Bush. And it's also a subtle nod to all the ways that Bush is someone who's always gotten by with help at all the key moments from family friends, retainers and others similarly hunting for access and power.
There's another element to this ad that we'd be remiss not to note too. It puts McCain on the spot and pulls him right back to the center of this battle. Given the fervor of his words, he can hardly disavow them or complain of their use. But there's something else too. If you listen to the ad you'll see McCain hangs his demand for an apology on a letter signed by five senators, each Vietnam vets, calling on Bush to apologize for his smears against McCain.
The five, as reported by the Times on February 5th, 2000: Senators Max Cleland of Georgia, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Charles S. Robb of Virginia, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
--Josh Marshall
From The Chicago Tribune ...
The commander of a Navy swift boat who served alongside Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry during the Vietnam War stepped forward Saturday to dispute attacks challenging Kerry's integrity and war record.William Rood, an editor on the Chicago Tribune's metropolitan desk, said he broke 35 years of silence about the Feb. 28, 1969, mission that resulted in Kerry's receiving a Silver Star because recent portrayals of Kerry's actions published in the best-selling book "Unfit for Command" are wrong and smear the reputations of veterans who served with Kerry.
Rood, who commanded one of three swift boats during that 1969 mission, said Kerry came under rocket and automatic weapons fire from Viet Cong forces and that Kerry devised an aggressive attack strategy that was praised by their superiors. He called allegations that Kerry's accomplishments were "overblown" untrue.
"The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us. It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there," Rood said in a 1,700-word first-person account published in Sunday's Tribune.
Rood's recollection of what happened on that day at the southern tip of South Vietnam was backed by key military documents, including his citation for a Bronze Star he earned in the battle and a glowing after-action report written by the Navy captain who commanded his and Kerry's task force, who is now a critic of the Democratic candidate.
Rood's previously untold story and the documents shed new light on a key historical event that has taken center stage in an extraordinary political and media firestorm generated by a group calling itself the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Here's <$Ad$>the article from which that passage comes. The 1,700 word account apparently comes in tomorrow's paper.
As I said, I think the Kerry campaign is right to go aggressively on the attack against the president for running his campaign this way and seeking to profit politically from this garbage. But that's not enough. Kerry's surrogates have to go aggressively on the attack against the president on all his many points of vulnerability, which are legion -- his dishonesty about his own gap-ridden service in the Texas Air National Guard, his White House's on-going efforts to cover up the Plame leak, the endless record of deceptions tied to the Iraq invasion, all of it.
Counterattacking on the president's shameless behavior on the Swift Boat matter is necessary, but hardly sufficient. To be successful, Kerry and his team and his surrogates (you know, the folks he's on a first name basis with but doesn't know from Adam and can't control in any way) need to place the president on the defensive across the board.
This whole Swift Boat episode is entirely in keeping not just with the record of George W. Bush, but, to be frank, his whole family. Think back to the 1988 and 1992 presidential races. Partly, it's in the their political DNA. But it's also in the nature of blue bloods trying to ape populist politics -- for the key example, see the 1992 GOP convention in Houston and the sad antics of Bush family retainer Rich Bond.
I said a few days ago that it was ridiculous to compare the ads run by Moveon to the Swift Boat ones. And it's true -- they're very soft soap in comparison. But that's a mistake. They should be hitting much harder.
The president has chosen the ground on which he wants to fight this campaign. And as per usual he's mobilized friends and family retainers to do the fighting for him. The president is playing tackle football, not touch or flag. If the Dems keep up with the latter they'll lose.
Back in the primaries John Kerry would say that if the Bushies thought they could pull a Max Cleland on him, he'd say, "Bring it on." Well, it's on.
My sense of Kerry is almost entirely defined by watching his 1996 race against Bill Weld up close. So I think he has it in him to fight. But now's when we find out.
--Josh Marshall
Apropos the Bitch Slap theory, see these coordinated comments from the Bush campaign, reported in this article in the Post ...
Underscoring how personal the dispute has become, Bush's campaign chairman, Marc Racicot, went on CNN and said the Kerry campaign has come "unhinged," and that Kerry himself "looks wild-eyed." Earlier yesterday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Kerry is "losing his cool." In 2000, the Bush campaign used similar language to portray rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as potentially too unstable to run the country.
It's the same cowardly rich-boy viciousness we've seen so many times from this guy and his family. But the Post piece gives some sobering signs about how effective it's been.
--Josh Marshall
I thought we might have closed the door on further entries in the contest to see which Illinois Republican luminary could deliver the most anemic or feeble endorsement of Mr. Keyes.
But for longtime Illinois Governor Jim Edgar let's allow one more nominee.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Edgar told the GOP State Central Committee: "I think Alan Keyes, he'll be fun. He's intelligent, he's articulate and he's entertaining, which is important for the media, because that's the business they're in."
Late Update: My friend Rick Klau has put a list of nominations for the best feeble endorsement up on his website. My favorite is the one he found from Sen. Dale Risinger, R-Peoria: “We’re going to support Alan Keyes and hope for the best.”
--Josh Marshall
When they put together the anthology or college class source book of early 21st century popular political discourse they may include this column by Deborah Orin as the template example of the product of the right-wing agitprop machine, with all the familiar tactics and methods bundled together in one place.
In its own dark way it's almost irresistible, like slowing down on the highway to take in a really bad car wreck. You should really read it, with particular attention to the familiar tactic of using one discredited or unproven claim to add weight to another discredited or unproven claim -- something we might call the probabilism of innuendo.
--Josh Marshall
Amazing. President Bush isn't even man enough to answer a straight question about these Swift Boat ads. (You'll have to pardon my antiquated and gendered language. But I'm not sure English has any more presentable way to convey the same meaning.) Not only will Bush not answer them. He won't even let his press secretary do so.
As we've noted, these ads are funded by the president's financial backers, put together by his political associates from Texas, and obviously meant to support his campaign.
Just one example from the Austin American-Statesman may serve to illustrate the point ...
The [Swift Boat] group was organized last spring with the assistance of Merrie Spaeth, a Republican public relations executive from Houston, who also was a public relations consultant to independent counsel Kenneth Starr during his investigation of former Democratic President Bill Clinton. Her late husband, Tex Lezar, ran for lieutenant governor of Texas on George W. Bush's GOP ticket in 1994.
Obviously folks he's never <$Ad$>had any contact with at all.
In any real world sense, this is a front for the president. And for the saps who are willing to give the president the most improbable benefits of the doubt -- that this is something he has nothing to do with and is utterly beyond his control -- well, he won't even toss them a bone by making even the most innocuous statement of disassociation. (Talk about being someone's ... well, you get the idea.)
In addition to this, as we noted yesterday, the president now goes around the country with his 'Ask the President' town hall meetings and uses them as a forum where questioners repeat these slurs without, again, his making even the most perfunctory statements of disassociation. ("Well, I respect your views, sir. And I appreciate your support. But I don't want to question Mr. Kerry's service.")
The example we noted yesterday evening from Oregon a week ago ...
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, sir. Q On behalf of Vietnam veterans -- and I served six tours over there -- we do support the President. I only have one concern, and that's on the Purple Heart, and that is, is that there are over 200,000 Vietnam vets that died from Agent Orange and were never -- no Purple Heart has ever been awarded to a Vietnam veteran because of Agent Orange because it's never been changed in the regulations. Yet, we've got a candidate for President out here with two self-inflicted scratches, and I take that as an insult. (Applause.)THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Six tours? Whew. That's a lot of tours.
Let's see, who've we got here? You got a question?
Now, today Scott McClellan got asked about these ads again and again. And he kept refusing to answer the question, insisting on reframing the question as one about unregulated soft-money (that is, 527s) and all the "shadowy groups" that are out there attacking president. (In other words, this is no different from the Moveon ads that say Bush has piled up a deficit for our grandchildren or accusing him of misleading the country about Iraqi WMD) After hitting on the question again and again, that led to this exchange in which the Oregon incident finally gets brought up ...
Q Well, the charge, though, has been made not just in advertisements, but it has now been made directly to the President.MR. McCLELLAN: And there have been a lot of false, negative charges made against the President by these shadowy groups. So if he would join us, we could get rid of all of this unregulated soft money activity.
Q Let me ask it this way: The President has said and believes that John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam, right?
MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, he's made that very clear. We've made it very clear that we will not make his -- will never raise questions about his service. We haven't, and we won't.
Q This advertisement raises questions about his service, and in fact concludes that he served dishonorably. So the President thinks this ad is false, right?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, the issue here is these unregulated soft money groups that exist. The campaign finance reforms were passed in order to get rid of this kind of activity. Yet there is a loophole in the law, and the FEC has refused to address it. We think that all of this activity should be stopped.
Q Could I follow on that? Because what Terry seems to be getting at, what's clear from this event that Bush had last week --
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, let's not be selective here. Let's look at the overall activity that's going on by all of these shadowy groups. I think we're being a little selective right now. And Senator Kerry is being -- is trying to have it all ways, yet again. He says one thing, while his campaign goes out there and does another thing.
As I said, afraid to answer the question. Afraid to stand up. Just ... afraid.
Maybe pops can pull some strings. Remember, he used to be a congressman from Houston.
--Josh Marshall
Well, it seems there wasn't something in the air.
I didn't know the Kerry campaign was finally going to return fire today over this Swift Boat nonsense. But this morning, in a speech to the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston, he responded squarely to the attacks. You can see complete text of the speech and the new response-ad they're running. But the key point is that he aimed his remarks at precisely the right target ...
Over the last week or so, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn’t interested in the truth – and they’re not telling the truth. They didn’t even exist until I won the nomination for president.But here’s what you really need to know about them. They’re funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Republican contributor out of Texas. They’re a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the President won’t denounce what they’re up to tells you everything you need to know—he wants them to do his dirty work.
Thirty years ago, official Navy reports documented my service in Vietnam and awarded me the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Thirty years ago, this was the plain truth. It still is. And I still carry the shrapnel in my leg from a wound in Vietnam.
As firefighters you risk your lives everyday. You know what it’s like to see the truth in the moment. You’re proud of what you’ve done—and so am I.
Of course, the President keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: “Bring it on.”
This is a good thing -- and not simply because Kerry has to respond to the president's surrogates who are trying <$Ad$>(and, to an extent, succeeding) in damaging his candidacy with scurrilous and discredited attacks.
There is a meta-debate going on here, one that I'm not sure even the practitioners fully articulate to themselves and one that I'm painfully aware the victims don't fully understand.
Let's call it the Republicans' Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.
It goes something like this.
On one level, of course, the aim behind these attacks is to cast suspicion upon Kerry's military service record and label him a liar. But that's only part of what's going on.
Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really -- a personal, characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they're tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.
In a post-9/11 environment, obviously, this question of strength, toughness or resolve is particularly salient. That, of course, is why so much of this debate is about war and military service in the first place.
One way -- perhaps the best way -- to demonstrate someone's lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves -- thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can't or won't defend themselves certainly isn't someone you can depend upon to defend you.
Demonstrating Kerry's unwillingness to defend himself (if Bush can do that) is a far more tangible sign of what he's made of than wartime experiences of thirty years ago.
Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person's supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who's receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.
This is certainly what Bush's father did to Michael Dukakis and, sadly, it is what Bush himself did, to a great degree, to Al Gore.
In other ways, Bush's bully-boy campaign tactics play to his strengths, albeit unstated and unlovely ones. Many of the polls of the president have shown that while people don't necessarily agree with the specific policies he's pursued abroad many also intuitively believe that there's no one who will hit back harder. There's some of that 'he may be a son-of-a-bitch but he's our son-of-a-bitch' quality to the president's support on national security issues.
This meta-message behind the president's attacks on Kerry's war record is more consequential than many believe. So hitting back hard was critical on many levels.
--Josh Marshall
"Let's get some things straight here. There is a right-wing slime machine. It has kicked into gear with this phony attack on Kerry's military record. Bush benefits from the ad and condones it. And if Kerry doesn't hit back harder, it could cost him the election."
That's a quote from Jacob Weisberg, Editor of Slate, from an exchange he has with his colleague Will Saletan today about the Swift Boat ads and a contending ad from Moveon.org which questions President Bush's military service.
The exchange is quite worth your while to read for several reasons.
First of all, Saletan takes the Swift-Boat ad and in a few crisp paragraphs shows how all the charges are either unfalsifiable claims about Kerry's character (i.e., he sucks, isn't a good guy, isn't trustworthy, etc.), ones that have no basis in available evidence, or -- in more cases -- are specifically contradicted by the available evidence.
Will likely would have been aided in this work of demolition by this new front page article from tomorrow's The Washington Post. Larry Thurlow is one of Kerry's most vocal critics. He's a member of the Swift Boat group; he's in the group that put out the ads, etc. Thurlow's claim to fame is his contention that Kerry's boat wasn't actually under fire in a 1969 incident for which Kerry was awarded a Bronze Star.
The Post asked Thurlow to release his records. He refused because "he was unwilling to authorize release of his military records because he feared attempts by the Kerry campaign to discredit him and other anti-Kerry veterans." It seems he had some reason for concern. The Post got the records from a Freedom of Information Act request; and they back up Kerry's version of events.
On the one hand it's tempting to smile or take some grim satisfaction in seeing this character hoisted on his own petard. But doing so would give these guys too much credit. Catching a liar lying isn't a coup; it's a definition. Indeed, these aren't just lies. The whole campaign is probably literally libelous -- an effort coordinated between various parts of the right-wing slime machine, as Weisberg aptly calls it.
What Weisberg also makes clear is how ridiculous it is to even compare the Swift Boat ad with those now being run by Moveon.org. One has demonstrable falsehoods, while the other contains two statements which are certainly true and have been reported by newspapers around the country (viz, that Bush got into the Guard with family connections and was later grounded) and another that is almost certainly true but not provable from available evidence (viz, that he 'went missing').
There is a great desire among journalists to appear even-handed in such cases and create equivalences where there simply are none. And this is a great case of that.
This is the sort of character assassination that our domestic Falange specializes in, the sort of effort that the standard Washington types usually lament as a grievous wrong several years after it happens, but never at the time. The effort is being put together by the president's supporters. He is benefitting greatly from it. And he and his aides have gone out of their way not to criticize it in any way.
On the campaign trail President Bush makes no effort to distance himself from it at all. Quite the contrary, in fact, as in this exchange from an 'Ask President Bush' session last Friday in Oregon ...
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, sir.Q On behalf of Vietnam veterans -- and I served six tours over there -- we do support the President. I only have one concern, and that's on the Purple Heart, and that is, is that there are over 200,000 Vietnam vets that died from Agent Orange and were never -- no Purple Heart has ever been awarded to a Vietnam veteran because of Agent Orange because it's never been changed in the regulations. Yet, we've got a candidate for President out here with two self-inflicted scratches, and I take that as an insult. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you for your service. Six tours? Whew. That's a lot of tours.
Let's see, who've we got here? You got a question?
What a stand-up guy ...
In any case, Kerry does need to hit back harder. Probably not directly, as that might exacerbate the problem, but with surrogates who will hit back much harder and start putting into play the president's record if he doesn't relent. Really, though, this comes back to the press, whether they'll allow the president to play the silent accomplice in this character assassination and pay no price for his actions.
As Weisberg puts it, "The ad is a carefully crafted lie ... beyond vile."
Unfortunately, lies like this, once uttered, are impossible to counter in their entirety, just as mud thrown against a wall makes a terrible mess even though it doesn't stick. The only way to counter such misdeeds is to shine a light on those cynical and deceitful enough to seek to gain from them. That would be the president and his supporters. But on this front most of the media are content to act as indifferent bystanders to the offense.
--Josh Marshall
In the department of races I've been watching, let me mention a new poll out from Connecticut's 2nd District, where incumbent Republican Rob Simmons is facing Jim Sullivan.
The 2nd District is basically the eastern half of the state (see here), an area that I can fairly call myself an expert on, as long as we stick to how things were in the 1600s. About the area's more recent history, I know pretty little.
That ignorance aside, however, a new poll out, commissioned by the Sullivan campaign and the DCCC, has Simmons up by two points over Sullivan, 41% to 39% among likely voters. The poll was taken on August 11th and 12th and had a sample size of 504 likely voters.
Now, that's a relatively small sample size, though not so small for a congressional district poll. And the poll was commissioned by the challenger. Still, it shows a basically dead-even race and an incumbent that is deep down in the danger zone at 41%. Add in the fact that the most recent Quinnipiac poll put President Bush's approval rating in the state at 37% and you've got a very winnable race for the Democrats.
Give this race a look. Here's Sullivan's site.
--Josh Marshall
What exactly did the Iranians tell European diplomats last month in Paris at talks about Iran's nuclear program?
Yesterday Undersecretary of State John Bolton spoke on the Iran issue at a panel discussion at the Hudson Institute in Washington. I wanted to be there. But I wasn't in town.
According to press accounts, Bolton said that the Iranians told their German, French and British counterparts that they could produce enough uranium for a bomb within a year, and that they'd do so if the Europeans didn't back down in their demands that the Iranians dismantle their nuclear program.
In other words, the Iranians threatened that they'd make a bomb within a year if the Europeans didn't back off.
The Post says, delicately, that "there were discrepancies between Bolton's account and those of European and U.S. diplomats, who said that Iran's deputy negotiator, Hoseyn Moussavian, said Iran could start enriching uranium within a year, but it would take longer to enrich enough for a weapon."
In a small note on page A4 in USA Today Barbara Slavin puts the point a little more squarely, saying that "two diplomats from two of the European countries at the Paris talks said they were unaware of such a threat. The diplomats ... were not present at the talks but were briefed on them..."
(Slavin, at least according to the invitation, was one of the panelists at the Hudson event.)
Now, my point in noting this discrepancy (to use the Post's delicate phrasing) is not to gainsay the seriousness of the challenge of Iran's nuclear program or to paint them with white hats. But US and European officials seem to be saying, about as clearly as they can, that what Bolton says happened did not happen. And that fact should have everyone's attention.
Mr. Bolton is probably more guilty than any other member of this administration of repeated, public mistatements, exaggerations and distortions of intelligence about Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba and other countries regarding weapons of mass destruction and proliferation issues.
The big story here is not what Bolton said -- at least not in the sense of considering it presumptively factual. It is rather that while we're in the midst of the administration's passing off its past sins on admittedly blameworthy intelligence agencies, it is continuing to practice the same sort of manipulative and deceitful practices that have already caused the nation such grief.
Tough words? Sure. But given what we've witnessed to date I cannot see how they are not fair. Nor can I understand how such repeat performances don't garner more attention.
--Josh Marshall
Quote of the day.
"I've never been a press hound."
Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL), explaining her lack of public appearances in <$NoAd$>her congressional district, which includes some of the hardest hit counties in the state.
Writes a columnist today in the local paper ...
Harris hit those counties on Tuesday for the first time. She said she was in Sweden over the weekend attending a family wedding. When she heard about the destruction, she cut short her stay in Europe and headed home.Although she wasn't visible to the public the past few days, Harris said she and her staff have been working behind the scenes to help victims.
...
Harris said if she had been in the country and toured the hurricane damage, she's convinced the newspapers and her critics would have accused her of having a political motive.
Another candidate for Rich Kids Who Can't Catch a Break.
--Josh Marshall
Retiring Republican congressman says war was "a mistake", "not justified" and "a dangerous, costly mess."
Rep. Doug Bereuter of Nebraska made the statements in a four page letter to constituents detailed in an article in today's Lincoln Journal Star.
--Josh Marshall
I wanted to pass on this passage from Charlie Cook's most recent 'Off to the Races' column in which he analyzes the state of the presidential campaign in various states ...
At this point, there remains 10 states that are too close to call: Florida with 27 electoral votes, Iowa (7), Minnesota (10), Missouri (11), Nevada (5), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), Ohio (20), Pennsylvania (21) and Wisconsin (10). While too close to call, these states are not necessarily dead even. In Pennsylvania, President Bush, after holding a consistent lead over Kerry, finally slipped behind last month, but not far enough to warrant moving it into the "Lean Kerry" column. The same case exists in Florida, where a recent poll by a Republican firm for a private client put Kerry up by four points, but no one believes that the state is anything but a toss up. In Minnesota, New Hampshire and New Mexico, Kerry seems to be up by a bit, but again not quite enough to move those into the Kerry column. Bush is ahead in Missouri, but it's a close call as to whether the lead is big enough to justify moving it into the "Lean Bush" column.In adding up all the electoral votes that are in the safe and lean columns for each candidate, President Bush has a tight 211 to 207 lead in the Electoral College. Bush also has 120 votes in the toss up column. However, if you pushed each of the 10 toss up states to Kerry -- who seems to be ahead by a slight margin -- he would come out on top.
Two points on this. <$Ad$>
These numbers seem somewhat different from ones you can find on sites like this one that tally up all the different state-wide polls to give a read on where the electoral college numbers are. But I think it's worth noting that those tallies can be at least somewhat misleading for the following reason. Unlike people, all polls are not created equal. And when you get down to state-level polls the range of quality becomes much greater than it is at the national level. A veteran politics watcher like Cook can see through that smoke and take into account the poor quality in some polls and deeper trends at work in given states. For that reason, I put a lot of stock in Cook's opinion.
Still, he does seem to me to be understating Kerry's recent strength in Pennsylvania and Florida. In the case of Florida, what seems to have been a private GOP poll may have put Kerry up by 4 points. But the most recent independent poll, done by Quinnipiac, put him up by 7 points (6 with Nader added to the mix). And the poll before that, by ARG from the beginning of this month, also put Kerry up by 8 points (7 with Nader).
In fact, if you just go by the polls (which is not necessarily the best way to go) Florida is as solidly in the Kerry camp as Michigan -- and Cook doesn't put Michigan on his list of too-close-to-call states.
I agree with Cook to a degree. Some skepticism is warranted on the Florida numbers. One has to take the state's history into account, who the governor is, and what we might call the natural advantages the GOP has in the state, both legal and otherwise. If Kerry really ends up winning Florida by 7 or 8 points, it'll mean that President Bush was defeated in a blow-out.
In any case, these aren't criticisms of Cook, just possible points of disagreement. I'm posting his analysis because I put a lot of stock in what he says. Those are just my two cents.
--Josh Marshall
I finally got a chance to talk to Chris Homan, Campaign Manager for Pete Sessions, about the sign war going on in the Sessions-Frost race down in Dallas.
Homan said he believed that the school sign incident (described below) was authorized by the Frost campaign and designed to "intimidate" Sessions and his disabled son. He called Frost's charges that the whole stunt was a Sessions dirty trick "delusional" and an example of the "near psychopathic level [Frost] is willing to drop to" to win the election.
It seems awfully hard for me to believe that the Frost campaign really authorized covering Sessions' kids school with Frost for Congress signs. On the other hand, Homan notes that Frost's campaign hasn't put forward any evidence to support its dirty tricks claims. And while I doubt very much that Frost authorized this little stunt, it certainly doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that this is something that might have been done by over-zealous supporters.
Homan also said that the Frost campaign had a history of sign practices that were "sleazy at best."
Now, finally to the matter of the police report I mentioned earlier which showed Sessions getting questioned by a police office for personally removing his Democratic opponents signs late in the evening a few days before election day 2002. (According to the police report, Sessions was not cited.) Homan confirmed that it was a genuine police record but called it "more or less a police activity report ... a meaningless piece of paper."
According to Homan, Texas has a law against putting candidate signs on public roadways. And Sessions and his aide were merely "collecting yard signs ... that had been illegally placed along the road."
In other words, says Homan, Sessions was just doing his (rather late night) civic duty.
--Josh Marshall
You can't say Alan Keyes doesn't have a novel approach to homeland security issues. Yesterday, according to the Sun-Times, Keyes reaffirmed his view that the September 11th terrorist attacks were a warning from God that America should outlaw abortion.
--Josh Marshall
There's an interesting passage in the analysis portion of the new Zogby poll. It says ...
Kerry leads among all age groups except 30-49 year olds, where the two candidates are pretty much tied. Catholics give Kerry a 50%-37% edge – numbers more similar to Clinton’s leads in 1992 and 1996 than Al Gore’s 51% to 46% margin in 2000. Protestants are for Bush (57% to 33%), especially on the strength of the President’s 68% to 20% margin among Born Again Protestants.
Meanwhile, the last major sounding of Hispanic <$Ad$>voters, done by the Post, Univision, and Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, puts Kerry over Bush by a 60% to 30% margin.
Jewish voters, though probably only electorally significant in one swing state this year, remain as Democratic as they were four years ago (75% to 22% for Kerry), despite much more than the usual degree of pandering from the White House, according to this poll just out from the National Jewish Democratic Council.
And though it's probably not too much of a surprise that President Bush isn't doing all that well among Muslim voters, let's note for the record that this poll from June has the president clocking in at a rather anemic 3% support among voters who say there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger.
Now, many times I've noted the unlovely tendency many political commentators have of claiming that Democrats are 'dependent' on the black vote or that absent black votes the Democrats would be a permanent minority party. And far be it from me to make the same disreputable charge in reverse.
But if you look at these numbers you can see pretty clearly that the weight of the GOP comes heavily from white voters and particularly white evangelical voters. Despite all the terrible buffeting the country has gone through in the last few years, the thesis of Chris Caldwell's masterful 1998 essay, 'The Southern Captivity of the GOP' is well worth revisiting.
(Unfortunately, the Atlantic Monthly has chosen not to make it available to the public on its website. If someone can point me to a site that has reprinted the piece, using some sort of public interest exception to the IP laws, I'd be much obliged.)
--Josh Marshall
"The Illinois Republicans are not just guilty of tokenism. They are guilty of last-minute scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel tokenism. The local party has been undergoing a sort of collective mental breakdown ever since Jack Ryan's Senate candidacy collapsed in June over a sordid sex scandal."
That's from the well-known lefty rag, The Economist.
--Josh Marshall
Some challenges are best left unmade?
Marty Frost and Pete Sessions are two sitting Texas congressmen battling over the same district -- fallout from the redistricting battle last year. A side note to the campaign in recent days has been a fairly silly tussle over campaign road signs and whether one or the other of the two campaigns is stealing them, using them for dirty tricks, or doing anything else that no one in his or her right mind would care about at any other time save for during a hotly-contested congressional race.
The latest round started yesterday when Sessions was dropping his 10 year old son, who is a special education student, off for his first day of school at Lakewood Elementary School. There he saw the school and playground covered with Frost campaign signs.
"It was obvious that I was being targeted, my son was being targeted, my family was being targeted," said Sessions. "It disappoints me. It's disturbing."
The Frost campaign said it had nothing to do with it, noting that many of their campaign signs had recently been stolen and suggesting that those stolen signs had ended up in said school yard.
Now -- and I promise, this is actually going somewhere -- Sessions, not surprisingly, responded that his campaign had done no such thing and demanded that the Frost campaign come forward with any proof that his campaign was involved in stealing signs or any other such disreputable sign-related activity.
Well, the Frost campaign seems to have done him one step better.
Late this afternoon the Frost campaign sent out a press release with a police report from a few days before the 2002 mid-term election (Oct. 27th 2002) in which a Dallas police officer, Jana A. Brewster, caught Sessions -- then a sitting member of congress -- and an aide on a late-night sign stealing run.
(I have not been able to independently verify the authenticity of the report. But, given the fact that the Frost campaign is publicly distributing it, I'm going to assume it's on the level.)
The relevant portion of the police report states that the responding officer was driving along when she spotted Sessions' truck pulled over on the side of the road with a man "pulling up elections signs." The officer then stops the two guys and ...
both susps were asked for identification. R/O looked in the bed of the truck and there were approximately 10 political signs iwth the name "Pauline Dixon" (i.e., his '02 opponent) on them. Susp1 (i.e., Sessions) was asked if Pauline Dixon was aware that he was pulling up her signs and Susp1 replied, "No." Susp1 was then asked if she was who he was running against and Susp1 stated, "Yes." Both Susps were released at the scene and the signs remained in the bed of the truck...
The driver of the car (or in Dallas police talk, Susp2) seems to have been Bobby Hillert, Sessions Health, Education and Technology LA in his capitol hill office.
I tried to contact the Sessions campaign for comment. But when I called, the person designated to field press inquiries was busy in a conference call and couldn't speak to me. If and when we hear back from him, we'll post his response.
--Josh Marshall
Here's a thought.
I usually think of Republicans as interested in limiting the franchise for select groups of voters. But in a move which -- and here I have to give the guy credit -- really does seem to look beyond divisive racial categories, Alan Keyes has called for all Americans, regardless of race, creed, etc. etc. etc., to lose their right to vote for senators.
Let's also note that this seems like an exceptionally brave move for a man currently running for senate under the current democratic rules.
In any case, can we get Sen. George Allen, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to go on record about whether he thinks this is a good idea? Or how about the president?
Perhaps also we can get a response on Keyes' proposal for slavery reparations in the form of a two generation federal tax holiday (with the exception of payroll taxes) for all African-Americans?
--Josh Marshall
Politicsnj.com is suggesting that there may be another snap press conference from Gov. McGreevey today. I suppose we'll know soon enough.
--Josh Marshall
The last adjectives I would have thought to use to describe Alan Keyes would be 'prudent' or 'pragmatic'.
But in this case, I think they may apply.
Keyes is 'leasing' his new apartment in Illinois -- i.e., "the land of my spirit, of my conscience and my heart" -- on a month-to-month basis.
--Josh Marshall
David Ignatius today has an excellent column on the politicization of terror alerts and the related matter of the leak of the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. As he notes, it"appears that Khan may, all too briefly, have been one of the most important agents in place the United States has managed to recruit in al Qaeda."
The conventional wisdom on this -- or at least the widely aired claim -- is that administration officials leaked Khan's name in order to bolster the credibility of the terror warnings issued just after the end of the Democratic convention, and that they did so out of some mix of organizational incompetence and indifference to the consequences of the leak.
Yet an author in Salon today has a more troubling theory.
Husain Haqqani says there were two leaks from the Pakistanis -- the first, leaking Khan's name and the second, blaming the initial leak on the Americans. The leaks, suggests Haqqani were "motivated by [an] eagerness to show off their success in arresting al-Qaida figures or, more ominously, by a desire to sabotage the penetration of al-Qaida that Khan's arrest had made possible."
The two possibilities are quite different in their implications. But both suggest -- a point Haqqani develops through the piece -- that the US has delegated the al Qaida hunt to an inherently unreliable partner.
(After all, we know Pakistan's intelligence service -- the ISI -- was riddled with Taliban and AQ sympathizers prior to the war. So there's no reason to think that's changed entirely.)
Nor is the author here just some random scribe. If you scan down to the author bio, it notes that Haqqani was an "advisor to former Pakistani Prime Ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif and ... Pakistan's ambassador to Sri Lanka." Since those are the two previous democratically-elected Pakistani prime ministers, the second of whom was overthrown by the current military head of state, it is fair to infer that Haqqani is not well-disposed toward the current government. But those posts and the high-level diplomatic appointment also suggest that he's pretty wired in the country and probably has pretty good sources in country.
He concludes the piece by noting "As long as the U.S.-Pakistan relationship remains a single-issue alliance based on the quid pro quo of changes in Pakistani policy for U.S. money, the regime in Islamabad will continue to be tempted to take its time in finding all the terrorists at large in Pakistan. After all, most subcontractors who are paid by the hour take longer to get the job done."
--Josh Marshall
Okay, no denying or talking around it. I was in a bit of a blog funk today. So here I was, late in the evening, wondering what would put me back on track. And I knew I had to channel back into the Illinois senate race to get my bearings, knowing as I did that Alan Keyes would never disappoint me.
On most days you can find Alan Keyes explaining why affirmative action either violates the categorical imperative or is specifically rejected in the Declaration of Independence, if of course you interpret it correctly using numerology. But today he thought he'd mix it up a bit. So he said Barack Obama wasn't black enough.
I couldn't find the actual transcript. But this local TV report says that Keyes claimed "Obama can't relate to other blacks because he is not from the same heritage as most African Americans." And just to drive the point home Keyes also claimed Obama advanced the genocide of the black race by supporting abortion rights.
"We're the first people who have ever been pushed into genocide before our babies are born ... So the people who are supporting that position are actually supporting the systematic extermination of black America," he told a local radio station.
All of this may have come because of what happened yesterday when both candidates showed up at the Billiken parade on the South Side of the Chicago -- an event which is billed as the largest African-American parade in the country.
Obama, not surprisingly, got a raucous hero's welcome. And Keyes ... well, he didn't get a hero's welcome. You can read all the details here. But the one nugget that caught my yeye was this moment where, according to the Chicago Tribune, a parade goer "briefly grabbed Keyes' arm and advised Keyes, 'Take your [expletive] back to Maryland.'"
Now Keyes is on to another crowd pleaser: ending elections for senators and giving the choice back to state legislatures. "There has been a steady deleterious erosion of the sovereign role of the states," Keyes told a radio station on Friday and ending popular elections for senators would help put things right.
--Josh Marshall
A number of readers wrote in today noting that TPM was downloading e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y slowly. We're working on rectifying the server issue that was causing that problem. So the site should soon be back to its normal speed.
This, however, is an opportune moment to share with you something we've been working on.
If you access TPM through a high-bandwidth connection, it usually downloads tolerably fast. But if you're using a slower conncetion, like dial-up, for instance, it can be quite slow.
So we've developed a faster downloading version of the site here.
This other version of the site doesn't actually download more quickly, at least not exactly. The difference is that the main TPM site appears all at once. So you have to wait for each piece of the site -- all the text and all the images -- to download until you see anything but the beige background. This other version downloads one piece at a time. That isn't quite as aesthetically pleasing (it can be a touch jagged), but you end up seeing the text more quickly.
As I say, if you're using a fast connection, you probably won't notice much difference. But if you're using a slower connection, you'll probably prefer this alternate, fast-downloading version.
Finally, please let us know what you think about this faster downloading version of the site. If the response is positive, particularly from folks with high bandwidth connections (the great majority of users), we'll likely end up making it the default version of the site.
--Josh Marshall
"If Bush can win reelection despite the failure of his two most consequential -- and truly radical -- decisions, he will truly be a political miracle man. But as his own nominating convention approaches, the odds are against him."
Those are the words of Washington Post columnist David Broder in a column that appeared in Sunday's paper. And I reprint them because I think they mark a significant milestone simply because of Broder's role in defining conventional wisdom in Washington.
A few days ago I was talking to a friend about the coverage of the presidential campaign and how Washington's chattering classes have remained stuck in a mind-set that judges this a dead-even race -- or even one the president is bound to win -- long after the objective criteria -- to the extent there can be such a thing -- have said otherwise.
By objective criteria, I'm referring mainly to poll numbers which show Kerry consistently besting the president, though often by numbers which are in the margin of error for the given poll.
(See pollingreport.com's summary table of recent presidential polls for an example. Since August 1st, the Gallup poll has twice found President Bush beating Kerry among likely voters -- by 3 and 4 points. But every other public poll taking this month has Kerry ahead.)
The additional fact to note, of course, is that incumbent presidents tend to get what they poll in head-to-head match-ups. Thus, if past races are any indicator, if a poll says Bush 46, Kerry 47, Bush will probably end up getting about 46% of the vote while Kerry will pick up most of the rest of the uncommitteds.
Other measures of independents all show danger signs for the president. And some further indication can be found down-ballot -- especially on the senate side. But my point here isn't to get into the nitty-gritty of the polling numbers. These are pretty conventional ways to interpret polling data. My point is only to argue -- as Charlie Cook has been arguing in his recent columns -- that if you go by conventional ways of reading the numbers, both nationwide and in key swing states, President Bush is on the way to losing this race.
That sense of the race has hardly settled in among pundits or daily newspaper reporters, or if it has, it hasn't shown through in their copy. And yet here you have David Broder writing a column which, though it says many things, says mainly that President Bush is likely to be thrown out of office -- not because John Kerry is lighting the hustings on fire, but simply because President Bush's fundamental policy decisions have failed and voters are going to hold him accountable.
That perception, that conventional wisdom, once it takes hold, can have a poisonous effect on the efforts of the perceived loser. And when that perception begins to take hold among Republicans, if it does, it will set off a vicious internal dynamic within the party.
And so this, I think, will be the key issue over the next three weeks, as we build up to and then come out of the Republican convention: when does the CW defined by Broder -- the veritable pontiff of beltway CW -- start registering? If the polls change it may never, of course. But if not, when does the president start moving ahead in the polls? Can the GOP convention fundamentally shift the dynamic of the race? And, if not, when do the first signs of panic begin to appear within the president's ranks?
The GOP convention now seems like it'll be a much more high-stakes affair than the DNC.
--Josh Marshall
