I'm just the guy that can't stand cant. ___________

 
LOTT’S LEGACY: Whatever else Trent Lott has proved himself to be, he has demonstrated prowess as a vote counter in his three decades in Congress. Lott put that skill to use this morning and resigned as Senate majority leader after counting the horses’ heads in his bed.

While Lott’s resignation as majority leader may spare Bush and fellow Republicans some embarrassment, it may have come too late to put all the worms back in the can that Lott opened with his tribute to Storm Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign.

If Lott had resigned his leadership post a week ago – or even if he had not kept reviving the story with near-daily clumsy apologies – L’affaire Lott might have been quickly dropped by the news media as just another politician done in by a gaffe. By hanging on and staying in the public eye with his pathetic serial apologies, Lott has practically forced commentators to look for some larger context in which to place his transgressions.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, Lott’s statements retroactively endorsing a segregationist campaign for president – as well as his long history of opposing civil rights legislation – are reflective of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy. For more than three decades, Republican candidates have won the votes of Southern whites by indicating that they would be far less sympathetic to the grievances of African Americans than the Democrats have been. Starting in 1968, when Strom Thurmond campaigned for Richard Nixon, the Southern Strategy has enabled Republican presidential candidates to rely on large blocs of electoral votes from the South.

Since hardcore racists are among the voters attracted by such Republican appeals, the Republican Party has always been skittish about discussing the Southern Strategy in the rest of the country. To a large extent the news media have obliged the Republicans on this point and have rarely focused on the Southern Strategy.

Lott, however, has performed an unintentional service to his country – and the Democrats – by keeping the story of his political demise alive and fresh. With each bumbling apology, Lott would revive the story and force commentators to look for new angles and eventually they focused on the Southern Strategy. The topic of the Republicans’ cynical and crass manipulation of white racial attitudes to achieve electoral success in the South has become a mainstream news topic. For a few examples, see what a leading newspaper, the last elected president and an insightful blogger have said about the Republicans’ Southern Strategy.

It would be a fitting tribute to Lott if his legacy is a continued sensitivity by the news media to the Republicans’ Southern Strategy. Perhaps, the major news media will turn the spotlight on the Southern Strategy the next time Republicans try to suppress black voter turnout – as they did recently in the Louisiana Senate race – or make veiled references to the Democrats as the party of criminal or unpopular blacks – as Bush the elder did in 1988 and Senator Frist (a leading contender to replace Lott as majority leader) did in 1994.

If a heightened awareness of the Republicans’ Southern Strategy is Lott’s legacy, the Democrats may want to give Lott the tribute he deserves. The next time Republicans try to profit from white voters’ racial resentments or suppress black voter turnout, Democrats might want to state the following:

When Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon and Trent Lott ran for office, we voted against them. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.
posted by Gary at 5:09 PM

 
BUSH’S SOUTHERN STRATEGY OF SILENCE: While the Bush administration is renown for speaking with one mind on all things political (and for this administration all things are political), when it comes to the fate of Trent Lott, the White House is certainly having trouble expressing that mind.

The reason for the Bush administration’s recent muddled statements on Lott appears to be that the White House would prefer that voters not know that what is on its mind is preservation of the Republican Party’s southern strategy. While the White House’s statements about Lott have been ambiguous, the White House has expressed no ambivalence toward the southern strategy, which Republican presidential candidates have used since the 1960's to lock up southern electoral votes with campaigns designed to appeal to white voters opposed to civil rights legislation.

The White House’s enigmatic approach began last Thursday when Bush criticized Lott for his statement at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party lamenting that Thurmond did not win his 1948 third-party campaign for president on a virulently segregationist platform. The White House immediately muddied that message by having presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer state “emphatically and on the record, the president doesn't think Trent Lott needs to resign.”

Since Thursday, the White House has strived to make its intentions towards Lott even less clear. Reporters trying to discern Bush’s position on whether Republican Senators should vote to replace Lott as Senate Majority Leader in a caucus vote on Jan. 6 received mixed messages yesterday.

In public, the White House was reaffirming Bush’s view that Lott did not need to resign as Senate Majority Leader:

The White House, which rebuked Lott last week, repeated that Bush does not believe that Lott, elected to become majority leader last month, should step aside. But it refused to say if the president wants Lott to be majority leader.

In private, however, White House sources were singing a different tune:

A ... Republican close to the White House said Bush's advisers were second-guessing a decision last week to give Lott a chance to survive. Despite strong criticism of Lott's remarks by Bush, spokesman Ari Fleischer was instructed to say the Mississippian should not resign.

In fact, some Republican sources were indicating that Bush and his advisers would prefer for Lott simply to vanish from the face of the earth:

In contrast to Monday, when White House officials went to great lengths to portray themselves as leaving Mr. Lott's fate to his Senate colleagues, today they appeared to be more overtly involved.

Republicans said that Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, was engaged in phone calls with party members about Mr. Lott today and was receiving advice about what the White House should do.

Mr. Rove was careful, Republicans said, not to push a point of view or otherwise be seen as trying to manipulate the outcome of Senate affairs.

Mr. Rove declined to comment on Mr. Lott's remarks. But privately, a Republican close to President Bush said that Mr. Lott's refusal to step aside was prolonging the inevitable.

Although the Bush administration apparently views Lott as a liability that needs to be thrown from the train, they do not want their fingerprints on the body. And why does the Bush administration prefer the present chaotic situation to playing any discernible role in replacing Lott? The most likely answer is that Bush and his advisers want to discard only Lott – not the southern strategy:

Bush's political advisers say they are highly disappointed with Lott's explanations, but say they had been ordered by the president not to take any overt or covert action against the Mississippi Republican.

The White House faces a dilemma: Lott is hurting both Bush and his party, but any effort to take down Lott will hurt Bush with his Southern base, say senior Republicans close to the White House. Bush also feels some loyalty toward Lott, White House officials said.

Thus, the president's political team is forced into what one White House official called a “strategy of silence,” hoping events themselves lead to Lott's removal or – much less likely – somehow end the controversy.

It is richly ironic that Bush, after slapping Lott’s wrist for his retroactive endorsement of Strom Thurmond, is settling on a southern strategy of silence.

The original southern strategy was used by Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond in the presidential race of 1968 to convince unreconstructed white voters that Nixon would not advance the cause of civil rights for black Americans. With a nudge and a wink, Nixon and Thurmond telegraphed to racists that Nixon’s silence on civil rights issues should be interpreted as signaling that a Republican White House would be more to their liking than a Democratic administration.

Bush’s southern strategy of silence is true to the spirit of Nixon’s and Thurmond’s original southern strategy. Rather than take a moral stand and actively seek Lott’s removal as Senate Majority Leader, Bush is remaining silent so as not to antagonize white southern voters that see nothing wrong in Lott’s embrace of Thurmond’s segregationist past.

Regardless of what happens to the beleaguered Lott, perhaps he can take comfort in the knowledge that even though Thurmond’s segregationist platform of 1948 was rejected by the voters, Thurmond’s southern strategy of 1968 has been adopted by Bush.
posted by Gary at 2:02 PM

 
LOTTS O’ LIES: Trent Lott’s chances of surviving his retroactive endorsement of Storm Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat race for president would be better if Lott were only a bigot and a liar. Unfortunately for Lott, he is also a clumsy liar.

As Lott engages in serial apologizing in an effort to keep his post as Senate Majority Leader, he is tripping over his own lies.

On Larry King’s show last Wednesday, Lott tried to excuse his comments expressing support for Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for president by pleading ignorance about what Thurmond stood for a half century ago. After apologizing for comments at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, Lott added:

Having said that, you know, I see – I was 7-years-old when, you know, Strom first ran for president. I don't really remember anything about the campaign.

Lott’s plea of ignorance was laughable. Lott is a 61-year-old senator from Mississippi – a state at the heart of the civil rights struggles of past decades – who has served with Thurmond in Congress for three decades. If Lott had been a thirtysomething political neophyte, his plea of ignorance might have been plausible. Coming from him, the plea was ludicrous.

Indeed, in his interview with BET’s Ed Gordon last night, Lott effectively admitted that his earlier plea of ignorance about Thurmond’s segregationist background was a lie:

GORDON: But you also saw a senator that personified for years segregation.

LOTT: Yes, but let me tell you...

GORDON: Did you not, though?

LOTT: I did. I did.

GORDON: And you knew and understood what he stood for?

LOTT: I – absolutely I did.

Later in the interview, Lott tried once again to fall back on his claimed ignorance to excuse his record in voting against the Martin Luther King Holiday in 1983. Lott’s whopper that he did not knot know what Martin Luther King represented was so ridiculous that Lott quickly began back pedaling when Gordon prodded him:

GORDON: Let's talk about the King holiday.

LOTT: I want to talk about the King holiday. I want to go back to that.

I'm not sure we in America, certainly not white America and the people in the South, fully understood who this man was; the impact he was having on the fabric of this country.

GORDON: But you certainly understood it by the time that vote came up, Senator.

LOTT: Well, but...

GORDON: You knew who Dr. King was at that point.

LOTT: I did, but I've learned a lot more since then.

Having chosen mendacity and ignorance for his sword and his shield as he fights for his political life, Lott also tried the lie that he is in favor of affirmative action. Lott conveniently ignored his 1998 vote to eliminate affirmative action for federal construction contracts. When Gordon probed this untruth, however, Lott fell back on feigning ignorance of what affirmative action really means.

GORDON: What about affirmative action?

LOTT: I'm for that. I think you should reach out to people ...

GORDON: Across the board?

LOTT: Absolutely, across the board. That's why I'm so proud of my own alma mater now, University of Mississippi, that obviously had a difficult time in the 60s and 70s, now led by an outstanding chancellor, Robert Khayat, that has gotten rid of the Confederate flag, that has now has an institute of reconciliation, that has a leadership...

GORDON: Yet your votes in the past have not suggested that you are for affirmative action.

LOTT: I am for affirmative action. And I practice it. I have had African-Americans on my staff, and other minorities, but particularly African-Americans, since the mid-1970s.

I have had a particular program ...

GORDON: But to have one on one's staff--you understand the difference, though, to have a black on your staff and to push legislation that would help African-Americans, minorities across the board, are completely different.

LOTT: You know, again, you can get into arguments about timetables and quotas.

Lott has apparently reached the point that he is willing to say anything – no matter how outrageous or untrue – to keep his job as Senate Majority Leader. While Lott might have been able to survive if he had merely been a bigot and a liar, I suspect his being a clumsy liar is one liability too many even for his Republican colleagues.
posted by Gary at 10:36 AM

 
NO GORE IN ‘04: The republic is a little poorer today with Al Gore’s announcement that he will not run for president in 2004.

Gore is one of the most thoughtful politicians around today. If he had not been savaged by numerous misleading treatments in the news media in 2000 – fueled largely by Republican and right-wing spinmeisters – he would undoubtedly be president today. For that matter, if five members of the Supreme Court had not disgraced themselves with the most partisan decision in Supreme Court history, he would probably be president.

Recently, Gore has been a forceful critic of the Bush administration’s slapdash policies, which appear coherent only when they forthrightly cater to corporate interests. Unlike many other Democrats, Gore has not been afraid to criticize a foreign policy that has simplemindedly chosen a forceful sounding bellicosity towards Iraq over a more considered approach of how best to deal with terrorism. He has also not been afraid to attack disastrous economic policies that favor the rich.

Despite sounding like a presidential candidate – and a great one at that – Gore has decided that another spokesman might serve the Democrats better in 2004:

Well, I personally have the energy and the drive and the ambition to make another campaign. But I don't think it's the right thing for me to do. I think that a campaign that would be a rematch between myself and President Bush would inevitably involve a focus on the past that would, in some measure, distract from the focus on the future that I think all campaigns have to be about.

....

The last campaign was an extremely difficult one. And while I have the energy and drive to go out there and do it again, I think that there are a lot of people within the Democratic Party who felt exhausted by that, who felt like, O.K., I don't want to go through that again. And I'm, frankly, sensitive to that feeling.

Gore’s decision must have been a difficult one to make. I certainly find it a difficult decision to accept.

Given Gore’s recent outspokenness, I think he would have been an effective candidate against a fundamentally dishonest administration, which is adopting domestic policies even more ill-advised than the first Bush administration’s. For just the latest outrage, read today’s Washington Post article on the Bush administration’s plans to shift taxes from the rich to the poor. (Link via Counterspin Central.) Gore, who has the instincts of a populist – in the best sense of the term (see Trent Lott for the worst sense) – would have been one of the best spokesman for the Democrats in 2004 in denouncing Bush’s class guerrilla warfare on behalf of the rich.

In recent weeks Al Gore has shown what a spirited Democrat can do as he has forcefully and effectively blasted the Bush administration. I hope other Democrats that what to be president are not shy in following in his footsteps.


posted by Gary at 10:30 AM

 
WHEN A BUSH FLIES: Reading President Bush’s slap-on-the wrist criticism of Trent Lott’s retroactive endorsement of Strom Thurmond and the 1948 Dixiecrats brought to mind that age-old ethical question that has divided philosophers for centuries: When an elephant flies, do you criticize him for not getting very far off the ground?

While it is all well and good that Bush has finally criticized Lott’s lament that America did not vote for a segregationist platform a half century ago, that criticism was both too late and too weak for Bush to be given any credit. After several days of White House statements that Bush accepted Lott’s half-hearted apologies, Bush finally criticized Lott yesterday:

“Any suggestion that the segregated past was acceptable or positive is offensive, and it is wrong,” Mr. Bush said as his mostly black audience of religious leaders in Philadelphia rose from their chairs and erupted in shouts of approval and long burst of applause. “Recent comments by Senator Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country. He has apologized, and rightly so.

“Every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals,” the president continued. “And the founding ideals of our nation and, in fact, the founding ideals of the political party I represent was, and remains today, the equal dignity and equal rights of every American.”

After reading these noble words, who can dispute that Bush would not countenance any Republican leader that expressed hostility to civil rights for all Americans? Well, Bush can – and, through a spokesman, did – dispute it. Despite his ringing endorsement of equal rights for all, Bush wants Lott to continue as the Republican leader in the Senate:

While Mr. Bush did not address the question of whether Mr. Lott should step aside, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said in an interview after Mr. Bush's speech that “emphatically and on the record, the president doesn't think Trent Lott needs to resign.”

Now, Bush could have done the moral thing and called for Lott to step down as majority leader. Or Bush could have been wishy-washy and had a spokesman say noting more than that Lott’s continued tenure as majority leader was a matter for him and the Senate Republicans to decide. Or Bush could have been mildly supportive of Lott and have a spokesman merely say that Lott does not need to go.

Instead, Bush had Fleischer state that Bush “emphatically and on the record ... doesn’t think Trent Lott needs to resign.” Why was it necessary for Bush to express his support for Lott “emphatically”? Perhaps Bush was afraid that Republicans would think that Bush was actually serious when he mouthed those noble words and not realize that his rebuke of Lott was just a political ploy designed to end the controversy:

The White House at first tried to stay clear of the controversy, but Bush and his advisers, in meetings Wednesday night and Thursday morning, decided it could undermine their efforts to increase black support in the next election. In 2000 Bush received just 9 percent of the black vote.

....

“The president did Trent Lott a big favor today,” said Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who accompanied Bush to Philadelphia. “He basically cleared the air. ... This is not an issue that divides us anymore.”

Given Bush’s endorsement of Lott’s continued leadership role, it seems clear the Bush’s toothless rebuke of him was done more for political than moral reasons. Bush is not so committed to the ideals of equality that he minds having the Senate run by a segregationist sympathizer.

While Bush deserves criticism for this lack of moral leadership, this episode offers no illumination on the age-old ethical question posed above. Unfortunately, this elephant didn’t really fly, he merely stomped around the jungle making loud noises.
posted by Gary at 11:14 AM

 
LIES, DAMNED LIES AND TRENT LOTT: Trent Lott’s pathetic attempts at apologizing are revealing him to be a liar as well as a bigot.

In his first feeble apology, Lott claimed that his retroactive endorsement of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for president in 1948 was reflective of nothing more than a poor choice of words. At the time I thought that it was marginally conceivable that Lott had not really thought through what he was saying. But (as I discussed in my previous post) even if idle, such comments reflected gross racial insensitivity. (Actually, I said he did not give a rat’s rump about black Americans).

As I discussed, I suspected that such an interpretation might be overly charitable to Lott. Indeed it was. It has since been revealed that Lott made almost identical comments endorsing Thurmond’s 1948 campaign at a campaign rally for Ronald Reagan in Mississippi in November 1980. Far from being a spur of the moment effusion at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party, Lott’s praise for the Thurmond of half a century ago has a lineage of more than two decades.

Given the untenability of Lott’s original defense that he made his remarks because he was giddy from being at a birthday party, Lott is now trying to explain what he meant by his multiple endorsements of Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist campaign. According to Lott, whether it’s 1980 or 2002, when he thinks about the Dixiecrats’ 1948 campaign he thinks of defense issues. In giving his new, improved mea culpa yesterday to the right-wing pundit Sean Hannity, Lott claimed:

When I think of Strom Thurmond, I'm talking about defense issues. If you look back at that time, which was 1948, defense was a big issue. We were coming out of the war, of course, but we also were dealing with Communism and then in the '80s, you know, when I talked about Strom again, we were talking about the problem in Iran, talking about deficits over the years, strong law enforcement speeches.

What a load of bunk. Lott is being deceitful when he implies that for Strom Thurmond in 1948 “defense was big issue.” If ever there was a one issue campaign in the history of America, it was Thurmond’s 1948 campaign as the presidential candidate of the State Rights Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic Party in 1948 for the sole reason that they were opposed to civil rights for blacks. Thurmond ran on the issue of being opposed to civil rights for blacks – not on any defense issues. Take a look at the Dixiecrats’ 1948 party platform. Not a word about defense issues. Instead, you get such noble sentiments as “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race ....”

Speaking on Larry King last night, Lott made another real howler when King asked whether he really thought the country would have been off if Thurmond had been elected in 1948:

KING: But you don't think he'd [have] been a better president, say, than Harry Truman who defeated him that year?

LOTT: You know, I'd have to go back and look at the election of that year.

Lott’s answer is a clumsy lie wrapped inside an evasion. Does Lott really expect people to believe that after being roasted for several days for retroactively endorsing a segregationist candidate in the 1948 race, he has no idea what Thurmond’s campaign was about? Lott obviously knows that Thurmond’s campaign was all about maintaining segregation of the races, but still refuses to disavow that effort.

Take a moment to consider this. After getting pilloried for days, Lott still can’t bring himself to say that it was better for the country not to have elected a segregationist as president in 1948. The man is an absolute disgrace.
posted by Gary at 11:17 AM

 
WHAT (IF ANYTHING) WAS ON LOTT'S MIND?: Now that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has issued a half-hearted apology for his love note to Senator Thurmond’s racist campaign for president in 1948, America’s media can return to more pressing issues such as pinning down Senator Kerry on the price of his haircuts.

Before we leave Senator Lott on his own magnolia lined memory lane, however, a few points are worth considering.

Lott’s statement was a classic gaffe. My definition of a gaffe is slightly different from Michael Kinsley’s, who has defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth.” I’ve always thought that definition, while clever, misses the mark. For example, Ronald Reagan’s idiotic statement that trees and other plants are the main cause of air pollution was both a gaffe and untrue. I think a better definition of a gaffe is when a politician does not let the limitations of his mind prevent him from speaking it.

Lott’s statement was a gaffe in that sense. I have no doubt that Lott was speaking his mind when he waxed nostalgic about Thurmond’s pro-segregation 1948 race for president.

The question is what was on his mind. As Lott was waiting to speak at Thurmond’s party and staring at the Centenarian, was Lott really musing about how much better America would be if we didn’t have those pesky laws against lynching and denying the vote to blacks? Probably not. (Though lacking President Bush’s ability to look into the eyes of a man and see his soul, I can’t say for sure.)

While we can never be sure exactly what Lott meant – especially since he refuses to say – even the most charitable view of what he meant is actually quite damning.

To be more charitable to Lott than he probably deserves, he may not have been thinking about anything specific and was expressing some vague resentments about federal enforcement of civil rights laws. To be even more charitable, Lott may have just been trying to honor Thurmond and wanted to praise him as a states’ rights prophet before his time without even reflecting that the cause he was celebrating sought to perpetuate the subjugation and degradation of black Americans. Yet, the denial of civil rights to blacks was so central to Thurmond’s 1948 campaign, such a lapse on Lott’s part would indicate that the denial of civil rights to black Americans is an issue that never crosses his mind.

Thus, even this most charitable view paints a sorry picture of Senator Lott. For the most charitable thing that can be said of the man leading the Republicans in the Senate is that he does not give a rat’s rump about black Americans.
posted by Gary at 11:08 AM

 
THE STUDENT PRESIDENT: President Bush was a bit off the mark when he said he would be the education president.

It turns out that Bush is really the student president, given his tactic of “studying” problems – such as stem cell research – as a way of pretending to be concerned about problems without doing anything to upset his right wing backers.

The Self Made Pundit has already mocked Bush in our Nov. 13 post for using this tactic of calling for more research as a way of avoiding tackling the ever growing problem of global warming.

The cause for that derision was a New York Times report that Bush was recycling his father’s environmental plans and calling for four more years of research into the causes of global warming rather than taking more immediate steps to address this impending global catastrophe. The Self Made Pundit was outraged (though hardly surprised) that Bush was cynically calling for years of research as a way of feigning interest in the potentially disastrous problem of global warming while doing nothing to disturb his corporate backers.

Perhaps we were too harsh at that time in criticizing Bush for calling for four more years of research before taking action. After all, given the Bush administration’s ties to energy industries, the proposal could have been far worse. For example, the administration could have proposed studying the problem of global warming for another 10 years – not jut four – before taking any action.

Unfortunately, Bush too apparently realized that his environmental approach could have been far worse, and has decided to go for it. Bush is now calling for 10 years of research before taking any meaningful action on global warning. As The New York Times reports today:

On Tuesday, the Bush administration convenes a three-day meeting here to set its new agenda for research on climate change. But many climate experts who will attend say talking about more research will simply delay decisions that need to be made now to avert serious harm from global warming.

President Bush has called for a decade of research before anything beyond voluntary measures is used to stem tailpipe and smokestack emissions of heat-trapping gases that scientists say are contributing to global warming.

....

But many climate experts say the perennial need for more study can no longer justify further delays in emission cuts.

"Waiting 10 years to decide is itself a decision which may remove from the table certain options for stabilizing concentrations later," said Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton.

For example, under today's rate of emissions growth, he and other experts say that certain losses are already probable, including dwindling of snow-dependent water supplies and global die-offs of vulnerable ecosystems like coral reefs, alpine meadows and certain coastal marshes.

....

If greenhouse gas concentrations double, climate experts expect substantial disruptions of ecosystems and water supplies, coastal damage as sea levels rise and intensified drought and downpour cycles. Even more calamitous surprises could lie in store, including disruptions in the Atlantic Ocean currents that help warm Europe.

The experts concede that they cannot say exactly what may happen, or when. Also, changes will probably occur slowly — sea levels rising by millimeters a year, say — so there will be no one event to prompt people to choose a fuel-saving hybrid car over a gas-guzzling S.U.V.

But the warming will have enormous momentum, they say. Unlike soot or sulfur pollution, which falls out of the atmosphere within days or weeks, molecules of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can circulate for a century or more.

Similarly, the toxic effects of the Bush administration’s cynically negligent inaction on global warming will continue to harm the environment for decades to come.
posted by Gary at 10:25 AM

 
THE KURTZ AWARD FOR UNINTENTIONAL IRONY GOES TO ...: The Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz deserves some kind of an award for his journalistic achievements. It cannot be easy to write media criticism that manages to be both wishy-washy and conservative leaning while never venturing into actual criticism of the media. Yet Kurtz has managed this trifecta of bad political journalism.

As Kurtz noted in his column on Friday, Al Gore has criticized those elements of the news media that regularly repeat Republican Party talking points as “news.” Since Kurtz is a media critic, you might expect him to offer an opinion on whether Gore’s criticism has any validity.

Does Kurtz, the media critic, even entertain the thought that partisan manipulation of our national political discourse might be detrimental to our society? No. Instead, he poses hypotheticals about how even if Gore is right, he shouldn’t be discussing such things:

Let's say Gore is right, that conservative news outlets are trying to blacken the reputations of people like him. Doesn't complaining about it just sound like whining? Or is he playing to his base, the way conservatives have done all these years by moaning about the liberal media?

Perhaps Kurtz just needed the weekend to mull over Gore’s criticisms that right-wing media outlets such as the Washington Times do the bidding of the Republican Party. Kurtz actually addresses the issue in today’s Washington Post.

Kurtz, however, seems to find Gore’s media criticisms to be unwarranted, absolving at least the Washington Times of being a Republican Party mouthpiece. In a column entitled “Right, but Not 100 Percent Right,” Kurtz writes:

Since taking over the Washington Times editorial page last summer, Tony Blankley has thrown some hard rhetorical punches. And it's not just Democrats who have been on the receiving end.

....

Blankley .... says "The Washington Times is a conservative paper, it's not a Republican paper. We don't hold a brief for either party. We hold a brief for our values and principles.”

It's no surprise that the colorful Blankley, a "McLaughlin Group" regular, is skewering leading Democratic officials. "It's going to be a long two years for Lefty Pelosi and the San Francisco Democrats," he wrote in one signed column. But Republicans aren't exempt from the Blankley Treatment.

Just who are these Republicans the fiercely independent Washington Times is attacking despite their ties to the Republican Party? They are Republican maverick Senator John McCain and ex-Republican Senator Jim Jeffords. Apparently, Kurtz views McCain as a loyal Republican and includes Jeffords on the theory that an ex-Republican is a type of Republican.

If a poll were taken of Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration on who is the biggest traitor to the Republican Party, the only suspense would be in whether McCain or Jeffords finished first. Yet Kurtz views the Washington Times’ attacks on these two Republican Party heretics as demonstrating the paper’s autonomy from the Republican Party.

Let’s add unintentional irony to Kurtz’s other journalistic achievements.
posted by Gary at 10:32 AM

 
BAD NEWS FOR THE DEMS, BUT JUST HOW BAD?: The current political opinion polls have correctly been depicted in the news media as bad news for the Democrats. However, the news is not as bad as some of these polls indicate on a superficial level.

Take a look at the New York Times/CBS News poll released yesterday. At first glance, it certainly seems like terrible new for the Democrats. One main finding is that 51 percent of the respondents view the Republican Party favorably while only 45 percent view the Democrats favorably.

I doubt that the news (while certainly not good) is really that dire for the Democrats. This poll was taken on the heels of two weeks of heavy media coverage depicting a triumphant Bush as ascendant over hapless, clueless and messageless Democrats. Such coverage undoubtedly depressed the Democrats’ favorability ratings.

I would wager that a substantial number of Americans that wanted the Democrats to win in the midterm elections now view their favored party with less than warm or favorable feelings. Indeed, the detailed breakdown of the poll results (largely ignored by the media) indicates that disappointed Democrats did play a role in the Democratic Party’s low favorability ratings. While 95 percent of Republicans expressed a favorable opinion of their party, only 77 percent of Democrats stated they had a favorable view of the Democratic Party.

A better gauge of the parties’ relative appeal to the voters would their favorability ratings on the eve of the midterm election. The New York Times/CBS News poll taken from October 27 to 31, 2002, actually found the parties in a virtual tie, with 55 percent of all respondents expressing a favorable view of the Democrats and 54 percent expressing a favorable view of the Republicans.

Equally suspect is the recent poll’s finding that Al Gore has a favorability rating of only 19 percent. While this is hardly good news, I find its significance dubious. Favorability ratings of politicians – especially before a campaign starts in earnest – can bounce around and be unreliable indicators. Gore’s own history of favorability ratings proves ths point. According to CBS News Polls, from February 1995 to June 1999 Gore’s favorability ratings dropped from 48 percent to a low of 17 percent. Yet, once Gore’s presidential campaign got underway, his favorability ratings generally improved, until he was at a high of 51 percent in December 2000.

Even CBS News’s own political reporters have warned that these poll results should be taken with a bagful of salt:

In the latest example of confusing poll results, the CBS News/New York Times poll conducted over the weekend says that only a third of Democrats think the party "should give Al Gore another chance to run and nominate him," while 55 percent think "the Democrats should nominate someone new." So the message from Democrats to Al Gore is: "Go Away." Right?

Not so fast. Last week, we reported on a CNN/Time poll that said 61 percent of Democrats would like to see Gore run again. The wording of the two questions produced two very different pictures of how the rank and file feels about the former vice president.

The CNN pollster, Keating Holland, suggests that the CBS wording may actually reflect the hard-core Democratic support for Gore since it tracks with the 34 percent of Democrats in their poll who say they'd vote for him in a 2004 Democratic primary field that included Hillary Clinton.

While we're at it, only 33 percent of Democrats in the CBS/New York Times poll had a favorable view of Gore compared to 70 percent in the CNN poll. Was it something he said on his book tour? Probably not. Once again the questions were worded differently. CBS/NYT asked people if their opinion of Gore is "favorable, not favorable, undecided, or haven't you heard enough about Al Gore yet to have an opinion?" Fully 43 percent of Democrats said they are undecided (28 percent) or hadn't heard enough (15 percent) about Gore (you wonder exactly where they've been, but that's another issue!) CNN asked a favorable/unfavorable question that pushes voters to express an opinion. And, when pushed, most Democrats were positive.

So what should he do? Probably take his own advice from this spring. Deep six the polls and follow his heart.

Since the poll also found that Americans tend to favor the Democrats’ policy positions over the Republicans’ positions, the news is not all bad for Gore and the Democrats. If the Democratic Party actually puts up a fight for what it believes during the next two years, it might just give Democrats a reason to feel favorable about their own party.
posted by Gary at 10:18 AM

 
MORE GORE: Democratic critics of Al Gore who do not want the winner of the popular vote in 2000 to make another run for the presidency in 2004 should pause and just listen to what Gore has been saying lately. In his recent media forays plugging his new pair of books (as well as reintroducing himself to the voters) Gore has been uttering plain-spoken common sense like a latter day Harry Truman.

Under Bush and the Democratic opposition, political discourse in America has devolved into an unprecedented combination of mendacity and timidity. While previous presidents have lied, members of the opposition party have usually not been timid in responding to political duplicity by the president and his party. Fearing Bush’s popularity as a wartime president, however, today’s Democrats have largely failed to confront an unabashedly partisan leader who has not been timid in engaging in such reprehensible tactics as misleading the public about his economic policies titled toward the super rich and attacking the patriotism of Democrats.

As articles in today’s New York Times and Washington Post illustrate, however, Gore is now engaged in a flurry of truth-telling that should put the Bush administration to shame. As the Post reports:

Gore said in an interview here that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network pose a greater immediate danger than does Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Bush's decision to shift attention to possible war with Iraq, he said, represented "an historic mistake" that has left Afghanistan facing chaos and U.S. intelligence agencies without some of the resources needed to carry out the war against terrorism.

....

At the same time, he urged Democrats to speak more boldly than they have done in the past. Exhibit A, he said, is health care. He argued in favor of a politically risky single-payer national health insurance system, saying incremental approaches cannot solve the problems of rising costs, bewildering bureaucracy and a steady increase in the number of Americans without health insurance.

....

Gore had stern words for Bush's economic policies, calling the administration's tax cuts, energy policy and approach to regulation of corporate America "payback and greed" that reward wealthy Americans and big corporations at the expense of middle-income families and individual investors.

Instead of offering tough regulation of the accounting industry, he said, the administration caved to lobbyists for the industry who demanded of administration officials "that they kneel and kiss their ring -- and they do." The average investor "was essentially told to go to hell," he said.

These are far stronger words than any other leading Democrat has used to discuss the Bush administration. There is also more honesty in these words than this administration has expressed in its nearly two years of existence.

Gore should run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. The Democrats discovered in the midterm elections what happens when you’re shy about expressing your beliefs. Whatever else he is, Gore is not shy.
posted by Gary at 11:31 AM

 
DEPARTMENT OF THE TITANIC: It would be unfair to compare the rush to establish the Department of Homeland Security with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

A better analogy would be rearranging the lifeboats after the Titanic hit that iceberg. It might have been a good idea at one point, but that was probably not the best time to engage in reorganizations.

The creation of the Homeland Security Department is being hailed as the greatest reorganization of the federal government since Congress approved President Truman’s proposal to create the Department of Defense more than 50 years ago. The creation of the Department of Defense is instructive, however. FDR and Congress did not rush to reorganize the federal bureaucracy while America was engaged in the dire struggle of World War II. Instead, the country wisely focused its energies on defeating an undeniable Axis of evil before turning to a reorganization of the nation’s defenses that had the potential of being disruptive. As The New York Times notes:

President Harry S. Truman announced his plan to combine the War and Navy Departments into a single Defense Department in December 1945, three months after the American victory in World War II, but the plan was not approved by Congress for another two years.

Even supporters of the new department acknowledge the danger that such a massive reorganization of the government could disrupt anti-terrorism efforts in the short run:

“This is going to be difficult and it's going to take longer than anyone thinks,” warned Senator Fred Thompson, the Republican of Tennessee who was a leading sponsor of the Senate bill creating the Department of Homeland Security.

Comptroller General David M. Walker, who directs the General Accounting Office, the Congressional watchdog agency, said today, “It's going to take years in order to get this department fully integrated – you're talking about bringing together 22 different entities, each with a longstanding tradition and its own culture.”

He said that if the initial organization was handled badly and if the agencies that are being brought together in the department resisted cooperation, the result could damage the government's counterterrorism program as it exists now.

“If this is not handled properly, we could be at increased risk,” Mr. Walker said. “That's why you have to focus on a short list of priorities, including making sure that key people are in contact with each other.”

He added, “That's as basic as trying to make sure that things like voice mail and e-mail are linked up.”

It is not at all clear that whatever increased efficiencies may result from this new bureaucracy could not have been achieved – without substantial disruption – by such measures as improving coordination of existing departments and agencies. Determining that, however, would have meant actually studying the issue – as the federal government did in creating the Department of Defense – instead of rushing to rubber stamp a bill laden with giveaways to corporate special interests. Even if the benefits outweigh the costs in the long term, it probably would have been wiser to adopt interim measures in the short term since any disruptions in our anti-terrorism efforts now could be deadly on a massive scale.

Senator Byrd has been one of the few voices to warn that it is wiser to remain focused on the main goal of combating terrorism than to rush ahead for the sake of being able to claim that you did something:

Mr. Byrd, of course, is not one of those timid souls, and his recent speeches have been extraordinary even for the maestro of senatorial rhetoric, who turns 85 on Wednesday. While his colleagues have debated the fine points of the domestic security bill, he has been virtually alone in asking the larger question: Why is this new department suddenly so necessary? What will the largest and hastiest reorganization of the federal government in half a century do besides allow politicians to claim instant credit for fighting terrorism?

....

“Osama bin Laden is still alive and plotting more attacks while we play bureaucratic shuffleboard,” Mr. Byrd told the Senate. “With a battle plan like the Bush administration is proposing, instead of crossing the Delaware River to capture the Hessian soldiers on Christmas Day, George Washington would have stayed on his side of the river and built a bureaucracy.” Mr. Byrd imagined Nathan Hale declaring, “I have but one life to lose for my bureaucracy,” and Commodore Oliver Perry hoisting a flag on his ship with the rallying cry, “Don't give up the bureaucracy!”

....

As he was waiting to speak on the floor yet again this afternoon, Mr. Byrd sat in his office and marveled at the rush to pass the bill.

“That Department of Homeland Security will not add one whit of security in the near future to the American people,” he said. “In the meantime, the terrorists are going to be very busy. I'm concerned that in our drive to focus on the war in Iraq and the Department of Homeland Security, we're going to be taking our eyes off what the terrorists may do to us.”

I fear that Senator Byrd may be right.

The establishment of the Homeland Security Department belongs in the same category as the Bush Administrations rush to invade Iraq. Perhaps such efforts will prove necessary in the long term. In the short term, however, America should be more focused on the greatest immediate threat to its security – Al Qaeda and the recently resurfaced Osama bin Laden.

I think it would be far wiser to remain focused on this immediate threat and devote more energy and resources to rooting out existing Al Qaeda adherents and cells in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries. Who knows, we might even find that fellow President Bush once said we would get dead or alive.
posted by Gary at 9:35 AM

 
GORE’S SUPPORT IS FALLING ... UP: Gore is in a far stronger position for the Democratic presidential nomination than some media reports indicate. A case in point is MSNBC’s misleading treatment of a newly released poll.

MSNBC’s headline for the AP report of this new poll is:

Little Support for Gore in 2004

No clear Democratic front-runner, poll shows

If you read only the headline, you would think that Gore’s support among all Democrats is slipping. You would be wrong. The reverse is true.

The AP article reports on the result of a presidential preference poll of Democratic Party insiders, specifically 312 Democratic National Committee members:

THE POLL of 312 Democratic National Committee members – roughly three-quarters of the committee’’s total membership – suggests the contest is wide open, with none of the top possible candidates standing out as having particularly broad support.

Only 35 percent of those polled said Gore should run again, while 48 percent said he should not and 17 percent were undecided.

Asked who they favor in the 2004 race, 46 percent of respondents said they had no preference. Out of a list of 10 prospective candidates, 19 percent of those polled named Gore as their pick, 18 percent backed Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and 13 percent named Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the outgoing Democratic leader in the House, was chosen by 10 percent. The other possible candidates were in single digits, including Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the 2000 vice presidential nominee, who garnered 4 percent.
“It looks like a party that’’s desperately seeking fresh faces,” said Charlie Cook, a nonpartisan campaign analyst in Washington.

The views of Democratic Party insiders, however, are not necessarily representative of the rank and file. In fact, recent polls indicate that Gore is actually gaining in support among all Democrats nationwide.

A CNN/Time poll conducted Nov. 13 to 14, shows that an overwhelming 53 percent of Democrats favor Gore as the 2004 nominee over his six most likely challengers (Joe Lieberman, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, John Edwards and Howard Dean). Polls of Democrats in October and early November had found Gore to be the front runner, but with support in the 32 to 36 percent range against such likely challengers.

Given the disastrous approach many Democratic leaders took in timidly avoiding conflict with Bush in the months leading up to midterm elections, their lukewarm feelings towards Gore might not be such a bad omen for the former vice president. As discussed in my Nov. 15 post on “GORE, THE REPUBLICAN PROPHET,” unlike many Democrats, Gore has not been afraid to constructively criticize the Bush administration’s foreign policy failings.

Gore has proven himself to be far superior to most Democratic insiders in discerning what is best for his country and his party. Don’t count Gore out yet.
posted by Gary at 10:45 AM

 
MOVIE REVIEW OF THE YEAR: While the Self Made Pundit is generally content to limit these posts to matters political, occasionally contributions to the arts deserve recognition.

The movie review tends to generate little respect as a literary form. The great Pauline Kael, late of the New Yorker, has too few progeny among today's movie reviewers.

Yet, every now and then a movie reviewer will achieve that perfect expression of some truth or heartfelt emotion that deserves to be praised as a work of art. I believe the Dallas Observer's Gregory Weinkauf has achieved that state of grace in the closing lines of his review of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets." (Link via Slate.)

Weinkauf concludes his mostly favorable review of this movie by musing on its place in the cultural landscape of today's America:

[T]he film of Chamber of Secrets is a welcome delivery of childlike wonder for a planet of ever-increasing ugliness. We've accidentally allowed a retarded monkey to rule America, but otherwise it's not such a whimsical place. Perhaps works like this can help set that to rights.

While I doubt that Warner Brothers Pictures will feature the above quote in its ads for "Chamber of Secrets," it has swayed me. I'm seeing the movie first thing tomorrow morning.
posted by Gary at 10:02 PM

 
GORE, THE REPUBLICAN PROPHET: While Al Gore may be an unlikely candidate for Republican Party prophet, the Bush administration has wandered into the very multilateral approach on Iraq proposed by Gore weeks ago. If the rest of the Democratic Party had followed Gore’s approach as much as Bush has, the Democrats would have done far better in the recent midterm elections.

As the Self Made Pundit has discussed in several recent posts, a major cause of the Democrats’ losses in the midterm elections was their timidity in confronting the Bush administration. Along these same lines, a newspaper column and a magazine article argue persuasively that the Democrats’ timorous approach in debating Iraq cost them an opportunity to advance both the national interest and their own partisan interests.

In today’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne examines how the Democrats missed a major opportunity to contribute to the formulation of policy as the Bush Administration zig-zagged between a unilateral approach aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein and a multilateral approach aided at disarming Iraq of any weapons of mass destruction.

As Dionne notes, the Bush administration is currently in its multilateral phase. After threatening to go it alone in Iraq, the United States has successfully brokered a unanimous Security Council resolution demanding Iraqi compliance with weapons inspections.

Dionne rightfully castigates the Democrats for largely failing to criticize Bush’s herky-jerky approach to the vital issue of Iraq. Dionne believes that if the Democrats had urged Bush to take a more multilateral approach in the months before the midterm elections, they could have taken credit when Bush finally saw the wisdom of working through the U.N. As Dionne comments:

An effective opposition party might have something useful to say about all this uncertainty. .... But too many Democrats simply wanted to push Iraq aside so they could get to that economic message of theirs that worked so brilliantly on Nov. 5.

....

Had the Democrats made a concerted push much earlier for a tough multilateral approach to Iraq -- as former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke was urging them to do -- the party could have claimed victory when Bush turned toward the United Nations.

Dionne notes that these same points are made in Heather Hurlburt's wise article "War Torn" in the November issue of the Washington Monthly. Hurlburt also assails the Democrats’ timidity as self-defeating:

The irony is that a policy of using the threat of U.S. military power to enforce U.N. mandates in Iraq is one that both the hawks and at least some of the doves in the Democratic Party could have agreed on. Had they taken that position last spring--or even during the summer--Democrats might have helped shift the debate in a more sensible direction earlier, and served the country by limiting the negative international fallout from the hawks' unilateralism. They also might have helped themselves politically: When the president shifted his positions in September, it would have been seen, rightly, as a victory for the Democrats.

I agree with Dionne’s and Hurlburt’s analysis of the Democrats’ missed opportunity to constructively criticize Bush’s Iraqi policy. The failure of most Democrats is even more striking than Dionne and Hurlburt acknowledge, however, because Al Gore was recommending this forceful approach back in September.

On September 23, 2002, Gore made a major foreign policy speech in which he urged Congressional Democrats to push Bush to adopt the very policy that Bush eventually embraced:

I believe that the resolution that the president has asked Congress to pass is much too broad in the authorities it grants and needs to be narrowed severely.

The president should be authorized to take action to deal with Saddam Hussein as being in material breach of the terms of the truce and therefore a continuing threat to the security of the region. To this should be added that his continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially a threat to the vital interests of the United States.

But Congress should also urge the president to make every effort to obtain a fresh demand from the Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time. If the council will not provide such language, then other choices remain open.

But in any event, the president should be urged to take the time to assemble the broadest possible international support for his course of action.

Needless to say, in the days that followed, Republicans attacked Gore’s speech as irrelevant and worse. Typical was one Republican Party hack’s comment that “It seems to be a speech that was more appropriate for a political hack than a presidential candidate, by someone who clearly failed to recognize leadership.” However, in the weeks that followed, Bush adopted the approach recommended by Gore.

Just as Gore suggested, Bush obtained “a fresh demand from the Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time.”

Such shameless disparaging of Gore’s and other Democrats’ ideas only to later embrace them is of course nothing new for the Republicans. One of the most outrageous recent examples involves the Democrats’ proposal of a Homeland Security Department. Bush spent months opposing the proposal, only to then embrace it and attack the Democrats as unpatriotic for not rubber stamping his version. Another example involving Gore was the Republicans’ ridiculing of Gore in the 2000 campaign for his suggestion that the internal combustion engine would eventually be replaced. The Bush administration has since adopted the goal of eventual replacement of the internal combustion engine.

I think I’ll watch Gore’s appearances on ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s David Letterman Show tonight to see if Gore makes any other policy suggestions that can be ridiculed by Republicans until a decent interval has passed, at which point they can be adopted by Bush.
posted by Gary at 12:22 PM

 
THE RECYCLING PRESIDENT: The Bush administration has announced a new environmental agenda that shows that President Bush is dedicated to recycling.

Unfortunately, what Bush is recycling are old strategies for studying global warming from the administration of Bush the Elder. To be fair to Bush the Younger, however, his environmental plan is substantively different from his father’s since this time around the plan ignores much of what scientists have learned in the past decade about the human causes of global warming.

As today's New York Times reports:

The Bush administration, saying there are still many uncertainties about threats posed by human-caused climate change, has outlined a broad, years-long research agenda on global warming.

Among many other goals, the draft plan calls for new work to be completed in the next four years to clarify how much of the warming since 1950 has been caused by human actions like emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide or soot; to explain differing temperature trends in the upper and lower atmosphere; and to improve computer models that simulate climate and monitoring systems for tracking the real thing.

The proposal was lauded yesterday by industry officials and some scientists who have long questioned the mainstream view that global warming is mainly caused by people and poses big risks.

But many climate experts said the proposal mainly rehashed issues most scientists consider settled. For example, they pointed out, big international and national panels of climate experts concluded in the past two years that at least half of the warming measured since 1950 was indeed caused by human actions, namely smokestack and tailpipe emissions.
....

Some experts on global change said the research plan was deeply flawed because it ignored findings of a decade-long federal assessment of potential impacts of climate change around the United States that was published in 2000 by the Environmental Protection Agency.

That assessment has been attacked by industry lobbyists and some scientists as overly apocalyptic and shaped by Vice President Al Gore, and they have strongly pressed the Bush administration to expunge it from any new documents.

Dr. Mahoney said the previous climate-impacts assessment contained much high quality work that was left out to avoid new conflicts. "The important thing is to say how can we move ahead without fighting the old battles," he said.

Other experts said they doubted the new approach would speed action. It does not differ much from strategies set more than a decade ago by the first Bush administration, which also called for reducing uncertainties and improving the accuracy of projections, some experts said.

Perhaps we will also hear President Bush echo his father’s eloquent critique of Al Gore as “Ozone Man.” On second thought, it is unlikely that this President Bush would express his views so candidly. Instead, look for more studies on the environment that Bush can point to as showing his concern while doing nothing to disturb his corporate backers.

On the issue of global warming, Bush is merely fiddling while the world burns.
posted by Gary at 10:06 AM

 
CRAFT ME A MESSAGE, VOTERS SAY: Post-election polling is confirming the view (expressed in last Wednesday’s Self Made Pundit, among other places) that the Democrats’ dismal showing in the midterm elections was more a result of their failure to craft a message than a rejection of any Democratic message.

A Newsweek poll of Americans finds that the Democrats’ failure to offer “clear alternatives” to Bush and the Republicans was a major factor in the Republicans’ electoral success:

FORTY-EIGHT PERCENT said one “major” reason was “the Democrats didn’t offer a clear alternative to the Republicans on the Bush tax cuts and other economic issues.” They said three other reasons were “major” factors: “The Democrats didn’t offer a clear alternative to Bush and the Republicans on the issue of war with Iraq” (51 percent), “President Bush’s willingness to use military force, if necessary, to disarm and remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” (59 percent) and “President Bush’s personal popularity and campaign efforts” (53 percent).

Far from giving the Republicans a ringing endorsement, the respondents of this poll also viewed the prospects of Republican control of Congress with less than enthusiasm:

Asked about the Republicans winning control of both houses of Congress, 30 percent of those polled said it was a “good thing,” 34 percent said it was a “bad thing” and 29 percent believed it will be make “no difference” either way.

Considering that only 30 percent of respondents considered it a good thing that Republicans won control of both houses of Congress, the Democrats certainly had the potential of doing much better in the election if they had articulated a clear Democratic program.

I think much of the debate now underway about whether Democrats should move to the left misses the point. The Democrats should forcefully fight for policies they believe will benefit Americans without getting bogged down in overly analytical arguments about whether a given policy is “liberal” or “conservative.”

Having a responsible economic policy that seeks to benefit the great majority of Americans strikes me as more conservative than a radical right-wing agenda that seeks to redistribute wealth to the super rich with tax cuts geared to the top 1 percent. Fighting corporate crime may be a progressive issue, but it is also a law and order issue.

The Democrats are certainly capable of crafting a message that voters will find attractive. In order for voters to hear that message, however, the Democrats need to be passionate and fight for it rather than to act shy and dispirited as they too often have during these past two years.

posted by Gary at 10:13 AM

 
MEET THE NEW TONE, SAME AS THE OLD TONE: While the Democrats have ample reason to hold themselves responsible for their dismal showing in Tuesday’s elections (as discussed in Wednesday’s post-mortem post), it’s nice of President Bush to remind us that he and the Republicans played a little role too.

Bush gives us this reminder in his own inimitable style of lying about how he and his followers are full of good intentions. Now that the election is over, Bush rewrites campaign history by informing us that the secret of Republican success was to “change the tone” and eschew negative campaigning. As the Washington Post reports today, this is pure malarkey:

Democrats were particularly incensed yesterday about Bush's claim Wednesday that Republican candidates had succeeded because of their clean campaigns. "Their accent was on the positive," Bush told his top aides, gathered in front of the Oval Office fireplace. “If you want to succeed in American politics, change the tone.”

Bush usually stays above the fray, but some of his hand-picked candidates ran tough negative campaigns. Some used images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to try to tar Democrats as soft on national security. Bush occasionally joined in the attack.

The day before the election, Bush repeated a statement that had caused Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) to issue a futile demand for an apology when the president first said it in October. Complaining in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, about his stalled plan for a Department of Homeland Security, Bush said the Senate is “more interested in special interests, which dominate the dialogue in Washington, D.C., than they are in protecting the American people.”

....

Bush's candidates were as rough as anyone in a tight race. Before the death of Sen. Paul D. Wellstone, GOP candidate Norm Coleman referred to Minnesota's two senators as “a joke and a shadow.”

“I run against a guy who quite often I think is just the lowest common denominator,” Coleman, who won his race, said in July.

Rep. C. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) used an ad featuring videotape of Osama bin Laden in his successful campaign to unseat Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), who lost both legs and his right arm in a grenade explosion while serving as an Army captain in Vietnam.

So let me get this straight. Bush thinks that a Republican campaign is positive even if it implies that the Democrats lack patriotism and insinuates that a decorated, triple amputee war veteran is soft on Osama bin Laden.

I shudder to think what Bush would consider a negative campaign.
posted by Gary at 10:16 AM

 
THE MORNING AFTER: You have to give people a reason to vote for you. The Democrats didn’t and they lost Congress last night. It’s that simple.

Fearing to confront a popular war-time leader, Democrats have too often shied away from confronting Bush and his disastrous economic policies in the past year. The Democrats have also failed to articulate their own alternative economic plan. By acting as if they were embarrassed to be Democrats, the Democrats have actually reinforced the Republican attacks on Democrats.

The Democrats have behaved as if voters would vote for them only if they didn’t make too much of a fuss. Instead, many voters heard Democrats asking to be ignored and those voters complied.

The Democrats’ timid approach flies in the face of American history, which shows voters want politicians to have plans to deal with problems. The Republicans’ Contract With America did not prove especially popular after Republicans captured Congress in 1994, but it had already served its purpose on the campaign trail by convincing voters Republicans had a substantive plan.

During World War II the Republicans did not shy away from attacking FDR and his domestic policies while supporting the war. Those Republicans were not viewed as unpatriotic for engaging in politics. Today’s Democrats need to realize that true patriotism requires one to fight for those policies – both domestic and foreign – that are in the country’s best interests. Besides being the right thing to do, such an approach will attract more voters than the Democrats’ fainthearted approach of the past year.

I hope the Democrats learn at least one lesson from this election. You can’t beat something with nothing.

As a final point for this election wrap-up, I note that many Democratic leaning pundits have egg on their faces for being too optimistic about the Democratic prospects in the election. The Self Made Pundit, however, is content to note that his electoral prognostication skills (see the previous post) have improved since his prediction in 1972 of a McGovern presidency.
posted by Gary at 10:02 AM

 
ELECTION FORECASTS: The Self Made Pundit has a long and proud history of making insightful written election forecasts since he received an A on his paper in college analyzing and predicting the outcome of the 1972 presidential race. (While I hesitate to get bogged down in such minutia, for those of you curious, the title of the paper was “Why McGovern Will Win The Election.”)

I predict that the big news of the election will be that the Democrats take both Houses of Congress. So, continuing in the proud tradition of President McGovern, here are my predictions:

House:

Dems 220
GOP 214
Ind 1

Senate:

Dems 53
GOP 46
Ind 1

Close Senate Races:

Arkansas -- Pryor 52, Hutchinson 47
Minnesota -- Mondale 50, Coleman 46
South Carolina -- Graham 53, Sanders 47
Colorado -- Strickland 50, Allard 48
Missouri -- Carnahan 49, Talent 48
South Dakota -- Johnson 51, Thune 48
Georgia -- Cleland 50, Chambliss 49
New Hampshire -- Shaheen 50, Sununu 48
Tennessee -- Alexander 53, Clement 45
Iowa -- Harkin 54, Ganske 44
New Jersey -- Lautenberg 53, Forrester 44
Texas -- Cornyn 51, Kirk 48
Louisiana -- Landrieu 50.1, Terrell (24)
North Carolina -- Dole 50, Bowles 48

Governors:

Dems 29
GOP 21
posted by Gary at 11:00 AM

 
THE POLLS’ DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: The polls have a dirty little secret. Put aside for a moment all those precise numbers listed as the polls’ margins of sampling error and confidence levels. The secret is that the polls’ election day forecasts are based on a large amount of guesswork.

While polls trumpet that they have 95 percent confidence that their margin of sampling error is 4 percent or less, what they don’t emphasize is the amount of guesswork that goes into determining the group of voters to poll as “likely voters.” At late stages in campaigns, polls typically focus on “likely voters,” not registered voters, since large numbers of registered voters do not vote in any given election. The guesswork comes in deciding what questions to ask to identify those “likely voters.”

Different polls use different criteria to select these groups of “likely voters.” For example, the Ipsos-Reid/Cook Political Report Poll identifies “likely voters” as those voters “who say they are extremely likely to vote.” By contrast, Gallup labels respondents as “likely voters” through “a series of questions measuring current voting intentions and past voting behavior.”

This explains why polls of “likely voters” can be widely divergent. The most recent polls of “likely voters” show anything from a Democratic lead in the generic Congressional vote of two points to a Republican lead of seven points. The reason these polls are getting different results is that they use different criteria to select these so-called “likely voters.” They are polling different groups of people.

Thus, when Gallup says that it can say with 95 percent confidence that the margin of sampling error for its poll of “likely voters” is 4 percentage points, it is only expressing a degree of confidence in the sampling the views of people who have those “current voting intentions and past voting behavior.” Gallup and the other pollsters express absolutely no confidence level that the respondents they have labeled as “likely voters” are actually representative of those who will actually go to the polls. Due to the subjective criteria used to identify “likely voters” there is no measurable “margin of error” for whether actual voters are being accurately predicted.

Pollsters’ selections of “likely voters” can be particularly unreliable since they fail to measure the effects of Get Out The Vote (“GOTV”) drives by the political parties. If the parties had roughly similar GOTV drives, this failure might not make a big difference. But the parties are not equal in this regard. The Democrats have been far more successful at GOTV drives in recent elections. While Republicans have claimed to made advances, the Democratic operation still appears to be far superior.

The failure to measure the effects of GOTV drives is one reason that most polls failed to predict in 2000 that Gore would win the popular vote and that the Democrats would gain five Senate seats. Interestingly, Zogby, one of the few pollsters to correctly predict that Gore would win the popular vote, now has the Democrats winning the generic Congressional vote by 51 to 49 percent, while Gallup, which wrongly forecast Bush as the popular vote winner, now has the Republicans ahead in the Congressional vote by a margin of 51 to 45 percent.

I think Gallup is seriously underestimating turnout this year. Gallup forecasts that voter turnout will be 35 percent, which is less than in each of the last four midterm elections, which had turnouts that ranged from 36 to 39 percent. Since Gallup and other pollsters agree that the Democrats lead among all registered voters, any underestimation of turnout tends to underestimate the Democratic share of the vote.

Voter turnout today will probably be better than the polls are assuming, in large part due to the Democrats’ GOTV. States that have early voting (with voting starting in late October) have been reporting that turnout (at least of early voters) is up significantly this year. I suspect that tonight will be a far brighter night for the Democrats than many pundits are predicting.
posted by Gary at 10:41 AM

 
ELECTION DAY ADVICE: It's finally election day. I had considered recommending that all of you vote, but then I realized that advice would probably be futile.

No, the Self Made Pundit has not received one of those Republican flyers designed to depress the vote and become apathetic. The reason I think such advice would be futile is that the possibility that anyone interested enough in politics to read this weblog is not already planning to vote simply boggles my mind. But, if you are that one special reader, please take my advice and vote today.

For the rest of you, my advice is try to convince some friends and colleagues to vote today. They'll be impressed at your civic mindedness. They'll look at you in a new light and you'll find yourself getting that date, that raise, that bacon cheeseburger you've been dreaming of.

Do whatever little thing you can to increase the turnout today. As I'll discuss in a post a little later this morning, this election will turn on the degree to which the turnout turns out ... to turn a phrase.
posted by Gary at 8:21 AM

 
ARROGANCE PITTSONIFIED: Harvey Pitt’s job as chairman of the SEC may now be in jeopardy, though not for Pitt’s failure to do his job. As Paul Krugman notes in his New York Times column today, by not doing his job, Pitt is doing the job expected of him by the Bush administration.

Instead, the reason Pitt’s job may now be in jeopardy is his recent display of arrogance. Since Bush’s colossal arrogance is one of his few actual accomplishments, he may well be offended by Pitt’s acting as if he were a Bush.

As The New York Times reports today, Pitt arrogantly hid from his fellow SEC commissioners that William Webster, his pick to head the new government board overseeing the accounting profession had performed oversight duties as head of the audit committee of U.S. Technologies, a company now facing allegations of fraud. Pitt’s failure to mention this salient fact was particularly contemptuous of his colleagues since the SEC voted to appoint Webster in a 3 to 2 vote only over the strenuous objections of the Democratic commissioners that Webster lacked the credentials to head an accounting board.

Traces of Pitt’s deception can also be found in the SEC release announcing Webster’s appointment to the accounting board. The release contained a glaring omission, describing Webster’s audit committee experience as follows:

He has served on a number of audit committees, including Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc., Pinkerton Inc. and Maritz Inc.

Webster’s highly relevant experience as chairman of the audit committee of U.S. Technologies was somehow deemed not important enough to make the release.

As the Times comments sarcastically in an editorial today, it and other critics of the Webster appointment were wrong in thinking that Webster lacked relevant experience:

A correction is in order here. Last week we mistakenly wrote that William Webster lacked any relevant experience to serve as chairman of the new oversight board for the accounting profession. It turns out that Judge Webster has some very relevant experience, but of the kind that should have automatically disqualified him from being considered for the post, to which he was appointed last Friday.

From April 2000 until last July, Mr. Webster, a former C.I.A. and F.B.I. director, headed the audit committee of the board of U.S. Technologies, a company that is now nearly insolvent. The company and its former chief executive officer are being sued and investigated for possible fraud. Mr. Webster's committee fired the company's auditors in the summer of 2001 when they raised concerns about internal financial controls. Mr. Webster has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but even the most generous reading of his performance would disqualify him from heading a body whose mandate is to establish and police tough new auditing standards.

Pitt’s arrogance in preventing the other SEC commissioners from fulling vetting Webster’s qualifications should also disqualify him from heading the SEC.

Do I really think Pitt’s job is in jeopardy? Not yet. Since Pitt apparently remains loyal to Bush and has not been convicted of any crime, he meets all the stringent requirements demanded by Bush of his appointees. There will have to be a deafening chorus critical of Pitt to jar the Bush administration out of its smug satisfaction with its cronies.

If the Bush administration had any interest in an effective SEC – or even if the administration had a modicum of shame – it would replace Pitt now. Instead, the Bush administration is awash in the arrogance that Pitt now personifies.
posted by Gary at 12:14 PM

 
DESPERATE IN MINNESOTA: A new poll in the Minnesota Senate race validates the Self Made Pundit’s view that the Republicans’ unseemly and mendacious attacks on Walter Mondale within 48 hours of Senator Paul Wellstone’s death in a plane crash were a sign of desperation.

While the Republicans had high hopes of capturing Wellstone’s Senate seat earlier in the campaign – and had run a harshly negative campaign against Wellstone to defeat him – Wellstone had pulled into the lead shortly before his death. In a poll two weeks ago, Wellstone led the Republican candidate, Norm Coleman, by 47 to 41 percent.

In the new poll, the Republican has continued to slip, with Mondale leading Coleman by a solid 47 to 39 percent. The poll also has more bad news for Republicans hoping to turn the race around by attacking Mondale. The poll indicates that Mondale’s strength with the voters has a stable base, with 98 percent of Minnesotans recognizing his name and 66 percent having a favorable image of him.

While more Republican attacks on Mondale are probable, such negative campaigning is more likely to tarnish Coleman’s image than Mondale’s.
posted by Gary at 9:45 AM

 
HAS RETIREMENT MADE NEWT GINGRICH LAZY?: It turns out that the Republican strategy of going negative on Walter Mondale (the Democrats’ likely replacement on the ballot for the late Senator Paul Wellstone) in the midst of memorial services for Wellstone is even stupider than I discussed in yesterday’s post.

You might think that Newt Gingrich has enough experience dealing in half-truths and distortions not to launch the Republican campaign against Mondale with an easily disproved lie. Perhaps Gingrich has gotten lazy since his resignation from the House, but that is just what he did on NBC’s Meet The Press Sunday.

Gingrich claimed that Mondale favors privatization and raising the retirement age for Social Security, citing Mondale’s participation on a commission that recommended such changes for social security systems in countries around the globe. What makes Gingrich’s charge a clumsy lie, however, is that Mondale co-wrote a dissent from the commission’s report, opposing such changes for Social Security in the United States. (Link via Talking Points Memo.)

It’s always risky to launch a negative campaign against a well-known and admired candidate. It’s even riskier if a state is in mourning and the candidate has not even begun campaigning. But it’s practically off the charts of rational behavior to launch such an offensive campaign with an easily disproved lie.

Engaging in such risky behavior smacks of desperation. I doubt the Republicans believe their own propaganda that they stand a chance of beating Mondale.
posted by Gary at 10:39 AM

 
STUPID COP, BAD COP: While more fainthearted politicians might have hesitated to resume negative campaigning within 48 hours of Senator Paul Wellstone’s death in a plane crash, the Washington Post reports that Republicans are already attacking former Vice President Mondale, the Democrats’ likely replacement in the Minnesota Senate race.

Showing that he has lost none of his touch for unintentional irony, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA.) told NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday:

"I think that what you'll see on the Republican side is an issue-oriented campaign that says, you know, if you want to raise your retirement age dramatically and privatize Social Security, Walter Mondale is a terrifically courageous guy to say that," Gingrich said.

Launching negative attacks on Mondale before Wellstone is even buried is not only offensive, it is downright stupid politically. Republican Senate candidate Norm Coleman obviously hopes he can avoid responsibility for these attacks. As the Post notes:

Political operatives said they expect Coleman to use a good-cop, bad-cop strategy, with state and national GOP leaders picking apart Mondale's record while Coleman focuses mostly on a more positive campaign centered on his agenda.

I think Coleman’s approach is more likely to turn out to be a stupid-cop, bad -cop strategy since in this compressed one-week campaign, voters are likely to view all Republican attacks against Mondale as coming out of the Coleman campaign. Attacks against Wellstone’s likely replacement will probably remind voters of the harshly negative campaign Coleman had been running against Wellstone, even if the assaults have now been delegated to surrogates. Voters are more likely to be offended than persuaded by new assaults that are practically interrupting memorial services for Wellstone.

Since Republicans seem to be handling this tragic situation with all the finesse they showed when Senator Robert Torricelli dropped out of the Senate race in New Jersey and they fought in court to effectively give voters a one-party election, the Democrats now seem assured of retaining both the Minnesota Senate seat and control of the Senate.
posted by Gary at 10:19 AM

 
CITIZEN WELLSTONE: I was very sad to hear that Senator Wellstone his wife, their daughter and five others died in a plane crash on Friday. I think Wellstone was probably the most principled person in the Senate.

While Wellstone was often described as an ideologue, I think that description missed the mark. Although he was certainly a strong liberal and partisan, Wellstone’s most distinguishing trait was that he was a true man of principle.

Other politicians of both the left and the right all too often tailor their principles to fit the popular passions of the day, supposedly so they can fight battles that are winnable. In contrast, Wellstone was willing to fight for his beliefs even when outnumbered, as he showed in his opposition to the resolution giving Bush a blank check to act against Iraq.

Wellstone showed it was possible to remain true to your convictions and still be a successful politician. Wellstone’s civic life – which proved the possibility of such integrity – was both an inspiration and a great public service in itself.

In a time when so much of our political discourse is infected with mendacity and hypocrisy, a man of such honest spirit will be sorely missed.
posted by Gary at 12:18 AM

 
THE NEW TONE IN WASHINGTON: Today’s Washington Post has good news and bad news about President Bush’s keeping of his campaign promises.

The good news is that Bush is keeping his promise to bring a “new tone” to Washington. The bad news is that Bush is breaking his promise to make that “new tone” a tone of “bipartisanship.”

As the Post reports, Bush is pressuring federal government employees to work on Republican campaigns for the midterm elections, making his presidency probably the most partisan since Herbert Hoover’s. (As reflected by Bush’s economic policies, there’s something about Hoover that makes Bush just love to emulate him.)

President Bush has harnessed the broad resources of the federal government to promote Republicans in next month's elections. ....

More than 330 administration appointees, some of whom were told by White House officials that they needed to show their Republican credentials, have taken vacation time and are being flown by the party to House and Senate campaigns in states where control of Congress will be decided.

....

Scholars called Bush's partisan use of the government unprecedented for a midterm election, and said the aggressiveness and thoroughness of his politicking approached that of a presidential reelection campaign.

Although the Hatch Act is designed to protect federal workers from pressure to work on political campaigns, the Bush administration is twisting that act for just the opposite effect. In a creative skirting of the edges of the Hatch Act that would have made Enron’s accountants blush, the administration is using the words of the act to flout its spirit:

A recent e-mail to the 6,100 full-time headquarters employees of the Environmental Protection Agency reminded them of the provisions of the Hatch Act, which was designed to protect federal employees from political pressure. But some employees said they were surprised by its emphasis on participating in, not abstaining from, campaign activities. The memo said they “are permitted to take an active part in partisan political management and campaigns,” subject to limitations, and reminded them they are free to “express support for the president and his program” when they are off-duty.

If Bush had been savvy enough only to pressure federal employees into campaigning for Republicans – without himself getting deeply involved in campaigning – his politicalization of the government might have paid off. As discussed in yesterday’s Self Made Pundit, however, I believe that Bush’s heavy politicking at a time when he claims Iraq is an imminent threat is likely to backfire. As the Post notes:

Undeterred by preparations for possible war with Iraq, Bush embarks today on 12 days of barnstorming in battleground states and districts, with a break Friday and Saturday for meetings with world leaders in Texas and Mexico.

I’m glad to see that Bush is going to take a few hours to broaden his horizons on the weekend, when he is taking a break from his job as Republican Party leader. It’s now clear why President Bush practices foreign policy as if it were a hobby, making idle reamarks such as his comment that if a regime changes its policies, that’s regime change. To Bush, foreign policy is a hobby. Watch him at his real job on the campaign trail these next 12 days.
posted by Gary at 9:42 AM

 
ROPE-A-DOPE: President Bush could be making a classic blunder by spending the last two weeks before the midterm elections on the campaign trail rather than staying above the fray and focusing on his duties as Commander in Chief.

The party controlling the White House has won House seats in a midterm election only twice in the past century. In 1934, the Democrats gained seats while FDR stayed in the White House fighting the Great Depression. In 1998, the Democrats gained seats while Bill Clinton stayed in the White House tending to presidential duties and fighting off a Republican-led impeachment drive that was unpopular with the voters. By contrast, Bush’s decision to get into the electoral mud of campaigning is likely to squander the Republicans’ chances to keep the House and regain the Senate.

Recent polls have shown Democrats with a slight lead in the overall congressional vote nationwide, due to voters’ preference for Democrats on economic and other domestic issues. Republicans have been able to stay close mainly due to Americans’ rallying round Bush as a war-time leader. This impression of Bush as Commander in Chief has been buttressed in recent weeks by Bush’s focusing on Iraq as an imminent threat to America.

The message that Iraq is an imminent threat, however, is made far less compelling by Bush’s leaving the Iraq problem to be debated by U.N. diplomats while he spends his days on the important tasks of campaigning for Republican congressional candidates state senator Jim Gerlach and former Congressional aide Kevin L. Raye.

Bush’s presence on the campaign trail stumping for obscure Republicans also presents a target for the Democrats who have largely feared to criticize Bush as a war-time leader. Democrats are now free to nationalize the election by asking why Bush is on the campaign trail instead of tending to the faltering economy.

If Bush thought he had the Democrats on the ropes, he may yet discover that on Social Security, the economy and other domestic issues, they can still sting like a bee.
posted by Gary at 11:20 AM

 
THOSE GIDDY REPUBLICANS: Paul Krugman takes a whack at Republicans giddy over the prospect of victory in the midterm elections – the subject of yesterday’s Self Made Pundit – in today’s New York Times. The admirable Krugman, who does not suffer fools, hypocrites, and crony capitalists gladly, notes that the giddiness stops at the Oval Office (though only after making Bush lightheaded with malevolent joy):

The White House also apparently expects Christmas in November. In fact, it is so confident that it has already given business lobbyists the gift they want most: an end to all this nonsense about corporate reform. Back in July George W. Bush declared, "Corporate misdeeds will be found and will be punished," touting a new law that "authorizes new funding for investigators and technology at the Securities and Exchange Commission to uncover wrongdoing." But that was then; don't you know there's a war on?

....

.... But now the administration wants to cancel most of the "new funding" Mr. Bush boasted about.

....

In retrospect, it's hard to see why anyone believed that our current leadership was serious about corporate reform. To an extent unprecedented in recent history, this is a government of, by and for corporate insiders. I'm not just talking about influence, I'm talking about personal career experience. The Bush administration contains more former C.E.O.'s than any previous administration, but as James Surowiecki put it in The New Yorker, "Almost none of the C.E.O.'s on the Bush team headed competitive, entrepreneurial businesses." Instead they come out of a world of "crony capitalism, in which whom you know is more important than what you do and how you do it." Why would they turn their backs on that world?

While Krugman is generally right on the money in his criticisms of the Bush administration’s right-wing policies, perhaps he is being a bit too harsh here since the rapacious instincts of the administration’s crony capitalists are surely reined in by Bush himself, who attained corporate success and wealth as a result of his ability at ... I mean his mastery of ... I mean his knowledge of .... On second thought, never mind.
posted by Gary at 8:45 AM