JUSIPER
Monday, September 29, 2003
What Liberal Media, Redux
I understand the Bush Administration's desire to dismiss debate among the Democratic field as shrill, but it's not clear why the New York Times headline writers feel the same need to be dismissive. The headline for the continuation of their front page article on the most recent debate characterized disagreement among the candidates as squabbling while today's article summarizing campaign comments from the weekend described them as bickering. Why such loaded language? If the NYT wants to make the argument that the Dems are focusing on minor issues instead of major ones then why don't they go ahead and make that argument. Otherwise, leave the snide commentary to the Republicans.
3:03 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Is he with us or against us? With us, fortunately
Calpundit and Political Aims have both picked up recently on a rather disturbing statement that Howard Dean made to LA Weekly earlier this year, as evidence that he's bad news for the Democratic Party. I recall being stunned by the statement myself when I first heard it. But Skeptical Notion deals with it handily, pretty well allaying the concern (even for Calpundit and Political Aims). Here's what Skeptical Notion has to say, beginning with the Dean quotation:
'It's going to be incredibly hard. I mean, we've already got 39,000 people working for us all around the country . . . I really do believe - and I think about this - I want to get this nomination, and if I don't . . . these kids are not transferrable. I can't just go out and say, 'Okay, so I didn't win the nomination, so go ahead and vote for the Democrats.' They're not going to suddenly just go away. That's not gonna happen.'
There's something rather interesting going on there.
First off, the quote dates back to March, and was used in an LA Weekly piece a few weeks back.
When it came out, the quote was bandied about in the usual places and the meaning of Dean's words discussed. Thankfully, it turns out that a caller on Larry King had asked Dean, point blank, whether he'd run as a third party candidate. Dean answered, in no uncertain terms, that he would not run as an independent, that he would endorse the Democratic nominee, and that the important thing was removing George Bush from power.
Since the King interview was in June (a few months after the LA Weekly quote), it seemed safe to assume that the doctor was basically stating that his supporters weren't his property, and they'd do what they wanted, regardless of what he said. And, as far as that goes, I think he's right. I'd imagine that while most of his supporters endorse the "Anyone But Bush" concept, at least some are likely to go elsewhere...or at the very least, lose a great deal of their energy and enthusiasm as a result.
Last Friday, however, I noticed the LA Weekly quote popping up in comments on several blogs, often with close to identical wording.
It's possible that someone in the media picked up the LA Weekly quote, and a lot of new people saw it (which leads to the question of why Dean's comments on Larry King weren't included in the piece).
Still, the timing coming on the heels of the Clark announcement and with Bush's dropping poll numbers....I can think of a number of people who would benefit from Dean getting tarred with the "divider not uniter" label. And, as I noted above, it's impossible to control what your supporters do.
I think it's pretty likely that someone, somewhere, is getting a bit worried about Dean and is taking thopportunityty to try to sow a little discord in the party.
2:33 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Formidable weapon
I suppose I shouldn't be anymore, but I'm continuously amazed at the creative uses that progressive political organizations are finding for the internet. Here's one: MoveOn's nation-wide phone bank to help defeat the California recall. It has the potential to be a highly efficient, cost-saving tool, with thousands of self-motivated volunteers footing the bill for get-out-the-vote efforts. MoveOn did it during the 2002 elections too. Damned if this won't be a formidable weapon come November 2004, combined, of course, with other other internet-based efforts and more traditional, locally oriented campaigns
2:03 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Withdrawal symptoms?
Somebody else is concerned that an "October Surprise" of sorts may be in the offing. From the Washington Post last Friday:
... at a House hearing yesterday, Democrats pressed Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz about whether the administration plans to withdraw troops right before the 2004 presidential election. He said no decisions are being made on political grounds. "These are national security decisions; they have to be made on that basis," he said."
We can only hope.
1:41 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Thursday, September 25, 2003
More on Clark's soul
A week ago, I argued that Wesley Clark was anything but a tool of Bill Clinton. Here's more along the same lines, from a piece by Spencer Ackerman in the New Republic, on the subject of Clark's sacking by the Pentagon following his victory in Kosovo:
Clark's tactical and strategic wisdom went unappreciated inside the Beltway. ... Clinton privately told Clark, "I had nothing to do with it." Indeed, Clinton had very little to do with practically everything about Clark--including Clark's victory--while generals who shared the president's disinterest in the mission stymied a successful commander. Yet Clark has never disparaged Clinton's efforts to take full credit for winning the war--most recently, during the former president's triumphant trip to Kosovo last week. How un-Clintonian.
11:13 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Questions you won't hear at the debates
It's just over an hour until the third televised debate for the Democrats. Certain questions won't get asked, but they should. JUSIPER's going to get the ball rolling.
James Carville thinks any Democratic candidate deserving the party's nomination should be able to supply a solid reply to this simple request: "Sir, tell us the kind of campaign that you will run to combat Republican thuggery."
In that spirit, here are a couple of other strategy-oriented questions that I'd like to see answered:
(1) What kind of media strategy do you plan in order to discredit Bush when he tries to put a positive spin on the economy and the war during his State of the Union address in January?
(2) What resources will you have in place in order to prepare for the possibility of an "October Surprise" by the Bush administration in the final months of the general election campaign?
Got any to add? Post them to comments or email us. We'll post new ones of our own before each of the upcoming debates, and after we've got a bunch of humdingers, we'll email them to the DNC and to each of the Dem candies.
2:47 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Big tent
Wesley Clark's entrance into the race for president seems at first glance to give the other Dem candies just another reason to snipe at each other. That's what the headlines have been suggesting. But I'm going to be watching for how well Clark brings them together, and unites their conflicting personas in his own.
Sure, the general's back-and-forth with himself last week on whether he would've voted for war in Iraq wasn't the most heartening way for him to enter the race. It had me soured on him. But it only does lasting harm if you see things in terms of how the Democratic dialogue's been framed so far. If you look at it in a different light, it hints at Clark's new strategy: an effort to embrace the whole of the party.
Clark said he would've voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the president to use force, but also that he would've voted against going to war. It sounds like a flip flop, and you're not going to hear me arguing with that. But boiled down to its essence, it was also something else. What Clark was saying - and what he could start saying even more strongly - was this: Kerry's right, Gephardt's right, and so is Dean. They all are.
A report in today's Washington Post suggests that this is precisely the kind of approach that would fit in with the tack the general's going to take:
Mark Fabiani, an adviser, said Clark will purse a "more optimistic campaign" and encourage the others "to respect each other's points of view."
So, there you have it. Wesley Clark: raising the big tent for the Democratic Party, in its confusion over how to stand on the war. There's room for everyone.
2:37 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Bon voyage, Sini
Sini's on vacation starting today, so it's likely that he won't be posting again until the middle of next week. We wish him well as he travels far and wide. In the meantime, he's left JUSIPER readers a bon voyage gift: this handy, color-coded map of primary dates that he learned about from a friend.
1:28 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, September 22, 2003
Good news for Kerry
The good news isn't just that Chris Lehane quit John Kerry's staff last week. It's that the people left behind now have a free hand to improve Kerry's campaign. David Kusnet, once a Clinton speechwriter, mentions a key player, Bob Shrum, in a piece at Salon.com:
With Lehane's departure, Shrum is clearly calling the shots on Kerry's message.
...
A former wordsmith for Massachusetts senior Sen. Edward Kennedy, Shrum has orchestrated hard-hitting campaigns for clients ranging from Kennedy and Kerry to former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, the late California Sen. Alan Cranston, and the late Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey. Shrum helped craft populist appeals for two of Kerry's current rivals -- Edwards in his 1998 campaign for senator and Gephardt in his 1988 run for the presidential nomination -- and counseled Al Gore to adopt a similar theme ("the people against the powerful") in the last lap of his presidential campaign in 2000.
...
Now Shrum seems to have synthesized a message that melds populism with Kerry's patriotism and the New Democrats' emphasis on the middle class. In the weeks ahead, the campaign will criticize Bush for failing to ask the wealthiest Americans to contribute to their country in a time of crisis, while differentiating Kerry from Dean and Gephardt, who want to eliminate recent tax cuts for the middle class as well as wipe out those for the wealthy.
Sini's always reminding me that if the Republican Party's afraid of anything, it's a populist platform. After all, the populist message is probably precisely what what won Al Gore the popular vote. (Whereas Gore's deficiencies as a candidate were what prevented him from getting any more.)
9:52 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Time to stop the feud ...
... before it gets blown out of proportion. A lot of bloggers are supporting either Howard Dean or Wesley Clark. Some have taken to promoting their guy by slamming the other - whether it's one of those two, or any other Dem candie. It's time to stop. Chris at Interesting Times is asking bloggers to take a pledge to that effect. You can count me in.
8:52 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saturday, September 20, 2003
Unsupporting numbers
At the end of his stellar presentation at the National Press Club, "Truth and Transparency," Comptroller General David M. Walker came a brief question and answer period. Midway through it came this question: What did he think of Dick Cheney's statement last Sunday on Meet the Press when he said that he and George Bush were deficit hawks?
A flustered Walker, known for a previous run-in with the oil executive, paused for several moments, surely trying to strike the right balance between the apolitical and truthtelling dimensions of his job. And this was what he said:
"The numbers don't support that."
The press corps burst out laughing, both at his discomfiture and at the understatement. But Walker got the last word when he talked about his job and the importance of its independence from political trends. "Even when you speak the truth," he said, "not everybody wants to hear the truth."
9:58 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Thursday, September 18, 2003
New stuff at JUSIPER
We've got a couple of new features at JUSIPER worth mentioning. First, there's "Sini's Pick of the Week", in which my estimable co-blogger will be showcasing items available at Amazon.com that he deems to be worth checking out for their high quality and their cultural importance. Sini's pop culture knowledge is both expansive and deep, so it promises to be interesting. It's in the sidebar below our blog list. Second, the site now has a search function, just below the "Recent Posts" list, so you can find out what we've written in the past on any topic. Hope these prove useful, and thanks for reading!
UPDATE: I should add that anything you order after clicking on one of our Amazon links gives JUSIPER a small commission. Any money that comes to us from Amazon goes into enhancements for the blog!
9:19 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Waging war for Wesley Clark's soul
Kos sounds angry at Wesley Clark. As one of the guys who helped start the Draft Clark movement, Kos now thinks Clark has turned his back on the very people who the general claimed inspired him to run. Here's what Kos says:
Clark is building a team with high-powered Clinton guys, seemingly deploying a traditional top-bottom approach that runs counter to the very spirit that fueled the Draft movement.
In a comment Kos posts to a discussion thread on his site, he goes a little further:
I think Clark would make a huge mistake surrendering all the good things accomplished by the Draft people.
Seems to me that Kos - along with some other bloggers and blog readers - thinks that Clark has become a tool of the Clintonistas at the expense of the grassroots. I have immense respect for Kos, and his mission. But the more I think about it, the more I think that on this one, he's wrong.
First, it seems unrealistic to expect a man who's served in the military for as long and as a high up as Clark has that he would suddenly surrender himself to a sprawling and decentralized movement, and allow a beast like that to guide him rather than the other way around.
Second, if Clark's experience as NATO supreme commander showed anything, it was his independence of mind. In fact, Clark apparently pissed off so many people in the Pentagon because he does things his own way. And his relationship with Bill Clinton is more complex than the latter's praise of him as a "rising star" suggests. Here's an excerpt from The Oxford American's piece on him in the June/May 2003 issue:
[In the Pentagon in 1999,] just after being told he would have to retire early to make way for his successor at NATO headquarters. "I was walking down the hallway and one of the senior military guys turned to me and said, "You know, Wes, the [Clinton] White House is really concerned that they didn't get any bounce out of the war, they didn't get anything favorable."
It angers Clark that these are the lasting impressions of a war he helped win, and to make his point that day in the conference room he mimicked his detractors: "I guess the most important lesson is, we never want to do anything like that again." Then he shouted in his own voice: "Why? You were successful! Why, why, why? Why don't you want to do it again? Why don't you want to do it better next time?
When NATO was the last organization that could help, it pulled itself up by the bootstraps and helped. I think they should take enormous pride and credit in that. Instead, it was like, "You know, I guess we really screwed this thing up."
He doesn't seem to have had much respect for the Clinton operation when he was working for them. If there's any kind of relationship now - which seems likely given the staff appointments that have so upset Kos - it's probably a marriage of convenience. I wrote earlier about the possibility of a Wesley-Hillary ticket; I now think that may be something Bill is just gunning for, not something Clark has agreed to or even considered. Clark's using the Clinton/Gore campaign people just to position himself well with the party establishment, and I imagine that he alone is going to decide what they do and how far they go with it. It's just a gut instinct, but I think Clark's damn smart, and he's not going to turn into some tool for Clintonistas, ready to be shaped like Play Dough in their sweaty hands.
Kos is worried even more that John Kerry's now-ex-senior staffer, nasty Chris Lehane, will join Clark:
Well, Lehane and [Clark aide Mark] Fabiani are business partners. In fact, they are known as the "Masters of Disaster", specializing in public relations damage control. With campaigns, their MO is to create such disasters -- for their opponents, by tearing them down. They did it to Bradley on Gore's behalf. They worked for Gray Davis and Garry South (masters of sleaze themselves).
That's why Lehane quit the Kerry campaign -- because Kerry wasn't aggressive enough confronting Dean's rising star (though ironically, it was Lehane's early attacks against Dean that helped raise Dean's stature).
Now with his Fabiani near the top of Clark's organization, it shouldn't be long before Lehane is working right alongside him.
I may very well be wrong on this, but if the following quotation from the New York Times is any indication, Lehane has his hands full with Gray Davis and the California recall:
"I think no matter how you slice it, today's decision is a good thing for those who oppose the recall," said Chris Lehane, a Davis adviser who also worked for former Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 Florida recount battle. "It reinforces the notion that this is a continuation of Florida 2000 and taints the entire process. And the more scrutiny Schwarzenegger and the others come under, the more they come unraveled."
If Lehane left Kerry because he's salivating for candidate meat, maybe he feels like he's the one to be bringing on that scrutiny to Schwarzenegger.
One final note: JUSIPER readers may know me as this blog's die-hard Howard Dean supporter. I do favor the doctor more than my co-bloggers, who find things to like about him but in varying, lesser degrees. And I haven't changed my mind about what I've said about Dean up to this point. But there's something about Wesley Clark. It's not just that he meets the same criteria that initially piqued my interest in Dean, that he's an outsider to the party along multiple dimensions. No, it's also this:
On some issues, Clark will be be on Dean's left. In other ways, he might attract Southerners who'd otherwise vote for Bush. The utterly fantastic thing about Clark is that he has the capacity, very nearly, very possibly, to be all things to all people, just enough to really make things strange and wonderful for the Democratic Party, making the electorate more receptive to some important, liberal ideas that Americans have been told in the past to fear.
Now we just wait and see what kind of candidate Clark actually is, and what kind of campaign he really runs. No backflips for me yet, not just yet, anyway.
12:36 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Fear of four stars
In response to George Bush's admission that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11, skippy poses this question:
we wonder why all of a sudden awol has decided to tell the truth?
Skippy's own answer lies in a link to a Pollkatz chart of Bush's falling approval ratings.
Here's my take: Bush thought it prudent (yes, I said prudent) to answer the question before a four-star general and former NATO supreme commander, who announced he's running for president the very same day, could ask it.
UPDATE: JUSIPER's guest blogger Cliff sends in the following alternative or additional interpretation:
Why would Bush want to correct the 70 percent of Americans who believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks? After all, shouldn't he be glad that so many people believe he dismantled the regime of the man behind the worst terrorist act against the US?
The answer may be that Saddam's recent tape has made Bush nervous. If Saddam cannot be found, and the public believes he is behind 9-11, the public might become angry that Bush hasn't been able to apprehend or kill the man responsible for 9-11. Public sentiment would worsen if subsequent tapes were released.
The polls, the tape, the general. Another lucky trifecta for the president.
12:23 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Pick of the Week: Celia Cruz and Friends
There is no American equivalent to Celia Cruz. She was, in the Latin American world, something like Ella, Aretha, Tina, Patti, the Queen Mother, and everyone's favorite aunt all rolled into one. A Cuban exile, she left the island for good in the 1950's and as she never failed to remind people, "already a star." Her rebirth in the 1970's with the Fania All Stars led to a new career singing salsa. In the 1990's she became a pop icon, scoring a Panamerican smash in 1998 with one of her signature songs, "La vida es un carnaval." This concert, featuring guests Tito Puente, La India and Johnny Pacheco, was filmed for PBS just four years ago; her stage presence in her mid-70's was greater than it had ever been; JUSIPER honors itself in paying tribute to the Queen, La guarachera de Cuba. ¡Azuuuucar!
5:28 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Cook's sobering addendum
In his latest column, Charlie Cook offers a sobering addendum to JUSIPER's earlier analysis. He suggests that it not so much the state of the economy by June 2004 that will be decisive but a much subtler factor:
In their work, "Forecasting Elections," professors Michael Lewis-Beck of the University of Iowa and Tom Rice of the University of Vermont have found the highest correlations with election outcome are comparisons of unemployment figures from March of the election year to June of that year; inflation rates for June of the year before the election to June of the election year; change in real personal income from the second quarter of the year before the election to the second quarter of the election year; and change in gross domestic product for those periods.
Inflation did not have nearly as strong a relationship as the others.
In short, keep your eyes on the rate of change in key economic factors between now and May rather than the absolute values of the numbers. If, as in 1992, the recovery begins in the fall, it will be too late. But, says Cook, "If the economy is clearly recovering next year -- particularly if improvement is visible by the second quarter -- Democrats could probably nominate the reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy and still lose the general election."
10:48 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Prescription Drug Benefit Collapsing; Times Blows Story
First in a three-part series on health insurance
The New York Times reports on its front page today that "lawmakers have been deluged with complaints from retirees who fear losing drug benefits they already have from former employers."
Most retired people, you see, already have prescription drug coverage, and many get it from their former employers. But the benefit that the Bush Administration and Congress are now working on adding to Medicare is universal, so employers could simply stop covering their former workers and allow them to get prescriptions from the federal government. Unfortunately, the new program is also less generous than many private plans, so the retirees who get plopped into the public pool would lose at least some of their benefits.
The Bush plan's original price tag of $400 billion was already far too low, considering that lawmakers have realized only over the past month that it will actually affect seniors who already have drug benefits. (The Congressional Budget Office says one-third of them will lose their coverage under the bills the House and Senate passed this summer; everyone who winds up uncovered is an extra person the new benefit will have to cover.) Now Congress is scrambling to offer tax credits to lure employers into maintaining their coverage of retirees, adding a massive surcharge to the bill.
And here's what the Times left out of its story: members of Congress have already taken steps to make sure that they will never be affected by declines in coverage brought about by the Bush plan.
Maybe you thought that would be impossible. After all, in June, Minnesota Democrat Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) offered an amendment to the Senate's Medicare bill to require eligible members of Congress to have the same level of prescription drug coverage that the Bush plan would bring to other seniors. And the Senate passed the Dayton Amendment by a vote of 93 to 3.
Less than a month later, however, on July 8, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) sponsored a measure to insulate federal employees from the effects of Medicare "reform." Federal workers, including members of Congress, choose their coverage from the variety of insurers that participate in the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP). Davis wanted to prevent FEHBP plans from cutting back drug coverage for retirees and dumping them into the new Medicare for their prescriptions. His plan passed on a voice vote.
Soon afterward, Sens. George Allen (R-Va.) and John Warner (R-Va.) introduced a similar measure in the Senate. With three members from the other side – Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) – as co-sponsors, it's likely to pass. And when it does, Congress will have protected itself, along with all federal employees, from precisely the problem seniors covered by private-sector plans are now complaining about.
The five Senate co-sponsors have two things in common. One is that they all represent states with large populations of federal employees. Essentially, they moved to protect their constituents from Medicare "reform." The fact that other seniors are now demanding similar safeguards is devastating news for the Bush plan.
The other is that all five voted for the Dayton Amendment – making it look like they were in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to health insurance – before bringing Rep. Davis' proposal to the Senate. They covered their asses, in other words, and then they covered themselves.
Which raises the question of exactly why their coverage isn't good enough for the rest of us.
Stay tuned.
9:32 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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NEWS FLASH: The DNC "gets it"!
It's official folks, the Democratic Party gets it.
Following on the fundraising successes of the Dean campaign and MoveOn.org, the DNC has begun an online campaign to raise $500,000 before the FEC's Sept. 30 third-quarter reporting deadline. They're doing things right, too: they're making it exciting by constantly updating the campaign's progress; they're using vivid personalities to make it even more like an old-fashioned telethon - with James Carville and Paul Begala as your Jerry-Lewis-like hosts. All they need to do to make the effort perfect is to peg the campaign to particular events, which will get them additional help from the media.
If you want to contribute to the DNC, now or ever, you can use JUSIPER's link near the top of the sidebar, or here. JUSIPER colleagues, friends, family, and readers: I urge you to show the way! Even just matching your weekly spending on coffee will make a difference.
10:14 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Building bridges
I'd like to urge all JUSIPER readers to bookmark, read, and heed the words of Nathan Newman. He's currently posting about the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride and engaging in a debate on the role of labor in American politics with the American Prospect's weblog, TAPPED. Let's hope Nathan keeps at it, with all the passion and data that be's been bringing to bear so far. The mission that he's set out for his weblog is not only to promote unions but to convince the online elite - the vanguard of the newly emergent and politically powerful "creative class" - of labor's importance to progressive causes. I can't say enough how incredibly important and worthwhile that mission is, and how we need to keep things civil. Progressives need more bridge-builders like you, Nathan. (Another important bridge-builder I've cited, this time between "centrist" and "populist" Democrats, is Ruy Teixeira.)
9:59 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wesley and H...
By all accounts, this is Wesley Clark's week. Some reports say he's already made his decision about what he's going to do - we just have to bide our time until he decides to make it public. What is clear is that any hope that Howard Dean supporters held out for a deal between their man and Clark has been pretty well squelched.
There may still be a deal in the works, however. It just may not involve Howard, but someone else whose first name begins with an H.
"I am absolutely ruling it out," Hillary Clinton said. That sounds pretty clear. But exactly what is she absolutely ruling out? A run for the presidency, right? Well, what about a run for the ... vice presidency?
Maybe Bill Clinton's after-dinner mention of his wife and his former NATO supreme commander as the Democratic Party's "rising stars" wasn't idle chatter. Maybe he knows something we don't. Maybe there is a deal in the works - a deal that'll pair Wesley and Hillary.
I mean, if you think about it, what are the chances that a liberal Democrat is going to be the first woman to win the presidency? The Democrats already have the female half of the gender gap on their side - it's the other half they need to work on. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see Hillary bringing in a whole lot of NASCAR dads. Now, if she's standing next to the ideal alpha male, a four-star general, well that's another thing entirely, and possibly the perfect way (strategically speaking) for the Democrats to make history by getting to be the first party with a woman in the Oval Office ....
7:37 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, September 15, 2003
Common blood, un-common valor
Since David Brooks, the New York Times' new conservative columnist, felt free this weekend to recycle the idea circulated earlier this summer that equates George Bush and Howard Dean because of their blue blood, I've decided it's only fair that I recycle my own take on the subject, which you can read here. I acknowledge the two men's similarities of birth, but contrast their life choices: one traded on his famous name and parlayed his social advantages into wealth and power, whereas the other followed a path independent of his family's fortune into a life of service, service that has been both public (in Vermont government) and private (as a family practitioner).
I'll even take it a step further. George Bush calls himself a compassionate conservative and a Christian. But in his entire life, has he ever done anything remotely charitable, or anything that showed genuine courage?
2:22 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sunday, September 14, 2003
No recall till March
This news comes to us by way of secret JUSIPER informant F.
It looks like that recall election ain't gonna happen. Not in October anyway.
11:39 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Bush's latest numbers
A few quick thoughts the innards of the Washington Post's latest poll:
1. George W. Bush continues, inexplicably, to be favored 56-39 on the education issue even as he weakens Head Start and refuses to speak out on the gutting of his own education bill. Because he doesn't deserve that kind of rating on the merits, and because funding for education is being cut in state after state, this is an obvious opportunity for Democratic presidential candidates to tie his Administration to the disastrous underfunding of education on a state and local level. But this requires that a candidate be able to sell the underlying argument -- that Bush's tax cuts and other budgetary policies have had immediate ramifications and costs in terms of local services. So far, the only candidate I have heard make an effective case for this is Dean. This needs to be part of every presidential candidate's stump speech and basic message.
2. Inconceivable to any but the Green Party voters who gave him the office, Bush is favored 51/42 on the environment. The Sierra Club has already done the homework on this issue for any interested Democratic candidate.
3. It is worth remembering that despite ad after ad prior to the 2002 election focusing on Medicare, Social Security and prescription drugs, Republicans actually got a majority of the senior citizen vote. Despite two years of stasis but extreme budgetary irresponsibility that will have an impact on any debate relating to Social Security, Bush's numbers have not moved. Bush has gone from 41/50 on Social Security in the last poll before 9/11 to 43/46 today. Again, Democatic contenders need to make the case that the budget numbers have real consequences. Because of the IRA-in-the-sky notion of Social Security that plagues most of the electorate, this is an uphill but critical task.
4. Huge majorities approve of Bush's performance on homeland security (63/32) and the U.S. campaign against terrorism (70/27) and international affairs (53/43). And yet there is enormous ambivalence. The electorate still believes the war was worth fighting (61/27) but believes there has been an "unacceptably high" (55/43) number of casualties in Iraq. Worse still, a clear majority believes (55/42) that the Bush administration does not have a "clear plan for handling the situation in Iraq." Nonetheless, as we have noted before most of the major Democratic contenders will have an uphill task convincing the electorate of their ability to lead in these matters, despite a Bush security record whose poverty the electorate is beginning to recognize.
5. The electorate overwhelmingly opposes the (61/38) the $87 billion in proposed new spending. Given the choice, 41% would pay for it by eliminating tax cuts, 19% by deficit spending, and 28% by cutting spending. Wonder what they would cut.
6. For all that, there is one thing that Americans do understand. And here there has been a massive shift in the numbers in just seven months. Americans now believe that Bush promises on prescription drug benefits are going nowhere. Bush has gone from 46/35 in February to 35/54 today. If Bush's request for $87 billion sails through, today's New York Times suggests, meaningful prescription drug reform may be D.O.A.
And there's reason to think that may be the case. The CBO last October published estimates for the cost of prescription drug reform under four different plans: the Clinton midsession review plan, the Robb Amendment, H.R. 4680 and Breaux-Frist II. Without going into the details of each plan, about which many have and will continue to write, here are the respective cost estimates for each plan, in billions of dollars per year: 512, 274, 195, and 233. Add even the chintzy House bill to a $540 billion deficit and you get $735 billion, a level at which one might begin to wonder not only about tipping points but about our credibility in international financial markets.
Why should this matter to Mr. Bush? Well, it's pretty simple really. In her new book on senior political activism, Harvard's Andrea Campbell states the following:
In 1996, when seniors were 12.7 percent of the total population, they made up 17.2 percent of the voting-age population and 24 percent of all voters in the presidential election.
Just imagine what proportion of the electorate they must constitute in Florida, where as of 1999 they made up up 18.1 percent of the population, not to mention Pennsylvania (15.8%), West Virginia (15.1%), or Iowa (14.9%).
And don't forget that there are plenty of signs that seniors doubt that even a signed bill would pass muster.
7. A final note: respondents are fairly certain that most Americans are worse off (52/9) than they were when Bush became president, almost identical to the 48/7 number his father faced around this point in 1991. Since 1992 the more personal question about one's own financial situation has resulted in a response of "about the same" by roughly 50% of respondents. Clinton defeated Dole in 1996 with a 29% saying they were "better off" and 22% saying worse off. Bush lost to Clinton in 1992 when the numbers were 22-32. The numbers against Bush right now are 21-30.
8. It seems reasonably clear that Bush would lose the election if it were held today. His hopes depend on an economic recovery, a Democratic candidate with no credibility on security and happy seniors. Given his luck with trifectas (and $250 million) don't count him out; after all, he almost won last time around.
9:17 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Bill goes to Iowa
Bill Clinton gave quite a speech at Tom Harkin's steak fry yesterday. There are a lot of things worth quoting in the speech, most particularly his devastating indictment of the Adminstration's foreign and fiscal policy. Hopefully a transcript will be posted soon. So for the moment a section that has not been quoted yet.
I was shaking hands with the group on the way over here. And this fellow said, “I want you to help us next year,” and I said, “I’ll do all I can.” I said, “We can win,” and the woman next to him right over there said, “Honey, we won the last time.”
You know I’m not like most Democrats. I really thought there was something truly beautiful about that 5-4 decision on the election. After years and years and years of judging, finally justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas finally stood up for minority rights and affirmative action. I mean, they thought it was time for the minority to have the White House, and they stopped counting the votes in Florida and they just gave it to them. It was truly touching to see such a conversion on their part.
Look, we’re laughing, but let me say something serious.
That election was not a mandate for radical change, but that’s what we got. Even if you believe in the SC decision or you believe we shouldn’t have counted all the votes in Florida, that election was tight as a tick. And even if we’d won, that election was tight as a tick. It was not a mandate for radical change.
10:28 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saturday, September 13, 2003
Returning Army's 3rd Infantry Division's words to Bush
This one speaks for itself.
The division's fatigue appeared evident in the response to the president's remarks. Bush's speeches at military bases are commonly interrupted repeatedly by sustained and frequent cheers. On Friday, while Bush got an enthusiastic Army 'hoo-ah' shout when he began and a standing ovation at the end, most of the rest of his speech was greeted with polite applause.
Pvt. Kenneth Henry, 21, a radar operator with a field artillery unit, said the response was muted by the pervasive knowledge among the soldiers and their families that they will likely have to return to Iraq soon.
"How could you make these people feel better when you just said you're putting $87 billion into sending them back?" Henry asked.
Henry spent about six months in Iraq, traveling from Kuwait over the border to Nasiriyah and through the Karbala Gap before helping to take the Baghdad airport. He said he lost about 10 members of his unit, the Alpha 1-39 Field Artillery, and he's not eager to go back.
"What I heard him say was, 'You went there. You took names. Came home. Now you're going back,' " Henry said. "He likes war. He should go fight in a war for two days and see how he likes it."
11:14 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Thursday, September 11, 2003
Fuzzy math
A blast from the past. Here's a short excerpt from the first debate of the 2000 election, held three years ago next month.
BUSH: I want all seniors to have prescription drugs and Medicare. We need to reform Medicare. There have been opportunity to do so, but this administration has failed to do it.
[...]
I believe we ought to give seniors more options. I believe we ought to make the system work better. But I know this: I know it's going to require a different kind of leader to go to Washington to say to both Republicans and Democrats, "Let's come together."
And my point is is that my plan not only trusts seniors with options, my plan sets aside $3.4 trillion for Medicare over the next 10 years. My plan also says it's going to require a new approach in Washington, D.C.
BUSH: It's going to require somebody who can work across the partisan divide.
GORE: If I could respond to that, Jim, under my plan, I will put Medicare in an iron-clad lockbox and prevent the money from being used for anything other than Medicare. The governor has declined to endorse that idea, even though the Republican as well as Democratic leaders of Congress have endorsed it.
I'd be interested to see if he would this evening say that he would put Medicare in a lockbox. I don't think he will, because under his plan, if you work out the numbers, $100 billion comes out of Medicare just for the wealthiest 1 percent in the tax cut.
[...]
BUSH: I cannot let this go by, the old-style Washington politics, of "We're going to scare you in the voting booth."
Under my plan, the man gets immediate help with prescription drugs. It's called "Immediate Helping Hand." Instead of squabbling and finger-pointing, he gets immediate help.
Let me say something. Now, I understand -- excuse me...
LEHRER: All right, excuse me, gentlemen...
GORE: Jim, can I...
(CROSSTALK)
LEHRER: ... minutes is up, but we'll finish that.
GORE: Can I make one other point? They get $25,000 a year income. That makes them ineligible.
BUSH: Look, this is the man who's got great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think, not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator.
(LAUGHTER)
It's fuzzy math. It's to scare them, trying to scare people in the voting booth.
Fuzzy math.
That line, no doubt carefully vetted beforehand, was brilliant politics, as proven immediately by the dreadful focus groups the networks put together after the debates. Bush was right. Kind of: to a vast section of the American population, any math is fuzzy math. According to a 1997 study by the international Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, says the Washington-based Statistical Assessment Service, fully 21 percent of Americans possess numeracy skills "at the lowest level." What does "lowest level" mean? It means that people "cannot look up a phone number in the Yellow Pages or work out the change from $2 when buying goods worth $1.58."
Al Gore ran that lockbox and the "top 1 percent" into the ground in 2000. But a Time magazine poll in 2000 revealed that 20% of Americans thought they were in the top 1% while 19% thought they would be there soon. A better communicator might have said something about the actual amount entailed, which ranges from Heritage's $208,000 a year to Citizens for Tax Justice's $518,000 a year. Most people can at least understand that they aren't making that much.
Or maybe he could have talked about the top 1% in terms of wealth, since that group now holds more wealth than the bottom 95% combined. After all, not every family has a net worth of $10 million, and let's face it, the great beneficiaries of the Bush tax cut fall among this group's ranks.
So when Bush announces a request for $87 billion, (that should be $162 billion, if Josh Marshall is right) how many people are really able to differentiate between that and $87 million, much less think about it in terms of its proportion to discretionary spending? Anyone who has taught statistics knows that there aren't even many college students who can tell the difference, so why expect it from telegenic news anchors or the electorate at large?
Bush's words on "fuzzy math" were soothing to an electorate who had no time for a schoolmarmish yet incomprehensible Al Gore. But America's innumeracy has an enormous consequence. It has enabled politicians to lie to them outright about the costs, benefits and distribution of policy. This Administration's mendacity on these matters has already created one of the worst fiscal crises in the country's history. The OMB itself reports that this is the worst deficit since World War II, even when adjusted for inflation. Brad DeLong certifies its long term impact on interest rates. And if we are, as UPI's Martin Hutchinson believes, at the "tipping point," it could get far worse.
The consequences are massive. It's not just meaningful prescription drug benefits for the elderly that are going to go out the window. It's also homeland security, rapidly becoming an unfunded mandate (once but no longer anathema to Republicans).
Defense analysts now believe that Bush's tax cuts for multi-millionaires and subsidies to Halliburton's international shareholders will eventually come at the expense of the military budget itself.
And forget about funding for elementary and secondary education.
Then again, given their electoral dependence on innumeracy, maybe that's what they want.
7:14 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Donkey Rising responds
Ruy Teixeira, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, has posted his response to my series of posts, "How Dean Can Win", on his Donkey Rising blog. Head over there, read it, and report back with your thoughts!
11:44 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Book your flights now
Donald Rumsfeld explained today how Iraq will make up for the shortfall in funds for reconstruction:
He observed that Iraq could not rely on its oil revenues alone to rebuild its decrepit infrastructure but must plan to develop industries like tourism that would benefit from national and historic treasures like the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon.
"Tourism is going to be something important in that country as soon as the security situation is resolved, and I think that will be resolved as the Iraqis take over more and more responsibility for their own government," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "In the last analysis, they have to create an environment that's hospitable to investment and to enterprise."
Yeah, okay, but there's that other problem. I hear Beirut and Belfast didn't exactly qualify as tourist hot spots.
11:20 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Straight talk on trade
Trade policy has never easily translated into campaign sound-bites, and that was never clearer than when Lieberman tried to label Howard Dean an old-fashioned protectionist in the Democratic debate last week. If Dean succeeded in his promise to impose U.S. labor, environment, and human rights standards on our trading partners, trade would quickly dry up, and there would be a Dean recession. Another old-fashioned Democrat bites the dust, or so Lieberman hoped perhaps….
Lieberman is probably correct in that Dean’s views on trade are not carefully-spelled out at this point, and hopefully more nuanced views will begin to emerge. Trade shouldn’t have to be a liability for Democratic candidates either. This week’s WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico provides an unusual opportunity to showcase the hypocrisy of the Republican trade message. As the lengthy front page article by Elizabeth Becker in yesterday’s New York Times explains, agriculture will be one of the core issues, and in particular the agriculture subsidies that support agribusiness in the United States and impoverish small farmers in the developing world. Republicans, the party of free-trade, receive 72% of the political donations from agribusiness. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that rich countries’ agricultural policies lead to starvation,” comments Ian Goldin, the World Bank’s vice president for external affairs. Trade protectionism, argued Carlos A. Ball in the Los Angeles Times, is at the heart of the Bush Administration’s disastrous policy towards Latin America. The NYT follows up on the issue with an editorial today.
True, unions have been a more traditional constituent of the Democratic Party than farmers in the developing world (although U.S. concessions on agriculture would probably make it easier to achieve labor’s objectives on other issues), and yes, American farmers would be turned-off (but how many Midwestern states were blue in 2000?), but there are also a few people concerned with the problems associated with illegal immigration, drugs, and failed states. It has never been clearer that America is not immune from the consequences of vast global inequalities. Why not talk straight on trade?
9:12 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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While Ralph looked in the mirror...
Cingular Wireless was hit today with a $12 million fine for deliberate fraud and deception. Todd Wallack of the San Francisco Chronicle reports that:
"After signing up for service, many Cingular customers belatedly found the service didn't work in the home or where they needed it.
"But Cingular refused to let customers out of their long-term service agreements without paying up to $550 in termination penalties.
"Now, in a stinging rebuke for the carrier, California regulators Tuesday proposed fining Cingular $12.1 million for refusing to let customers cancel their contracts, even when it couldn't provide the service it promised. "
"'Binding (customers) in advance to a one- or two-year contract constituted an unjust and unreasonable rule,'" wrote Jean Vieth, an administrative law judge with the California Public Utilities Commission. Vieth also ordered Cingular to give refunds to customers who paid the early-termination fees. "
This precedent may mark the beginning of a wave of long overdue action against wireless providers. As Michael Shames of Utility Consumers' Action states, “This drives a stake through the heart of wireless companies' arguments that they haven't done anything wrong and that competition is working fine.”
Ralph Nader did one great thing with his life, long before he helped transfer political power to a man busy destroying much of his legacy. With all three branches of the federal government are in Republican hands, the only real forum for consumer activism is state and local government. Kudos to the California Public Utilities Commission for today’s bold action and the promise of more.
8:59 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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High crimes and misdemeanors
That what the city of Santa Cruz thinks. What about you?
9:14 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Alabama voters reject Gospels at ballot box
It's not the first time, of course. They did it in the 1860's and in the 1960's. And come to think of it, just about every year in between.
Pity their poor Republican governor, Bob Riley. He's got to be the loneliest man in the world tonight. He learned, alas, too late that the Republican version of the Bible ends before the sheep and the goats.
10:24 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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The Spirit of '76
We are delighted to present Peter's latest post.
Howard Dean is now ahead in … Maryland?! One recent poll puts him at "25% there, with Lieberman at 23%, Kerry at 11% and Gephardt at 10%."
The fact that Dean is ahead in a state to which he has paid barely any attention is terrible news for regional candidates like Edwards and Graham (and to a lesser extent Gephardt and Sharpton), but it shouldn't be any surprise. The media, along with political elites, love to talk about state-by-state strategies, the potential for brokered conventions and whether particular candidates should be "stopped." But American presidential nominating contests have been driven for a long time by national public opinion, which in turn is shaped by national campaigns and news – including news about campaigns, which can create a feedback loop that turbo-charges a candidate who starts to break away from the pack. Remember, right after Gary Hart won the New Hampshire primary in 1984, he also won not only in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but also in Florida, a state he hadn't campaigned in at all.
Some writers and various Dean opponents have compared his campaign to George McGovern's in 1972. But that race quickly collapsed to a group of three candidates of roughly equal strength and deeply divided by Vietnam and busing: McGovern, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace. However aroused the Democratic base may be this year, the ideological and cultural splits among Dean and John Kerry and even Joe Lieberman pale in comparison to the fratricidal divisions of '72.
A much better, and so far largely overlooked, analogy to what's happening now is 1976, where the (former) governor of a small state took control of the Democratic campaign before many people even knew who he was – by establishing himself as the leading outsider among a large field of candidates in a year when the party's top insiders did not deign to run.
In 1976, 11 candidates, including a flock of senators, entered the Democratic fray, but Humphrey and Ted Kennedy stayed on the sidelines. Jimmy Carter campaigned early and hard, struck a distinctive moralistic tone and developed an outstanding organization of volunteers. Carter finished behind "uncommitted" in the Iowa caucuses, but the fact that his 27% topped the other candidates (Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana finished second, with 13%) generated huge publicity, and he then won New Hampshire with 28%. (Rep. Mo Udall of Arizona finished second there, at 23%.)
Carter had a defining moment in Florida, where he beat Wallace and established himself as a politician from the "New South." In Pennsylvania, he faced down Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the experienced but stupefyingly boring Democratic establishment candidate, and, despite organized labor's support for Jackson, Carter won that northern industrial state, 37% to 25%. Four days later, he destroyed Lloyd Bentsen in Bentsen's home state of Texas. (In contrast to today, there were still occasional favorite-son and late-stage dark-horse candidates in 1976, not just press speculation about them.)
On May 10, Time Magazine reported: "According to all the conventional wisdom, the process was going to be a marathon shambles, producing nearly five months of furious activity but probably settling nothing. Suddenly, only third of the way through the obstacle course, the race was all but over. Starting out 17 months ago with no national political base, name recognition or backing from powerful interest groups, onetime Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter had carved out on his own a broad constituency."
Of course, by the spring of 1976, Carter had quite diverse backing: southerners and northerners, inner-city blacks and blue-collar voters who disregarded the instructions of their union leaders, rural and suburban voters. None of the current Democratic candidates has established this kind of broad support – yet.
But all of the long-term, structural trends that enabled Carter to win the nomination in 1976, in a way he wouldn't have been able to in, say, 1952, have accelerated over the last 25 years: the growing power of candidate-centered organizations relative to political parties; the increasing openness of delegate selection contests to voters; the bandwagon-inducing effects of early polls and victories; the spreading reach and appetite of the media, which can quickly close the celebrity gap between veteran politicians and newcomers.
And right now, you'd have to notice that Dean is cleverly harnessing all of them.
In 1976, after the Pennsylvania primary, old acquaintances began bombarding the 64-year-old Humphrey with phone calls. "They pleaded," wrote Time, "that only he could stop Carter, whom many organization Democrats mistrust as an unknown and untested outsider … Next day, looking exhausted, he flabbergasted friends by announcing that he had decided to stay out, but would still hold himself available in the 'unlikely' event of a convention deadlock."
Aren't you starting to get the feeling that Democratic insiders are standing with mouths agape all over again, "flabbergasted" that it already may be too late to "stop" Dean?
If Dean emerges, sustainably, as the top preference among national Democrats, he will be the party's nominee, whatever the party's insiders say. Look at Jimmy Carter. Or Barry Goldwater or John F. Kennedy or Wendell Willkie. That's how the system works.
--Peter
12:09 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, September 08, 2003
Back where he belongs
Virtually every organization listed at Polling Report now has George Bush's job approval rating down to its pre-9/11 level.
11:28 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Frank Kramer, American hero
We recently received this letter, which went to all members of the Harvard Book Store's mailing list. Privately owned and a Cambridge institution, the store received the Publisher's Weekly Bookseller of the Year award in 2002. We encourage all Boston-based JUSIPER readers to join the rally protesting this disturbing aspect of the Patriot Act.
Dear Harvard Book Store Customers,
We try not to email you with information unless it is directly related to Harvard Book Store, but we feel it is important to let you know about the following occurrence.
John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States, will be speaking at Faneuil Hall tomorrow morning ˆ Tuesday, September 9th ˆ as part of a tour to promote the USA Patriot Act. The media is to arrive at 8:05 AM, and John Ashcroft will speak at 9:20 AM to an audience exclusively of law enforcement personnel.
A rally and press conference will be held beginning at 8 AM at Faneuil Hall. Frank Kramer, the owner of Harvard Book Store, will be one of the speakers at this rally.
Harvard Book Store opposes the Patriot Act, specifically Section 215, because it allows FBI agents to search the bookstore or library records of anyone who they believe may have information relevant to their investigations, including people who are not suspected of committing a crime. The request for a court order authorizing the search is heard by a judge in a secret proceeding, which prevents a bookseller or librarian from objecting on First Amendment grounds. The court order contains a gag provision that forbids a bookseller or librarian to alert anyone to the fact that a search has occurred. As a result, it is impossible to protest the search even after the fact.
Although we realize this is very late notice, the Justice Department only announced John Ashcroft‚s visit on Friday afternoon. Notice is short, and the rally is early, but we urge of those who are in agreement with us to please join us at Faneuil Hall tomorrow morning at eight. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback.
Sincerely,
Amanda Darling
Marketing Manager
Harvard Book Store
10:59 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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"But I even spoke to them in Spanish."
La Opinion's brilliant reporter, Jorge Luis Macias, says only two things are clear after the New Mexico debate: the big losers were Al Sharpton for not showing up) and George W. Bush.
The report was relatively upbeat about Democratic chances in 2004, but largely because of an overall assessment that Bush has not come through on his promise: 70% of Latinos surveyed in a recent poll "believe that Bush has not fulfilled his promises" in areas related to Hispanic interests, while only 12% believe he has. But even now 34% would vote for Bush, as opposed to 48% for an unnamed Democrat.
But how about the Spanish? Wasn't that supposed to have Latino voters eating out of the candidates' hands, even if, as Macias says, no one stood out?
"'Two things bother me,' said Manuel Lopez, Albuquerque resident. 'It bothers me that they think that we would [be dazzled by] their badly spoken Spanish, and it bothers me that they think that most of us only care about legalization or how to get government benefits. It's as if they think that they can get the Latin vote in exchange for food stamps, as if we Latinos' votes were for sale.'"
Ouch.
12:23 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sunday, September 07, 2003
Cuban Americans aren't the only voters Bush has to worry about in Florida
The LA Times' Ron Brownstein reports that Republicans are building an unbeatable machine in Florida. So that means George Bush wins - hands down - in 2004, right? Not, perhaps, if the Democratic candidate can win the votes of 97,000 Nader voters - who could bite Bush in the face this time around instead of the Democrat, particularly if it's someone like Howard Dean, who attracts their like in droves - and 60,000 Muslim voters, who went overwhelmingly for Bush last time and are now feeling betrayed by Bush's assault on civil liberties and his Middle East policy, yet somehow still hopeful for the future.
11:48 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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What a bunda!
It must be appalling for social conservatives to watch the lengths to which the GOP will go to excuse what they surely see as "Governor Hope"'s morally reprehensible behavior. The socially conservative voters he has lost to McClintock are not likely to come back, especially after the latter's debate performance, in which he provided some of the predicted red meat on race, abortion, and, finally, if subtly, gay rights. All of which suggests a big Election Day bunda kicking for Arnold with potentially massive national repercussions.
11:39 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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"Lucky me. I got hit by the trifecta."
Talk about a trifecta. Today the Washington Post hits George Bush with one, hard. In three stories, the Post says that Bush's hopes for peace in the Middle East are "in tatters", that the Department of Homeland Security is "hobbled", and that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is "galvanizing" a previously weakened Al Qaeda.
This, from the paper of record that helped the White House justify war in Iraq.
11:05 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saturday, September 06, 2003
JUSIPER attacked, massive collateral damage ensues
JUSIPER's devastating political analysis today caused a crippling denial of service attack aimed at eliminating our home, blogspot.com. We apologize to the rest of the blogging community, y particularmente a Michael Jackson Magic. JUSIPER has threatened your safe existence, Michael Jackson Magic, and for this we apologize.
8:31 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Virginia really is for lovers!
Zogby reports today that only 40% believe Bush should be re-elected while 52% would vote for an unnamed Democratic opponent. If the undecided 8% went the risk-averse route and split roughly 2-1 for the incumbent (it’s usually the other way around, although they did end up going to Gore rather than Bush in 2000), that would still result in a 54-46 election. An eight-point margin would have swung the following additional states into the Democratic column:
Arizona
Arkansas
Colorado (Bush would win by 0.2, but the Greens won’t hit 5 this time)
Louisiana
Missouri
Nevada
New Hampshire
Ohio
West Virginia
Virginia (yes, really.)
Remove Tennessee, fold in that other state, and BG’s trusty electoral map utility reveals a 379 vote Electoral College victory—Clinton’s tally in 1996.
Not saying it’s going to happen. It's early yet, and that recovery really might be around the corner. Just that it really, really can. And do you notice that only 33 electoral votes would come from the South even with an eight-point victory? A decisive victory may be possible regardless of the Democratic nominee's identity. Or birthplace.
7:57 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Friday, September 05, 2003
Rumsfeld didn't know, but apparently Dean did
Chris at Interesting Times recalls a CNBC interview with Howard Dean on the day the statue fell in Bagdhad:
If you get a chance I would urge you to watch this interview. During it Dean made some predictions about how things would go wrong if we didn't internationalize the post-war effort immediately. He said the perception of us among the Iraqi people would quickly turn from being liberators to occupiers. He said that we would begin to suffer casualities that would rival the deaths in Lebanon.
Nearly every one of the predictions he made has come true. The only one he missed on was his prediction that WMD would be found, but I think we can forgive him that one since pretty much everyone predicted the same thing (including myself).
Dean's harsher critics already think he's got a know-it-all attitude. What'll they think now?
9:07 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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How Dean Can Win: A Response to the Naysayers (Part 4 of 4)
(Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
Howard Dean's campaign has a number of unique strengths - some well recognized by now, but others less so.
His message, for one. Until recently, Dean was purely a protest candidate. His platform was reactive: he was anti-lots-of-things, but pro-very-little. That changed on June 23, the day Dean made his official announcement in a speech called "The Great American Restoration". He talked about achieving both strength and liberty by bringing people together - rather than dividing them - and by emphasizing mutual obligations. (Dean's take on state budget problem problems, for instance, is that it's Bush's fault and the fault of state governments that acted irresponsibly during the 1990s.) The substance of Dean's declaration in Burlington got no play in the major press, but skeptics can read the transcript if they want to know what Dean's positive message in the general election candidate is going to look like.
The Burlington event was at once canny and profound in its backdrop: a small town complete with church steeple, and Dean extolling Puritan John Winthrop's communal vision of New England. Dean's going to make himself the uniter and paint Bush as the divider, something he's already begun to do effectively.
And then there's money. George Bush could have $250 million before the conventions. In the era since McCain-Finegold campaign finance reform, Democrats no longer have the soft money they've grown addicted to, meaning they'll lag the GOP even more than before - unless they radically change their act. Dean's campaign has found a way to address the gap, and holds the potential to prove that Democrats still represent the little guy. Dean's recent comment that he may forego federal matching funds has people abuzz that he's raising a lot more money than anyone expected. In order to really compete with Bush in money terms, any Democrat is going to have to renounce matching funds so he or she can spend more than the $47 million limit. Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, is aiming sky high, apparently having set a goal of raising $100 each from a million people.
The Dean campaign excels at fundraising, but its distinctiveness goes beyond money. George Bush is going to have locally staffed organizations everywhere: "By the time the first votes are cast in the Democratic primary election season, on Jan. 19 at Iowa's caucuses, the Bush campaign plans to have a well-established national organization of chairmen and other staffers in every county in key states, and a leader in every crucial precinct." To match that, Dean has his own extensive cadre of supporters, and it's growing. They are aiding the campaign in its battle for the nomination in multiple ways: they contribute money, they respond to negative press on Dean, they work to increase Dean's name recognition, they recruit more supporters, and they do these things both in traditional and in new, creative ways. Additionally, Dean has organizations of these activists in states where the other candidates have barely set foot.
For this reason alone, any other candidate who wins the nomination would be smart to make Dean his running mate: by bringing in concrete resources that no one else has, Dean could actually defy the conventional wisdom among pundits that the bottom of a ticket adds little to the top.
The importance of Dean's organization extends forward in time, too, past the primaries. He'll have his cadres in place for the general election, to work on voter turnout and on providing ammunition and voices with which to respond to attacks by the media and the Republicans.
In fact, something that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere else is how Dean's extensive network could prove an essential aid to governing, particularly at a time when Congress is controlled by Republicans (and will likely continue to be for structural reasons). Governing has increasingly taken on the features of campaigning. Of course, presidents have long used a strategy of pressuring Congress by "going public", some more adeptly than others. Bill Clinton, the most speech-making president in history, knew this well.
But Dean could take it to a new level: imagine if the president had networks of activists that answered directly to him, constantly exposing, needling, and applying pressure on Congress in a highly targeted way. Such a strategy for governing would be, to say the least, formidable. (It would provide the president with - gasp! - a real party.)
The era of bipartisan cooperation is long over, if there ever was one, ended by right-wing power grabs that seek to undermine the institutional structure of government in the U.S.: Florida 2000 was only beginning; think of the ongoing Texas redistricting efforts, the attempts to bypass traditional rules on filibusters in Congress, etc.
The Democratic party needs SERIOUS reinvention, but it appears at a loss how to do it. The Dean campaign is showing the way. Some may say that it's too early to think about a strategy for governing. Wrong. It's precisely the right time to think about it. If you offer a broad vision for how you're going to govern, that instantly makes you more appealing. Dean tells audiences that he's running in order to return power to the people, and talks about the GOP as beholden to "Ken Lay and the boys". The "special interests" of corporate cronies and religious fanatics have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill; Dean can tell the general electorate that they can defeat those nefarious forces through him.
I've seen reports that Dean's campaign is experiencing growing pains, and finding it hard to keep up with its growing base. With such a far-flung, decentralized operation, they'll need to do some really creative work to keep their edge, updating the Carville-style "war room" for the new era they've ushered in.
I'll echo Teixeira again: let the debate continue. In fact, let's take it to the next level, informed by the mission he sets out on his Donkey Rising website. Let's emulate Teixeira's optimism and adopt his concern for bridge-building among Democrats. How do we get past each candidate's weaknesses? What can each one do to fire up the party's base for a razor-thin race in a fifty-fifty nation? How can each use his own particular strengths to attract other voters? Dealing fairly and honestly with these questions will not only help us make better judgments, but will give us the ammunition we need to help the nominee next year, whoever it is.
This is a mission for which bloggers are well-equipped. Let's make that a call to arms, a way to help liberals "hit back hard," as Joe Conason puts it in his new book, Big Lies.
In the end, I agree with Donna Brazile: all the leading Democratic candidates are strong, and "one of them is going to defeat George Bush." Dick Gephardt is excelling at the vivid, punchy phrases in his attacks on Bush, and it'd be no bad thing to have the king of labor himself on the campaign trail and in the White House. John Edwards has a smart populist appeal that I like, in addition to being unavoidably racially progressive in a way that only a Southern Democrat can. I think John Kerry would make a fine president. And if Wesley Clark enters and proves a strong candidate, just watch out for me as I do backflips down the street. (At least two of us here at JUSIPER like the idea of a Clark-Dean ticket - yes, with Clark at the top - an idea that was floated in JUSIPER's inaugural post.)
I for one am going to have a seriously hard time come my state's primary. But that's only because there will be wealth in the choices.
4:42 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Thursday, September 04, 2003
The ghosts of Mississippi haunt Texas today
Salon.com's Michelle Goldberg points out that race looms large in the Texas power grab that forced the flight of 11 Texas Democrats:
While most press accounts cast them as opponents of a Republican plan to grab power by redrawing legislative districts, the lawmakers-in-exile here see something at once more subtle and more important: the latest chapter in the South's long, ugly war over minority voting rights.
Nine of the 10 senators remaining in Albuquerque are black or Hispanic; the other one represents a district that is mainly minority. And within a few years, experts say, Texas will join California as a state where Latinos, African-Americans and other minorities will outnumber Anglos.
So it is not far-fetched to say that how this drama unfolds will determine whether minority voters in Texas gain power proportionate to their numbers. That's why several Texas Democrats are trying to hold firm even as their audacious gambit gives way to a protracted, depressing slog and their unity begins to crack.
"This is an effort to seriously gut minority voting rights," says Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, head of the Texas Democratic Senate delegation. "We could not protect our constituents without breaking quorum" and fleeing Texas to short-circuit the Republican plot.
I can't help but hear echoes of the ghosts of Mississippi - the Mississippi of the mid-1980s, when white state legislators engaged in a campaign of "massive resistance," doing all they could to "crack, pack, and stack" black majority districts in order to deny blacks the fruits of hard-won voting rights.
Meanwhile, the NYT reports that the Latino Democratic govenor across the state border may get tough in return:
In Santa Fe, N.M., Gov. Bill Richardson, who offered sanctuary to the Texans, cautioned the Republicans that their "big power grab" in Texas might impel him to put redistricting before New Mexico's special legislative session in October. "I don't want to use it as a threat," Mr. Richardson said. "It's just an option."
The fight-back strategy of the Texas 11 looks to be infectious.
5:39 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Take A Bow
[What an embarrassment of riches. Today we receive our first guest post from JUSIPER friend Cliff, curently a law student at the University of Michigan.]
Why haven’t leaders of the Religious Right decried the Britney-Madonna kiss? Probably for the same reason that it remained silent in the face of shows such as The Bachelor and Mr. Personality: they know they are losing.
Today’s Senate hearings concerning the threat of the Lawrence decision to the Defense of Marriage Act highlight a stunning contradiction: the Religious Right would say nothing about a public homosexual kiss (involving a married woman) or television shows in which strangers are married for pageant and prize money, but howl at the prospect of private, state-recognized homosexual relationships.
I’m sure that members of the Religious Right find the extramarital kiss and the aforementioned FOX reality shows offensive. But I suspect its leaders know that at this point in the Culture War, they would alienate by criticizing FOX or MTV more Midwesterners than they would attract.
--Cliff
5:09 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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The responsible superpower??
[Today's post comes from our dear friend E., just returned from a summer spent in China and Japan researching an upcoming manuscript on the Asian political economy. We are happy to have him back and ecstatic to have him posting for us.]
Beijing's effort to appease the visiting U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, while far from an actual commitment, is the second major signal in as many weeks of China's earnest desire to be viewed as responsible world power, a quest that, somewhat ironically, has been aided tremendously by the irresponsible policies coming out of Washington. After all, prior to 9/11 and the focus on Iraq, it was China that was touted as the next great enemy. Who knows? The world might have been persuaded. Not now. Last week Beijing was playing the soothing host, working diligently towards a peaceful resolution of the crisis on the Korean peninsula, where there is little doubt that weapons of mass destruction indeed exist. This week, it is making soothing sounds (if not taking action) that the "world's factory" understands that it must play a responsible role in the international economy. Not every great power, Beijing seems to imply, has the luxury of being able to run roughshod over the world.
--E.
12:56 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Must-see DNC TV
The DNC's first debate for the Dem candies airs tonight. It takes place in New Mexico, home of Gov. Bill Richardson (a conservative Democrat who many see as a good prospect for a running mate), adopted home of the Texas 11 as they hide out from their democracy-thwarting colleagues, and a state that Al Gore won by only 366 votes in 2000. John Edwards' web site has a handy channel listing.
9:19 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday, September 03, 2003
School's out! Out of money, that is
A possible scenario for the near future: it's June 2004, the presidential campaign is heating up, and the economy is looking a little better. Advantage: White House. What's a Democrat to do? Here's what: focus on schools. School will have just let out, after "one of the most austere school years in memory", leaving parents, kids, and teachers to pick up the pieces. At least eleven states have already cut spending for K-12 education for 2004, including Oregon, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Alabama, Oklahoma and Florida.
8:30 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday thoughts
1. Why is anyone excited at the return of Duran Duran?
2. Can we announce our award for best advertisement early this year? I don't think anything is going to match the voice of an invisible Don Cornelius selling cargo pants. Possible ever. Frightening thought: no one buying the pants knows who he is.
3. Is there a trashier current show now than MTV's Newlyweds? This is not a rhetorical question; I just can't think of any.
Please feel free to sound off on these important matters using our comment boards.
3:26 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, September 02, 2003
A Rove by any other name ...
Cheap-labor conservatives. Banana Republicans. Corporate-jet conservatives.
Know any others that smell as sweet? Post them via comments, or email us using the link at the right.
7:57 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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How Dean Can Win: A Response to the Naysayers (Part 3 of 4)
(Read Part 2)
Today's entry deals with Howard Dean's rhetoric and his appeal to different kinds of voters. I resume with the third of Ruy Teixeira's claims about the assumptions made by Dean supporters. Teixeira's words:
Assumption #3: Sure, Dean may have some trouble with some independent voters. But he will do well with independent-leaning members of the public who do not currently vote. In fact, he will bring out enough of these currently nonvoting independents to more than cancel out his losses among today's independent voters.
Problem #3: This almost never works. The idea you can make up serious losses among existing voters by turning out lots of nonvoters is a very dangerous game indeed. Nonvoters rarely differ enough from voters of similar characteristics to warrant such an approach. (For those who want the long course on why this is so, DR recommends, in all due modesty, The Disappearing American Voter. Instead, stick to the tried and true: get out your base (the folks you know will vote for you); fight like hell for the swing voters; and hope that an exciting campaign will bring in some new voters that will lean your way. But to vest your hopes in new voters is a serious - albeit common - mistake.
I'm going to concede this point right now: I've never bought the argument that bringing new voters into the political system will make a huge difference in the popular vote. (I've read, and highly recommend, Teixeira's The Disappearing American Voter!) However, you can't tell me that in the highly competitive, 50-50 nation that we have today, mobilizing 500 new voters in a state like Florida or New Hampshire isn't going to make a difference.
That said, I don't think the Dean campaign needs to rely on new voters. Dean could very possibly do better with a lot of independents than Kerry or Gephardt could. His emphasis on non-ideological, pragmatic solutions, and fiscal conservatism - like a lot of moderate Republicans - among other things, could win him support from people that don't usually go for Democrats.
Possibly more important, the huge turnout for Dean at a rally in Seattle - as many as 15,000 - tells me that a good deal of the people who voted for Nader last time will be supporting Dean this time. When Dean pushes his centrist positions into the spotlight during the general election, those supporters won't likely abandon him to vote for Nader, when he decides to run. At Salon.com, Joan Walsh wrote: "His base knows exactly how moderate he is. I interviewed dozens of his liberal devotees, and they all know the not-so-liberal aspects of his record." They liked Nader for his rhetoric, not his policies; they like Dean for the same reason. Dean has effectively neutered Nader, a move that will prove incredibly useful in the general election.
His passion and outspokenness inspire the left wing of the party; his policy record and pragmatism as former Governor of Vermont will appeal to centrists. The Democratic Party badly needs unity. The DLC and other Democrats who think Dean is too far to the left are missing something really big: Dean is a centrist who liberals are supporting enthusiastically. If that's not an obvious chance for the two wings of the party to come together, I don't know what is. The GOP has harnessed its extremists; you won't find them home on election day or voting for someone else. Dean's contribution is that he can ensure that the Democrat's left wing won't either.
Anyway, arguing with Dean's claims misses the point: Dean's rhetoric about bringing new voters into politics, like a lot of other things he says, has a great deal of rhetorical value: it recasts the agenda, plays up his own strengths, and generates excitement. Arguing with Dean's rhetoric may get his naysayers points in a debating club, but it misses the big picture.
Jonathan Chait's argument in particular suffers from this tunnel vision. His TNR diatribe consists mainly of pointing out the "fallacy underlying Dean's argument," which is that "Democrats in Washington have gone along with Bush's policies rather than resist them." Consequently, his case against Dean focuses more on proving Dean wrong than on proving him unelectable.
For instance, Chait called Dean's premise that American likes a leader with strong convictions "nonsense", and points out how Bush pandered to swing voters. (I could point out that a really good politician gives the impression of having strong convictions while making important compromises too.) Chait gets so tied up in debating Dean's stump speech that he loses sight of Dean's rhetorical brilliance: by saying that Americans have already chosen a leader with strong convictions, he's making himself look good, and setting Bush up for a fall. Dean's got a flair for doing this, and repeats these kinds of things over and over again.
Consequently, Chait writes,
the eventual nominee, if not Dean, will have to reconcile with a liberal base whose expectations the former Vermont governor has raised. If the eventual nominee tries to woo the political center, he will therefore depress the base.
What Chait's saying is that if Dean loses the nomination, the level of activism among the Democratic base will be at exactly the level it would have been at if Dean had never existed. (Follow the logic: Dean excites the base excessively during the primaries, the other guy depresses it during the general, and the two cancel each other out.) In fact, part of what got the base so excited was the DLC's slanderous critique of Dean. Actually, what's likely to do more damage in November 2004 is all the talk about Dean's supposed weakness and unelectability, if he does win the nomination.
In any case, if anything is nonsense, that is. If the eventual nominee can't excite the base even after getting Dean's help in the primaries, it'll be the nominee's own fault, and he'll lose the election. Turnout is going to be a crucial component of victory, and a nominee that can't rile the base will be sunk. After all, Al Gore won the popular vote with a populist campaign. To be sure, we don't know that Dean can turn out the traditional base - and by that I mean minority voters and unions. Given his speechmaking skills and policy proposals, however, I expect he'll have little problem. (See earlier JUSIPER posts on Dean's race problem and the March on Washington commemoration, at which Dean was the only white presidential candidate on the stage.)
Chait also argues that Dean's opposition to the Patriot Act "could be politically lethal in a general election." Actually, it could resonate with Midwestern voters. John Ashcroft's tour of the Midwest - including stops in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio - last week revealed that the administration's has been forced into the defensive on the Patriot Act. The way some people are feeling, Dean could force a fight on this issue in traditionally red states. "What a lot of us in Idaho are saying is, 'Let's not get rid of the checks and balances'," a critic of the Patriot act told the Washington Post. "People out here in the West are used to taking care of themselves. We don't like the government intruding on our constitutional rights." That's a Republican speaking, Idaho state Rep. Charles Eberle.
Chait assumes that the Dean campaign won't be able to shake a "broad measure of the man" which defines Dean as "the spokesman for the left wing of the Democratic Party." More importantly, Chait writes,
Dean's appeal remains socioeconomically confined. His self-described combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism inspires the educated elite--who have been gravitating toward the Democratic Party--but holds little sway among blue-collar and rural voters who have slipped toward the GOP. A recent New Hampshire poll showed Dean winning 77 percent approval from likely primary voters with postgraduate degrees but less than 50 percent approval from those without college degrees. Rural and working-class voters have warmed to Bush because they believe he shares their values--an important element of which is his notion of evil, which can be defeated only through force, whether or not the rest of the world approves. Dean's pompous demeanor, outspoken social liberalism, and antiwar stance would render him helpless against the cultural populism Bush uses so effectively.
Chait assumes complete stasis by the Dean campaign, and that Dean will be stricken dumb by Bush, when in fact Dean is probably the one candidate this is least likely to happen to.
Dean's early support consisted entirely of the people Chait's talking about. But at that point, Dean was an unknown; the only people who had heard of him had done so on the internet (or in Vermont). I suspect that support for Dean is broadening demographically as his name recognition rises and his stump speech gets heard. Salon.com's Joan Walsh talked to a handful of just the kind of working class people that Chait would have us picture as rejecting Dean, and finds them interested. Not exactly statistical evidence, but it tarnishes Chait's logic. (A new Zogby poll shows evidence that Dean's support is indeed expanding.)
In a separate piece for TNR, Chait spells out how he thinks Dean's fiscal conservatism will make him "cannon fodder." Dean says people would be willing to pay higher taxes if they had guaranteed health care and the economy they had when Bill Clinton was president. According to recent Pew polling, two-thirds of all Americans favor "government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes."
Look: if the economy appears healthy, the nation secure, and Bush trustworthy, no Democrat will win. The party's only chance is if the circumstances favor a Democrat: continuing job losses, problems with national security or Iraq, or a deepening in Bush's credibility problems. Even then, against the big money and steel resolve of the Bush people, it'll take a candidate able to exploit those circumstances. On this score, of all the Democrats, Dean has positioned himself best. Furthermore, he and his campaign staff, under Joe Trippi and Kate O'Connor, have already proven themselves to be extremely canny and willing to take big gambles. Gambles, I might add, that have paid off.
Part 4, on Dean's message, money and organization, coming later this week ...
UPDATE: Part 4 due tomorrow (Friday) ...
UPDATE: Read Part 4.
1:30 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, September 01, 2003
Labor Day JUSIPER: End the cap! And cut the payroll tax on Americans who actually work for a living.
[We are delighted to present a third post from Peter Keating, presently on location in Pennsylvania]
Today's a good time to take a look at the payroll tax in America.
The federal government levies a 15.3% tax on wages, and uses the proceeds to finance Social Security, Medicare and disability insurance. If you are self-employed, you pay your whole bill to Uncle Sam. If you're a salaried employee, you pay half the tax through a regular payroll deduction (the 'FICA' line on your paycheck), and your employer pays the rest.
Counting employers' share of the payroll tax – which economists say we should, because the tax reduces the amount your employer can pay you – about 75% of Americans pay more in social insurance taxes than in income taxes. Keep that in mind the next time your favorite Republican argues against making income tax credits refundable, ostensibly because if you don't pay income taxes, you don't deserve cash back from the government. Plenty of people work, and therefore pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, for which there are no deductions, exemptions or brackets, without qualifying to pay income taxes.
Payroll taxes don't hit all salaries equally. All wages are subject to a 2.9% tax that funds Medicare. But other social insurance taxes (10.6% for Social Security plus 1.8% for disability) apply only to a maximum amount of earned income per person. That amount is set by law and is adjusted each year to cover cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security. This year, it is $87,000.
In other words, if you're a firefighter making $48,000 a year, you would pay $5,088 in Social Security taxes. But if you make $71 million – that's what Tyco's Dennis Koslowski was paid last year while he was laying off 11,000 workers – you would pay Security taxes on just the first $87,000 of your income, for a total of $9,222, and then stop. In the first case, your Social Security tax rate would be 10.6%. In the second, it would be 0.01%.
Only 6% of Americans earn enough to meet or exceed the maximum amount subject to social insurance taxes. But they make a lot of money. The government taxed about 85% of all earnings for Social Security last year, compared with 92% when the program launched in 1937. The extra 15% that's allowed to escape – income that individuals generate beyond the Social Security tax cap – now amounts to almost $1 trillion.
Now, you can do a lot with $1 trillion. If you took the tax cap off and just charged everyone today's rates, you could probably (with some COLA adjustments thrown in) guarantee Social Security's solvency forever. But let's back off such fantasies. What if we took the cap off, kept the extra revenues within Social Security and used them to subsidize a cut in the overall payroll tax levy?
We could cut the rate by 15% immediately.
The Social Security and disability trust funds expect to take in $642.5 billion in taxes this year. Collecting that amount from a pot of $6.1
trillion – a back-of-the-envelope estimate of all earned income in the U.S. – instead of $5.2 trillion, which is approximately the amount now covered, would require a rate of 10.5%, down from the current 12.4%. And everybody earning less than $102,742 (the amount on which a 10.5% tax would equal today's maximum charge for Social Security and disability) would get a tax break.
So here's a modest proposal: without raising the deficit, let's cut burdensome payroll taxes by 15% for more than 95% of working Americans. The harder you work, the more you'll save: what could be a better tag line?
Of course, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to cut payroll taxes in 1991, to force Social Security surpluses down and stop budgetary raids on them, and tried to raise the tax cap in 1999. And he not only failed, he found nearly as much opposition among Democrats as from Republicans. Many Democrats instinctively see any reduction in payroll taxes as a threat to funding Social Security. Their reflexive hostility to any change contributes mightily to the enormously destructive myth that Social Security is a system of individual accounts into which we all "pay into" for ourselves. (It's not – it's a social insurance program that provides a range of benefits that the market cannot.)
And neither party seems too concerned about the overall burden on lower- and middle-income taxpayers, or more generally, on working Americans. If the only income you have is what accountants appropriately call "earned" – meaning you worked for it, as opposed to selling stock for it or inheriting it – you have been a big loser in the income-and dividend-tax cuts passed by the Bush Administration and congressional Democrats over the past two years.
Something to think about on Labor Day.
--Peter
12:33 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Cuomo to Bush: "Too bad you didn't call Clinton"
Mario Cuomo, from Sunday's New York Times Magazine:
Q: What would you do if you were in their shoes, taking on this president?
You say, you won two wars, but you won them with Clinton's armed forces, not your own. When Cheney after the war in 1991 as the secretary of defense, on behalf of President Bush, called President Reagan to say thank you for the armed forces that just defeated Saddam Hussein, that was the proper thing to do. Too bad you didn't call Clinton. Because you should have. By the rough criterion that says if you're there when they win the World Series, then you get the credit, well then, you get the credit. But when you were left all to your own in Afghanistan and Iraq to reconstitute the places by restructuring them, and building them, well, you've failed so far -- miserably. So the thing you were left to do on your own, you did poorly. And then we turn to the economy. Are we better off three years ago than we are now? Are you kidding?
Q: Doesn't a small part of you wish you could be the one making this case?
Nobody's ever heard it. That's the prerogative of the private citizens, that you can make these great arguments that no one ever hears.
11:27 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Gray's cross
Whether or not Arnold Schwarzenegger believes in God, religion certainly hasn't played a major role in his campaign. Lou Sheldon, however, seems to have decided that he is the worst thing that ever happened to evangelicals within the Republican Party, going to the extent of fouding a new wing of his Traditional Values Coalition, Californians for Moral Government: "There is no evidence that Mr. Schwarzenegger has any strong moral convictions on any public issue." The group has written 10,000 letters to pastors around the state condemning the actor for his views on social issues
Tom McClintock, meanwhile, is Baptist. And not, it would appear, passingly. His wife is an administrative assistant at the First Baptist Church of Elk Grove. Although press reports have emphasized McClintock's pro-life views and focus on removing government services through budget reduction, they have said remarkably little about his positions on gay rights. Right wing groups have not demanded a strong position from him on this greatest of red meat issues; one can only conclude that one is forthcoming or that he is getting a free pass because of his church affiliation.
I don't seem to find too much evidence for Cruz Bustamante's overt religiosity either, despite the right wing's claims that he "wears his Hispanic and Catholic heritage on his sleeve." Religion will not be a factor to the Latinos voting for him and against Pete Wilson. He can certainly sell himself as a Catholic to those voters who identify with politicians ethno-religiously, however much his views on abortion and gay rights might not tally with the Church theologically. The Church, already concerned with the flight of Hispanics to evangelical churches, will be a tad less vocal in its opposition to Bustamante than other Catholic politicians like Tom Ridge.
And finally there is Governor Davis. His standard biographies have always identified him as Catholic. He has, however, had any number of run-ins with Church authorities; Msgr. Edward Kavanaugh of Sacramento's own St. Rose Catholic Church, for example, refused to attend an interfaith service at his first inauguration way back in 1999 because of his views on abortion. Church groups were certainly not happy at Davis' decision to sign the Reproductive Privacy Act last August, just before the election. As late as last December, Kavanaugh refused the Governor entrance to a Catholic children's home so that Davis could play Santa Claus and deliver gifts. "[T]he governor would not be welcome unless he first renounced his support for abortion rights." The Monsignor was later praised effusively by Bishop Wiegand. Right wing Catholic groups were strongly in favor of the recall efforts against Davis, "for instituting policies that facilitate the murders and molestation of innocent children." A month later, Wiegand called on the governor to change his policy on abortion or stop taking communion.
Following Davis' recent decision to pass the domestic partnership bill, the extremely conservative Catholic Family Association of America (CFAA) called on Bishop Weigand of Sacramento to go one step further and "publicly deny...Davis reception of all sacraments but that of repentance and to excommunicate him from the Catholic Church if Davis persists in public scandal.
The last few weeks have seen the New Gray Davis: demonstrative, emotional, yet professional. Part of the big rollout has been a series of interviews in which he has gone out of his way to talk about his personal faith. In one with Karen Breslau of Newsweek, Davis attributes his stoic nature to his Catholic upbringing and told a story of inspirational verse given to him by "a pair of nuns he befriended at a basketball game." In Monday's New York Times, Dean Murphy notes the Davis' campaign role in ensuring that voters know "that his wife, Sharon, steered him toward a religious reawakening." Later in the article, Dean speaks to Sharon Davis:
"When things get tough politically, Mrs. Davis said, she reads from Psalms in the Bible to her husband as a reminder that 'these things have happened to rulers for 3,000 years.' The couple regularly attends Roman Catholic Mass, and her religious faith, Mrs. Davis said, has always been something her husband has admired and, more recently, sought to share."
For all his troubles with the hierarchy and his brazen opposition to Church dicta, Davis received 55% of the Catholic vote, a huge shock to right wing Catholics.
The 2002 exit poll published by the Los Angeles Times revealed the following statistics:
1. Non Catholic Christians, representing 46% of the sample, voted for Simon 55-35
[remove African Americans and Hispanic Protestants and the numbers almost certainly become even more overwhelming in favor of Simon]
2. Catholics, representing 25% of the sample, voted for Davis 53% to 39%.
3. Jews, representing 4% of the sample, voted for Davis 69% to 22%.
4. Others, representing 25% of the sample, appear to have voted for Davis, if my calculations are right, 60% to 24%
Davis and Bustamante, the two Democrats, are the only major candidates in this bizarre election who are Catholic. Davis' people are likely expecting White Protestants to vote overwhelmingly for Schwarzenegger and McClintock--and probably for the recall. His chances at hitting 50% may well depend on retaining the loyalties of Catholic voters. He doesn't have a chance at getting the right wing ones. But history has shown he has a very good chance of getting a majority of the rest. And that, combined with the overwhelming support he has received from those not identifying with Christianity, might just be enough for a victory.
1:48 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sunday, August 31, 2003
Money questions
Curious about the consequences if George Bush accepts public funding for the general election, JUSIPER reader David asks, "if the $250 million [raised during the primaries] is not spent, is it lost? Does Bush have to return it? Or does he get to keep spending it on the campaign?" Here's part of the answer, from today's Boston Globe:
Although this money theoretically is for the primaries, Bush has no primary opponent. He is thus able to spend his money from now to the Republican convention in September 2004, giving him a major edge for the fall campaign.
The disparity is so large that Representative Martin T. Meehan, the Lowell Democrat who coauthored the campaign law, said in an interview that Democratic candidates would be better off rejecting public financing and avoiding the attendant spending cap -- hardly the position of a reformer.
Where is Bush's money going to come from? Same places as before:
Bush, relying heavily on oil and financial interests, rejected public funding. Thus he didn't have to abide by the cap. As a result, he had about $100 million to spend, more than twice the sum raised by Gore, the Democratic nominee, who did agree to the cap.
Then came the campaign-finance law. Doubling the individual contribution is likely to double Bush's war chest to $200 million.
Meanwhile, the only organization that can give the Democratic nominee direct aid - the DNC - is strapped, starved. The Globe story points out that in it's current state, the party lacks the money to do an adequate job even of registering minority voters. That's something that can't be overlooked; as Jesse Jackson has been saying, "We must go South again." The Globe doesn't mention, however, that such tasks can be performed partly by other organizations acting independently, like the new $75 million effort planned by unions, women's rights groups, and George Soros.
No doubt, there's going to be a lot of finger-pointing going on -- at the campaign finance reformers in Congress, at the DNC for its reliance on the now-banned soft money. But there's no time for blame. It's time to remake the party, fast. Time to heed Kos, and the sudden jackpot wisdom of the Dean campaign. The Globe quotes former DNC chair Steve Grossman, now Dean's national cochair:
''The Democratic Party's salvation is to take a serious look at what the Dean campaign has done in terms of donor development and cultivation and to try to emulate that.''
Things the DNC needs to adopt and co-opt into a coherent structure, with a measure of centralized leadership and coordination: Jerry Lewis-style telethons for the wired world, and new local and national infrastructures developed via new tools like internet-arranged meetups -- which connect people, not just their money. And it needs to stay in step with the old infrastructures -- unions, enviromentalists, civil rights groups, etc. -- that are becoming increasingly interconnected themselves via new, movement-style connections.
1:28 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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