JUSIPER
Monday, October 13, 2003
Clark campaign monopolizes Google advertising for "Dean"
Do a Google search for the word "Dean", and take a look at the Sponsored Link that appears on the right.
6:52 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sunday, October 12, 2003
Union kicks lapdog
So the California prison guards ended up not supporting the the best friend they ever had. Serves him right.
12:07 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Finally time to play the Plame game?
Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame are considering socking it to the Bush administration with a civil suit - the very thing that former Nixon counsel John Dean has called "one of the hidden keys to Watergate". The threat of a subpoena scared the bejeevers out of Nixon's men, Dean says, and forced a turning point on the scandal by putting the White House on the defensive.
Such a move seems especially important given the inexplicable silence of the Dem candies on the Plame affair. (A silence which, by the way, I need some help understanding, if anyone has any thoughts ...)
10:35 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday, October 08, 2003
The French get 20% of NBC
But to do us the service of scrapping NBC's news division (save Chris Matthews) and Saturday Night Live and rebuilding them from scratch they would still need 31% more.
My understanding is that the new company's slogan will in fact not be "We make Queer Eye... and lots of missiles!" Please correct your notes accordingly.
3:25 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Someone's fuming privately ...
Phil Carter at Intel Dump is convinced that the White House's new plans for managing Iraq means Donald Rumsfeld "has been cut out of the loop".
12:11 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Take a walk on the bright side
This morning brings bad news from California, but not a total disaster. Let's look at the bright side:
(1) Prop 54 lost.
(2) It's likely that efforts will quicken to pass a constitutional amendment allowing immigrants to run for president. That won't meet with approval from all Republicans. If McClintock's campaign was any indication, the chance of an amendment that would allow Arnold to be the party's nominee in 2008 (or beyond) will horrify some on the right, and possibly pry open lingering splits in the party.
(3) The recall of one executive paves the rhetorical path for the rejection of another. Democrats need to start making a big deal out of Californians' desire for fiscal responsibility, trustworthiness, and a leader who looks out for ordinary people rather than big corporations and link it to the presidency. Onto the bigger battle.
11:51 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Security and Accountability
Since September 11, 2001, the federal government has been trying to improve its oversight of visitors to the U.S. Specifically, the Department of Homeland Security has established the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT), a massive program to "strengthen management of the pre-entry, entry, status and exit of foreign nationals."
So how's it going? Not too hot, according to a recent GAO report (GAO-03-1083), which states:
[A]lthough the program has governmentwide scope, an accountable governance structure to direct and oversee the program that reflects this scope is not yet established. In addition, a US-VISIT program management capability has yet to be established, important aspects defining the program's operating environment are not decided … and the mission value to be derived from the program's initial operating capability is unknown.
That sounds pretty bad. But just to be sure, I asked a management consultant what all the jargon really means.
"They don't know what they're doing," she translated. "They've got nothing."
A month earlier (in report GAO-03-760), the GAO looked at another key DHS initiative, the development of a homeland security blueprint, called an "enterprise architecture," to integrate the sharing of information among different levels of government to prevent terrorism. That's not going too well, either. Turns out that federal, state and city agencies don’t routinely share their data on terrorist methods, techniques or threats, and the material they do share isn't regarded as timely, relevant or even accurate. "Overall, no level of government perceived the process as effective," the GAO stated, "particularly when sharing information with federal agencies." Maybe that's because federal agencies haven't even established procedures to promote information sharing yet.
Makes you wonder: just how long a grace period should the Bush Administration get before it is held accountable for not controlling our borders or coordinating its own data on terrorism? Even if you give them a mulligan for the nine months leading up to 9-11, the two years since sure seems like enough.
10:44 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Monday, October 06, 2003
Hugs vs battery
How fortunate for Arnold that few California voters actually bothered reading the original Los Angeles Times story. He is now allowed to conflate an innocent hug he didn't initiate with clear cases of workplace sexual harassment and serial sexual battery.
Despite the seriousness of the women's charges and the threat they posed to his campaign, Schwarzenegger managed to find a bit of levity.
After downing a protein burger —without a bun — at an In-N-Out restaurant in Merced, the actor received a warm hug from a local woman.
Schwarzenegger laughed and told her, "Don't do it. Don't do it. Otherwise it will be in the paper again."
9:22 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Sunday, October 05, 2003
Je ne regrette rien
As of last week, one and a half million absentee ballots had already been filed in California out of three million that were sent out.
Campaigns serve, ideally, an educational purpose for an electorate. When voters make their decisions before a campaign has gotten underway, one can end up getting weird results. Perhaps the thousands whose mail-in ballots helped Steve Forbes win Arizona in 1996, had they waited, might have rather voted for Bob Dole to stop Pat Buchanan, fresh off his New Hampshire victory. Had mail-in ballots been used during the 1992 campaign, Ross Perot might have won a few extra percentage points among those who voted prior to the infamous 60 Minutes broadcast.
In short, there is a learning process during a campaign, and it is richest in the week or two prior to an election, when newspapers, candidate forums, debates, and one's fellow voters can bring out sometimes unexpected truths.
If the latest allegations cause a massive swing against Arnold (by no means a certainty at this point) the recall may succeed anyway on the strength of absentee ballots. It wouldn't be the first time this happened in California politics, say Howard Fienberg and Iain Murray:
Empirical evidence of [absentee ballot] impact on exit polling arose as early as the 1982 California election, when exit polls predicted Democrat Tom Bradley would defeat Republican George Deukmejian for the governorship and that Democrat Jerry Brown would defeat Republican Pete Wilson for U.S. Senate. Both predictions were wrong because so many Republican voters cast absentee ballots.
In the 2002 election, only seven million Californians bothered voting. So far, nearly one million women have already cast their ballots. If Mr. Schwarzenegger is victorious, I wonder how many of them will regret their complicity in his success.
11:25 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saturday, October 04, 2003
All time low
From today’s LA Times:
Indeed, many of his supporters seemed to brush aside the accusations. In a visit to a building materials company in Santa Clarita, a woman shouted: "He can grope me!"
9:50 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Friday, October 03, 2003
Thursday, October 02, 2003
Smiles at the Commerce Committee
In the policy free environment that is Maureen Dowd’s brain (neocon Josh Chafetz has the last word on this), there is little room for anything but the personal. Call me a sucker, but maybe that’s why today’s Joseph Wilson profile seemed to be her best work in years, aided no doubt by great material and an extremely quotable and rather sassy couple.
As for Wilson, how perfect is it that he was a Bush supporter until South Carolina? What I would have paid to have been in McCain’s office this morning.
1:39 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Truthtelling
Peter reports that this was the song Bruce Springsteen opened his Shea Stadium concert with last night, following a rather extraordinary video montage on the war.
12:20 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Here come the WMD's
By the end of the war, the Bush Administration seemed to have lowered the threshold for WMD down to hand grenades. I guess it's a meaningless word now, but here's a country that's well on its way to having them as they were previously defined.
UPDATE: Some of the obsequious reporters at the Kay/Rockefeller/Roberts press conference today were clearly dazed at the bombast of latecomer Porter Goss, who used the occasion to scream about the great job people in the intelligence world were doing -- a great feint. But when a reporter had the temerity to suggest that the question wasn't about the intelligence community's good faith but the administration's, Goss very nearly became unhinged. Good thing no one asked him about Korea.
12:16 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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$55 billion more for Iraq?
The Bush Administration would have done better to have asked for $200 billion right off the bat; when you are talking about numbers that huge, who is really going to notice the difference? If they start asking for billions more every few weeks, this issue is going to have legs well into 2004.
12:02 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Wednesday, October 01, 2003
The Haggis is in the fire for sure: Dean, Gephardt and Medicare (Part 2)
(Read Part 1)
Let's be clear about three things. First, Dean spent his entire tenure as governor of Vermont trying to extend health insurance to all its citizens. Indeed, the 1995 battle over Medicare took place while Dean was seeking a waiver from the federal government to extend Medicaid to people with earnings of up to 150% of the poverty line.
In February 1995, Dean proposed giving states control of Medicaid, but only if the federal government maintained responsibility for children under the age of 18. "That would solve the problem for those who want a block grant and the problem for those of us like myself who feel very strongly that children are a federal interest, and a national interest," he said. In contrast, the GOP Medicaid proposal would, he told PBS' Robert MacNeil on September 21, "result in children losing health care and in old people being kicked out of nursing homes, and there are no two ways about that."
In July of that year, Dean told the Washington Post: "As you control costs you must expand coverage. We have expanded individuals covered as we have worked hard to restrain costs. That is where the congressional plan falls apart. It helps to balance the budget but does nothing to move toward universal coverage in the private system. The Republicans are missing a wonderful opportunity to expand coverage, not reduce it."
Keep those quotes in mind the next time you hear Gephardt assailing Dean on health care.
Second, Dean did try different tactics on health care, and sometimes experimented with unorthodox ideas. Originally, he had a plan for universal coverage; when that got blown out of the water, he went back to the drawing board, eventually implementing reforms that cover all of Vermont's children and offer prescription benefits to one-third of its senior citizens. That's what good governors, and good leaders, do.
And let's face it: Medicare could use some creative thinking. Over the span of its lifetime, the program has been an enormous success. (On a personal note, Medicare saved the lives of my father and my grandmother by paying for operations and care my family certainly could not have afforded.) But as it's currently run, Medicare has lots of kinks. It contains no prescription drug benefit, as you may have heard, nor does it offer catastrophic coverage. Medicare Part A (which covers hospital stays) has very high deductibles, while Medicare Part B (which covers doctor visits and outpatient care) has very low deductibles. So total costs keep zooming up every year, yet many individuals have to buy "medigap" insurance to cover what Medicare doesn't.
A lot of Medicare's problems stem from the fact that there is a disconnect between what seniors pay (their premiums) and what they get (their benefits), making it difficult to enact fundamental changes even though Congress micro-manages certain aspects of the program. The result is a pretty encrusted bureaucracy. Prescription drugs aren't part of Medicare for any good reason -- they simply weren't as important to medicine in 1965 as they became in the '90s, and it's taken the system a decade to catch up.
Finding a way to make Medicare more responsive to its recipients' needs while funding it fully is an incredibly important job for the next Democratic president. But -- and here's the third point -- some candidates will always try to score points with the party's key constituents by scaring the hell out of them. These candidates aren't populists or "paleoliberals." They're reactionary partisans, vowing to protect the programs that help the party's base against all change, even potential improvements.
Gephardt in his current incarnation is a full-throated reactionary partisan, slamming "ambiguity on the question of who will better protect our seniors" and proudly trumpeting his opposition to NAFTA. It's as though we live in a world where the '90s never happened, as though Bill Clinton never demonstrated (if sometimes accidentally) that market forces can be yoked to the common good, both inside government programs and throughout the larger economy. Republicans don't really care about that fact, but Democrats must.
Of course, Gephardt is pandering largely because he's desperate to stop Dean in Iowa, a state heavily populated by seniors, farmers and union members. But he should remember what happened to Gore, who campaigned as a reactionary partisan to bludgeon Bradley in 2000 before re-emerging at the Democratic convention as a born-again populist. Gore's exaggerations and relentless attacks pushed him ahead in New Hampshire and secured him the nomination, but they also earned him widespread scorn. And later, when he came up against an opponent whose proposals really were worth deriding, Gore found voters did not trust him to draw policy distinctions. Sometimes means matter.
With his abysmal performance in the 2002 elections capping a long list of moves that have driven the Democrats into a congressional minority, there's no evidence that Gephardt knows how to win national elections. If the other candidates are smart, they won't let his tone-deaf cries of wolf dominate this primary season.
3:49 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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South Carolina numbers
There is a lot to think about in the latest South Carolina poll. One of them, of course, is the implosion of the Lieberman campaign. At this point it does not appear he’ll even get to third place in the first three states. Another is the inability of New England candidates Dean and Kerry to connect with local Democratic voters despite a lot of money and a ground operation. Still another is Edwards’ lead, which gives him some breathing room and a reason not to drop out; indeed, if Dean can’t convert an Iowa/New Hampshire victory into a strong showing in South Carolina, look for Super Tuesday to go very badly for him indeed. The other Southern candidate, Clark, is already in second place here.
But to me the most interesting thing about the poll is Carol Moseley Braun’s numbers; she has gone to 4, with Sharpton at 5. Name recognition has gone up quite a bit but remains at only 44%, while Sharpton’s has remained at a relatively constant 70%. Which suggests that Braun has a better shot at improving her numbers than Sharpton, since he may already have the support of those who might consider him. All of which only goes to show one thing: that Donna Brazile is a genius.
8:55 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Do acts of treason demand a Patriot's response?
I'm waiting eagerly for John Ashcroft to use the Patriot Act to demand the White House's phone records so he can nab the official who blew Valerie Plame's cover. Oh, wait, I forgot: the government's new tools against terrorism, like the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security, are supposed to be used only for fighting terrorism ... and for tracking down Texas politicians. Not for an offense that was once called merely an act of treason by President George H. W. Bush.
8:22 AM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Barbara makes it to New York
Barbara Walters emails me every week with the latest on 20/20 and life in general. It is invariably one of my week's highlights. Here is an excerpt from the top broadcast journalist and latest epistle:
What with blackouts and hurricanes, air travel last week was a mess. A lot of you, I know, have real horror stories — mine is sort of a near-miss: I got on the wrong airplane! It was the kind of thing that happens in bad movies or real nightmares.
I was sitting on an airplane on the ground in Los Angeles, talking to my office on the phone, when I heard two other passengers discussing our arrival time in Boston. "Boston!," I said to them, "This plane is going to New York, isn't it?" Turns out it wasn't — but I was able to get off just before they closed the door and I made it to the correct flight. Television I know something about, but I have a lot to learn about airports …
The reason for my trip to Los Angeles was an interview with a couple who beat the Hollywood odds-makers. Four years ago, the Tinseltown take on the marriage of Courtney Cox (of Friends) and David Arquette was "It'll never last." How they worked through their own personal and professional problems is a fascinating story — one which we'll bring you in a few weeks. I'll have more to tell you soon.
11:14 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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Saving grace
The first thing I saw on the CNN airport channel as I arrived back in the US today was the translator scandal. Saddening and shameful as the affair seemed from my seat at JFK, my heart was suddenly filled with great consolation at the thought that however much these young men might have betrayed their own nation, at least they weren't gay.
10:58 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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The Haggis is in the fire for sure: Dean, Gephardt and Medicare (Part 1)
For more than two weeks now, Dick Gephardt has been attacking Howard Dean for allegedly siding with Newt Gingrich during the battles over Medicare in the mid-'90s.
Here's Gephardt in New York, for example, at last week's Democratic debate: "When I was leading the fight against Newt Gingrich … Howard, you were agreeing with the very plan Newt Gingrich wanted to pass, which was a $270 billion cut in Medicare."
Could this be true, the left-wing governor of Vermont as erstwhile fifth columnist for the GOP? You can't tell by reading the New York Times. Last Friday, the "paper of record" ran a story headlined, "Dean on Medicare: Looking at Record," but author David Rosenbaum wrote of Dean, "it is not clear he ever endorsed Mr. Gingrich's proposal."
Um, I thought it was the Times' job to make these things clear, but I guess not. So allow me.
Gephardt is lying.
On September 16, 1995, The Manchester Union Leader reported Dean's reaction to the Republican plan for Medicare:
"Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said the proposed cuts in Medicare mean he is expected to run his state 'with a lot less money' and no time to establish new guidelines to comply with the changes.
'How the hell are we expected to do that?' he asked. 'That mandate is going to put me into debt.'"
Earlier in 1995, Dean had offered support for a budget-balancing plan devised by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.Mex.). Ultimately, however, Dean opposed the budget bill that Republicans rammed through Congress that year, which led to the federal government shutdown – the "very plan Newt Gingrich wanted
to pass."
We have reached a new and critical phase in the 2004 campaign: the point at which candidates who are afraid they are about to fall off the table not only target a front-runner for attack, but smear that rival, too.
The dissemination of misleading information has become a cottage industry within modern political campaigns, replete with aides eager to explain how all of their bosses' allegations are technically correct. The Gephardt campaign, for instance, is now running a website called "DeanFacts.com," where you can find two paragraphs carefully sourced to the May 18, 1995 issue of the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, including this quote:
"'I fully subscribe to the notion that we should reduce the Medicare growth rate from 10 percent to 7 percent, or less if possible,' Dean said."
Now, here's a section of the Times Argus piece that the Gephardt site does not mention:
"Dean had harsh words for what he called the 'radical right wing' in Congress, primarily members of the House, and Gingrich's Contract With America."
Here's another:
"The Vermont governor has been an outspoken critic of the Contract With America, which he continued to describe Wednesday as the 'Contract on America.'"
Just for fun, here's one more:
"He [Dean] said the 10-point plan was flawed because it was short-sighted. According to Dean, the Contract calls for reducing federal support for programs that will show results far in the future, such as child nutrition programs, job training and education."
Gephardt has usually been a bit more careful in attacking Dean than he was in New York. For example, in Des Moines on September 12, he said: "It was in this period when Gingrich said Republicans wouldn't immediately kill Medicare. Instead, they would let it wither on the vine. And it was also during this time that Howard Dean, as chairman of the National Governors Association, was supporting Republican efforts to scale back Medicare."
You see, if you are a reporter or other obsessive personality checking this statement, you will find that Dean offered support to Domenici's efforts to balance the budget, which makes Gephardt's second sentence factually accurate. But if you're a voter who listens to the sentences back-to-back, it won't matter that Domenici is a fair-minded man, a principled legislator and no Newt Gingrich. Or that Domenici's plan was not "the very plan" Gingrich backed, and was instead actually quite similar in some ways to one of Bill Clinton's budget proposals. All you will hear is the equation: Gingrich = death of Medicare = Dean.
The stringing together of discrete facts into a chain that elides the truth is a tactic that Al Gore perfected in 2000. Those were the days when Gore claimed Bill Bradley voted against flood relief for Iowa's farmers, said Bradley's health care plan would deprive AIDS victims of health care and even told an Apollo Theater audience, "You know, racial profiling practically began in New Jersey." Each charge had a nugget of statistical backup; each was nevertheless hugely misleading.
It's extremely tough to figure out how to respond to such mischaracterizations during a campaign. Ignore the jabs, as Bradley did, and you will bleed. Slap back, and like NBA refs who call fouls on the second shove, the public and press may turn on you. Complain about the attacks, as John McCain did in 2000, and you not only risk coming across as a whiner, but you also shift the focus of your campaign from substance to process — an especially lethal diversion for an insurgent. Somehow, Dean has to communicate his position on Medicare, and how it's changed in the past eight years, without seeming defensive.
UPDATE: Read Part 2.
10:29 PM | Post or Read Comments (0)
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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