Volume 5

[rockysigman]

Nah, the Michigan quarterback situation is as important a current event as anything I can think of.

I agree with pretty much everything you said about the game. Interesting that Henne has already put in a pretty good game as a starter before he's even had his first class.

It was really weird watching that game on TV. That was the first home game that I wasn't at in 4 years.

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

A flavour of English analysis of the election campaigns, and Karl Rove:-

Rove's plan is simple: a mass mobilisation of the Republican base, coupled with a brutal media operation that has gone after Democratic nominee John Kerry's Vietnam record, seeking to portray the decorated veteran as a weak-willed liar.

Last week, the plan went like clockwork. The New York convention saw a series of brutal attacks on Kerry, lavish praise for Bush and dire warnings about the war on terror. The message was simple: America cannot risk electing Kerry. Bush was painted as a war leader; Kerry ridiculed as an untrustworthy flipflopper.

There has been a fundamental shift in the presidential race. Bush's offensive has left Kerry's campaign floundering. Last week, he shook up his top staff, bringing in Clinton era experts. He also went negative, too, lambasting Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney for dodging Vietnam. For Democrats that means Kerry, at last, has come out swinging.

But Republican strategists hope it may already be too late. After months of trailing, Bush has now moved decisively ahead in the polls. A Time poll had him with a huge 11-point lead. Another had him four points up.


But Rove is leaving nothing to chance. At a meeting last week of delegates from Ohio, perhaps the most important swing state in the race, Rove exhorted party members to greater efforts. 'Do more than you've ever done before,' he said 'We need to ask everyone we know to get involved in this crusade.'

Rove is credited with creating the Republicans' awesome machine. It is a huge pyramid, with Rove at its apex, feeding down in disciplined layer on layer into every county in every state in America. It has databases of tens of millions of voters, has signed up one million volunteers, has put field organisations in key states long before Democratic rivals and has poured millions of dollars into voter registration drives. Rove has learnt the lessons of 2000, when five states were decided by less than half a percentage point.

The media operation is equally sophisticated. Kerry's Vietnam record was meant to make the Democrats immune on national security. But Rove has a record of attacking opponents' strengths, not weaknesses. Kerry has faced a full-frontal assault by Republican leaders and shadowy surrogate groups, such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Kerry, a triple Purple Heart winner, has been left desperately fighting allegations that he betrayed fellow veterans by turning against the war.

Given that Bush himself dodged Vietnam when family connections got him a place in the National Guard, it was a stunning turnaround that Kerry's support among veterans proceeded to plummet.

The war on terror is key to Republican success. It is ever-present on the campaign trail and in television adverts. It was the main selling-point of the convention.

New York was a media triumph for the Republicans. Leaders of the Bush campaign have carefully distanced themselves from their dirty tricks squadrons. Instead, they relentlessly focused on the war on terror. Speaker after speaker, from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani to Bush himself, recalled in starkly personal terms they way they had dealt with the terrorist attacks of 11 September. The war in Iraq was artfully moulded into the war on terror. The message was simple: trust Bush to protect America from terrorist attacks. They have sought to make the election more about electing a commander-in-chief than a president.

The most devastating attack came from Zell Miller, a Democrat senator who has effectively defected to the Republicans. Miller laid into Kerry as not strong enough for the job. It was crude theatre. Miller listed defence cuts that he said Kerry had supported and then added: 'The man now wants to be the commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces? U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?'

Many pundits decried Miller's speech as over the top. But a survey of a focus group of swing voters in Ohio said they found the speech convincing. Miller's diatribe had hit home.

From a distance, at the start of last week, Kerry looked as if he didn't have a care in the world. Resting at his holiday home in Nantucket, he donned a wetsuit for a spot of windsurfing. A day later, he and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, took their motorboat out for a spin. They smiled and laughed as Kerry steered through the choppy waters.

But behind the scenes, the atmosphere was feverish. After a dreadful few weeks, the Kerry campaign has been gripped by rumours of a shake-up. Last week, Kerry and his campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, finally swooped. In came high-profile names from the Clinton era. Joe Lockhart, a former White House spokesman, will now join Kerry on his travels. Former Clinton adviser Joel Johnson will head a 'war room' to toughen up attacks.

Change was needed. Democrats were wrong-footed at their Boston convention. They stressed the importance of not 'Bush-bashing', only to be blown away by Republican attacks throughout late August. Kerry is also said to be furious at the lacklustre response to allegations about his Vietnam record. It put his campaign on the back foot, forcing them to fight on an issue (national security) they thought they had dealt with and keeping the election away from their core strengths, such as jobs and healthcare. 'They are allowing the Republicans to define the issues. You can't win an election that way,' said Ken Warren, a political scientist the University of St Louis.

But, Kerry's supporters say, there are two months to go. They insist, despite the last few polls, that the race is still on a knife-edge. They are probably right. There has already been a dramatic shift in gear. Last Friday, Democrats began a $45 million advertising campaign in 20 states, spending more than half of their remaining funds. Kerry also held a midnight rally after Bush's speech that forced him on to the television networks. He used the opportunity to accuse Bush and Cheney of skipping their Vietnam service. 'I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have,' he said.

That could be a fruitful line of attack. Already Bush's hell-raising youth and National Guard service are moving back onto the agenda. Ben Barnes, a Texas politician who says he secured Bush's place in the Air National Guard, is expected to give a TV interview as early as this week. 'I'll have something to say about that,' he told The Observer.

A video of Barnes is already circulating on the internet. It was shot several months ago, at a pro-Kerry rally in Austin, Texas. In it, the former lieutenant-governor of the state is blunt. 'I got a young man named George W. Bush into the National Guard,' he says. He then describes how he was spurred to speak out after visiting a Vietnam memorial and feeling guilt at all the sons of the rich and powerful whom he had helped avoid being sent overseas. 'I became more ashamed of myself than I had ever been,' he said.

Suddenly America's already bitter, dirty and divisive election has just slipped even further downhill. It is possible that Rove may regret the direction in which the campaign is going. Probably not. One of his first political experiences on a national level was in 1973, when he was accused of holding seminars for college Republicans on dirty tricks techniques.

So much is now at stake. Away from Iraq and the war on terror, many Democrats are deeply afraid of the domestic agenda of a Bush second term. Bush has vowed to move on abortion rights, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and make his tax cuts permanent.

Social and religious conservatives are now firmly in control of the Republican Party. In New York, reporters were banned from a rally of Christian conservatives at the Waldorf-Astoria. Inside speakers debated fighting abortion and trying to remove the separation between church and state in American life.

For Democrats, that meeting was a stark example of the importance of this election. Many Republicans, who regard themselves in a 'culture war' with a liberal elite, probably felt the same. But as Republicans left New York last week, they were confident that their side is winning.

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

I guess the moral is that Kerry has finally acknowledged the simple truth of modern elections - if your opponents go negative and employ dirty tricks, you have to do the same. The Democrats will not win while they insist on playing comparatively honourably, and one only hopes for their sake they've not realised it too late.

The other aspect of that article that concerned me was the stuff about christian conservatism being more influential, and the idea of more closely linking church and state, impinging on womens' abortion rights etc. Is that an accurate or fair charge? Are the lunatics increasingly in danger of taking over the Republican asylum?

[Dr. Drum]

RocDoc said:

The lowered electricity amount....hmmm....Western expertise...

In the face of what? Shit infrastructure which has been made even MORE shit for a time, at least, by some sort of (I'd have to suppose by your estimation then) 'minor insurrection' (which of course should be considered NO barrier to 'progess' especially when it's Western-style)which actually keeps the contractors trying to resurrect this inferior system through superhuman means, at fear of being taken hostage by *GASP* the very people who they are trying to help...

My point wasn’t that resistance to the occupation is irrelevant, it was that your basic assumption – we're talking about a country which always during it's MOST 'civilised' most technologically advanced days during Sodom's reign had near constant power outages – is incorrect. Iraq was a developing country, its infrastructure wasn’t uniformly up to Western standards but there was a time, before the wars and sanctions, when Iraq was a regional leader in fields like education and health care. It’s infrastructure didn’t alway SUCK, there was a level of prosperity and a middle class – it was in fact civilized, even if its government and political system was not.

Two points on the 4500 mW electrical output pre-invasion vs. 4300 mW in June 2004: the latter figure isn’t attributable solely to sabotage by the Iraqi resistance. One of the problems has been a huge black market for commodities like copper electrical wire since the end of the war, which goes back to some of the stuff Mary was mentioning from the Klein article about mass firings and the general impoverishment of the population. The other point is the pre-war figure wasn’t attained under the best of conditions either – the country was under UN sanctions – and was presumably suffering similar material shortages.

[chrisfan]

JesusLooksLikeMe said:

I guess the moral is that Kerry has finally acknowledged the simple truth of modern elections - if your opponents go negative and employ dirty tricks, you have to do the same. The Democrats will not win while they insist on playing comparatively honourably, and one only hopes for their sake they've not realised it too late.

The other aspect of that article that concerned me was the stuff about christian conservatism being more influential, and the idea of more closely linking church and state, impinging on womens' abortion rights etc. Is that an accurate or fair charge? Are the lunatics increasingly in danger of taking over the Republican asylum?

JLLM, part of me doesn't even know why I'm responding, because I know that you're not giong to believe what I say over the British media anyway. But I almost wish I had it in my budget to send you a plane ticket so you could come here and actually see what is going on, and how things have been working. You comment that Kerry is "finally learning" that he has to go negative. As someone who has been watching the tactics ofboth sides first hand, rather than by relying on media reports (which are inaccurate an distorted -- there are several things reported in that piece as fact, which at the very best would be reported here as "alleged") I can assure you that the negative attacks on Bush have been coming for about a year now. John Kerry and the Democrats have not been a bunch of nice cordial pussies who've been beat up, and are FINALLY fighting back. BOTH sides have been negative. BOTH sides have been coming out swinging. In fact, there was a great deal of frustration in Republican circles during the primary season that the Democrats were coming out hard slamming Bush, and he was not defending himself.

I'll continue saying it, and you'll most likely continue to not believe it ... but your perceptions of what is happening in this election appear to have no basis in fact.

[Proud]

as expected, bill clinton's surgery is successful.

i'm glad that's over with... hopefully bill's health'll be good for a long time coming. he's only 58... he's gotta have at least another good 20, maybe around 30 years in 'im, if he stays healthy. since he's a former president, i'm sure he gets some fine treatment...

well, everything's good now. phew.

[stratman19]

JesusLooksLikeMe said:

I guess the moral is that Kerry has finally acknowledged the simple truth of modern elections - if your opponents go negative and employ dirty tricks, you have to do the same. The Democrats will not win while they insist on playing comparatively honourably, and one only hopes for their sake they've not realised it too late.

The other aspect of that article that concerned me was the stuff about christian conservatism being more influential, and the idea of more closely linking church and state, impinging on womens' abortion rights etc. Is that an accurate or fair charge? Are the lunatics increasingly in danger of taking over the Republican asylum?

Sorry JLLM, but I for one, am not going to bite on this one. It's clear you have your left wing bias (and that's ok) and preconceived notions in your mind, of how things are here. I doubt there's much I could say to change that. You'd be much better off just asking American liberals here your questions, as they would be much more likely to tell you exactly what you want to hear (preaching to the choir, as it were). I'm mildly surprised that Chrisfan had the guts to even take a stab at it. A futile exercise, but good for her.

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

Well thanks for the response chrisfan. If what you say is true (and I have no reason to believe otherwise, as you're a lot closer to the action than me) then it begs the question of why the British media is so consistent in painting a contrary picture.

I suspect that the British media is very anti-Bush, just as it is increasingly anti-Blair... and I think in our left-wing media this clearly stems from both the Iraq War, and the resultant kicking that the BBC took in the Hutton report. In our right-wing media it probably has something to do with Bush getting along with Blair, and refusing to meet Michael Howard (Tory leader) because he's taken a "Kerry position" on Iraq.

So yeah, I'm prepared to concede on this issue chrisfan, because I'm getting my stuff third-hand through a biased British media, and you're simply in a much better position to see the truth of the matter than I am.

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

stratman19 said:

Sorry JLLM, but I for one, am not going to bite on this one. It's clear you have your left wing bias (and that's ok) and preconceived notions in your mind, of how things are here. I doubt there's much I could say to change that. You'd be much better off just asking American liberals here your questions, as they would be much more likely to tell you exactly what you want to hear (preaching to the choir, as it were). I'm mildly surprised that Chrisfan had the guts to even take a stab at it. A futile exercise, but good for her.

Hmmm, not sure what to say to this. I'm not exactly a radical left-winger these days. More centrist really. I do, however, get extermely alarmed at any prospect of church and state mixing too closely, and I was merely ASKING the question of whether this might happen in the US during a Bush second term (as the article I pasted seemed to be implying). Is that a problem?

[Dr. Drum]

Mouthing the dreaded "C" word – what has the cult of Blair done to you, JLLM? And you don’t actually believe that tripe about the Republicans, do you?

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

Dr. said:

Mouthing the dreaded "C" word – what has the cult of Blair done to you, JLLM? And you don’t actually believe that tripe about the Republicans, do you?

Well, this issue has come up a few times now, and I've yet to see any Americans on this board saying that Chrisfan has got it wrong, so I'll just have to assume that she's right and that both sides are being equally negative.

As for centrist... well, I guess that would still make me liberal/leftist by American standdards. But in European terms I've never been particularly radical or left-wing. That's why I'm a long-time admirer of Blair.

[chrisfan]

I thought this was an interesting piece, and falls in line with the current discussion ...

Bush-beating is nothing but snobbery
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 07/09/2004)

In Sunday's Observer, Robert McCrum observed: "Today, by some margin, George W Bush is the most despised figure in America." Really? The paper sent McCrum to America to interview nine novelists about the election. That's the first mistake right there: shipping a guy 3,000 miles to take the pulse of the nation by interviewing a bunch of guys who already agree with him. One of the reasons why the Bush-despisers will be waking up stunned on the morning of November 3 is because they spend way too much time talking to each other and sustaining each other's delusions.



"These guys are out of touch with reality," twitters Wallace Shawn, referring to Bush and Dick Cheney rather than himself and McCrum. "They could - and probably will - do anything. This is the scariest I've known it."

If the graduates of the creative writing schools are beginning to sound drearily predictable, the humdrum gentlemen of the press are writing ever more creatively. Just over a month ago, John Kerry gave his "I'm reporting for duty" convention speech. I thought it was typical Kerry - "verbose, shapeless, platitudinous, complacent, ill-disciplined, arrogant, and humourless," as I wrote in the Telegraph back then. But what do I know? The American media hailed it as a triumph.

A day or two later, the numbers came in and showed that Kerry's "triumph" had mysteriously not prompted the traditional post-convention bounce in the polls. Even Michael Dukakis got a bounce. But not Kerry. Indeed, according to Gallup, he had the first recorded instance of negative bounce. Fortunately, the Dems and their chums in the press were able to reassure themselves that this lack of bounce didn't mean anything.

"Just before the convention, polls showed that many more Americans than usual had already made up their minds about whom to support, leaving a small number of undecided voters to woo," explained Bill Straub of the Scripps-Howard news service. As for the Republican convention, "Bush is similarly unlikely to see his poll numbers flourish."

Ingenious! It was the instant conventional wisdom. There are no swing voters left to bounce. The post-convention bounce is no longer relevant. It's a thing of the past. It belongs to the age of buggy whips and whalebone corsets. Forget about it. We're living in the post-bounce era of American politics. Only a chump not up to speed on this new political reality would be dumb enough to suggest that the absence of bounce is because Kerry's Vietnam-retro acceptance speech was a flop.

Last Thursday, Bush gave his speech. Unlike Kerry's "triumph", this was a dud. "Too long," yawned Bob Schiefer on CBS. He lost the crowd, alienated moderates, etc. Then the Time and Newsweek polls came in, and showed Bush with an 11-point lead over Kerry. How did that happen? Whatever became of the post-bounce era of American politics?

Not to worry. The new conventional wisdom is that it was the sheer meanness of the Republicans that earned them the bounce, and so Kerry's hitting back saying he's not going to be criticised by a President and Vice-President who weren't in Vietnam. If you didn't serve in Vietnam, you can't criticise John Kerry. On the other hand, if you did serve in Vietnam and you criticise John Kerry, that just means you're a "Republican smear artist". Either way, don't criticise John Kerry, because, if you do, he'll spend his next 10 campaign rallies droning on about how he's not going to take criticism.

The Kerry campaign is a bore that's degenerating into a laughing stock.

"Bush-despising" is no doubt very comforting to McCrum's beleaguered literati but in the end it's little more than snobbery - fine for cocktail condescension but utterly inadequate for an election campaign. You can't beat something with nothing, and Kerry is about as spectacular a nothing as you could devise - a thin-skinned whiny vanity candidate who persists in deluding himself that Bush's advantage is all down to "smears" and "lies" and "mean" "attacks". It's not.

Bush's something is very simple: his view of the war on terror resonates with a majority of the American people; when he talks about 9/11 and the aftermath, they recognise themselves in his words; they trust his strategy on this issue. For an inarticulate man, he communicates a lot more effectively than Senator Nuancy Boy.

Wallace Shawn, by contrast, is a writer, a man who makes his living by words and yet devalues his own currency. Is the Bush-Cheney tyranny truly a "scary" time for him? Is he really "scared"? Of course not. He's having a convivial drink with a fawning Brit interviewer; what could be more agreeable?

"Scary" is - to pluck at random - being held hostage in a school gym and the kid next to you is parched and asks for water and the terrorist stabs him in the belly in front of your eyes. "Scary" cannot encompass both that situation and Wallace Shawn's vague distaste for Bush without losing all meaning.

"This Russian school business works for the Republicans," a Democrat griped to me over the weekend. Alas, it does - because it's a reminder for those who need it that the war on terror isn't some racket cooked up to boost Halliburton profits but a profound challenge to America and the world.

Could what happened in Beslan happen in the US? Two months ago, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported on a fellow called Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, a suspected terrorist who'd fought with his fellow jihadi in Chechnya and somehow wound up in Minnesota, where he'd applied for licences to transport hazardous materials and drive school buses.

Americans who care about this stuff know where George W Bush stands. They're not sure where the Democrats do - sometimes it's full-scale Michael Moore denial, at other times it's going through the multilateral motions with Kofi and Co. No point on that continuum is of sufficient electoral appeal.

Last week, apropos the Islamists' impressive mound of Israeli, Nepalese and Russian corpses, Kofi Annan's office issued the following statement: "The secretary-general strongly condemns all hostage-takings and killings of innocent civilians."

Or, as Cole Porter wrote in Friendship: "If they ever put a bullet through your brain, I'll complain."

That's the UN policy on Sudan. Americans don't want it to be the policy in the war on terror. That's why they'll stick with Bush.

[chrisfan]

For anyone interested in the polling, I think this link gives a really good breakdown of how things stand:

realclearpolitics.com/Presidential_04/RCP_EC.html

[JesusLooksLikeMe]

That's a sharp article, and has a lot of good points in it that the left should digest.

There was an excellent article by Bruce Anderson in yesterday's Independent newspaper that touched on many of the same points.
Anderson also pointed out that the Republicans have a "clear, simple narrative" both on terrorism and the economy which voters can digest, and enough seem to accept to win. Kerry, on the other hand, "can't seem to decide whether he is a fiscal conservative or whether he wants to spend even more than Bush. He sometimes implies that higher taxes on the rich would be sufficient to reduce the deficit and pay for additional spending... [people] know that two plus two does not equal 18. In manufacturing states Kerry has flirted with Protectionism... a larger number of Americans' living standards depend on free trade."

On terorism and the Iraq war, Anderson asserts that Kerry is even more implausible and contradictory.

Not only this, but Kerry's campaign strategy has been misjudged so far, and in any case it is handicapped by Kerry's biggest liability: himself. Kerry, Anderson notes, is a man who seems to inspire little respect or liking even amongst his closest allies. Americans will certainly not find him more likeable than Bush in the upcoming Presidential debates.

*************************************

All of which makes grim reading. As for me, I wonder why the Democrats chose Kerry given his lack of charisma. And why does Kerry seem to have no simple theme or message? What does he stand for? Does he really think he can win a Presidency by saying "I served in Vietnam and I'm not George Bush"??

[Dr. Drum]

JesusLooksLikeMe said:

Well, this issue has come up a few times now, and I've yet to see any Americans on this board saying that Chrisfan has got it wrong, so I'll just have to assume that she's right and that both sides are being equally negative.

I don’t for a moment think Democrats are choirboys, JLLM, but I also don’t think the issue is negativity per se. All electoral campaigns issue both positive and negative statements in varying measure. The issue is whether these are informative or misleading. Quite obvious that the Republicans have been relying on the
latter.