Category: Politics

Mickey Kaus is not a guy I count on to get it right that often, but his endorsement of Kerry is rooted in a clarity of vision that I’ve seen from barely any pundit. I’m gonna go ahead and quote this, since he doesn’t have permalinks:

What’s at stake isn’t how to give millions of relatively healthy Americans better health care. It’s how to stop millions of relatively healthy Americans (and other humans) from eventually dying at the hands of aggrieved groups who will in coming decades a) find it easier and easier to organize, thanks to the Web, and b) be increasingly be able to get their hands on increasingly destructive weapons, especially bioweapons. I get this basic framework from my colleague Robert Wright’s excellent series on terrorism, available here. (For appropriate accompanying atmospherics, I recommend the unsuccessful but eerily prescient film Twelve Monkeys.) Currently the dominant threat is Islamic extremist terrorism. But after that it will be some other flavor of terrorism—environmental radicals, perhaps, or animal rights fanatics, or separatists, or superempowered Columbine nihilists, or all of them at once.

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In the larger war on terror, however, it’s no contest. Both candidates will hunt down and kill existing terrorists. The issue is how many new terrorists are we creating—as Donald Rumsfeld famously wrote, “Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get.’?” Let’s say that n is the number of net new terrorists who’ll come online in the next four years. Isn’t it obvious that n is a lot lower if Kerry is president than if Bush is president? Even if you think the Iraq war was worth fighting, as it may well turn out in the long run to have been, it’s hard to deny that it has angered millions around the world, and that Bush is a focal point of their anger. A tiny but definitely non-trivial percentage of these people will be angry enough to try to do us harm, and as the years go by technology will make it easier for them to accomplish this. We lower the volume of lethal hatred simply by thanking Bush for his efforts and retiring him.

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I’m continually amazed that bloggers, of all people, don’t appreciate the way intensely motivated individuals, operating without centralized state (or any other) control, can be empowered by new technology to do us tremendous harm. To put it in mundane current blogospheric terms, when it comes to preventing future attacks, the terrorists will more and more come to resemble bloggers in their pajamas and America will come to resemble CBS. That’s not a position we should be comfortable in. (Yes, it may be hard for small groups of non-state bloggers to develop nuclear weapons. But it might not be hard to acquire nuclear weapons. And bioweapons may well be developable by alarmingly small groups.)

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

If the Democratic Party expects to maintain moral high ground this election, there’s going to have to be a lot less of this sort of thing.

CNN’s Carlos Watson thinks it’s a tight race, but he’d call it for Kerry after months of thinking Bush had it in the bag. I think he’s being pretty realistic. Eleanor Clift, over at Newsweek, uses much of the same reasoning to predict a Kerry win.

Once again, it’s about the end game. As I’ve said before, Kerry has the superior end game. Rove is terrifying, sure, but he’s known for slinging mud well before the election. He is not so good at handling those last few days. Remember in 2000, when he made the nearly fatal mistake of sending Bush to California in the closing days of the election? Whouley and Sasso have proven experience as closers. That’ll show this year.

In fact, it already is.

Ron Suskind has a nice archive of Bush White House documents that he’s releasing now and again. Interesting stuff. One recent piece of interest was this projection of oil price rises following an invasion of Iraq. Suskind notes the optimism inherent in the assumption that oil prices will be the only thing affected. Me, I notice the optimism that $45 a barrel is the worst case scenario. We’ve beaten that by $7 a barrel, for reasons that the memo doesn’t even speculate on. Namely, terrorist action to prevent the flow of oil.

Your article of the day is from Fox News, and it says that Bush is leading Kerry by 2% in the polls.

“Um, how is this good news for Kerry?”

The key paragraphs are paragraphs two and three, which read:

These new poll results show a slight dip in polling conducted Wednesday and Thursday night when Bush topped Kerry by 50 percent to 45 percent.

Polling was conducted Thursday and Friday evenings, so about half of those interviewed would have had the opportunity to hear reports of a new tape from Usama bin Laden.

So: the tape hasn’t helped Bush, which is not any great surprise, because the tape is a big fat reminder that Osama is still out there.

Now, that poll is from last week. You can get the current tracking polls here, and Fox News is right at the top of the page. There’s been an additional Fox News polling cycle since that article was written, and it shows Kerry up by 47% to 46% among likely voters. This is a big fat swing over to Kerry; as predicted, the undecideds are breaking his way.

Today we’re going to dispel the myth of chaos in the Democratic ranks. This is a really popular one, because everybody knows that the conservative movement has spent 40 years building a network of think tanks, foundations, funding, and so on. Progressives can’t compare. Wring your hands.

This apocalyptic vision fails to take into account the utility of the Internet, which makes a huge difference when you’re trying to build a movement. Thankfully, someone figured this out. Make no mistake: Howard Dean will be as responsible for a Kerry victory as anyone.

So what’s it look like in the field? I turn you over to Harold Meyerson, who says “Those liberal organizations that already knew how to do politics — the AFL-CIO, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) and a few others — are doing it better than they have before. Those liberal groups that stayed aloof from elections or phumphered ineffectually are now playing the game like seasoned pros.”

He goes on to talk about the organizational umbrella provided by America Votes. I hadn’t been paying attention to those guys, and clearly I should have been — their membership list is startlingly comprehensive. As Meyerson says, this is a new high water mark for left-wing unity.

Right. You’re going to get one of these once a day between now and Tuesday. They’re mostly directed at my friends who are feeling mopish about the potential for a Kerry victory.

Today, I’ve got an Al Giordano essay for you. Al is one smart cookie. He predicted Kerry’s victory in Iowa. He knows Kerry and Kerry’s people really well. He is not randomly making stuff up to make himself feel better.

See, here’s the deal. Kerry fits nicely into the frame of “another boring liberal from Massachusetts.” If you want to take the lazy way out, you just recycle all the Dukakis stories and you’ve got yourself a news cycle. Now, I liked Dukakis — but Kerry is simply a tougher candidate. He knows what it means to be on the national stage. He is the guy who refused to let go of the BCCI scandal, he’s the guy who defeated an incredible popular William Weld in his last election, he’s the guy who wins.

If Kerry wasn’t charismatic — if he wasn’t good at what he does — Nixon wouldn’t have singled him out for special attention in the 70s. Nothing’s changed. The media frame is wrong. Kerry is not Dukakis.

Read Al’s piece. More tomorrow.

Because I could, I made a spreadsheet for the election night drinking game. You enter the predictions for each player, using the nifty little pulldown menus for the candidate choice, and then you enter the actual winner and their percentage over in those right hand columns. If the square in the “Glug” column goes red, that player has to drink.

No, I don’t expect anyone to actually use this or anything.

Lawrence Haws wrote me the other day and pointed out that Bush recently said it was “up in the air” whether we could ever be safe from another terrorist attack. He said this disproves my assertion that Bush pretends he can keep us safe.

True enough! And Kerry responded to Bush’s comment by saying that he was going to win the war on terror, which is just as ridiculous when Kerry says it as it is when Bush says it. Terror is not an opponent, it’s a tactic.

Of course, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, promptly said that “The president said we can win the war on terror and we will win the war on terror.” So it’s not as if Bush and his team are going to stand by their admission, any more than Bush stood by his comments at the GOP convention when he said he didn’t think it was possible to win the war on terror.

Bush wants us to think he can keep us safe. So does Kerry. Every now and then the truth slips out — I really liked Kerry’s comments to the New York Times, when he explained that he wanted to reduce the threat of terrorism until it doesn’t affect the fabric of our everyday lives. And every time it slips out, the other side pounces on it and uses it as a stick. I don’t particularly see either campaign occupying high moral ground here.

With one caveat: Kerry, so far, has not told Americans that they will be nuked if Bush wins.

This scenario is not going to happen, because if McCain was going to take a shot at Bush he’s had plenty of opportunities to do it already. But it’s a fun little piece of speculation about an obscure piece of election law, so if you want to find out how McCain could be elected President this year, go read it.