Politics

What, then, are the fair expectations? How do I judge the next four years? Things I do not expect of Bush: Peace in Iraq. Not because I think he’s incapable of it, but because I think it’s an incredibly difficult problem. I wouldn’t have expected Kerry to make Iraq work either. Things I am willing to judge him on: North Korea. He needs to make progress. I define that as North Korea reducing the number of nuclear weapons on hand without actually using them. He said he could do this with his approach, and he needs to follow through. ...

Ashcroft has resigned (original). That’s good.

If anyone was paying attention to my list of criteria for judging Bush’s success, it’s been updated.

Probably not my last note on this, but quite possibly my last for today: Kerry was not a bad candidate. There was not a magic candidate who would have gotten the Democrats 51% of the vote. Clinton didn’t win because he was from Arkansas, he won because he was an incredibly good campaigner. He might not have won this election. It’s not as if there’s any evidence that a more moderate candidate (and Kerry’s fairly moderate) would have done better. ...

Regarding new directions, I recommend to you David Neiwert, who remembers that the American progressive movement started both inside and outside the cities. But we have terminology issues here. At present, progressive is used as a substitute for liberal. I’m not entirely sure that’s accurate, considering that Teddy Roosevelt wound up a progressive in the end. My personal current bet is that within ten years we’ll have a moderate party and a conservative party. I hedge this by saying that I don’t think civil liberties are a liberal or a conservative issue — see also William Weld and (odd fellow traveller, here) Bob Barr. I think there’s a small chance that neither of these parties will be the Democratic Party. It’s possible that one of them will be progressive. ...

Well, that was unexpected and I have no explanation. Ohio is within the polling margin of error, so I’m disappointed but not shocked. The 5% margin in Florida is surprising. Possibly I should have been paying attention to Gallup. The interesting question for me, right now, is how the pollsters failed to catch a chunk of Bush voters, cause Florida wasn’t even close. And Zogby’s not gonna have quite as many clients next cycle. Ah, the perils of being a celebrity pollster. Then again, I seem to have made similar mistakes. ...

They won’t let me turn on the webcam. Pout. But that’s OK; it’s still an intensely fun night over here at the Tatro-Kaplan household. If anything you can’t find out anywhere else happens, I’ll post about it in this post. For example, I can report a strong Kerry lean in his household.

Everything you need to know about exit polls is right here. Note that the numbers are particularly likely to be off this year, because they weight the results based on past turnout at each precinct, and we know that the turnout this year is hugely unusually high. But yeah, the leaked numbers are warming the cockles of my heart, too. Even if I don’t think Kerry is actually going to win Pennsylvania by 20 points.

Yeah, it’s pretty much all guesswork now, as far as the pundits and polls go. So let’s look at unsourced rumors about what the campaigns think, via Chris Suellentrop in Slate. Could easily be people seeing what they want to see. Could be an accurate indicator of campaign mood. Could be that Kerry’s people have better campaign discipline than Bush’s people. You know what I think. See you on the flip side.

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. ...