Saturday, October 25, 2003

But is he any good at it?

Digby talks about the apparent hiring of Ace Smith (what a name!), political dirt-digger extraordinaire, by the Dean campaign.

Personally, I don't have a big problem with hardball politics in this day and age. I think it's probably smart to be as rough and tumble as you have to be. Certainly, the Republicans aren't going to hold back, so we'd better be prepared to hit back.

I do wonder, however, how sadly betrayed many of Dean's supporters must be to learn that he would hire such a low-life, dirt digging, mud slinging political bad boy as old Ace. I feel their pain. Considering the fact that the Clark campaign's hiring of the deplorable Chris Lehane's wife was considered to be a total capitulation to the reprehensible tactics of cynical DLC nasty campaigning, I can only imagine how hurt they must be to find that the lowlife Ace has been brought on board.

Count me as a Dean supporter who is not repelled by this action (and I suspect that a lot of other Dean supporters will be just fine with it). I have absolutely nothing against hardball politics. In fact, I've been urging Democrats to become more hardball for several years. The fact that Dean appears willing to do just that is one of the major reasons I am supporting him.

Face it, it will take a wrestler to bring down George. Democrats keep killing themselves by their consistent pooh-poohing of this kind of rough-and-tumble politics.

Some may think this is hypocritical given how Dean supporters have been so critical of operatives like Chris Lehane. But see, here's the key point: it's not that Lehane is a scumbag that cause me not to like him. It's that he's an INEFFECTIVE scumbag.

If you are going to go negative on someone's ass then you should, at the least, be good at it.

Friday, October 24, 2003

Acceptance, cooperation, and not taking anything for granted

TAPPED's Garance Franke-Ruta notes that the DC conventional wisdom may finally be reaching the acceptance stage with respect to Dean's possible nomination for the Democratic ticket. Good. I don't demand that the insiders fall into line behind Dean. But I would like it if they would try to work with their potential nominees instead of running around in a panic at the prospect. Will Dean have a tougher row to hoe than the preferred candidates? I think that is certainly possible with respect to Clark (I've always thought Dean had a better chance then either Kerry or Gephardt and certainly better than Lieberman's). But instead of wasting neurons thinking of ways that Dean might crash and burn I would prefer it if they would use their considerable talents to think of ways that Dean might succeed.

It's called acting like winners.

Franke-Ruta also notes that the Dean campaign is decidedly not acting like it has this sewn up. This is yet another positive sign from the campaign that they get it. They know that over-confidence can destroy you as effectively as the most effective attack campaign. They aren't taking anything for granted, which is precisely what we will need to defeat Bush next year.

Google News Democratic Primary Poll for 10/24/2003

  This Week (10/24) Last Week (10/17)
1 Howard Dean 6280 19.0% -0.4 1 5920 19.4%
2 Wesley Clark 5730 17.3% -1.5 2 5750 18.9%
3 John Kerry 5120 15.5% +0.4 3 4610 15.1%
4 John Edwards 3900 11.8% +0.0 4 3600 11.8%
5 Joe Lieberman 3340 10.1% +0.1 5 3040 10.0%
6 Dick Gephardt 3260 9.9% +0.6 6 2840 9.3%
7 Dennis Kucinich 2280 6.9% +0.9 8 1820 6.0%
8 Al Sharpton 2010 6.1% +0.0 7 1860 6.1%
9 Carol Moseley Braun 1120 3.4% -0.1 9 1060 3.5%

Clark's assault on Dean's share slacks off a little. Clark is no longer the fresh new face on the block and Dean is showing resurgent strength in money and in NH. Gephardt is also showing a slight resurgence due to his pulling even with Dean in Iowa.

Short and sweet: as far as the media's concerned Dean is still the #1 story.

The following is a chart of the Google News Media Share over the last few months.

(Methodology: All numbers are taken from the hit counts when searching on the Google News Service for news stories containing each candidate's name. Click on each name to rerun the search. You will get different results as the numbers are constantly changing. I make absolutely no claim that these numbers have any real meaning.)

Thursday, October 23, 2003

(Not so) bold prediction: Lieberman will be the next to drop out

The bad news keeps coming for Lieberman. First he loses the polling lead in Arizona, now he loses it in New York. And both times to Howard Dean.

The latest Marist poll had Dean favored by 18 percent of New York Democrats in the race for the party's presidential nomination. Lieberman, the party's vice presidential candidate in 2000, was at 16 percent. They were followed by former General Wesley Clark (search) at 14 percent and Rep. Richard Gephardt (search) at 10 percent. The other Democratic contenders were all in single digits.

Just last month, pollsters from the Marist College institute in Poughkeepsie had Lieberman leading the pack at 23 percent with Dean next at 13 percent.

Dean goes negative?

Hmmm. For weeks now Howard Dean's primary opponents, specifically Gephardt, Lieberman and Kerry, have been attacking him on multiple fronts, trying in some way to slow his momentum (it may be working in Iowa). So Dean has issued two new campaign ads that specifically address the attacks. As Dean himself put it:

"I learned a long time ago that when somebody says something that's not true," he said, after a midday gathering in a New Hampton living room, "you have to respond, and that's what we're doing. They have said all over Iowa, they've left the impression that I'm against Medicare. That's not true."

So what is the response? The Times headlines it as "In New Ads, Dean Becomes First in Campaign to Attack Fellow Democrats". Kerry issues a press release titled "Dean goes negative".

Got that? Dean responds to criticism and he is the one who is characterized as going on the attack. He is the one who blamed for going negative.

Clever.

Update: Joe Trippi responds to the absurd suggestion that Dean is the one who is going negative with a simple multi-page listing of story headlines documenting the repeated attacks on Dean by other candidates over the last several weeks. It appears that Kerry and others have at least learned one lesson from the Republicans: accuse your opposition of doing what it is you are doing.

All you need is love?

The following Wesley Clark quote (from the Washington Post) is making the rounds this morning:

"How do you think I could have succeeded in the military if everybody didn't like me? It's impossible," he said. "Do you realize I was the first person promoted to full colonel in my entire year group of 2,000 officers? I was the only one selected. Do you realize that? . . . Do you realize I was the only one of my West Point class picked to command a brigade when I was picked? . . . I was the first person picked for brigadier general. You have to balance this out. . . . A lot of people love me."

This comment was made in the context of a discussion about the negative view that some of his military peers have of him. TNR's Adam Kushner sees this as an indication that Clark's critics might be right about his hot-headedness. MWO thinks Kushner is full of it for taking such a tenuous thread and using it to justify the criticism. Howard Kurtz quotes it as well.

I don't think it is as bad as Kushner makes it out to be, but I don't think it is as unimportant as MWO would have it either. The comment as quoted looks like a frustrated outburst coming after several weeks of repeated criticism. Now, regardless of whether the criticism is fair, Clark is going to have to learn to live with it because it will be SOP for the remainder of his life in the public sphere. Clark may, as his supporters assert, be a master of the insider politics that goes on in the Pentagon and Washington. But the public politics of a national campaign are an entirely different test of character that Clark has yet to pass. If his response to these kind of attacks is to cry out "but people love me" then he is setting up his own failure.

Bless the children

I hope my kids grow up to be as on the ball as Christina. I don't agree with everything she believes in, but I love how forthright she is about her beliefs. She don't take shit from no one.

And how can you not admire a 14 year old who is spending her spare time doing a comparative reading of the Koran?

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Dean: the real conservative?

There are two fascinating articles online that discuss the deeper meanings of the Dean campaign. The first is an American Prospect article by Garance Franke-Ruta ("Shock of the Old") and the second is a Village Voice article by Kareem Fahim ("The Army of Dean"). If you have time to read only one I would recommend the Franke-Ruta article.

There have been plenty of column inches written about how different the Dean campaign is, but I think Franke-Ruta's is the most original and intriguing take on it that I have ever read. He puts forward the thesis that Dean's campaign harkens back to an old tradition in American democracy: the New England Liberalism of the 18th and 19th century. There are two many good points in his article to highlight just one, but just to give you a sample:

This quality in Dean's rhetoric -- that he is appealing not just to people's partisan leanings, nor to their particular ethnic or gender identities but to their history and identity as Americans -- is what has made him compelling to so many liberal voters who feel America is no longer even trying to be a "City upon a Hill." Instead of fearing the legacy of northeastern liberalism, he has embraced it as the philosophy that founded contemporary democracy, created America, kept it whole during the 19th century and fought to expand the franchise so that African Americans and women could participate as full citizens. When the other presidential contenders have tried to reach back past the Great Society, it has often been to connect with the last northern Democratic president, John F. Kennedy. And Dean? In the Boston speech, he quickly mentioned the 1960s and the New Deal -- but he built his address around the Sons of Liberty, who had carried out the Boston Tea Party. At his formal announcement speech, he skipped past JFK and went all the way back to John Winthrop, a Puritan settler, theologian and early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, quoting these words: "We shall be as one. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together."

This return to origins is, to be sure, partly typical political calculation. "You get beat by not wrapping yourself in American history," says Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi. But part of it is also a genuine effort by the campaign to imbue Dean's argument with "a foundation in the history of the country" at a time when democratic practices seem increasingly subject to contestation from the right. "We've got to remind people of why we are the kind of country we are," says Trippi. "We've gotten so far away from some of the original principles."

Dean is spear-heading an effort to reclaim that heritage and assert that the South isn't the only part of America that counts. The idea of America started in New England after all. As Franke-Ruta points out, the Meetup phenomena is similar in many ways to the New England town hall.

I've been mulling an idea in my mind that Dean is the real conservative in this race because he wants to bring us back to a tradition of participatory Democracy that has become increasingly out of favor in our modern society. What could be more conservative than to say that the original model for American Democracy is still the best?

The title of Dean's announcement speech was "The Great American Restoration". Some have interpreted his campaign as simply a reversal of the radical agenda of the Bushies. I think Dean is looking back much further than that.

Update: I almost forgot. While I was reading Franke-Ruta's article I was struck by something that I hadn't given much thought to: Dean's religiosity. I had heard that he was a Congregationalist, but I hadn't heard much else about his faith tradition beyond its name. Dean rarely ever invokes God in his speeches. This is something I have always found refreshing, but I've sometimes wondered if it might be held against him in some more religious regions of the country.

Franke-Ruta's article makes me wonder whether the minimalist approach to religiosity might actually be a defining characteristic of Dean's faith. But that does not mean that Dean isn't a deeply religious man. Franke-Ruta comments on the religious zeal of Dean's appearances despite the pronounced lack of any mention of God. He even goes so far as to call Dean a "northern evangelist". Dean preaches the faith by invoking God's spirit more than his name.

Does anyone else have enough experience with Congregationalism to comment on this?

What could they be talking about?

Anti-Tax Anonymous

There is a column in this morning's Oregonian about the effort to convert Portland General Electric (a subsidiary of Enron) into a PUD. I won't get into the details of the proposal as I don't know to much about it and it isn't why I'm posting this link. I'm posting this link because of the following paragraph:

Antitax rhetoric has become the crack cocaine of American politics. The campaigns sell it, the voters smoke it and the impact on society is just as destructive as -- and far more extensive than -- the literal crack cocaine epidemic. But unlike crack cocaine, this rhetoric shows no signs of going out of style.

The writer makes mention of Kerry's attacks on Dean and Gephardt for proposing that all of Bush's tax cut be rescinded. The writer makes the point that Kerry has to know that the system can't be saved piece-meal, but Kerry knows that anti-tax rhetoric sells and so he is using it, to his own long-term detriment. He is right that anti-tax rhetoric has become a drug that few can resist sampling despite its increasingly obvious negative effects.

This country needs an intervention in the worst way.

Finally!

The Bushies have a solution to the problem of war dead returning from Iraq.

Monday, October 20, 2003

Leadership for the 24th century?

I'm sorry, but it's hard to take this Wesley guy serious if he doesn't even have a campaign blog on his web site.

The evolution of Paul Krugman

Good review of Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling by Russell Baker in the current New York Review Of Books..

I haven't read the book, but I've been following Krugman's columns since the early days of his tenure at the times. It was obvious from the beginning that here was a writer who was different from the usual pundits. He didn't follow the rules of propriety that that group had established for itself. And it was clear that, in the beginning, Krugman didn't even realize he was breaking the rules. There was a certain quaint naiveté in Krugman's early columns where he would clearly lay out the problems with Bush's economic proposals with the expectation that others in the press would take the ball he had passed them and run in for the touchdown. When they consistently failed to do so Krugman's eyes were opened to the full extent of the corruption within establishment journalism.

As Baker says:

Few are equipped to challenge the mathematics and economic theory underlying the Bush budget, and though Krugman may scold them for not doing their homework, doing so would involve prodigious feats of reeducation. Even then it's doubtful that many would be willing to attack a president with charges of deceit, as Krugman has done. A sense of propriety, of dignity, sits heavily on the "commentariat," as Krugman calls it. In the code language of the trade, a colleague like Krugman is said to be "shrill" or "strident," words commonly used to caution a colleague that he is being crude and undignified.

In the higher levels of journalism there is a curious uneasiness about dealing candidly with the quite natural relationship between various money interests and government. All politics is to a great extent about who gets the lion's share of the money at a government's disposal, and a public that realized this might be less insouciant about elections than today's American nonvoter.

Journalism is reluctant, however, to make much of an effort to find out who will benefit if a given candidate wins, and who will lose out. Instead of providing this valuable information, the media tend to explain politics in terms of high-sounding ideological piffle about a "conservatism" and a "liberalism" which have very little pertinence to anything of consequence to the voter. The result is to deaden public interest in politics by diverting the mind from the fact that there is real money at stake.

It seems slightly scandalous that Krugman has persisted in noting that the present administration has been moving the lion's share of the money to an array of corporate interests distinguished by the greed of their CEOs, an indifference toward their workers, and boardroom conviction that it is the welfare state that is ruining the country. Krugman has been strident. He has been shrill. He has lowered the dignity of the commentariat. How refreshing.

I agree.

Stop being such Nice Guys(tm)!

The Washington Post has an article this morning on the question, yet again, of whether Dean is sparking a positive change in the Democratic party or whether his campaign will be yet another bloodbath of the McGovern/Mondale/Dukakis stripe.

Two things to note about this article:

  1. When the reporter (Thomas Edsall) went looking for an assessment of this question, the first person he quotes extensively is an unnamed Republican consultant. Does Mr. Edsall really expect a Republican to give an honest assessment of Gov. Dean's chances?
     
  2. Once again the article is chock-full of fretting and worrying by Democratic leaders. I think this public worry-wart behavior has done as much damage to the party's chances as any potential problem that Dean could cause. You don't see Republican's wringing their hands about what might go wrong do you? Of course not! Because they understand that the first key to being perceived as a strong leader is to act like a strong leader.

When are we going to get beyond this self-conscience over-analyzing behavior and actually start acting like leaders who deserve to be elected?