The Democratic Truth Squad

I highly recommend this Steve Soto post over on the Left Coaster. It is a proposal for the Democratic Party to put together a "Truth Squad" to follow Dubya around to ALL of his public appearances and give shadow press conferences in which the truth behind Bush's obfuscations will be revealed. The best thing that Terry McAuliffe can do at the DNC besides raising money right now is to create a �Truth Squad�. Such a concept would be comprised of a cadre of tech-savvy volunteers or pre-law grad students who would be a part of a team that follows Bush to all of his appearances, along with the Party�s designated mouthpiece on that subject on that day. Since all of Bush�s appearances and most of his remarks are announced by the press office in advance, it would not be too difficult for the DNC to plan these rebuttal press conferences with facts and figures ready to go in rebuttal to what Bush just said. The national media would already be in town for Bush�s event, and more importantly so would the local media, so the DNC would have a built-in audience for their �shadow� press conferences. At these press conferences, the DNC would trot out the mouthpiece(s), who would need to be articulate �up and comers� in the party who could appeal to a broad range of folks. The mouthpiece would provide a point-by-point challenge to what Bush said based on his actual record and the up-to-the-minute research that the tech geeks had just pulled off of their laptops. The mouthpiece would make the point that Bush was lying about his tax cut, lying about AIDS funding, lying about whatever issue Bush was talking about. And they would be doing it based not on partisan rhetoric, but the actual Bush record from material already in the media. This is a really great idea. I think the Democrats have to, as a group, commit themselves to run a non-stop campaign against Bush from now until election day. They can't attack him in half-hearted potshots from the crowd. They have to go after him every single day in every way that presents itself as an opportunity. And they must NOT listen to the media who will squawk about how whiny they are being or that they are being shrill or any of those other pejoratives that they have used for years to beat down any attempt by the Democrats to fight back. The Democrats must be on the offensive every single day of this campaign. By the time next November rolls around Bush should look like he has aged 20 years and Rove should be afraid of his own shadow. It can be done folks. It just takes the will to do it.

Two quick links

The words of a truly great American, Sen. Robert C. Byrd and An interview with another great American, Gov. Howard Dean I highly recommend you read both to get an idea of what this country could be like if we were lead by people of honor and decency.

Bush unbeatable?

CBS News/New York Times Poll. May 9-12, 2003. N=910 adults nationwide. MoE � 3 (total sample).
				.
"If George W. Bush runs for reelection in 2004, do you think you will probably vote for George W. Bush or probably vote for the Democratic candidate, or don't you know yet?"
		Bush	Democrat	Don't Know Yet	Don't Know
		%	%	%	%
	ALL	34	21	44	1
	Republicans	72	1	27	0
	Democrats	7	46	46	1
	Independents	22	18	56	4

The Google News Democratic Presidential Poll for 5/21/2003

I've decided to coordinate the release of the Google News Poll with the release of the weekly Cattle Call over on the DailyKOS (every Wednesday). You can consider this the first "official" instance of this poll.

John Kerry	3250
Bob Graham	2590
Howard Dean	2470
John Edwards	2230
Joe Lieberman	2070
Dick Gephardt	1820
Al Sharpton	1130
Dennis Kucinich	1020
Carol Moseley Braun	749

The rankings haven't changed, though everyone's numbers are up slightly by about the same amount. No analysis at this time. grubi, over on the American Dissent blog has combined these results, the Cattle Call, and a few other "polls" to produce a single "poll" of his own.

Rationing health care

Adam Smith discusses one key exchange in the Dean Town Hall this past Sunday that dealt with the question of rationing health care, particularly to those with fatal illnesses: In Sunday�s forum, Gov. Dean had a frank discussion with a questioner about making the hard decisions on how we will have to decide how to spend limited health care dollars. In it, he discussed how important family/doctor discussions about plans people should make about quality of life at the end of their lives are and the need for encouraging those discussions as a part of the national discussion on health care. Most people run away from listening to these �morbid� discussions. I started paying attention to the issue of death with dignity after having briefly been knocked into a coma after an act of random violence that ended up putting me on Social Security disability for the past decade. The idea of being hooked up to a rack of machines and tubes to lengthen lives isn�t just distasteful for most Americans. It�s horrifying. It�s that image that started the �death with dignity� movement in the first place. I thought this moment was the most powerful of the entire town hall because it was obvious that Dean really cares about this issue. He had the entire audience spellbound while talking about a very tough issue. He made the point that the very thing that makes America great is the very thing that makes our healthcare so expensive: our innate belief that we can fix anything if we just apply ourselves hard enough to the problem, including death. I think Dean's point in bringing this up was to say that the biggest flaw in our health care system is not the cost, per se, but the fact that fewer and fewer people have a close enough relationship with their health care provider that they can feel comfortable talking to them about this issue. Instead, many people are treated like defective parts on an assembly line run by managers who are convinced that they can fix anything that is wrong with them (the America way!) The doctors and nurses in industrialized medicine simply don't have the time or the training to deal with the human side of medicine. The result is that the most expensive treatments are ordered even in those cases where the recipients, if given a choice, might actually decline them. It's a tough to sell the proposition that one way to reduce health care costs is to encourage people to think about NOT getting medical care and I applaud Dean's courage for bringing it up. Of course the Wurlitzer will probably try to distort his statements and make it sounds like he is advocating cutting off medical care to the aged (Grannies health care eating through your budget! Pull the plug and save today!) Nothing could be further from the truth. If people want the care, even if the prospects are hopeless, they should have access to it. But they should also be fully informed and be allowed to make the decision NOT to proceed with the care. I wonder what the good Doctor's position is on Oregon's Death With Dignity law.

Strength is not the only component of competence

Over on the unofficial Dean blog Ezra Klein posts some thoughts on the recent DLC dustup and how Governor Dean should approach the issue of national defense. The conventional wisdom says that we must appear strong on national defense. I think that is semantically incorrect. We must appear highly competent on national defense. We do not have to be war mongers, but we must be able to deflect the war monger's attacks. The best way to look at it is we do not want to be the bully, but if we're not going to be the bully than we damn well have to be the karate master. I like Ezra's idea of contrasting a "strong" national defense policy vs. a "competent" national defense policy. Bush's policy is all about projecting strength while being rather incompetent in the choices of where to apply that strength. You can have the biggest hammer out there, but it won't matter for shit if you can't hit the nail. In fact, you can cause a lot of damage in the process. It's competency that has to guide our use of force and I think Dr. Dean can make a strong case that Bush has been incompetent in his use of America's military and economic might.

The Google News Democratic Presidential Poll (improved)

Thanks to Steven Gibson for giving me an idea on how to improve the poll results. He suggested I put quotes around the names. Here are the updated results:

John Kerry	3020
Bob Graham	2420
Howard Dean	2250
John Edwards	2030
Joe Lieberman	1920
Dick Gephardt	1710
Al Sharpton	1070
Dennis Kucinich	937
Carol Moseley Braun	685

It does appear that this reduces John Edwards' common name boost. Update: Looks like I mispelled Braun's name. I've fixed it and updated the results. She's still last, but with a much less embarassing result of 685.

Dems finally starting to attack Bush on national security?

As you all know, I'm a Dean fan. But I applaud Sen. Kerry for his comments taking the Bush administration to task for its failures in the war on terror. "Al-Qaeda never went out of business ... and I think that the triumphalism of this administration, the president's comments and others' about al-Qaeda on the run has really exceeded reality," US senator and presidential hopeful John Kerry told NBC's "Meet the Press" program. "What's happened is we broke the beehive, but we didn't kill the bees and we certainly haven't killed the queen bee." "This administration has been disengaged in the Middle East, lackadaisical about the relationship with Saudi Arabia. And I think we could be tougher and I think we could be smarter in how we protect Americans." I just wish it hadn't taken the Riyadh and Moroccan attacks for some Democrats to find the courage to attack Bush on such an obvious point. Hesiod has some excellent comments on this over on his blog.

The Google News Democratic Presidential Poll

This afternoon I read a comment by someone online that Howard Dean's name was getting mentioned more and more often in the news. His visibility has certainly increased since the attacks on him by both Kerry and the DLC. I was curious just how many stories out there were talking about Dean, so I went over to Google News to check it out. To be fair, I decided to compare the resulting numbers against the numbers for all the other candidates. Call this the first edition of the Google News Democratic Presidential Poll. My methodology was simple: I typed in the name, as listed below, and asked for results by most recent and then used whatever number came up. I make no claim as to how relevant these results are to reality. For one thing, I don't know anything about how Google puts together its search database (the first story I got for "John Edwards" was a story listing graduates at a local high school where one student had a last name of Edwards and another had a first name of John). If you click on each name you can repeat the search. Naturally it should produce different results since the underlying database is constantly changing.

John Kerry	4370
John Edwards	3610
Bob Graham	2950
Howard Dean	2590
Joe Lieberman	1980
Dick Gephardt	1720
Al Sharpton	1050
Dennis Kucinich	948
Carol Mosley Braun	14

These rankings come down about where I would expect them. Kerry, as the nominal front-runner, probably gets an honorable mention in almost any news story on the campaign. Edwards appears to be making a big splash as well, though for what I'm not exactly sure. Graham has probably been getting a lot of ink for his direct attacks on Bush's handling of national security issues (and I applaud him for that). As a Dean supporter I am very pleased by the Governor's respectable showing. The DLC dustup probably has a lot to do with that. Lieberman and Gephardt, according to this, look to be having some trouble getting coverage. Of course, they have enough name recognition at this time that they probably don't need the press as much as does Howard Dean. Sharpton, being Sharpton, probably has a high number of stories about him just in the right-wing press. Kucinich is doing surprisingly well coming in so close to Sharpton. Braun is just pathetic. Update: I did a little investigation into this and I think the reason John Edwards comes in so high in this poll is because his name is the most likely of all the candidates to be shared with other people. Thus, any story about a random "John Edwards" will be counted in his column while the other candidates are less likely to get this kind of boost. I'm not sure how to refine the search to eliminate this problem. Any suggestions would be helpful.

This is not your father's war

Steve Gilliard has a powerful post up on the DailyKOS that I recommend everyone read: Every time Bush makes one of his cowboy statements, Al Qaeda laughs. Osama and now Saddam know exactly what the limits of American power are and they operate outside of it. We cannot "hunt them down" or bring them to "American justice". They know this. They laugh at our words and know the weakness behind them, the squabbling and incompetence. The indolence and stupidity. The day we close Guantanamo, try those we think are guilty in open court and agree to an international tribunal for Osama and Saddam, will be the first day they will know we are serious. That we will no longer treat him as an exception and instead subject him to the true rule of law, in daylight and with protections. Not in the night of some jury-rigged military tribunal with laws created on the spot. As long as we remained captivated by the trauma of 9/11 and not the realities of an interconnected world, we will remain Osama's captives, trapped not only by his gaze, but by every idea and thought he issues. Until we can break free, accept our losses and fight Al Qaeda on our terms, in our way and accept a world of risk, we will continue to lose. Thank you Steve. Of course, it will be hard to convince the average American that whomping Saddam's military is not, in fact, going to make us safer. A good ass-whipping makes us feel so good at a visceral level, but in a war like this it accomplishes very little and produces many more problems then it solves. The American people, like so many in this administration, are still trying to force this war into an old mold. They are still trying to fight the last war. This is not a war that will be won on the battlefield. There may be times when we will have to resort to force, but this should be reserved only for those times when immediate threats have been identified. For the rest of the time, this is a war that will have to be fought in diplomatic courts, in board rooms, in churches and mosques, on trading floors and in the market square. It is like no other war we have had to fight before. It will make the "battles" of the "cold war" look like a bonfire on a hot day. It is a war that is in nearly every way, shape, and former completely contrary to the type of war that Bush wants to fight. The more he swaggers around on the world stage in his flight suit the more powerful the terrorists will grow. This is a war that America cannot and will not win on its own precisely because we think our military might is sufficient to keep us safe. The longer it takes us to realize this the longer this war will last and the bloodier it will be.