It's going to get worse

I've talked before on this blog about how the general election campaign will run in three phases. The first phase was the "should we re-elect Bush" phase in which the voters asked themselves whether Bush deserved to be re-elected. This was the phase that ran roughly from when Kerry locked up the nomination to the Democratic convention (actually, I'd place its end on the day Kerry picked Edwards).

In my judgment, the voters are strongly leaning towards kicking Bush out. However, that judgment won't translate into a defeat for Bush unless Kerry makes the case that he would be a good replacement. That was the second phase, and it ran roughly from the DNC convention/Edwards pick up to about now.

The verdict for Kerry is a mixed bag. It was going good for him in the days before and after the DNC convention, but the Swift Boat issue derailed Kerry's "elect me" campaign and it has never fully recovered. Sadly, I don't think Kerry has made a compelling case to the voter that he would be a good alternative.

But the voters still aren't all that sure about Bush. So now we begin the third phase, running from now, through the debates, until election day. In this phase the voters will have to decide if their previous judgments about both Bush and Kerry are justified.

The electorate right now is so polarized that I have my doubts that, barring unforeseen circumstances, few of the Bush and Kerry supporters are likely to change their minds. Furthermore, the positive case for Kerry has been damaged enough that the only alternative left for him may be to run a negative campaign, ala Bush's against Kerry, from now until election day. Kerry has to convince the few remaining fence-sitters that pulling the lever for Bush will be more distasteful then pulling it for him.

Kerry's failure to hit it out of the park in phase two means that we can look "forward" to a campaign that is almost exclusively about each candidate's negative opinions of each other.

Whoever crosses the finish line is going to be bloodied.

Flashback!

All this sturm-n-drang about the CBS AWOL memos and all the attempts to refute them by talking about typefaces and proportional-spacing and superscripts puts me back in mind to the early months of 1998 and the increasingly bizarre contortions Clinton supporters went through in order to deny the simple fact that he lied about his relationship with Lewinsky. And I speak as someone who was an active participant in said attempts (I had my own personal theory for several months that Lewinsky's conversations with Tripp were all an elaborate fantasy world created by a star-crossed young girl).

There comes a time when reality intrudes on fantasy and you have to put the fantasy away. Perhaps now is the Lewinsky-moment for the Bush supporters.

AWOL: A loser that must be fought

A reader passes on a note to Josh Marshal from a "a long-time social progressive/economic conservative who has gone increasingly progressive since Bush took office". In it he advises Democrats to drop the whole AWOL issue because only partisan Dems care about it.

The point is correct, to a certain extent. Few on the other side of the aisle are going to leave Bush because of this (barring some major revelation of illegal tampering with his documentation) and few in the undecided camp are going to be persuaded by all this partisan wrangling. This, combined with the Swift Boat story, is likely to create a "pox on both their houses" effect within that crucial group.

But, as Josh himself likes to point out, there is a greater struggle going on here. The last several years have seen a marked increase in smear attacks on Democrats by Republicans. The Democrats have usually responded to these attacks by taking the "high road". They didn't want to demean the political dialog by giving the smears more weight than they deserved. They also didn't want to drive away the undecided voters by engaging in that kind of fight.

Unfortunately this principled approach, with a helpful hand from the right-wing attackers, created the general impression of Democrats as wimps. And this led to the impression that Democrats don't have what it takes to defend America ("If they won't defend themselves, how can I trust them to defend me?")

Democrats have been placed in a difficult position: absorb the attacks and be perceived as wimps or fight back and be perceived as just contributing to the mess. I don't like the result of either option, but if I had to choose I'd rather be perceived as a mudslinger than a wimp. You cannot let the other side define you. If fighting back requires you to participate in a little tit-for-tat then maybe it may just be a necessary evil.

I guess I believe in the old maxim that you should never start a fight, but you should always finish it.

It's time we finished it.

The AP and the fallacy of false equivalence

This otherwise good AP article on the growing AWOL story misses the mark when its author, Pete Yost, perpetuates the fallacy of false equivalence.

With national security and the war on terrorism looming large on voters' minds, supporters of Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry are attacking each candidate's Vietnam War records. Republicans have accused Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, of fabricating the events which led to his five medals. Democrats point to gaps in Bush's stateside Air National Guard service in 1972 and 1973 to say Bush shirked his duty.

The is a false equivalence because all the documentary evidence released so far with respect to Kerry's record backs up his claims and, in many cases, directly refutes the claims of his attackers. However, in the case of Bush, it is the documentary evidence that repeatedly punches holes in Bush's claims about his own service and thus shows the attacks to be justified.

Got that Pete?

Kerry: the records back him up.

Bush: the records shoot him down.

Not the same thing.

Also, note the following from this story:

On Tuesday, the Defense Department released more than two dozen pages of records about Bush and his former Texas unit. They showed Bush flew for 336 hours in military jets after his flight training and ranked in the middle of his class.

Which brings up the question: why was a guy who was "ranked in the middle of his class" receiving "glowing reviews" for his performance? (see related post)

Time for Kerry to call Bush out

I think I understand the logic of having John Edwards be the point man for criticizing Dick Cheney for his reprehensible comments about how a vote for Kerry would make America more vulnerable to terrorism. Cheney is the Vice President. Edwards is the Vice Presidential candidate. Thus he is responding to the public comments of his counter-part.

But now Edwards is calling on Bush to denounce Cheney's comment.

Bush should do so (but won't, of course). But if the Kerry/Edwards campaign is going to ratchet this up to the presidential level then it should be Kerry who calls out Bush. Yet, so far as I have heard, Kerry hasn't made any public comment on the matter (correct me if I am wrong).

Time to step up to the plate Mr. Kerry.

Update:

As and ye shall receive:

Democrat John F. Kerry yesterday denounced as "outrageous and shameful" Vice President Cheney's statement that Americans risk another terrorist attack if President Bush is not reelected, as congressional Democrats assailed the credibility of a leading administration voice on national security.

Kerry, interviewed in Minnesota by a local television station, said Cheney's statement made it clear that the president and the vice president "will say anything and do anything in order to get elected."

"It is outrageous and shameful to make the war on terror an instrument of their politics," Kerry said. "I defended this country when I was a young man, and they chose not to. And I will defend this country as president of the United States."

I don't care that Bush found a way to avoid going to Vietnam

Let's be clear about this. Whether or not Bush used the Texas Air National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam doesn't bother me. If I had been around then I probably would have used whatever resource was available to me in order to avoid service (though, I suspect my reasons for doing so would be different then Dubya's). And the fact that Bush blew off his commitment is not, in and of itself a fatal mark against him. He himself has admitted that he used to be irresponsible. I believe that people can still become good people and achieve great things even if they fuck up early in life. Everyone deserves the chance to prove they aren't a habitual loser.

What Bush did or did not do 30 years ago is not the central issue in this story. What is the central issue is what Bush has done in the last 4 years with respect to this story. The fact that he screwed up back then wouldn't be relevant now except for the fact that he continues to deny, against all the evidence, that he ever did anything wrong.

Compounding that is the fact that he is allowing the dissemination of smears against a man who did serve honorably while at the same time denying that he ever did anything wrong.

This is a relevant story now not because it demonstrates that the Bush of 30 years ago was unfit to lead this country. It is a relevant story because it demonstrates that the Bush of today is still unfit to lead this country.

Was the rest of Bush's TANG service bogus?

Bush partisans like to respond to the AWOL accusation by citing the fact that he got "glowing" reviews in his first few years of service. Aside from the fact that this avoids the question of what happened in the last two years of his service, tonight's 60 minutes piece on Bush's TANG service brings up an interesting question: if at least one of his commanding officers was pressured to give Junior positive reviews and refused, is it possible that some of his other commanding officers received similar pressure but didn't refuse?

Could those "glowing" reviews that Bush defenders like to cite be as bogus as the rest of his service?

Update:

I just watched the 60 Minutes segment and it appears that the commanding officer who wrote about getting pressure to write positive reviews of Bush in 72-73 was the same commanding officer who wrote the earlier glowing reviews.

Does that mean those reviews were made under pressure as well? Hard to say.

Get Your War On!

Man 1: I have to say, I'm impressed with how objective the press has been about this Swift boat issue. They're really giving me the space I need to make up my own mind Does it help that I'm a stupid fuck?

Man 2: How do you convince a Washington journalist that you're not slapping him in the face?

Man 1: I don't know. How?

Man 2: Tell him you're not.

(link)

I want al Qaeda to attack us again

According to Mr. Cheney, by voting for Kerry and urging others to do the same, that is what I want.

I am so ashamed of myself.

Advice for the weary

There's a series of diaries over on the DailyKOS that offer a lot of helpful advice. I recommend them all:

• Devilstower talks about marketing Kerry
• ultrageek relates a conversation with a Republican that demonstrates how to argue the positives of the Democratic agenda.
• watou provides tips on how to get journalists to act like journalists and not just stenographers.
• radish tells us to avoid getting into the persuasion trap and instead get Bush supporters and Kerry opponents (not always the same thing) to explain their points of view to us.

I found the last post to be especially enlightening. It makes the point that sometime the easiest way to persuade someone to your side is to try and get them to persuade you to their side. Let them be the one who has to make the sale.

Good reading all around.

Can Bush be trusted when it is needed?

Kevin Drum posts on the possible future plans of the Bush administration in a fourth term, including whether it might gin up another case for attacking another nation (link). The interesting question, for me, is really not so much whether they will or will not do it, but whether we can trust them not to do it.

Let's put it another way: this is a dangerous world. Few will dispute that. We are in a war. Few will dispute that. That war might require us to attack another nation some time in the next four years. Again, few will dispute that.

However, if we need to attack some nation in the future and our justification for that attack is based purely on intelligence that says they are a threat to us, can we ever trust the case for the attack if it is made George W. Bush?

Putting aside the question of whether John Kerry has the will to attack in order to defend this nation, couldn't the case be made that he would have a better chance of building the trust necessary to lead us in such an attack?

If Syria, Iran or North Korea really were an imminent threat to us, which man would you trust to make the case for war against those nations?

That's the question we should be asking.