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06.11.04
WHICH WAY IS THE MCCAIN WIND BLOWING?: Mickey Kaus says this AP story undermines the suggestion in David Ignatius's Washington Post column that, under the right circumstances, John McCain might be amenable to joining a presidential ticket with John Kerry. I'm not so sure Mickey's right. What the AP story says is that Kerry asked McCain to consider becoming his running mate some time in late May, and that McCain refused to consider it at that point. But Ignatius's conversation with McCain (or, as he puts it, McCain's "inner circle") happened this week--well after the Kerry-McCain meeting described in the AP piece. Which is to say, it's entirely possible that McCain was rethinking his earlier refusal to consider joining the Kerry ticket by the time he (or his inner circle) spoke with Ignatius. My hunch is that McCain's people just got a little nervous that the Ignatius column read like too overt a nod in that direction, so they leaked the news of the earlier Kerry-McCain meeting to the AP in an attempt to walk it back. But I could be wrong ...
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WHOM DO NUMBSKULL UNDECIDED VOTERS HURT?: Adam Nagourney writes in today's Times that:
From a tactical point of view, undecided voters present a special challenge to the campaigns because of their disinterest toward politics. The Annenberg poll found that 55 percent said they were not following the campaign closely or at all, compared with 32 percent of the general electorate in swing states, which has produced a bit of a conundrum for both campaigns.
The suggestion here is that ignorant undecided voters are a problem for both candidates. But this doesn't seem quite right to me (not least because campaigns are a zero-sum game). For one thing, the article reports that most of what these undecided voters know about the candidates at this point can be reduced to: Kerry is a flip-flopper, Bush is a national security hawk. At that level of "knowledge," Bush clearly has the advantage.
More importantly, the article also says that these undecided voters tend to be sympathetic to environmental regulation, supportive of abortion rights, and, while they oppose gay marriage, they apparently don't feel strongly enough about it to support a constitutional ban. A majority of these voters also supported the war in Iraq, but think it's going badly enough that we should withdraw our troops as soon as possible. If that's right--and this is Nagourney's profile of undecided voters, not mine--then isn't the clear implication that more information would benefit Kerry and hurt Bush? Or, put differently, isn't the implication that the Bush campaign would want these voters to remain in the dark about the candidates' records and positions (especially the fact that it was the Bush administration's incompetence that created the current mess in Iraq), and that the Kerry campaign would benefit from the albeit tricky task of educating them?
The dynamic seems similar to 2000, when the superficial storyline--which, by definition, is particularly powerful among those (i.e., uninterested, undecided voters) who don't make an effort to get beyond superficial storylines--was that Bush and Gore were both moderates. Only the Gore campaign had an interest in dispelling that myth and, alas, it wasn't very successful...
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DAYENU: A quick sampling of fair and balanced Reagan coverage, from National Review Online:
John Devlin: He made us face up to present dangers. 06/10 11:50 p.m.
Rand Simberg: He was the father of the new space age. 06/10 11:59 p.m.
Hadley Arkes: He made principles easily accessible. 06/10 10:16 a.m.
Chester Finn Jr.: He changed our aspirations. 06/09 8:39 a.m.
John O'Sullivan: His leadership of the coalition made the difference. 06/08 12:51 p.m.
Tevi Troy: He led an intellectual revolution, too. 06/07 9:45 a.m.
Elaine Donnelly: The man attracted women! 06/07 9:44 a.m.
Doug Gamble: Humor glowed from his soul. 06/07 8:51 a.m.
James Robbins: He would have been the right man at anytime. 06/07 8:43 a.m.
Gleaves Whitney: He illuminated what was good about America. 06/07 8:43 a.m.
Paul Kengor: He lived a full, great life. 06/05 5:12 p.m.
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06.10.04
BOB DOLE IS PRICELESS: From today's New York Times:
Television anchors and commentators reached - and at times overreached - to match the poignant images. When Tom Brokaw of NBC suggested to Bob Dole that Ronald Reagan had been an inspiring flag-bearer for the World War II generation, it was a bit too much for Mr. Dole, who was wounded in Italy. He replied dryly that Mr. Reagan, who spent the war making Army training films in Hollywood, had never heard a shot fired. "But he was a captain," Mr. Dole said. "And mighty proud of it."
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06.08.04
THE DEMOCRATS' SECRET FUNDRAISING ADVANTAGE: An interesting tidbit from today's Washington Post piece about the difficulties Republican 527s are having raising money:
Meanwhile, election law lawyers said corporations are showing significant reluctance to get back into making "soft money" donations after passage of the McCain-Feingold law that went into effect on Nov. 6, 2002.
Unlike political committees regulated by the FEC, "527s"--named for the section of the tax code that governs their activities-- have no restrictions on the sources or amount of contributions, and some have received gifts of $5 million or more. Republicans, encountering corporate unwillingness to give to GOP 527s and seeking to capitalize on the Bush campaign's unprecedented fundraising success, urged the FEC to clamp down on the these groups' activities.
"I would say that on the whole the corporate business community has been very reluctant to support 527s," said GOP lawyer Jan W. Baran.
I guess it's pretty intuitive when you think about it: Rich corporations tend to be pretty cautious when it comes to potential legal complications. Rich individuals tend to have a healthy sense of their own agency, and tend to scoff at various attempts to restrict it. Fortunately for Democrats, a disproportionate share of their financial backers tend to be rich individuals, while a disproportionate share of Republican money comes from corporations and corporate types. (Obviously these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but you get the idea...)
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06.07.04
REAGAN'S TIMING COULDN'T BE BETTER--FOR KERRY: This is how Jodi Wilgoren sums up John Kerry's Reagan problem in today's Times:
The canceled schedule comes in a week that already posed a challenge for Mr. Kerry, who would have had to compete first with President Bush's trip to Europe in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, and then his convening of the G-8 summit meeting in Sea Island, Ga. Campaign aides had previously said that Mr. Kerry would talk about the economic squeeze on the middle class, trying not to interfere with the president's focus on foreign policy.
Now, he will have to struggle not to disappear from public view altogether.
But is the timing of Reagan's death really such a bummer for Kerry? Obviously it's a problem if Kerry can't recoup the money he passed up when he had to cancel two multimillion dollar fundraisers this week. But, given the fundraising success he's had so far, I can't imagine that will be the case. And, as far as the public campaign goes, I'd say Reagan's death represents a bit of a break for Kerry. This, after all, was the week Bush was supposed to recast himself as a president who plays well with others. Since the press was clearly gearing up to provide wall to wall coverage of his foreign travels and meetings, it's hard to see how Kerry wouldn't have "disappeared from public view altogether" anyway. Now Reagan's death pushes Bush to the margins of public view, too--essentially freezing the race where it was beforehand. If I'm Kerry, that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
(True, Bush may get a soft bounce from the nostalgia and good-feeling aroused by the Reagan coverage. But he was going to get that whether Reagan died this weekend, a year ago, or four months from now. As long as that was going to happen, much better to have the death drown out what the Bush campaign had billed as a pivotal moment in the marketing of its candidate.)
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