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08.27.04
NOTE TO READERS: I'm off to the Republican convention next week, so my posts will appear in TNR's convention group blog beginning Monday morning. I'm back here one week from Monday.
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BUSH'S SHREWD RESPONSE TO THE SWIFT BOAT CONTROVERSY: On the whole, I'm not sure the president had such a great
interview with The New York Times yesterday. As the e-mails I keep getting from those dreaded 527s have pointed out, Bush admitted for the first time the he miscalculated on post-war Iraq, and he gave a particularly goofy explanation for why 527s should be outlawed. ("We have billionaires writing checks, large checks, to influence the outcome of the election.") The Times also caught him embarrassingly off guard on a report the administration submitted to Congress yesterday, which argues that carbon dioxide and other gas emissions are the only plausible explanation for global warming. (That's a change from the administration's previously agnostic position.)
But I thought the president was incredibly savvy on at least one issue: dealing with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. Bush told the Times he didn't think Kerry had lied about his Vietnam record, then connected Kerry's grievance against him to his call to ban all 527s. "I understand how Senator Kerry feels--I've been attacked by 527's too," Bush said.
This is the best of all worlds for Bush. He distances himself from a scurrilous attack on his opponent (in a way that saying Kerry "ought to be proud of his record" and simply proposing to ban 527s doesn't), but without looking like he's caving to pressure to denounce the ads (since he's not actually denouncing them), without actually dismissing the ads as untrue (he just said he didn't "think Kerry lied"), and long after the damage has already been done. This allows swing voters to continue believing the attacks on Kerry, while creating the impression that the president is a good, honorable guy. (And, as a bonus, he makes it sound like both he and Kerry want the 527s outlawed--or at least like they both should want them outlawed--when that's clearly not the case.)
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08.26.04
HOW CONSERVATIVES REALLY FEEL ABOUT BUSH: Per my criticism of Ron Brownstein's piece about the Bush campaign's base strategy, David Kirkpatrick has a nice piece in today's New York Times supporting my contention that the attention to the base is a matter of necessity, not choice. Here's the relevant portion:
In a statement, Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union, called the platform "a bland and uninspiring document" that lacked "solid conservative meat." Although most conservatives enthusiastically support the lengthy platform section on fighting terrorism, Mr. Lessner said, its "open-ended commitment" to keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is troubling.
His harshest criticism fell on President Bush's plan for the new temporary worker program.
"This unfortunate initiative allows those who enter America illegally to become legal residents and apply for citizenship," he said. "This idea was D.O.A. among conservatives when the president first broached it, and it is still offensive."
In a private e-mail message that circulated among conservatives at the platform hearings and on Capitol Hill, Paul S. Teller, legislative director of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, forwarded Mr. Lessner's statement, adding:
"It confirms, as was made so clear to me during the time of President Reagan's funeral and laying in state, that President Bush has no broad vision--and certainly no conservative vision-- for the United States of America. All he has is a random assortment of policy prescriptions, many of which contradict one another. And let's not forget his primary goal on federal spending, to cut the deficit in half in five years. Wowwee."
Last night, Mr. Teller declined to comment on the message, except to say it was a private communication to trusted friends.
The potential effects of conservative discontent on the election remain to be seen. No conservative third-party candidate has gathered much momentum, and few conservatives are likely to pull a lever for Senator John Kerry on Election Day.
Bush campaign spokesmen often say the party is more united than ever, with support for the president comparable to their backing in Mr. Reagan's first term. Still, many Republican strategists argue that in a tight race motivation and turnout among the base voters could be decisive.
Yes, this was only one flip e-mail, and yes, as I've conceded in the past, D.C. conservatives aren't necessarily representative of conservative voters elsewhere in the country. Still, based on my occasional interactions with conservatives on the Hill and in the D.C.-based media, I'd say the sneering tone of that e-mail is actually pretty typical, which can't be a good thing if you're a Republican president.
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WHAT IS STEVE SCHMIDT TALKING ABOUT?: This strikes me as a new twist on that Lanny Davis tactic of claiming something is old news to lessen its political impact:
Arguing that Mr. Kerry's resignation recommendation [for Don Rumsfeld] had been recycled from last year, Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, called his seizing on the Abu Ghraib reports "just the latest example of John Kerry's willingness to say whatever he believes will benefit him politically."
Well, yeah, it has been recycled from last year--and from six months ago and from three months ago and from last week--because frickin' Don Rumsfeld still hasn't resigned!
You can imagine Schmidt flacking for, say, the South African government in the late 1980s: Arguing that calls to free Nelson Mandela had been recycled from the last 25 years, a spokesman for the National Party ...
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08.25.04
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WOULD KERRY BE WORSE FOR THE DEFICIT THAN BUSH?: I have a tough time getting worked up about Jonathan Weisman's scoop that Kerry would be just as bad for the deficit as Bush were he to make good on all his campaign promises. Maybe I'm just a little too trusting of Kerry when it comes to these things, but the Kerry proposal I value most is the one to restore pay-as-you-go rules for fiscal policy, meaning that each new spending or tax cut proposal would have to be offset by a spending cut or tax increase elsewhere in the budget. Once you've signed on to that, you've gone a long way toward the kind of responsible budgeting the current administration has nothing but disdain for.
There's obviously no guarantee Kerry would follow through on this. But given Kerry's fiscally conservative track record in the Senate, and given the people he's taking advice from--Gene Sperling, Bob Rubin, Roger Altman--I feel pretty comfortable about the direction things are likely to head in a Kerry administration. Certainly much more comfortable than I feel about the direction things are likely to head under the current president, given his track record and the people who'd have influence in his administration. And while adopting paygo from this point forward doesn't help with the trillions in red ink the Bushies have already run up, Kerry can hardly be blamed for that. I think the bottom line here is a lot like what Kerry's bottom line on Iraq should be: If you like the direction the country's finances have headed under Bush, by all means, vote for him.
The flaw in Weisman's piece is that he never explains what incentive Kerry has to present a detailed balanced budget plan during the campaign (particularly since the White House has no plans to do the same). Americans love the idea of cutting the deficit in the abstract; they like it much less in practice, when it comes time to cut programs and raise taxes. So, as a candidate, why wouldn't you try to benefit from the general anxiety over the deficit without the opening yourself up to the abuse you'd take if you promised to put this or that federal program on the chopping block? As Leon Panetta points out in Weisman's piece, Clinton didn't do more than pay lip service to the idea of reducing the deficit during the 1992 campaign, and that worked out pretty well.
In general, detailed balanced budget proposals are a horrible way for a Democrat to campaign, but a great way to govern. Given the Republican Party's awful record on deficits since the early 1980s, voters are going cut the Democrat some slack on the campaign trail. But if he doesn't make good on his rhetoric once in office, he's going to get hammered as an old-school, liberal, tax-and-spender when it comes time for re-election. That risk alone would advance the cause of fiscal discipline in a future Kerry administration more than anything he could propose today.
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WHAT IS HAROLD BROWN TALKING ABOUT?: So this I don't quite understand. The Rumsfeld-appointed blue-ribbon panel charged with investigating how Abu Ghraib came about concluded, according to a headline in today's Washington Post, that "Rumsfeld's War Plan Shares the Blame." The article reports:
One of the major factors leading to the detainee abuse, [former Defense Secretary and commission member Harold] Brown said yesterday, was "the expectation by the Defense Department leadership, along with most of the rest of the administration, that following the collapse of the Iraqi regime through coalition military operations, there would be a stable successor regime that would soon emerge in Iraq."
And:
The pervasive lack of troops, especially those with specialized skills, had a cascading effect that helped lead to the abuse, the report said. As the insurgency took off, frontline Army units, lacking interpreters, took to rounding up "any and all suspicious-looking persons--all too often including women and children," it said. This indiscriminate approach resulted in a "flood" of detainees at Abu Ghraib that inundated demoralized and fatigued interrogators, it continued.
And yet the commission members apparently don't think Rumsfeld should resign. As Brown told the Post, "If the head of a department had to resign every time anyone down below did something wrong, it would be a very empty Cabinet table."
Well, I guess that's right. But unless Brown was asked to speak generally about executive-branch human resources protocol, I'm not sure what the point of that statement is. In this case, according to Brown's own report, it was the head of the department who did something wrong, not just someone down below. If the head of a department had to resign every time he did something wrong ... well, you might just have a functional administration.
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