Sunday, October 31, 2004

pissed off...

It seems that throughout the country, voters who are likely to vote democrat (minorities, elderly, the poor) are being intimidated into not voting - See this example from South Carolina. I'll be honest, this absolutely pisses me off. This is a democracy! If you don't have the votes then get out there and convince people you deserve their vote. Don't coerce people into not voting. If you can't get a majority of the vote then you don't deserve to run the country. Those are the rules. If Kerry doesn't get the votes he needs to win, then I will happily call George W. Bush my president. But if you're willing to disenfranchise voters in order to win, well, that's un-American.

For more on vote suppression see these posts at the New Donkey:
http://www.newdonkey.com/2004/10/vote-suppression-update.html
http://www.newdonkey.com/2004/10/another-vote-suppression-update.html

Saturday, October 30, 2004

john kerry for president

by the Editors of The New Republic


There was a time, in the aftermath of September 11, when this magazine liked what it heard from George W. Bush. He said America was at war--not merely with an organization, but with a totalitarian ideology. And he pledged to defeat Islamist totalitarianism the same way we defeated European totalitarianism, by spreading democracy. For a publication that has long believed in the marriage of liberalism and American power, this was the right analysis. And its correctness mattered more than the limitations of the man from which it came.

Three years later, it has become tragically clear that the two cannot be separated. The president's war on terrorism, which initially offered a striking contrast to his special interest-driven domestic agenda, has come to resemble it. The common thread is ideological certainty untroubled by empirical evidence, intellectual curiosity, or open debate. The ideology that guides this president's war on terrorism is more appealing than the corporate cronyism that guides his domestic policy. But it has been pursued with the same sectarian, thuggish, and ultimately self-defeating spirit. You cannot lead the world without listening to it. You cannot make the Middle East more democratic while making it more anti-American. You cannot make the United States more secure while using security as a partisan weapon. And you cannot demand accountable government abroad while undermining it at home.

And so a president who promised to make America safer by making the Muslim world more free has failed on both counts. This magazine has had its differences with John Kerry during his career and during this campaign. But he would be a far better president than George W. Bush.


On domestic policy, Bush has been Newt Gingrich without the candor. Like Gingrich, he envisions stripping away many of the welfare-state protections that shield economically vulnerable Americans from the vagaries of the free market (while insulating corporations ever more from those same forces). But, rather than explicitly opposing popular government programs, as Gingrich did, Bush has pursued a more duplicitous strategy: He is eviscerating the government's ability to pay for them. His tax cuts, while sold as short-term measures to revive the economy, actually represent long-term assaults on the progressive tax code. If allowed to fully take effect, they will substantially shift the tax burden from unearned wealth to income, dramatically increasing inequality. And they will produce what Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, has privately called a "fiscal crisis"--a collapse in government revenue just as the baby-boom retirement sends Medicare and Social Security costs skyrocketing. This crisis will sap America's ability to wage the war on terrorism--since government will lack the funds to adequately safeguard homeland security or expand the military. It will create enormous pressure to eviscerate the government protections that guarantee poor and middle-class Americans even the meager economic security they enjoy today. And it will be entirely by design.

The tax cuts are typical of a president who cloaks a relentlessly ideological domestic agenda in moderate, problem-solving language--and gets away with it by distorting the facts. In 2001, Bush presented his policy on stem cells as a pragmatic compromise--in which research on preexisting stem-cell lines would be funded but research on new ones would not. But the supposed compromise was based on a falsehood. Bush vastly exaggerated the number of viable preexisting stem-cell lines, thus pretending he was facilitating the medical research most Americans support while actually crippling it in obeisance to his conservative Christian base.

On prescription drugs, the story is similar. With elderly Americans demanding that the government cover their prescription-drug costs, Bush endorsed a bill that administered such coverage not through Medicare but through the private sector in which his administration harbors a near-theological faith. Since private insurers had to be lured into the market with large subsidies, Bush's plan offered less coverage, at greater cost, than it would have under Medicare. But, when Medicare's chief actuary tried to estimate the bill's true cost, his superiors threatened to fire him. Only after the legislation passed did the Bush administration admit that it would cost $134 billion more than it had previously acknowledged.

By contrast, John Kerry has a record of fiscal honesty and responsibility that continues the tradition of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin. Unlike most Democrats, he supported the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction plan. Unlike most Republicans, he supported Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction package. And, unlike President Bush, he supports the "pay as you go" rules that, in the 1990s, helped produce a budget surplus.

It is true that, in this campaign, Kerry has proposed more spending than his partial repeal of the Bush tax cut will fund. But he has also said that, if the repeal does not bring in enough revenue, he will scale back his proposals. In fact, one of the virtues of Kerry's health plan is that, unlike Clinton's, it can easily be broken down into modest reforms. Even if Kerry merely makes good on his pledge to dramatically expand Medicaid and schip, programs that offer health coverage to poor children and adults, he will have done more to help struggling Americans than Bush has in his four years.


On foreign policy, Kerry's record is less impressive. His vote against the 1991 Gulf war suggested a tendency to see all American military action through the distorting prism of Vietnam. And his behavior in the current Iraq debate has not been exemplary. To be fair, his position has been more consistent than his detractors give him credit for. Republicans mock him for "voting for the war" before opposing it. But Bush himself urged congressional authorization for war as a way to force U.N. inspectors back into Iraq and to disarm Saddam Hussein peacefully. It was reasonable to believe that only a credible U.S. threat of force would produce an intrusive new inspections regime (which it did). And Kerry is right that, if Bush had allowed those inspections to continue, they would have eventually revealed that Saddam lacked weapons of mass destruction and eviscerated the rationale for war.

Kerry's greater failure was his vote against the $87 billion supplemental to equip American troops and rebuild Iraq. He was right to support funding the supplemental by repealing part of the tax cut (particularly since Bush officials like Paul Wolfowitz had shamelessly suggested that the war would cost America virtually nothing). But, once that effort failed, he should have supported the legislation anyway, as Senator Joseph Biden did. Building "firehouses in Baghdad"--a notion Kerry has repeatedly mocked--is not only something we owe the Iraqi people, it stems from the fundamentally liberal premise that social development can help defeat fanaticism. Abandoning that principle under pressure from Howard Dean is the most disturbing thing Kerry has done in this campaign.

But Kerry's critics are wrong to cite his opposition to the Gulf war--and his criticism of the current Iraq war--as evidence of his supposed reluctance to forcefully wage the war on terrorism. It is conceivable that, in the coming years, the United States might need to launch military action against another Muslim regime (though, given how greatly Bush has overextended the military, it is hard to see how we would do so). But the war on terrorism is far more likely to require military action within states, to secure lawless areas that terrorists have exploited.

The Bush administration's misguided tendency to see Al Qaeda as the instrument of rogue governments made it more willing to use force against Iraq but less willing to use force in Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. Kerry, by contrast, seems inclined to use American power where it could genuinely damage Al Qaeda. Even during the Democratic primaries, he attacked the Bush administration for not sending U.S. troops into Tora Bora to destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in the waning days of the Afghan war. He has proposed doubling U.S. Special Forces for operations just like that. And he has proposed strengthening America's capacity to act--including even militarily--to prevent nuclear proliferation, an issue on which the Bush administration has proved astonishingly passive.

Kerry's apparent willingness to act within states is particularly important because the U.N.'s obsession with sovereignty renders it impotent in such circumstances. His support for the Kosovo war, waged without U.N. approval, is encouraging in this regard, as is his openness to using U.S. troops--presumably without the Security Council's blessing--in Darfur, Sudan. These encouraging signs counterbalance his worrying tendency to describe multilateralism--and U.N. support--as an end in itself rather than instrument of American power. If elected, this tension will likely be a theme of his presidency, as it was of Clinton's.

Critics also call Kerry a narrow realist uninterested in battling Al Qaeda in the realm of ideas. But he has suggested an ambitious effort to support democratic civil society in the Muslim world. And, while we don't know whether Kerry would actually carry out such a campaign, we know that Bush--for all his grand rhetoric--has not. The administration's Greater Middle East Initiative, supposedly its signature effort to promote democracy in the Muslim world, was gutted after protests from the very autocracies President Bush pledged to reform. And, while the Iraq war was supposed to inspire liberals throughout the region, it may be doing the opposite. Anti-Americanism has reached such toxic levels that dissidents in Muslim countries seem increasingly fearful of any association with the United States. This is the bitter fruit of an occupation conducted with such shocking arrogance and carelessness that it calls into question whether the Bush administration's pledge to turn Iraq into a model democracy was ever really sincere.

But the war against Islamist totalitarianism is not merely a struggle for Muslim minds; it is a struggle for American ones as well. In the weeks after September 11, Bush presided over a country more united--with more faith in its government--than at any other time in recent memory. He has squandered that unity and trust for the cheapest of reasons. His administration has used the war on terrorism as a bludgeon against congressional Democrats and has implied that its critics are aiding the enemy. And it has repeatedly misled the public--touting supposed evidence of Iraq's nuclear program that American intelligence analysts knew was highly dubious, rebuking General Eric Shinseki for telling the truth about how many troops it would take to occupy Iraq successfully, and firing Lawrence Lindsey for saying how much it would cost.

The result is a country bitterly divided, distrustful of its government, and weaker as a result. The next time an American president tries to use force in the war on terrorism, he will not merely lack the world's trust, he will lack much of the American people's as well. That may be Bush's most damning legacy of all. He has failed the challenge of these momentous times. John Kerry deserves a chance to do better.

Thursday, October 28, 2004

week before prediction

Kerry wins uncontested
Why? Voter turnout. Likely voter polls fail most significantly when turnout is greater than expected - when people who weren't expected to vote do vote. High voter turnout, historically, has favored the Democratic candidate. I'm guessing we'll see higher voter turnout than any time in the last 40 years. Young people are excited. Many are fueled by anti-Bush (or pro-Bush) passions. Every state that is polling at even, or close to tied, will swing to Kerry on election day.

"Close your eyes and imagine the bluest stretches of Blue America on a crisp and clear Wednesday. It's the night after the presidential election. Though it was certainly close...John Kerry won by a healthy margin.... The raucous dancing in the streets started around five or six in the morning; a few hours later, inner-city youth are linking arms with investment bankers and unruly college kids in a line-dance snaking all the way from Nashua, New Hampshire to Corvallis, Oregon. Millions of nerds finally feel wanted. Cool kids nationwide are taking a break from fast-living and loose morals to contemplate the glorious future of the Republic. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Or rather, yes, Ohio and Wisconsin and Minnesota, ye large industrial swing states of the Middle West, you are John Kerry's Santa Claus. Cookies and milk shall rain down upon you in the form of federal largesse...."
-
Reihan Salam (The New Republic)

Monday, October 18, 2004

weak on terror

Check out my latest article in the Idealistic Nation on how Bush is failing in the War on Terror because he refuses to adapt national security strategy to the realities of the post-September 11th world.

The Case Against George W. Bush: The War on Terror

statistically significant

As I talked about a few posts ago, I think that polling in this presidential elecction is full of problems. Princeton Professor Sam Wang has put together a great website analyzing the election using meta-analysis to ask: if the election were held today, who would win?

Check it out: http://election.princeton.edu/

Saturday, October 09, 2004

kerry's war on terror strategery

I think Marc is right that any sort of "victory" in the war on terror could backfire on Bush by being seen as mere political gamesmanship, but I think there's something the Kerry campaign can take from all of this tactically. I think Kerry's been wrong, both tactically and realistically, to boil the entire war on terror down to catching Osama bin Laden. Just like catching Sadam Hussein earlier in the year didn't realistically make the world much much safer, though it did make us feel better about ourselves, catching Osama bin Laden isn't going to be a decisive blow to the terrorists in the larger war on terror. It will make us feel better, but the bottom line is that these terrorist groups don't operate like regular countries and institutions. They replenish and rebuild at an astounding rate (thus why Bush's statements about catching 75 percent of al Qaida are disingenuous at best, total lies at worst), and taking out their supposed leader is not going to hinder their efforts much.

Just like Bush has done in every speech since 9/11, Kerry has in the last two debates way oversimplified this administration's errors in the war on terror while at the same time opening himself to political peril should Bush and Rove pull a proverbial rabbit out of a hat. In his foreign policy speeches from now on, he should make it clear that Osama's an important symbolic goal, but that the fight is much larger, and this president has failed at both the symbolic and the real.

The way to win the war on terror is to have a comprehensive strategy that targets our troops, special forces and soft power where they're needed -- in countries that really spawn terrorists with lawlessness and poverty. Afghanistan was and has once again become that kind of place, and Bush missed a huge opportunity to win the larger war by focusing our energies on that country and building it, over time, into a free and open democracy. Instead, what we now have there is a dangerous, poor country that is run by warlords and the financial power of the world opium market because Bush diverted our resources to a place that was stable, albeit under the rule of a brutal tyrant. And he did so under false pretenses. Kerry has made a number of these same points, but he's wrapped it all into this failure to catch Osama bin Laden, and that's not only opened him to political peril should they find him, but it's also simply not true.

I'll have better thought-out posts in the future, but I'm not in such an articulate mood at the moment.

Sunday, October 03, 2004

october surprise?

The newest buzz in political circles is suggestion that the Bush Administration has an October surprise up their sleeves - a high value Al Qaeda leader whose capture will be revealed in the days before the election. The conventional wisdom is that this will give Bush a last minute boost, ensuring re-election. But is this really the likely outcome of such a surprise? It seems more likely that Kerry would benefit.

First, the only person whose capture could have any benefit for Bush would be Bin Laden. His evasion is the most visible tarnish on Bush's War on Terror record (though as you can read in my forthcoming Idealistic Nation article, it is far from his only failure.) The capture of any other terrorist would cause little more than a notice among the American public. In July, The New Republic published an article, titled "July Surprise?" suggesting that the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistan to capture high value terrorists during the Democratic National Convention. It turns out that Pakistan did just that. And announced it just hours before Kerry's acceptance speech. But who remembers? I doubt many people. That's cause the terrorists name was Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Ever heard of him before? Neither have I. So only a Bin Laden capture would do any good.

But could it instead do bad? After all, it would have taken Bush three years to catch the guy. But more importantly, the American public isn't stupid. Even without the rumors of an October Surprise in the media (and it's sure to only get louder), a Bin Laden capture in the week before the election would seem a little fishy to your average American. I mean, what are the chances of actually capturing him in that week? It seems more likely that he's already been caught and that people will find an election week announcement to be politically repulsing. Or even worse, what if we just haven't been trying hard enough (many of the troops that two years back were searching for Bin Laden are now in Iraq) or have him surrounded but haven't gone in after him (see Tora Bora for examples of Bush having done this already) and only plan to do so right before the election. Such a scenario, or even rumors that this is what happened could be politically devastating for Bush.

The point is, keep your eyes out for an October surprise (or non surprise if you were expecting it) and be skeptical.