Category Archives: Politics: US: 2004 Election

Lots happening.

• Stirling Newberry describes the campaigns' master plans and fears as we enter the home stretch:
  

  Television rules the day from here on in, it is about, not the doers, the thinkers the talkers – but the watchers. And in recent days those watchers are breaking hard away from Bush, because his message of “Iraq is alright” is not matching what they see from their own lives. In the next few days the mood of the media will also be important – do they stand by their man? Or do they begin to come over to the idea that kicking Bush can play – and that CBS wasn't wrong, just a little to early in shorting Bush with their memo story?

  Bush's reliance on Iraq says he knows that the economy, and even terror are losing messages. Which means he knows he has lost. Kerry pulling back means he knows he is losing.

  Who loses this one first? That is, who says something that can be played and replayed by the media as a sign of being “out of touch”. For those that have counseled aggression, instead there will be conservation – avoiding of any word that can be taken out of context. Both candidates will speak like movie reviews – even one word can kill them, so every word will ooze message. If they attack, they will pan, if they pander, they will gop on the praise in globs and blobs.

  The serious people have made up their mind about this election, now comes the sideshow version of the campaign, where both candidates become caricatures, not from the media, but by and for the media.

• Rebecca Danner checks in from a stint at a campaign phone bank.
  

  I dreaded the idea of phone banking and only reluctantly signed up but, to my surprise, it ended up being a lot of fun and I really feel like it makes a difference. When I told people about it the next day, I found that most of them had the same reservations and questions that I had going into it so I thought I’d write up a quick FAQ to encourage everyone out there to give it a try.

• Randy Paul chortles over the fissures appearing in the previously monolithic South Florida Cuban vote.
• Robert Sam Anson displays boundless cynicism about the campaign press corps.

Outlet Radio via Daily Kos

Dan Rather, CBS News Anchor

1. given documents he thought were true
2. failed to thoroughly investigate the facts
3. reported documents to the American people as true to make his case
4. when confronted with the facts, apologized and launched an investigation
5. number of Americans dead: 0
6. should be fired as CBS News Anchor

George W. Bush, President of the United States

1. given documents he thought were true
2. failed to thoroughly investigate the facts
3. reported documents to the American people as true to make his case
4. when confronted with the facts, continued to report untruth and stonewalled an investigation
5. number of Americans dead: 1100
6. should be given four more years as President of the United States

How do I know Kerry is surging in the RNC's overnight polls? Easy: TalkLeft: Unnamed Officials Warn of 'Spectacular' Al Qaeda Attack in U.S.

Must be yesterday's speech.

Newsweek reports the soundbite du jour: Kerry's New Call to Arms. Seems Kerry will now roll the dice and make Iraq the main issue.

This is a sensible, but high-stakes strategy. On the merits it's Kerry's best issue: while people still don't agree on the merits of the attack, everyone honest agrees Bush's post-invasion plan was to collect garlands from the happy natives. It sure didn't work out that way.

While some will say Kerry has adopted this tactic now out of desperation, and who knows they might be right, the fact is that there was no sensible way Kerry could have done it any sooner. Facts on the ground were too fluid, and there was the danger that something might work out right. Now that danger seems attenuated.

A different danger for Kerry remains: that the Bush admin will lean on Pakistan to scoop up 'Osama bin forgotten' sometime during the next four weeks. That would — very unfairly but very effectively — take a good chunk of the wind out of Kerry's sails.

So it's a good strategy, a timely strategy, but still something of a risky strategy. That's in a way good too: any challenger who doesn't take risks usually loses, and there haven't been any risks taken since Kerry mortgaged his house to pay for Iowa.

Hmmm. That risk worked out OK, didn't it?

If the left-leaning blogs were as on-message as the right-leaning blogs, in the next few days you would be hearing a vast echo-chamber effect from this Gadflyer post, about GW Bush, Girlie Man.

By next weekend, you would hear questions based on it on your TV pundit shows.

A few days after this, the obvious wimpish implications of draft-dodging, cheerleading at Yale, and question-dodging would be standard watercooler stuff.

But in fact, Democrats are not organized (pace Will Rodgers), they fail to understand that if you repeat something often enough it becomes taken as true, and they don't own TV networks.

So it probably won't happen.

Even though, oddly enough (and the implications drawn from male cheerleading excepted), I'm in broad agreement with the Gadflyer article's basic thesis: Bush is frit. That's why, for example, he won't face questions from a representative public. That's why he's running away from the second debate, where he might have to face real, unscripted, people rather than the milquetoasts we have for journalists.

More tellingly, that's why we have this idiotic color-coding system for terror warnings that never goes down. Bush & Co. are terrified that they'll get blamed for being asleep at the switch again for the next terror attack, having been asleep at the switches for 9/11. As a result, rather than take the stiff upper lip approach used by the British government in light of IRA terror — an attitude in which the whole country more or less shrugged off the constant bombs, our government here in the US encourages public panic. The fact that 'security theater' and other silly and expensive actions which don't do much good are constant victories for the terrorists is less important than the paramount need felt by a certain type of moral cowards: the need to avoid blame at all costs.

John Kerry got near the edge of this with his speech recently about the pass-the-buck administration, the excuse presidency: never wrong, never responsible, never to blame, but it's really deeper than that.

OK. Now I probably deserve my induction into the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill.

Boy, the Telegraph sure screwed up its report on this one:

Reuters.com: The U.S. Navy has rejected a legal watchdog group's request to open an investigation into military awards given to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry during the Vietnam War, saying his medals were properly approved.

“Our examination found that existing documentation regarding the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart medals indicates the awards approval process was properly followed,” the Navy's inspector general, Vice Admiral Ronald Route, said in a memo written to Navy Secretary Gordon England.

“In particular, the senior officers who awarded the medals were properly delegated authority to do so. In addition we found that they correctly followed the procedures in place at the time for approving these awards.”

In rejecting the request for an investigation made by Judicial Watch last month, Route said that “conducting any additional review regarding events that took place over thirty years ago would not be productive.”

That's for sure.

Update: More of the same from AP.