Category Archives: Politics: US: 2004 Election

Michael Moore's movie is a box office smash: The Political 'Fahrenheit' Sets Record at Box Office. Preaching to the choir, or a signal about the election?

The Decembrist: The Many Presidencies of Bill Clinton contains further thoughts on my tactical disagreement with Brad DeLong.

There are many points, but the most interesting of all is this one:

I agree that I don't want to concede all of this in July of the election year. That's why making McCain the VP probably wouldn't have made sense. A candidate cannot put forth a persuasive agenda for renewal and simultaneously acknowledge how much of it he will have to compromise on. But, by the same token, I want to avoid the cycle of disappointment when Kerry faces the recognition that his power to implement an agenda depends on his finding a working relationship with Congress.

To which I replied in the comments,

As for the danger of raising expectations, there is simply no choice. You don't get elected dogcatcher by beeing gloomy and without offering a vision that makes people hopeful.

It's no accident that he word the Bush campaign most uses about Kerry these days, even more than flip-flop, is “pessimistic”. I bet the focus groups tested wild in favor of “optimism”—and it's so easy to claim that any suggestion that the administration is incompetent and things are going badly as “pessimism”. The reporters write it right down…

Brad DeLong has been doing a very very good line in posts directed at “Republican Grownups”. Although something of an endangered species, recent events prove that they are not in fact mythical beasts.

But Brad's latest, It's Not too Late for the Grownup Republicans demonstrates why, while he's a great economist, he'd be miscast as a political scientist:

It’s not too late for the grownup Republicans to act. There’s
still time for the House and Senate Republican caucuses to go to Bush
and force his and Cheney’s resignations. Then Hastert and Stevens can
decline the job, and the presidential succession passes to Colin
Powell.

This then gets us a president who:

1. is a Republican.
2. certainly does not have a smaller chance of winning in November than George W. Bush.
3. would in all probability be good at the job.

It’s what would have already happened to any political leader in a
parliamentary system. It’s what the grownup Republicans owe the
country. And it may well be to the partisan political advantage of the
Republican Party to close down the current Clown Show as quickly as
possible.

On the one hand, yes, this would be an optimal solution for the nation, and probably for the Republicans (if you believe as I do that they look increasingly doooooooooooomed in the next election…although 'a week is a long time in politics' and the election is not next week).

On the other hand, while Brad's plan is good for the nation, it is so Not Going To Happen.

1. W is not a listening kind of guy. Any grownup who gets an audience with him will get the Wrath of W, not an attentive audience. And the Bush clan remembers its grudges.

2. Even if W goes, and even if Cheney passes up the chance to have the trappings of power as well as its reality, the chances that the hyper-ideological duo of Hastert and Stevens would (a) swallow all their personal ambition and (b) step aside for Traitor Powell (as they must surely see him) is so small we need a new number to describe it.

Of course, Brad knows this, so I suppose he's mostly jesting (and the part that isn't jest is wishful thinking), and by so doing demonstrating what a bind the dwindling band of mostly elderly Republican grownups find themselves in. Their choices are to sit back and do nothing, which is nearly criminal, or to commit party treason for which they will never be forgiven in their lifetimes.

Where are the Republican grownups? Mostly still in hiding.

PS. Why do I say this post shows why Brad isn't a political scientist? Because he bows in the direction of a parliamentary system. In fact, Parliamentary systems are like Republican-dominated government all the time. No checks and balances even on the good days. Yes, they can depose the irrational leader (e.g. the takedown of Thatcher). But that actually takes a very long time to happen. And parties in those systems often run awful leaders in elections (Michael Foot, William Hague, for example).

Meanwhile, the party majority votes in lockstep for fear of loss of preferment (poll tax!). No thanks.

UPDATE: Drezner has ideas, but they won't lead to results either…

Daily Kos says,

Farenheit 9/11 will one day be the subject of a thousands acedmic papers, especially if Kerry wins the White House. The movie's first trailer is already the most effective anti-Bush commercial ever made.

Of course, that trailer won't be shown on TV. It's a 2-minute piece designed for movie theaters, not television (though it'll bear watching whether theaters show the trailer). The real fireworks will hit, I'm sure, when this movie's ad campaign hits television.

Done right (and I do trust Moore to do it right), those 30-second movie commercials, run nationally, could be some of the most effective political advertising of the season (without being, legally, political advertising). Watch stations try to block the ad, in the face of a concerted GOP effort to suppress its showing.

Meanwhile, Digby points to the trailer of The Hunting of the President, which I see as another example of the same phenomenon. This movie is apparently only showing in a few cities, but the DVD is promised to be out by election time.

Kos again:

If the movie has a measurable impact on the elections, watch the concept become a new CFR loophole. Say we have President Kerry in office. A bunch of rich Republicans (the “haves” and the “have mores” or, as Bush likes to call them, his “base”) make an anti-Kerry movie in 2008, and release it, oh, at about this time. Then they run $100 million in ads promoting the anti-Kerry bit, all outside the reach of campaign finance laws and the FEC.

A loophole it will be next to impossible to close.

Last Halloween I asked,

How can it be that about half of the voters in this country tell pollsters that they are basically happy with an administration that lies like a rug? This is surely one of the central questions of the day.

Now comes Michael Bérubé, professor of literature and cultural studies, with a poll that is designed to address this still-burning (or at least spluttering) question.

Good blog, too.

Despite his low and shrinking standing in the polls, there are at least three¹ scenarios in which GW Bush could still win his first Presidential election.

But first, the good news.

It's been obvious for some time that if the election is based on any of the traditional fundamentals, Bush is toast. The big question mark counterbalancing this fact was Bush's apparent financial advantage (not to mention the subsidies that always flow with incumbency), especially if it allowed him to define his opponent. The relative failure of the recent $50+ million Bush ad campaign — leaving the field open for Kerry to use the convention in the traditional way, as his introduction to the American people — suggests that Bush's (diminishing) financial advantage is primarily good for stemming the wounds, holding the base, not for making gains with the independent/undecided.

Importantly, a segment of the press (only part — the big cable networks remain solidly owned by zealots) and a much larger segment of the Establishment have decided that Bush is dangerous to the increasingly Argentinian economy, to the US's hard power (the army is hurting), and now to its soft power (whatever claim it had to moral standing in the community of nations). That is not an atmosphere that leads to the press Gore-ing Kerry, and Kerry's too disciplined and experienced to make a serious error likely.

Indeed, one thing that impresses me about Kerry is his political discipline and toughness. He stayed the course in Iowa, when the pundits and the futures market had written him off. He laid low this last six weeks, raising vast — impressively vast — amounts of money, when the chattering classes were out there pushing him to do or say silly things. He had the self-discipline to lay low, let events take their course, let Bush self-destruct, and not look like he was piling on. Most importantly, his campaign seems to have learned important lessons from the Gore campaign — and not just the dangers of letting your opponents define you: Kerry has been playing nice with reporters on his campaign plane, spending social time with them; this matters too much. Kerry's new plane has an airborne reporters' bar — this can only be good. Most importantly, the campaign is working for the long haul, and worried about peaking too soon, right after the convention. That was one of Gore's mistakes, one that people forget—in part because his decline was so visibly helped by the media echo chamber's repeat of lies and distortions such as “Al Gore said he invented the Internet”..

OK, now the bad news.

Here are three scenarios in which Bush pulls it out.

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