Category Archives: Politics: US: 2004 Election

Must-read DeLong, If You Said to Me, Name 25 Million People Who Would Maybe Be President… He Wouldn't Have Been in That Category (quoting an amazing interview with Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein). Brad then adds his comments:

Never yet has a grownup looked me in the eye and said, “George W. Bush is qualified to be President of the United States.” The most anyone has ever done is to say (around the time of the inauguration), “Look, Brad, he'll be Queen Elizabeth; Colin Powell will be Tony Blair and Paul O'Neill will be Gordon Brown. There are lots of Head-of-State things that George W. Bush will do really well, and the government will be in good hands.” But I don't think any grownup would say that or anything like that now.

Which just shows you that Berkeley is special. I suspect that many people in this community probably think Bush is just fine for the job. Some national religious leaders, after all, have said they think that his 5-4 election in the face of both contrary precedent and a contrary popular vote was a sign of divine providence. Others predict a divinely-ordained Bush victory in 2004. These views don't exist in a total vacuum.

I bet it's nice in Berkeley this time of year.

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The Mirror of Justice has had an interesting series of posts debating the role of professions of faith and positions at odds with faith in Presidents and presidential candidates, the latest of which, by Rob Vischer, is More on Kerry as a “cynical nonbeliever”.

My brother finds and links to a Campaign Desk report that says that CNN is taking the fall for the Letterman Yawning Boy fiasco in which they falsely reported that the White House claimed the tape was doctored.

In yesterday’s coda to the Yawning Boy saga, I forgot to mention an illuminating report from Thomas Lang on the campaigndesk.org Web site on Friday.

Lang
arguably gets to the bottom of the question of why CNN ever reported
that the White House called to cast doubts on the accuracy of the
yawning boy video. This has caused much huffing and puffing amongst
administration critics.

Lang quotes CNN spokesman Matt
Furman thusly: “When we aired the Letterman clip Tuesday morning a
producer in the CNN White House unit called our national desk to raise
an issue about the potential authenticity of the tape. That
conversation was relayed among several people in the newsroom and by
the time it made it to [news anchor] Daryn Kagan it had gone through
several people in the news room and unfortunately [the on-air version]
became ‘The White House has said the tape is not authentic.'”

And speaking of yawning boy, reader Stephen Stackwick e-mailed me yesterday with this comment:

“Interesting that W. had time to scribble a note to Tyler but families of KIA servicemen get (duplicate) form letters.”

Stackwick was referring to last Tuesday’s Washington Post story by David Maraniss who told of one Iowa family who lost their son getting two identical form letters from Bush.

As a paid-up beliver in what the British call the ‘Cock-up Theory of Life’–the belief that Murphy’s Law explains much more variance than do Evil Conspiracy Theories, I guess I’m prepared to believe this, although it sure seems awful sloppy to have a procedure in place that lets errors like this go on the air.

The Economist almost never comes on Friday. It sometimes comes on Saturday. It often doesn't make it out here until Monday, leading me to grumble that they get better service in Cairo (they do). But this week's came today, and the cover is just perfect. My kids loved it too.