Fearless Election Prediction: Kerry Wins Election, Bush Wins Popular Vote

Months ago, I wrote a lengthy blog entry entitled “Machismo Theory” (you can find it in March, 2004 archives). My theory was very simple: For the last half century, the presidential candidate perceived by the electorate to be the stronger, the more macho, has won the election. At the time, I predicted that Senator Kerry, a war hero with far greater rhetorical skills than the president, would eventually come to be seen by the voters as the stronger leader. However, my prediction was wrong. President Bush has consistently surpassed Kerry on all measures of strength and leadership. Bush has maintained his lead through the WMD fiasco, through the mismanaged occupation, through the Abu Ghraib scandal that stretches to his doorstep, through his opposition to the 9/11 Commission, and through embarrassing books by terrorism czar Richard Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, and journalists Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh, and Kitty Kelley. He has maintained his lead on the “strength” measure even through three debates in which he looked like, to put it charitably, a college sophomore nervously trying out for the debate team.

As the campaign has progressed, it has become increasingly clear to me why Machismo Theory has held true over the years. Only a small percentage of voters can actually identify and articulate specific campaign issues. Twenty percent of Bush supporters for example still believe, against all evidence, that Saddam had some responsibility for 9/11. Rather than take an issue by issue inventory of the candidates’ positions, voters make up their minds impressionistically. As a result, the individual with the tougher image tends to prevail. I happen to have the bad habit of asking random people with whom I come into contact, who they’re voting for. When I do this, I get responses like “Kerry is too wishy-washy,” “Bush is an idiot,” “Kerry marched with Hanoi Jane during the Viet Nam war,” “I can’t stand another four years of Bush’s smirk.” It may be that the situations in which I pose my question dictate a certain shorthand type of answer; however, my sense is that if I asked for a more specific rationale, it would not be forthcoming. In this decidedly unscientific person-on-the street-poll, I have found marginally more support for Bush.

Based on machismo theory, on the many polls which show Bush a hair’s breadth ahead, and on my conversations with people, I predict that George Bush will win the popular vote. There is further evidence to support this: If you study the solid Republican South, state by state, you find that Bush is ahead in Georgia by 15 points, Alabama by 12 points, South Carolina by 13 points, Tennessee by a whopping 23 points (Al Gore Lost Tennessee by 4 percentage points), Kentucky by 22 points, Oklahoma by 30 points, and Texas by 23 points. In Democratic states, Kerry’s lead is far narrower: California by 9 points, New York by 11, Maryland by 10, New Jersey by 8. Even in Massachusetts, Kerry’s bulge is a moderate 14 percentage points. Given these disparities, it is remarkable that Kerry appears to be running even with Bush in national polls.

But as we all know by now, it is not a “national” election. Rather, it is an election comprised of 51 state elections. If George W. Bush wins 100% of the vote in, say, Oklahoma, he still only wins 7 electoral votes out of that 270 needed to win the election. If Kerry wins Pennsylvania by 2 percentage points, he captures the entire Pennsylvania booty, 21 electors. What I am suggesting is that this election may be the ultimate in poetic justice: George Bush will win the popular vote, and John Kerry will squeak by in the all-important Electoral College. How will Kerry do it? Let’s take a look at the states that Kerry will carry, with the corresponding electoral values:

Maine, 4
New Hampshire, 4
Vermont, 3
Massachusetts, 12
Rhode Island, 4
Connecticut, 7
New York, 31
New Jersey, 15
Delaware, 3
Maryland, 10
Pennsylvania, 21
District of Columbia, 3 (In my home town, Kerry will win with 78% of the vote)
Ohio, 20
Michigan, 17
Illinois, 21
New Mexico, 5
California, 55
Oregon, 7
Washington, 11

These states total 253 of the needed 270 electoral votes.

Let’s look at the Bush states:

Georgia, 15
Alabama, 9
South Carolina, 8
North Carolina, 15
Tennessee, 11
Kentucky, 8
Indiana, 11
Mississippi, 6
Louisiana, 9
Virginia, 13
West Virginia 5
Texas, 34
Arkansas, 6
Missouri, 11
Oklahoma, 7
Kansas, 6
Nebraska, 5
South Dakota, 3
North Dakota, 3
Iowa 7
Minnesota 10
Wisconsin 10
Wyoming, 3
Montana, 3
Idaho, 4
Utah, 5
Colorado 9
Nevada, 5
Arizona, 10
Alaska, 3

These states for George Bush total 254 electoral votes of the 270 needed.

Obviously with these electoral totals, neither candidate would win the election. However, there are two states missing. Conspicuously absent from the Kerry column is a state that always votes Democratic: Hawaii, with 4 electoral votes, is in a dead heat right now, with Kerry and Bush tied at 43%. Gore won Hawaii in 2000 by 18 percentage points. And then there is Florida, the ghosts of which hover over the entire election. Let's discuss the dynamics of the 2004 Florida election:

Much has been made lately about a nationwide increase in support for Bush in the African-American community. My hunch is that any such increase will be minute, and will be more than offset by increased registration and voting participation by blacks who support Kerry. The reason for this is a simple one: No group took the 2000 Florida debacle more personally than the black community. What the 2000 Florida election did was unveil the dirty little secret of American electoral politics: No group has been more undercounted, more disenfranchised, more excluded than the African-American community. I’m not referring to the “hard” disenfranchisement of the Jim Crow era--poll taxes, literacy tests, voter intimidation and murder. Rather, I’m referring to the “soft” discrimination of giving the poor the most unreliable, error-prone, dilapidated equipment by which to register their vote, and the least guidance and organization on election day. Voters in low-income, high minority districts, not only in Florida, but all over the country, were almost 4 times as likely as affluent voters to have their votes not counted. The black community knows this only too well, and will show up in record numbers on November 2, especially in Florida. The pent up desire to right the wrong of the 2000 election is today palpable in Florida. I predict that not only will John Kerry get 90% of the black vote in Florida, but further, a stout coalition of black voters and elderly voters will constitute the fifth “hurricane” to blow through Florida this season, and will deliver to Kerry the state’s 27 electoral votes. And when Hawaii returns to its traditional voting patterns, John Kerry will win the election with 284 electoral votes to George Bush’s 254.

Remember, you heard it here first. And if you look out your window in the early morning of November 3, that figure you see dancing in the streets will be me!

Finally, as an addendum to this blog entry, I’m posting a rather thought-provoking list. In this time when military strength and experience are such a focus of discussion, I have posted below the military service records of the key figures of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively, as well as that of some of the best-known commentators. Make of it what you will:

Democrats' service records:

* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as
an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
* Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star
with Combat V, Purple Hearts.
* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star,
Korea.
* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze
Star, Vietnam.
* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
* Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs,
Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal.
* Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in
Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
* Chuck Robb: Vietnam
* Howell Heflin: Silver Star
* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered
draft but received #311.
* Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.
* Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.

Republicans:

* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.
* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach
business.
* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.
* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* Jon Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve.
* Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor.
* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National
Guard.
* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.
* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was
over in Korea.
* Phil Gramm: did not serve.
* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit,
Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.
* Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although continued in NFL for 8 years.
* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.
* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: did not serve.
* Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
* Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.

Pundits & Preachers
* Sean Hannity: did not serve.
* Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst.')
* Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
* Michael Savage: did not serve.
* George Will: did not serve.
* Chris Matthews: did not serve.
* Paul Gigot: did not serve.
* Bill Bennett: did not serve.
* Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
* Bill Kristol: did not serve.
* Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
* Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
* Clarence Thomas: did not serve.
* Ralph Reed: did not serve.
* Michael Medved: did not serve.

- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 11:19 AM

 
Jon Stewart vs. Tucker Carlson: No Punches Landed

I recently made the glorious decision to install XM Satellite Radio in my car. XM, the audiophile’s dream technology, allows me to move seamlessly between smooth jazz, old school R&B, and CNN, with a million options in between. So I was in a great mood in my car last Friday afternoon, listening to “Inside Politics with Judy Woodruff,” when I began to hear promos for Jon Stewart’s upcoming visit to Crossfire. Since I like Stewart’s political satire on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, I decided to lengthen my list of errands so I could listen to the show.

One could tell from the blitz of promos on CNN, that due to Stewart’s blossoming celebrity in this election year, CNN regarded his appearance on Crossfire as a big deal. Once the show began, it was striking that co-hosts Paul Begala (on the left) and Tucker Carlson (on the right) had abandoned their standard point-counterpoint format in favor of making Stewart the show’s sole guest. Begala generously introduced Stewart by saying “He's either the funniest smart guy on TV or the smartest funnyman.” It was clear that both Begala and Carlson had an appreciation for Stewart’s satirical take on the political scene. Their plan for the show was a simple one: raise broad political themes, allow Stewart to riff on the absurdities of the election season, and bask in the reflected glory of Stewart’s hipness. The problem with this plan however, was that no one had consulted Stewart. To the co-hosts’ surprise, Jon Stewart came on the show with but one goal in mind—to tell the co-hosts how bad their show was. Ignoring the best attempts of Begala and Carlson to get him to comment on the political scene, Stewart immediately lit into Crossfire:

“…I made a special effort to come on the show today, because I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad… I felt that that wasn't fair and I should come here and tell you that I don't -- it's not so much that it's bad, as it's hurting America.”

As I listened in my car, my reaction was one of confusion. Was Stewart doing tongue-in-cheek shtick, or was he seriously accusing the Crossfire show of “hurting America?” To my amazement, the more he talked, the more Stewart seemed to be saying that this talk show, seen by a miniscule audience at 4:30 in the afternoon, was somehow a menace to democracy. According to Stewart, if the newsmakers of the day get together and speak passionately, vehemently, and even argumentatively about the issues, it results in debasing the public dialogue. Here’s Stewart:

“Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations. And we're left out there to mow our lawns…You're part of their strategies. You are partisan--what do you call it-- hacks….you're doing theater, when you should be doing debate, which would be great.”

I confess that I have no idea what Stewart’s core criticism of the show is. Is he accusing Crossfire of being too hard on its guests, or too easy? Is he upset that it features high profile politicians and lobbyists who are determined to stick to their talking points? The whole point of the show is to try to puncture those preestablished scripts. Indeed, isn’t that the challenge of all political talk shows?

Let me be clear about my own view of Crossfire: While I don’t watch it with regularity, when I do, I find it often enlightening, often entertaining, and often energizing. While I would not want to see its high-octane, steroidal format adopted by all TV shows, I see nothing wrong with the show’s tough, adversarial format. If Stewart finds Crossfire to be particularly uncivil, he seems to lack a sense of history. The pampheteers of the 18th century hurled so much abuse and invective--much of it untrue—at their political opponents, they made Crossfire look like a tea party by comparison. Political analyst Walter Shapiro, in his discussion of the presidential election of 1800, pitting John Adams against Thomas Jefferson, deflates all the Jon Stewarts of the world who decry the loss of civility in public discourse:

“There was never a golden age when campaigns limited themselves to high-minded dialogues on the issues and idealistic appeals to the better natures of the electorate. Even the lowliest ward heeler instinctively understood that you can win votes through fear as well as favors.”

Sharpiro continues:

“(John) Adams, who would fail in his bid for a second term, was pilloried as a secret monarchist. Scouring the written record, Jefferson backers maliciously dredged up bygone Adams statements favoring a "hereditary president" and a Senate with life tenure. Jefferson, too, was tarred by the mudslinging. A favored line of attack, employed by a Connecticut poison-pen artist, was to accuse Jefferson of being "a howling atheist" and an unpatriotic apostle of the French Revolution.”

Do these attacks have a familiar (and contemporary) ring to them? Uncivility isn't an argument on Crossfire in 2004; uncivility is Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804.To be fair to Stewart however, it is not clear that civility was his major complaint with Crossfire; it is hard to know, since his criticisms were largely incoherent. The best I could determine was that he alleged some collusion between Crossfire and its guests to obfuscate the issues. It is important to note that his attack was directed every bit as much at liberal Begala as it was at conservative Carlson. Begala, however, apparently shell-shocked by what was happening, became suddenly silent, ceding the discussion to Carlson.

Carlson, still trying to be deferential to the iconic Stewart, but stung by the criticisms, fought back, pointing out that when John Kerry was on the Daily Show recently, Stewart lobbed nothing but softballs at him:

“You have a chance to interview the Democratic nominee. You asked him questions such as -- quote – ‘How are you holding up? Is it hard not to take the attacks personally?’ ‘Have you ever flip-flopped?’ et cetera, et cetera. Didn't you feel like -- you got the chance to interview the guy. Why not ask him a real question, instead of just suck up to him?”

Stewart’s response was to say that it was inappropriate to ask him, a comic, to carry on like a hard-hitting journalist. In my view, it’s a bit late in the day for Stewart to be copping this plea. The fact that he’s doing political comedy doesn’t relieve him of the responsibility to be insightful. The greatest political cartoonist of his era, Herblock, showed once and for all that you can be consistently funny and penetrating at the same time.

As the show wound down, Carlson realized that it simply wasn’t going to be the laugh fest that he had envisioned, and said to Stewart, “I think you’re funnier on your own show.” To which Stewart replied, “Well I think you’re a dick on all your shows.”

At that point I wasn’t sure whether watching a political talk show on CNN or listening to an argument at a junior high school. The sheer juvenility of Stewart’s comment was breathtaking. For all the sycophantic pats on the back that Stewart has gotten since his appearance, I found his performance to be embarrassing. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that in order to be “cool,” one still has to be reasonably mature and reasonably insightful. On Crossfire, Jon Stewart failed both those tests. If you have any doubt about this, let met leave you with his explanation, uttered after the show:

"Let's face it, I was dehydrated…I had always in the past mentioned to friends and people I meet on the street that I think the show [Crossfire] blows. I thought it was only the right thing to do to go say it to them personally on their program…They said I wasn't being funny. And I said to them, 'I know that, but tomorrow I will go back to being funny, and your show will still blow.' "

If that's Stewart's idea of elevated discourse, I'll stick with Crossfire's version.
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 6:23 AM

 
It’s a Sweep! Kerry Wins Third Debate

If last night’s debate had been a baseball game, the audience would have arrived carrying brooms to symbolize what happened during the final debate. The challenger from Massachusetts pitched a shutout. John Kerry not only outperformed the president in his discussion of the nation’s domestic concerns, he registered a clean sweep, going 3-0 in the debate series. As moderator Bob Schieffer concluded the debate by wishing both men good luck in the days ahead, I half expected the audience to start chanting “Sweep, sweep, sweep!” Years from now in some future presidential battle, historians will sound a cautionary note about the transformative role of the debates of 2004, and the risk that the leading candidate takes by agreeing to go toe to toe with the challenger.

Shortly after the debate ended, the online, unscientific, poll at MSNBC was running 76-24% in favor of Kerry. Even at Fox News online, when I looked in, the tally was 66-34% in favor of Kerry. This morning’s USA Today/Gallup Poll offers definitive numbers on the contest: A random sample of debate watchers said that Kerry won the third debate by a margin of 52-39%. Further, 42% of respondents said that their view of Kerry was more favorable after the debate, compared with 27% feeling more favorable about Bush. The Kerry campaign should be all smiles this morning.

I watched the debate on CNN, where I am now accustomed to seeing analyst Jeff Greenfield get it wrong in his instant analysis. Greenfield complained that the debate was unsatisfying; that it was too “wonkish” with too many statistics being thrown around, and concluded that voters gained little new information with which to distinguish the candidates. He couldn’t have gotten it more wrong. When Kerry offered his litany of job loss statistics for the states of Arizona, Ohio, and Wisconsin, viewers didn’t have to remember the specific numbers to realize that these states have been hemorrhaging jobs for the last four years. When Kerry spoke of newly created jobs paying $9 per hour less the ones that had been lost, workers who have resigned themselves to low paying jobs to feed their families knew exactly what he was talking about. When Kerry stated that the value in real dollars of today’s $5.15 minimum wage was at its lowest point in 50 years, the working poor did not need degrees in economics to grasp those numbers.

But it wasn’t the numbers that mattered last night; it was the bearing of the two men, the difference in their vision of the future, and their respective zeal in articulating that vision that distinguished them. Indeed, in last night’s debate, George W Bush ran afoul of one of his own pet sayings: “You can run but you can’t hide.” During each debate, but most strikingly in the third one, we witnessed George Bush’s Achilles' heel: He is a man of very few ideas. Whether the topic was the minimum wage, the unemployment figures, or the outsourcing of jobs, Bush would reflexively divert the topic to education, as if the nation’s complex economic problems can be solved by offering a few more Pell grants to students. After Kerry delivered an impassioned pledge to raise the minimum wage to $7, Bush could only mumble something about having supported a minimum wage bill offered by Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell. The McConnell bill would increase the minimum wage to $6.25 over several years, would reach 3 million people fewer than the Democratic bill, and would lessen worker’s rights in areas such as safety, flex time, and overtime. Not surprisingly, beyond hastily mentioning the McConnell plan, the president made no attempt to champion it, defend it, or explain it. He simply moved on to talk about his “No Child Left Behind” program, utterly unrelated to the minimum wage. When the subject turned to health care, the president fell back on an old right wing chestnut: "I think government-run health will lead to poor-quality health, will lead to rationing, will lead to less choice." Lead to rationing? When 45 million Americans are without health insurance we already have in place a system of rationing, and the principle by which the rationing works is a simple one: The well-to-do get insured, and the poor don’t.

The president’s somewhat shaky command of the domestic agenda last night was made worse by his appearance. President Bush looked ill at ease throughout the debate, and even seemed to have unseemly saliva curling on the side of his mouth. Try as he might, he could not contain his characteristic smirk, and made a few too many stabs at nervous, uncomfortable humor. The more the president struggled rhetorically, the more he fell back on reminding us that his opponent was a liberal, as if such a trait was automatically disqualifying.

As for John Kerry, something remarkable happened last night. Even as he was being faulted by the president for being a liberal, midway through the debate John Kerry found his most sincere voice, and began to uphold the banner of the great liberal tradition in America. He spoke of the outrage that 223,000 kids in Arizona have no health insurance, he spoke of single moms struggling to survive on a minimum wage that is not a living wage, he called out the president for playing games with the assault weapons ban, he was steadfast behind the continuation of affirmative action programs, and he raised, however briefly, a topic that rarely gets discussed in America, the inequitable public education system, where wealthy communities, by virtue of their property taxes, get quality schools, while poor communities with small tax bases, get table scraps. Even while Bush was trying to tar Kerry with the “L” label, Kerry was showing that commitment, conviction, and clarity can still awaken a reluctant electorate to their basic humanism. Last night, John Kerry spoke in a way that would have made Hubert Humphrey proud.

Former Clinton White House spokesman Mike McCurry said before last night’s debate that he knew of no presidential candidate who had ever won three straight debates and had still lost the election. Whether that factoid is correct or not, I don’t know, but I do know that the Kerry campaign is now flush with confidence. That was evident last night as John Kerry was relaxed enough to make his first known joke about his wife Teresa’s money. Referring to himself, the president, and moderator Schieffer, Kerry said, “Well, I guess the president and you and I are three examples of lucky people who married up.” Kerry then paused, and it seemed that a light bulb turned on in his head. He continued with a grin, “And some would say maybe me more so than others.”

To be sure, Kerry still has a very tricky electoral map to negotiate. He needs to reel in “Blue” states like Minnesota and Michigan, shore up Wisconsin and Iowa, sneak up on Bush in Colorado, hang on to Pennsylvania (where Ralph Nader has just been disqualified by the state court), and finally land the big fish of Ohio to seal the deal. But you know what? I’ll bet that broomstick I was waving last night, that he can do it!

- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 7:24 AM

 
Kerry Wins 2nd Debate, But Is It Enough?

In 1984, Ronald Reagan debated Walter Mondale in Louisville, Kentucky, and fared very poorly. The country was stunned, as the “great communicator” appeared confused, inarticulate, and factually challenged. Nancy Reagan, dismayed at her husband’s performance, scolded Reagan aides for over-programming the 73 year old president. Mondale’s stock momentarily went up as a result of the rhetorical mismatch. However, in the second debate in Kansas City, Reagan was far more relaxed, and got off the memorable line, “I am not going to exploit for political purposes the youth and inexperience of my opponent.” The reality is, Reagan lost the second debate to Mondale as well. However, he didn’t have to win it; he merely had to prove that he had enough of his faculties for supporters to stick with him. The question for John Kerry is, was that election a precursor of what is currently happening with George W. Bush?

John Kerry also clearly won the second debate in St, Louis. Indeed there were times that I found myself holding my breath during the president’s answers, wondering if he was going to make it to the end of his thought. His grasp of detail was characteristically shaky, his inflection often whiny and pleading. Indeed the most maddening thing about Bush’s debate style is his consistent tone of “doesn’t everyone see how simple and obvious this is!?” The president never met a nuance that he liked. Beyond showing far greater command of the issues, Kerry also got off the best line of the second debate. In reassuring voters that only citizens making over 200,000 would see a tax increase under his stewardship, Kerry, commented to the audience and to moderator Charles Gibson:

“Now, for the people earning more than $200,000 a year, you're going to see a rollback to the level we were at with Bill Clinton, when people made a lot of money. And looking around here, at this group here, I suspect there are only three people here who are going to be affected: the president, me, and, Charlie, I'm sorry, you too.”

The problem for John Kerry however, is the same as that of Walter Mondale: Bush had so lowered expectations for himself, no one expected him to win the second debate. Nor is it clear that he had to win the debate to shore up his support. To the contrary, his supporters may have the same standard as did Reagan supporters: As long as he doesn’t show himself to be a complete idiot, we can still vote for him. Indeed, an unnamed Kerry aide predicted perfectly the dynamics of the second debate: “Bush will show that he can speak in a complete sentence, and everyone will call the debate a draw.” There is a stubborn tendency on the part of the voters to give the incumbent the benefit of the doubt.

My survey of current polls tells me that however much hemorrhaging Bush has experienced since the first debate, if the election were held tomorrow, he would still win. While some polls are superficially showing the race tied, a look at battleground states does not give me great optimism for John Kerry. While it is perhaps true that state polls are lagging indicators, and may not reflect the complete Kerry surge, I have seen no electoral map that currently favors John Kerry. He still needs to make up ground in Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, New Mexico, and West Virginia, while currently hanging on by a thread in Pennsylvania. I am not a doomsayer: The race is still eminently winnable, but in order to do so, Kerry will have to play every card in his hand, and play them well.

In other words, despite the progress that Kerry has made since the first debate, he is still behind the eight-ball. For months this blog has been suggesting two major strategic initiatives to the Kerry campaign. Unfortunately, they have followed neither. I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so! Let’s address what Kerry should have done, and what he should do now. What he should have done was:

1) Pick Sen. Joe Biden as his vice-president. Had Kerry done that, I strongly believe that today there would be no “security gap” between Bush and Kerry. Likewise, there would have been no perceived gap in gravitas, between Cheney and Biden during the vice-presidential debate. News reports indicate that Biden is playing an influential role behind the scenes. Unfortunately, Biden should be front and center, not behind the scenes.

2) Make the Abu Ghraib scandal an important issue in the campaign. Even the Washington Post, which at times has been a shameful apologist for the war, called in its Friday (10/08) editorial for serious discussion of detainees and Abu Ghraib. It is obvious why Bush doesn’t want to discuss the scandal; however, it is a major failure of judgment that Kerry also regards this issue as radioactive. There is one word for Kerry’s strategy: terrible.

What should Kerry focus on in the upcoming debate in Tempe, Arizona?

1) First, he should mount a full-scale attack on the Bush position that a tax increase for the rich would affect “900,000 small businesses.” Bush’s statistic is one of the phoniest of the entire campaign. Let’s clarify how Bush arrives at this figure: If Donald Trump has a summer home in The Hamptons that he rents out in the summer and makes $3,000, according to Bush, Trump is a “small businessman.” Here’s how the Washington Post discussed this issue in February of this year:

“….the broad Republican definition of "small-business man" includes not only doctors, lawyers and management consultants but also chief executives who earn $3,000 renting out their chalets in Aspen or report $10,000 in speaking fees. An aide on the Joint Economic Committee conceded that the definition includes the army of accountants and consultants at such giant partnerships as KPMG LLP and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, not the firms that "small business" brings to mind.”

By this definition, as Kerry rightly pointed out, George Bush is a small businessman! His 2002 tax return shows income from rental property, as well as income from Texas Rangers baseball team.

When “small business” is defined in real, commonsense terms, only 4% of those in the top tax bracket can legitimately be labeled “small businesses.” Kerry needs to smoke Bush out on the subject of the unaffordable Bush tax cut. Bushonomics should not be allowed to hide under the skirts of fictional small businesses.

2) Second, Kerry should pound away at the issue of drug importation from Canada, and how Bush did nothing to bring it about during his first term in office. This issue is a major winner for Kerry.

3) Third, Kerry should focus on his support of stem cell research, without, however, giving a convoluted answer full of clauses and qualifications. When Kerry gets too expansive, he not only loses his audience, they also begin to doubt the strength of his convictions.

4) Fourth, Kerry should stop saying that the Bush administration “retired” General Erik Shinseki after Shinseki warned that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to pacify Iraq. They didn’t “retire” the General, and saying this only makes Kerry look bad. The Bush administration shunned, discredited, undercut, and pooh-poohed Shinseki, but they didn’t retire him.

Finally, under the category of raw, idle, political gossip, I have a hunch that I‘d like to share: Among the many Western European leaders who would like to see George W. Bush lose, is none other than Tony Blair of Great Britain. My hunch is that Blair knows that he can work perfectly well with Kerry, and the removal of Bush would end the public relations disaster that Blair has experienced, that of being perceived in Britain as “Bush’s poodle.”

There are 24 days left in the campaign. It’s time to use every play in the playbook!

- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 5:41 PM

 
Dick Cheney: From Boss to Buffoon in 24 Hours

High profile political debates take place in two stages: there is the actual debate, and then there is the aftermath, when charges and counter-charges are sorted out. Rarely has an aftermath to a debate been as unkind to one of the participants as this one has been to Dick Cheney. In my field of psychology, it is a truism that you can know something intellectually, and you can also know that same thing in a deeper way that radiates to your core. I had such a moment of insight in the day following the Edwards/Cheney debate. Obviously, like most thinking people, I had long realized that Dick Cheney has a tendency to play fast and loose with the facts. However, when I saw lined up before me the string of goofs, gaffes, misrepresentations and outright lies that Cheney had put forth in the debate, I was seized by a blinding epiphany: “This guy is a con man.” Let’s take a look at some of the Cheney gems from Tuesday’s debate.

1) “I’ve never met John Edwards before.” Cheney’s assertion that as the president of the Senate he had never before met John Edwards, was meant to be one of those gotcha moments, designed to drive home the idea that Edwards was an overambitious rookie, who had not taken his Senate duties seriously. Check out this piece of instant analysis by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell:

"I think Dick Cheney did awfully well at, first of all, putting John Edwards in his place, saying that I have been presiding over the Senate and I didn't meet you until tonight. Talking about his not having been on the job was pretty devastating."

The problem, however, for Andrea Mitchell and Dick Cheney is that we now know that his assertion was totally phony. Once the debate was over, we were treated to some interesting video: There were Edwards and Cheney sitting next to each other at a prayer breakfast in 2001; there were Edwards and Cheney together as Elizabeth Dole was sworn in as the junior senator from North Carolina. As the senior Senator, Edwards’ duty was to escort her to Vice-President Cheney. It is reported that the Bible used for the swearing-in was that of Mrs. Edwards. Yes, Cheney’s blooper could be considered superficial. However, it fits into a disturbing pattern of intellectual sloppiness and consistent disregard for accuracy by the vice-president over the last four years. Sure, it’s also possible that Cheney had forgotten about his meetings with Edwards. But he could have easily gone to aides before the debate and asked, “Say, have I ever met this guy before? Do you remember us ever having spoken to one another?” My guess is that Cheney, in his arrogance, couldn’t be bothered checking the accuracy of his statement in advance; the would-be zinger was too good to let the facts get in the way. Since the debate, fact-checkers have confirmed that it was indeed unlikely that Cheney and Edwards would ever have encountered each other on the Senate floor: Cheney was almost never there.

2) “There’s no substance to the [Halliburton] charges.” If forgetting that you’ve stood next to a United States Senator at a swearing-in, and at a prayer breakfast is a bit strange, Cheney’s next misstatement lurches into the theater of the absurd. In defending his old company Halliburton, against charges of corruption, Cheney, with characteristic irritation and dismissiveness, directed debate watchers to factcheck.com, which he called “an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania” that would vouch for Halliburton’s integrity. There are two glaring problems with Cheney’s declaration: First, Cheney, once again the master of inaccuracy, gave out the wrong web address. Factcheck.com is a seller of dictionaries and encyclopedias and bears no resemblance to the site that Cheney was talking about. Cheney meant to say factcheck.org, a site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

All of this of course was lost on viewers of the debate, and thousands of hits poured into the erroneous website causing it to crash. The Web engineers at factcheck.com quickly realized that Dick Cheney had caused their site to crash, and devised a clever strategy: They rerouted incoming activity to Georgesoros.com. George Soros, billionaire, philanthropist, activist, is the godfather of the left-wing, and a major contributor to the Democratic Party. His site is large enough to handle the traffic, and Soros thus became the beneficiary of all the new incoming traffic. One couldn’t make up such a fitting and perfect comeuppance for the vice-president. Just recounting this sequence of events has me laughing so hard, I can barely finish typing this essay! In fact, I am having yet another one of those epiphanies: Payback is a bitch!

Now that my belly-laughs are under control, let me continue in serious. There is more! The second problem with Cheney’s statement was, not only was his web address wrong, but if folks had gone to the right web address (FactCheck.org), they would have found no support for Halliburton’s integrity. Indeed, having been thrust into the middle of the controversy by Cheney, the Annenberg Center was forced to issue a statement, saying that Cheney

"wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton. In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right."

Ouch! Here was Dick Cheney being smacked down by the very organization that he was calling on to vouch for Halliburton’s virtue! Once again, Cheney had tried to con the public, had looked directly into the camera, and had offered information that he knew to be demonstrably false.

There is an important lesson here for all of us. Pundits’ smug predictions to the contrary, high profile political debates always teach us something, always produce surprises, always tell us something about the participants, and are always worthwhile. Never was this truer than in the Edwards/Cheney debate, which produced an extraordinary phenomenon: In a single 90 minute debate, Dick Cheney managed to mimic, track, and recapitulate his disingenuous conduct during the run-up to the war. By the debate’s end, Cheney had created chaos, confusion, disinformation, anger, and had seriously shot himself in the foot. His arrogance was exceeded only by his incompetence. Sound familiar? This describes perfectly his conduct throughout both the run-up and the occupation. The Cheney modus operandi was made clear in the debate, laid bare for all of us to see. It is now up to Kerry and Edwards to make sure that the public is paying attention. If it is, George W. Bush is in deep trouble come November 2. I am confident that once citizens catch on to the Bush-Cheney con, their outrage will mount, and they will arrive at the same lofty, universal epiphany that I experienced: Payback is a bitch!

- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 11:12 AM

 
The Cheney-Edwards Debate: A Standoff and a Missed Opportunity

While Dick Cheney and John Edwards went toe to toe last night without a clear winner emerging, I have to say that I thought that Edwards was the more disappointing of the two. Why? Because given the failings of the Bush administration, Edwards had more to work with. The fact that he did not come out of the debate a clear winner, suggests that he did not adequately cultivate his natural advantage. The first half hour of the debate had a déjà vu quality to it, as both men strived to re-argue the first presidential debate. Only when moderator Gwen Ifill moved on to economic and cultural matters did the debate begin to break new ground. While Edwards’ performance did nothing to slow down the momentum that John Kerry has gained since the first debate, I thought that there were four distinct areas in which Edwards failed to solidly turn the debate in his favor:

1) It was a certainty that Cheney was going to condemn Kerry’s use of the phrase “global test." While Edwards was quick to point out that this criticism was based on a complete misrepresentation of what Kerry had said, shockingly, Edwards did not have the complete Kerry quote in front of him. This made his defense of Kerry’s statement far less compelling than it otherwise would have been. For the record, here is the exact quote from John Kerry:

"No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

The nature of the Bush-Cheney distortion becomes crystal clear once you have the full quote before you. Unfortunately, Edwards had not completely done his homework.

2) Cheney repeated the oft-heard assertion that Kerry and Edwards had “voted to commit the troops, to send them to war…” This is a mischaracterization of the Iraq war resolution, a point that John Edwards needed to drive home once again. This is what Edwards should have said:

“Contrary to the vice-president’s distortion, the vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, was not a vote to send the troops to war. Rather, it was a vote to give the president the authority to continue applying pressure to Saddam Hussein. It was a way to hold Saddam’s feet to the fire. When I voted for that resolution, I worried at the time that President Bush would see it as a blank check, as permission to rush into Iraq like a bull in a China shop. But there are times when you simply have to trust—out of basic respect for the presidency-- that the president will exercise sound judgment with the power that the Senate grants him. Unfortunately, this president let the country down. He went headlong into war under false pretenses, and once there, made a hash out of the occupation with horrendous planning. Frankly, the president betrayed the great trust that John Kerry and I placed in him.”

It was, and still is, important for Kerry and Edwards to point out that their vote for the war resolution did not mean that they were spoiling for war; rather, it meant that they wanted to keep Saddam in the headlock that he was in at the time.

3) One of the most consistent, indeed shocking, rhetorical failures of the Kerry-Edwards campaign is their inability to offer a clear cogent explanation for their vote against 87 billion dollar appropriation for the war. Because of their inability to explain it well, that vote has become an albatross around their necks, when in fact it should be seen as an act of statesmanship. Here is Edwards’ muddled explanation last night:

"On the $87 billion, it was clear at the time of that vote that they had no plan to win the peace. We're seeing the consequences of that everyday on the ground right now. We stood up and said: For our troops, we must have a plan to win the peace. We also thought it was wrong to have a $20 billion fund out of which $7.5 billion was going to go to a no-bid contract for Halliburton, the vice president's former company. It was wrong then. It's wrong."

Here is what I would have said:

“John Kerry and I believe in two simple principles: First, when you wage a war, you don’t ask your children to pay for it. Second, we believe that during wartime, everyone needs to sacrifice, not only the middle class, the poor and disenfranchised. That is why we both fought so strongly to pay for the $87 billion allocation by rescinding the tax cut on the wealthiest one percent of Americans. We voted against the $87 billion dollar authorization to try to force the president to find a just means to pay for the $87 billion authorization. But for the president to ask wealthy Americans to sacrifice was unthinkable. Just as the Bush economy has failed American citizens vertically—that is, the poor are getting poorer—we didn’t also want the Bush management of the war to fail American citizens horizontally—by literally stealing money from our children and our children's children. Vice-president Cheney misses the point. John Kerry and I passionately supported the buying of body armor for the troops. Unlike the president, however, we believe in paying for it. Moreover, the president indicated at the time that if our version of the bill had passed, he would have vetoed it, to preserve the tax cut. Does that tell you where the president's priorities lie?”

4) Finally, one of the striking things about Dick Cheney’s performance was his continual need to re-visit the presidential debate, to fill in the gaps and improve upon the president’s hapless performance. Had I been Edwards, I would have twisted the knife a little, pointing out how often Cheney ignored Gwen Ifill’s actual question to address some completely different issue from the presidential debate. I would have noted the president’s sophomoric performance, and suggested that perhaps Bush would like to take Cheney with him to the next debate, as they had done before the 9/11 commission. Now that would have been a great line!

We have learned over time that it takes several days for the dust to settle after a debate. It may be that once the fact-checkers and truth squads weigh in, that Edwards will be judged the winner. Dick Cheney is indeed the master of the phony factoid. One example of a Cheney falsehood was spelled out in today’s Washington Post:

“Cheney suggested that an agreement had been reached on debt relief for Iraq, saying that ‘the allies have stepped forward and agreed to reduce and forgive Iraqi debt to the tune of nearly $80 billion, by one estimate.’ While there are reports of some sort of agreement, no plan has been made public. Cheney also said that allies had contributed $14 billion in ‘direct aid.’ Actually, $13 billion was pledged, but only $1 billion has arrived.”

Lest anyone think that I’m being too hard on John Edwards and his performance, let me close with what I thought was his best line from the debate. After Cheney had criticized Edwards’ voting record and had called it “undistinguished,” Edwards offered this salvo:

“The vice president, I'm surprised to hear him talk about records. When he was one of 435 members of the United States House, he was one of 10 to vote against Head Start, one of four to vote against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors. He voted against the Department of Education. He voted against funding for Meals on Wheels for seniors. He voted against a holiday for Martin Luther King. He voted against a resolution calling for the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. It's amazing to hear him criticize either my record or John Kerry's.”

Wow…. If that voting record doesn’t expose the rot at the core of the apple, nothing will!
- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 8:50 AM

 
Why Kerry Won the Debate, and How He Can Improve

Presidential debates always ask two broad questions of the protagonists: First, how conversant are you with the pressing issues of the nation and the world? Second, how comfortable are you in your own skin? These questions are both vitally important to the electorate. The debates create an unnaturally pressurized environment that pierces through all the rehearsal, all the scripted answers, all the image management, to give us a peek, however fleeting, of the real individuals underneath. Often that peek serves to confirm our best or worst hunches about the individuals. In last night’s debate, John Kerry looked like a poised, experienced politician who was eager to present his vision of foreign affairs. George W. Bush looked uncomfortable, fidgety, frustrated, and halting in his presentation. While the president didn’t go so far as to look at his watch, as his father had in 1992, he did have look of a guy who would have rather been home with his feet propped up. Indeed, as many analysts have already pointed out, if you hadn’t known which man was the president, you would have assumed it was Kerry; he had the look of a poised incumbent, while Bush looked like a callow, nervous challenger.

With respect to the substance of the debate, Kerry also showed a greater comfort with his own grasp of the issues. In boxing parlance, he had far greater “ring generalship,” being the more assertive of the two, and typically defining the themes of the debate, while Bush was jumpy and reactive. Ironically, Kerry scored some of his best points on issues that were independent of Iraq: His discussion of the threat of nuclear proliferation and the vast, unsecured, “loose” nuclear materials in Russia, reminded us of the many ways that the current administration has fumbled the ball in its desperate focus on Iraq. Kerry’s call for greater involvement in the negotiations with North Korea brought some much needed attention to the ticking time bomb that exists in the Pacific Rim. After the debate, Bush’s claim that greater involvement by the U.S. would serve to undercut China’s influence over North Korea was roundly refuted by Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, the lead Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the Chinese have been asking us repeatedly to play a greater role in the Korean negotiations.

While there was no single line that will be discussed 10 years from now, perhaps the most significant exchange of the debate was the following:

LEHRER: Mr. President, new question. Two minutes. Does the Iraq experience make it more likely or less likely that you would take the United States into another preemptive military action?
BUSH: I would hope I never have to. I understand how hard it is to commit troops. Never wanted to commit troops. When I was running -- when we had the debate in 2000, never dreamt I'd be doing that.
But the enemy attacked us, Jim, and I have a solemn duty to protect the American people, to do everything I can to protect us……
KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy attacked us." Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. al Qaeda attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist.
They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other...
BUSH: First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that…

The significance of this exchange is that John Kerry caught Bush doing what the administration has been doing for three years: morphing Saddam Hussein into Osama Bin Laden. It seems clear that not only have they misled the American people into thinking that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, they have actually talked themselves into this false notion! It is frightening that Bush still identifies Saddam as “the enemy” that we needed to get after 9/11.

Kerry’s performance in the debate was a real shot of adrenaline for his campaign, and will serve his campaign in several important ways:

1. Had Bush won the debate, interest in the second debate would have waned. Instead, what happened last night will increase viewership of the second debate, and will up the stakes for both candidates. One already has the sense that Kerry handles the pressure better than his opponent.

2. Kerry’s performance will also create more interest in the upcoming vice-presidential debate. While the impact of John Edwards on the campaign to date has been negligible, a one-on-one debate is the kind of format where Edwards is at his best. A heightened contrast between Edwards and Cheney is something that the Kerry campaign relishes.

3. The nation last night got a chance to see John Kerry as a real, full-blooded individual, not the wishy-washy caricature that the Republicans have painted. He showed himself to be a confident, studied individual, who has clear ideas about the country’s role in the world, ideas which he can quite ably communicate. As such, he clearly debunked the cardboard image that many had of him.

Despite my praise for Kerry’s performance, he delivered no knockout punch last night. It was a win, but one Kerry will have to build on significantly in order to upend his opponent in November. In my view Kerry could have delivered a knockout blow last night if he had raised two important missing themes:

1) One of Bush’s mantras last night was that Kerry had voted to authorize the war. Numerous times Bush said, “he (Kerry) looked at the same intelligence I did.” Kerry should have pointed out that Bush was offering a gross mischaracterization of the nature of intelligence gathering. The president is not a passive recipient of intelligence that is sent to him in some final form; rather, the president, and the entire executive branch are part of the intelligence-gathering process. The president is a central player in creating that intelligence. When the president sternly told terrorism czar Richard Clarke to “get us information on Iraq” after 9/11, he was clearly conveying to Clarke “get me something that will support a war against Iraq.” When Dick Cheney was prowling the halls of the CIA, looking over agents' shoulders, and discussing administration goals with CIA officials, does anyone doubt that he was conveying the message that “we want intelligence that will support our policy objectives?” Intelligence is a complex conversation between the policy makers and the agents in the field. The president’s policy goals significantly shape—and distort--the kind of information that he gets. Kerry, on the other hand, a Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, is simply an end-user of intelligence information. He, like the rest of us, has to have a certain amount of trust that the information given to him is accurate and given in good faith. To put it simply, for the president to act as if he is a helpless victim of bad intelligence is a shameful canard. The president helped produce that bad intelligence. Kerry should have pointed this out before, and certainly should do it in the future.

2) Kerry made the crucial point that in order to achieve real security, military success has to be partnered with diplomatic initiatives, such as bolstering our relationship with the moderate Muslim world so that we can better isolate the extremists:

"we need to rebuild the alliances, by reaching out to the Muslim world, which the president has almost not done, and beginning to isolate the radical Islamic Muslims, not have them isolate the United States of America… And I think a critical component of success in Iraq is being able to convince the Iraqis and the Arab world that the United States doesn't have long-term designs on it…What I want to do is change the dynamics on the ground."

Unfortunately, however, Kerry didn’t raise the signature diplomatic and public relations disaster of the war: Abu Ghraib. Regular readers of this blog know that week after week, I agonize over Kerry’s refusal to discuss the Abu Ghraib debacle. Why he thinks it is unworthy of comment, I have no idea. Abu Ghraib embodies perfectly every theme that Kerry was addressing last night. It revealed our total cluelessness about how to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, our refusal to accept international norms such as the Geneva Conventions, our willingness the treat ordinary Iraqi citizens with complete disrespect, our gross miscalculation of how to secure good intelligence from detainees, and the shocking, possibly criminal negligence that existed throughout the military hierarchy. Perhaps most importantly, it also involved an administration cover-up of the nature and the enormity of the scandal. Bush and Rumsfeld knew about the scandal in January; we found out about it in May. Indeed, is it likely that if Dan Rather and Seymour Hersh had not broken the story, the administration would have never told the public. When Kerry was asked to list the ways that Bush had not been truthful, the fact that the administration had sat on the Abu Ghraib scandal for months until CBS broke the story should have been front and center in Kerry’s laundry list. It was nowhere to be found.

The list that Kerry did offer, that Bush had told us “he was going to build a true alliance, that he would exhaust the remedies of the United Nations, that he would only go to war as a last resort,” while true, grew a bit repetitive, and lacked the powerful impact that a discussion of Abu Ghraib would have had. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Just as Al Gore made a gross miscalculation by not invoking the name Bill Clinton throughout his campaign, John Kerry needs to bring up the horror of Abu Ghraib, in order to truly bring to light the full incompetence of the Bush prosecution of the war in Iraq.

All in all, however, debate number one was a fine night for the Kerry campaign. He showed that he could punch and jab with the best of them, and that he had the stamina to go the distance against a noticeably tiring opponent. Warning to Kerry: That was only round number one—you had better keep swinging!

- posted by jeffrowan111 @ 10:20 AM