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Thursday, February 26, 2004
Kucinich Part Deux
Mickey Kaus points out that Kucinich's strong showing comes from getting a grand total of 981 votes.
Can Anything Stop Kucinich?
The Nation wants us to know that Dennis Kucinich is on a roll.
...it comes at a particularly useful time for the candidate, who has been struggling to gain attention going into the March 2 "Super Tuesday" contests in delegate-rich states such as California, New York, Ohio and Minnesota.
Apparently Kucinich was the only candidate to actually show up in the Hula State. I do not see any evidence that his "strong showing in Hawaii" is resulting in increased attention.
About those ADA Ratings for Kerry and Kennedy....
The Washington Post had an article a few weeks ago about Kerry. Although in general the article fairly laid out Kerry's liberal voting record, it used some fairly loaded words: Kerry had opposed " costly weapons systems and tax cuts for wealthy Americans" (italics added). But what caugh my eye was this comment:
"Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal group, rated Kerry more liberal than Kennedy during the time they served together in the Senate, although by only 1 percentage point."
This appears to be true, but the ADA also rates Kerry 2 percentage points more liberal than Kennedy lifetime, and even this seems to understate the difference between the two. I don't know what's going on with the ADA's ratings, but they don't add up. Kennedy is show as having a 90 rating, but that actually appears too high. Kennedy's lifetime average rating prior to 1990 was 85; if we multiply that by his 27 years of service from 1963-89 that gives him a total of 2295. Add that to his 1990 onwards total of 1240 gives him a grand total of 3535, divided by 40 equals an average of 88.4, not the 90 shown in the ADA ratings. I thought maybe it was a rounding error, but even if Kennedy had been at 85.9 or so that would not lift his average above 89. I tried going back and adding up the individual years, but some of the years appear to be incomplete on the website.
What's going on? I would not be surprised if the ADA is trying to make Teddy not look so conservative next to Kerry.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
The New York Times has issued a correction to their latest quote from George Meagher:
An article on Sunday about people who supported George Bush in the 2000 election and are considering a vote for the Democratic candidate this year referred incorrectly to George Meagher, who voiced dissatisfaction with the administration. As noted on Feb. 3 in an earlier account of his comments in the same interview, for an article about veterans leaning toward Senator John Kerry, Mr. Meagher is an independent, not a Republican.
However, this correction only raises more questions. Consider what the Times actually said in the Sunday article:
George Meagher, a Republican who founded and now runs the American Military Museum in Charleston, S.C., said he threw his "heart and soul" into the Bush campaign four years ago. He organized veterans to attend campaign events, including the campaign's kickoff speech at the Citadel. He even has photographs of himself and his wife with Mr. Bush.
"Given the outcome and how dissatisfied I am with the administration, it's hard to think about now," he said. "People like me, we're all choking a bit at not supporting the president. But when I think about 500 people killed and what we've done to Iraq. And what we've done to our country. I mean, we're already $2 trillion in debt again."
Hmmm, an independent who threw his heart and soul into the 2000 Bush campaign, who has photographs of himself and his wife with the President? And the moaning about 500 people killed seems a little bizarre; nobody going into the Iraq War thought the casualties were going to be that LOW. Also, the Times does not correct Meagher's comment about "$2 trillion in debt again", which is simply not true. The national debt is FAR more than $2 trillion; the National Debt Clock estimates the current debt at a shade over $7 trillion. The deficit, often confused with the national debt, is far less than $2 trillion; the last estimate I saw was about $540 billion.
Monday, February 23, 2004
Macho Liberals Again
Real Clear Politics takes on John Kerry's sudden shot of testosterone:
Hence Kerry's decision to stick his chest out and walk around like a lanky, French-looking version of Robert Conrad with an Eveready Battery on his shoulder, daring anyone to come over and knock it off.
Actually I think Kerry is just trying to change the subject. Attacks on his anti-war activities or his Senate voting record are "questioning his patriotism", which gives him the opportunity to remind us that he served in Vietnam.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Thought I'd take a look to see how things are going. The first column next to the candidate's name is the total number of delegates for that candidate so far. The second is the percentage of the delegates chosen so far that the candidate has gotten. The third column shows how many future delegates that candidate needs to reach the magic number of 2,161, and the fourth column tells us what percentage of the future delegates the candidate needs to get.
Kerry 608 56.6% 1553 47.8%
Dean 201 18.7% 1960 60.3%
Edwards 190 17.7% 1971 60.7%
Clark 57 5.3% 2104 64.8%
Sharpton 16 1.5% 2145 66.0%
Kucinich 2 0.2% 2159 66.5%
Kerry's obviously well out front and really just needs to avoid a big mistake. Edwards needs almost 61% of the remaining delegates, which is quite a bit better than he's been doing so far. Of course, this assumes that all of Clark's and Dean's delegates stay put. Clark has endorsed Kerry; if his delegates are added to Kerry's total he'd only need about 46% of the remainder.
I am getting amused at how predictable the left is today. If you bring up Iraq as a necessary part of the war on terror, they will immediately start in about how 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. If you comment on how Saddam's regime was evil they will bring up the fact that Donald Rumsfeld shook hands with him 20 years ago, as if that was a good argument against deposing him.
The A-Rod Deal:
Not only do the Yankees get the best player in baseball, but they get the Texas Rangers to pay $60 million of his salary. Ouch!
The decision to keep Jeter at shortstop and move A-Rod to third is a tough one to defend except in terms of team
chemistry. Rodriguez is far the superior defensive shortstop. I don't think Jeter has the arm for third base, so the obvious move would be to switch him to second.
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
The Kerry story seems to be fizzling a bit, but some things just don't make sense. For example, consider the claim that Alex Polier dated Kerry's finance chief. The obvious question is why would they then let this story percolate all weekend?
Two possibilities:
1. The finance guy was married. (So what? I find it hard to believe that Kerry would jeopardize his campaign just to protect a staffer).
2. The fact that she was dating the finance guy was part of the scandal (that is, they were involved in a threesome).
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Kerry Maimed?
Drudge is reporting that the national press is on the trail of a John Kerry/intern story. Elle Magazine had an earlier story that indicated Mrs Heinz-Kerry would pull a bobbit on him if he ever cheated.
Andrew Sullivan seems to think that the Republicans leaked this. That doesn't make any sense to me. It potentially helps John Edwards, who is the one guy that Karl Rove doesn't want to face in the fall. Kerry's a target-rich environment. It seems far more likely that it's a shot from Chris Lehane or the Clintons.
Monday, February 09, 2004
RIP, Julius Schwartz, the Man of DC Comics' Silver Age
Many happy hours of my youth were misspent reading Julie's great comics.
The Democrats' Campaign to Date Explained
Howard Dean surged out in front by opposing Bush at every turn. He sensed that setting himself up as the anti-Bush was the way to get the attention of the activist base of the party and he was successful at that.
Kerry made the signal mistake of voting in favor of the war, but he has energetically managed to get on the opposite side of that vote, rather than stand by it as Edwards, Lieberman and Gephardt did. This, oddly enough, is probably the reason why Kerry managed to come back from the dead. I don't doubt he would be dead in the water. Mickey Kaus points out that Kerry voted as he thought best for John F. Kerry.
Not a lot of people are talking about this, but Sam Nunn is a big part of the reason John Kerry and John Edwards and Hillary Clinton and a whole lot of Democratic senators voted for the Iraq war. Nunn was on the short list of Democrats who could have been elected president in 1992 had he run for the job. However, he had voted against the Persian Gulf War. This is not as surprising as it sounds; Desert Storm was supported by only 10 Democrats in the Senate when it came to a vote. Nunn claimed in his autobiography that his vote against the war had cost him any chance to run for the presidency.
Well, you can imagine how Democrats voting on the Iraq war felt-- I'm not doing a Sam Nunn! So they voted in favor of the Iraq war. Indeed, you could say that almost every Democrat senator with national ambitions voted in favor of the war: Daschle, Clinton, Lieberman, Edwards, Kerry, Bayh, Feinstein... the vote was 77-23 (Desert Storm, which frequently gets mentioned by the anti-war crowd as the war everybody supported, passed 55-45).
Early on in the campaign it looked like the vote in favor of the war was going to sink Kerry, Lieberman and Gephardt. Two of them never recovered, and one of them did. Why? Because Kerry went back on his vote, seeing that it was a loser with his partisans. And ironically Kerry then managed to pass muster when the war ceased to be the signal issue for the Democrats.
There are a lot of other factors. Dean never really had the support that a lot of people thought he did. He ran a populist campaign that exploded as most populist campaigns do once the normal people start voting.
Kerry does seem fortunate to have gotten this far as the "safe" candidate. One would think a senator with a much higher rating (94%-88%) from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action than Ted Kennedy would ordinarily be considered the leftist candidate. Especially one with so many obvious problems--the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, throwing of somebody's medals over the fence, being Dukakis's lieutenant governor, then trying to cut intelligence budgets in the 1990s. Not to mention that he makes Al Gore look hip, and the creepiness of his two marriages to phenomenally wealthy women (his first wife was worth $300 million and his second $800 million).
Friday, February 06, 2004
The Most Liberal State in the Nation
It seems like hardly a day goes by that I don't hear that California is the most liberal state in the nation, or Massachusetts, or Vermont....
So I thought I'd take a hard look at the question today. I started by looking at the last three presidential elections, and the percentage of the vote that the Democratic contender got. For 2000, I added together the Gore and Nader vote.
The results were not terribly surprising.
In 2000, the states with the highest percentage of Gore & Nader voters were as follows: Rhode Island (67%), Massachusetts (66%), New York (64%), Hawaii (62%), and Connecticut (60%).
In 1996, the states giving the highest percentages to Bill Clinton were as follows: Massachusetts (61%), Rhode Island (60%), New York (59%), Hawaii (57%) and Illinois (54%).
In 1992, the states giving the highest percentages to Bill Clinton were as follows: Arkansas (53%), Maryland (50%), New York (50%), Illinois (49%) and West Virginia (48%).
If we average each state's ranking for the three elections, we find that the five most liberal states are: New York (3), Massachusetts (3.3), Rhode Island (4), Hawaii (4.7) and Maryland (4.7). It is a pretty sharp drop from there to Illinois, whose average ranking was 6.7 in terms of support to the Democratic candidates.
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Campaign as Therapy?
Great post by a Dean fan on why the campaign failed. I highly recommend reading it all, but I was struck by this:
"These passages, I want to emphasize, are from a piece that presents Dean as an all but certain winner, and yet the description now sends another message entirely: Less about Howard Dean than about James Moore, less like a political meeting than a support group, not so much about pushing Dean as they are about engaging people in conversation…"
This was definitely the part of the Dean phenomenon that impressed itself upon me. So many of the stories seemed to focus on the volunteers and not on the candidate. And when you focused on the volunteers, the message you got was that they all had the big L in the middle of their foreheads. The stories (and I'm willing to admit that they may have been unfair or unrepresentative) seemed inevitably to be of those who were either drifting through life or found themselves cast adrift. The sad part is that they are about to be cast adrift again.
About Those Polls
Kerry is doing well against Bush in the polls according to Gallup. But if you look at the graph that Polling Report has on their front page, you'll note that Bush improves against Edwards, beats Clark, and beats Dean handily.
What's going on? It's obvious that Kerry is benefiting from being seen as a winner. Edwards is #2, Clark is #3 and Dean is the year's big disappointment. In other words, these polls don't reflect anything other than current perceptions of the Democratic candidates. Kerry will come down to earth pretty soon.
And Another Thing!
Over on the former Lt. Smash's (now Citizen Smash's) blog, an anti-war vet tried another tack:
"I'm a Gulf War vet, my dad, a Vietnam vet, my grandfathers both WWII vets. It rankles me considerably when people tell me I'm full of crap (as some of you in this forum have) because I support our troops but not this war. I think a better question of our candidates (and our President, for that matter!) is "Would you send YOUR children to be shot or blown to bits on the field of battle or tortured, starved and raped in a POW camp?" If the answer is no, then I don't see how our leaders can ask any *other* parents to make that sacrifice."
I responded ironically: "Let me get this straight; only people who would send their children to be "tortured, starved and raped in a POW camp" can send our military to war?"
He replied quite civilly:
"I wasn't clear - only those who would send their kids away to the field of battle *for that specific cause* should be allowed to make that decision for someone else. At the very least, considering one's own children would give a little pause before volunteering someone else's kids for horrible duty."
Of course if you're smart enough to be reading my blog, you can see a couple holes in that one, right away. First of all, much like the chickenhawk formulation, it restricts the presidency, this time to people with children of military age and fitness. Childless? You can't run for President because you don't have any kids to send to any wars you want to wage.
But I chose a different line of attack: "What about the wishes of the kids? Do Jenna and Barbara get a choice in the matter? Or does W say, well I'm sending other parents' kids into battle, so you've got to go, too?"
He didn't seem to get it:
"My concern is that whoever makes the choice *fully* absorbs the ramifications of what he or she is doing, including putting a very real face on the effects of battle on American soldiers and their families. As so many of our politicians come from privileged backgrounds (in stark contrast to most of our fighting forces, who come from very poor upbringings), it oftentimes seems that our leaders volunteer "the other half" for duty they wouldn't - and infrequently ever - volunteer their own families for."
I think my response nailed it: "How does one volunteer one's family? Isn't that up to the individuals? Or do we bring back the draft, but only for the families of politicians voting in favor of war?"
Chickenhawks Again?
The left seems to love the chickenhawk BS; it comes up all the time. Cheney's a chickenhawk, Bush is a chickenhawk, Rush Limbaugh and George Will are chickenhawks.
What is a chickenhawk? In its simplest formulation, it's somebody who's hawkish on war, but doesn't want to go to war himself (or herself these days). Of course, it's generally a little more complicated than that. Cheney could not go to war if he wanted to; he's too old and has a bad heart, not to mention that he's got a more critical role to play in the chain of command. So liberals have to resort to a little sleight of hand to make him into a chickenhawk. Cheney's a chickenhawk because he supports the war in Iraq even though he himself did not go to Vietnam.
Of course, there is an obvious problem with that; suppose Cheney himself opposed the war in Vietnam but favored the war in Iraq? Suppose he opposed the war in Vietnam as a young man, but later came to see it as necessary? I have seen none of the folks railing on about Cheney as chickenhawk bringing up any statements of his about Vietnam other than the comment that he "had more important things to do at the time".
So let's just take it for granted that liberals think that nobody should send our troops to war who hasn't seen combat himself or herself. I don't agree with it, but it seems to proceed logically from the chickenhawk formulation as applied to Cheney. But follow the logic a step further. If nobody should send our troops to war who hasn't seen combat, then isn't it fair to say that nobody should be President who hasn't seen combat? After all, the President has to have the authority to send troops into combat.
Of course, liberals would be happy to agree to this now, since it appears that they are going to nominate a veteran to run against Bush. The real test will be 2008. I look forward to all the posts from liberals saying that they could never support Hillary for President because she never served.
Primary Totals Last Night
Here's what the Democrat's contenders did last night in all seven primaries combined per CNN (Totals may change slightly):
Kerry: 539,475 votes or 41.3% of the total
Edwards: 354,750 votes or 27.2% of the total
Clark: 215,229 votes or 16.5% of the total
Dean: 114,441 votes or 8.8% of the total
Lieberman: 62,942 votes or 4.8% of the total
Kucinich: 18,200 votes or 1.4% of the total
Note that the percentages shown are the percentage of the total vote for those six candidates combined; I ignored Sharpton, uncommitted, and other non-candidates. Probably should have ignored Kucinich as well.
Comments: It was a worse night for Howard Dean than even the media have made it out to be. His best finish was in New Mexico, where he won 16.6% of the vote (of these six) and took third place. He finished fifth in Oklahoma and South Carolina and overall managed only a little better than half the votes of Wesley Clark and 1/3rd the votes of John Edwards. RCP reports he is down 37-14 to Kerry in Michigan. Say goodnight, Gracie!
Kerry is the winner tonight but it looks like he only KOs Joe Lieberman this evening.
Still Dean has to be considered wobbly now. His fans were very hopeful that they'd get close in New Mexico, but now it looks like they'll finish third behind Kerry and Clark, with only about 1/2 of Kerry's vote total. Assuming Clark's lead holds in Oklahoma, Dean will be the only serious candidate left in the race without a victory.
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
More On Macho Liberals
From an unfortunately-timed article on why Howard Dean was running away with the Democratic nomination:
It's also what attracted the media to Dean. A database search reveals that in December 836 newspaper pieces about him mentioned the a-word. Look beneath the surface of Dean's plucky, peppery attitude and you'll find the underlying reason for his success. He's butch--and many Democrats are convinced that's what it takes to beat George Bush.
Dictionary.com defines "butch" as "Exhibiting stereotypically or exaggeratedly masculine traits or appearance. Used especially of lesbians and gay men."
The National Review is reporting early exit poll results which indicate that Edwards is winning in South Carolina and Oklahoma, but Kerry is winning elsewhere. Having been burned before (see New Hampshire, which some exit polls indicated was close), I'm going to pass on offering any real analysis other than to point out the obvious. If this is true it's good news for Edwards, bad news for Kerry and devastating news for Clark.
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