Politics 2004 Archives

Allahpundit and HuffPo take differing looks at Manhattan state court trial judge Justice Ira Gammerman's decision (the text of which is here) dismissing some parts of Dan Rather's complaint against CBS. Note that under NY state procedure, the decision on a motion to dismiss a complaint (i.e., without hearing the evidence) is immediately appealable, and given the amount of money and ego involved it would not surprise me if one or both sides appealed.

As an economic matter, the decision is mainly a victory for Rather; Justice Gammerman allows him to seek substantial breach of contract damages for CBS "benching" him after March 2005, under a contractual provision the court reads as essentially allowing liquidated damages designed to cover that purpose, by requiring CBS to then immediately pay Rather his salary due through November 2006.

More significantly, in terms of the evidence that can be introduced (and, presumably, the remaining source of his punitive damages claims), the decision also allows Rather to argue that (1) CBS owed Rather a fiduciary duty and breached it (the decision is unclear as to whether the breach is the decision to bench Rather or a broader theory involving making him retract and apologize for the Rathergate story) and (2) Viacom, CBS' parent, improperly and tortiously interfered with Rather's contract with CBS by forcing its subsidiary to bench and fire him. The judge held that it was a factual issue whether Viacom acted in its own economic interests by sacking Rather, which under NY law is a defense to a tortious interference claim.

The more politically explosive parts of the suit - dealing directly with Rather's claim that he was defrauded and effectively defamed by CBS making him apologize for the story when he really didn't want to - were thrown out on statute of limitations grounds and for failure to show damages, so really neither side can claim any vindication on the merits.

The net result of this is that, while Rather gets to pursue the money he feels is owed to him, it may be difficult for him to get a Bush-hating Manhattan jury to rule on his claim that the story was true after all. But whether he can get the court to hear evidence on that point depends in large part on the contours of the remaining claims, and whether he ends up surviving summary judgment (CBS is vowing to get a later ruling that there's insufficient evidence to send these claims to a jury) on any claim that goes beyond "after they benched me they didn't give me enough to do" to "they shouldn't have benched me because I was right." As much money as is involved in the former, it's only the latter that anyone will care about.

Dignity. Integrity. Duty.

Aw, heck, why not just blow it all on fancy airplanes?

Sen. John Kerry broke spending limits by nearly $1.4 million during his 2004 presidential bid, including some funds spent on customizing his campaign jets, a Federal Election Commission draft audit concludes.

The FEC could rule that Kerry's campaign must reimburse the government. Because his general election campaign was taxpayer funded, Kerry would have to pay back the U.S. Treasury.

Much of the disputed money was spent on customizing jets used by Democratic presidential nominee Kerry and his running mate John Edwards, according to auditors.

Read More »

As I've done in the past, I'm creating brand-new categories for the new year. You'll now go to Baseball 2005 for new baseball entries, Politics 2005 for new politics entries, War 2005 for new war entries, and Law 2005 for new law entries (the Law category hadn't needed an overhaul last year). I'll shortly be updating the link to baseball-only posts at the top of the page as well to send you to Baseball 2005.

Happy New Year!

This Powerline item is a classic fisking (link via Instapundit).

(Also posted in The Corner after I emailed this to Jonah Goldberg - Welcome, Corner readers!).

For all of Josh Marshall's huffing and puffing about the effort to expose how Joe Wilson got picked for the Niger trip, it's worth taking a little trip in the Wayback Machine to what Marshall had to say on July 8, 2003, less than a week before Bob Novak's now-infamous column identifying Wilson's wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame, as the person who picked Wilson:

Read More »

The Mad Hibernian's post on Friday on Michael Crichton's new book questioning "global warming" and similar environmental dogmas (which followed on this powerful speech by Crichton last year denouncing global warming theories) prompted some interesting comments and links. Now, I'm no expert on the subject myself, but I did think it was worth repeating here something I said in the comments to that post. I'm very skeptical of hearing "global warming" discussed as if it is a single concept, like "the earth is round." Basically, "global warming," as I understand its popular meaning, is really three different concepts:

1. The earth has, for some period of time, been getting warmer.

2. This past warming trend is not a random or cyclical phenomenon but is a trend that will continue into the future unless interrupted by human intervention.

3. The past trend and its continuation into the future are the results of specifically identifiable human activities, i.e., carbon emissions.

It is entirely possible to believe #1 without believing #2 and #3, or even to believe #1 and #2 without believing #3. Beware of anyone who tries to use evidence supporting just one of those propositions to convince you of all three.

Well, as promised back in late October, it's time to award the 2004 Bedfellow Awards. The Bedfellow Awards are named in honor of the comic strip "Bloom County," in which Senator Bedfellow was defeated on the strength of an election-day headline, "WARNING: VOTING FOR BEDFELLOW MAY CAUSE HERPES". Although the award gives special points for attacks that are false and/or unfair, the simplest definition of a Bedfellow Award nominee is a news story that (1) comes out shortly before the election, and (2) has a much larger impact on the election than it would have if it had come out earlier.

I solicited nominations, although I didn't get a whole lot of them. You can see some of the nominees here and a very early candidate here as well as in the post linked above and its trackbacks. Let's run through the awards:

1. Overall Winner: Osama bin Laden

Political experts will debate endlessly which candidate it helped and whether it had much of an impact one way or another (Kerry says it cost him the election), but there's no question that the big, knock-everything-else-off-the-front-page surprise story of the campaign's last weekend was the emergence of OBL himself from his gopher hole with a video message aimed directly at the American people and obviously timed deliberately to influence the election. (I'll leave aside here as well the debate over whether he was actually trying to help Kerry or just to show he could influence an American election as his minions had in Spain). The story, once out there, was a legitimate story, which is why I'm giving the award to bin Laden himself rather than the news media or the candidates, who had no choice but to react to it.

2. Anti-Bush Winner: The Al-Qaqaa Explosives Story

This was a favorite nominee, and it would have been an even more outsized story if CBS had succeeded, as planned, in sitting on the story until the Sunday before the election (instead, because the NY Times broke the story a week earlier, 60 Minutes had to settle for a story attacking the Bush Administration over the sufficiency of equipment for the troops in Iraq). The explosives story got more heat and less light than it would have earlier in the campaign because there was so little time to get to the bottom of the thing.

3. Anti-Kerry Winner: The Dishonorable Discharge

On November 1, the New York Sun's Thomas Lipscomb finally broke through Kerry's long stonewall on the circumstances of his discharge from the military, but the day-before-the-election timing wound up making the story a late hit. Of course, unlike late hits against Bush, this one got ignored and buried.

4. Senate Race Winner: The Kentucky Senate Race

Nasty, nasty, nasty, full of allegations of whispering campaigns, the most late-hit-filled and under-the-radar campaign of the year turned out to be the Kentucky Senate race, with Democrat Dan Mongiardo openly challenging the mental competence of Republican righty Jim Bunning, and Bunning accused of a whispering campaign to convince voters that Mongiardo was gay.

I didn't get enough nominations or pay close enough attention to pick a House winner, but the latest of the late hits had to be the attack on Louisiana Republican Billy Tauzin III for a citation for trespassing and illegal hunting of nutria, a kind of rodent.

Anyway, there were plenty of candidates from this year's presidential elections. Feel free to suggest additional honorable mentions in the comments and trackbacks.

*Great, great column by Tom Friedman on the radicalization of Iraqis under sanctions. Friedman often infuriates; he's right about diagnosing problems but responds by suggesting daft solutions. This one's more on the diagnosis side. (Link via Geraghty).

*A fine primer on Ukrainian history from a Ukrainian friend of LT Smash. If you've studied Russian history, as I did in college, some of this will be familiar, but there were also things here that were new to me or that I'd long forgotten.

*You'll want to head over to Soxblog, where pseudonymous blogger James Frederick Dwight (you really shouldn't need to think too hard on the origin of his pseudonym) is tearing apart a sloppy New Yorker piece comparing hospitals and clinics that treat cystic fibrosis (start here and scroll up for followup posts, including his discussion of my initial reaction to the piece, which was that it sounds like something drafted by the plaintiffs' bar).

*Yes, the Onion's Iraq Alert System just killed me. (Link via Simmons' Intern).

*Victor Cha, a Georgetown professor who advocates a "hawk
engagement" strategy regarding North Korea, will assume the post of Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

*You can look at this chart here and argue, as these Berkeley professors do, that the results on this graph show that the 2004 vote in Broward and Palm Beach counties were a suspicious outlier, but isn't the far more logical inference that the 2000 count in Broward and Palm Beach is the suspicious outlier? Gee, does anyone remember any controversy over the vote-counting methods used in Broward and Palm Beach in 2000? I wonder if the results would look less anomolous if you used the Election Day 2000 counts in those two counties rather than the figures that were generated a month later.

*The Gift That Keeps On Giving, Part LXVIII.

*Ann Althouse on Nancy Pelosi's horrible facelift/plastic surgery.

Jim Geraghty maps out the possibilities for CBS News after the final report comes out on Ra^thergate:

CBS could go one of three routes from this point. One, they could try to clean up their act, stop behaving as if their job is to drive President Bush from office, cover viewpoints beyond the left, and attempt to break up the groupthink that has calcified their news judgment.

Two, they could define themselves as the left-of-center news channel, and aim for the blue state audience. Instead of trying to prevent bias, they could embrace it, and make it part of their brand identity. "CBS News: The channel that progressives prefer."

Three, they could define themselves as the tabloid news channel, rushing things to air without checking, and intentionally eroding their standards for accuracy in the name of being first. They could be one part supermarket checkout line tabloid, one part Drudge, one part Wonkette, one part British Fleet Street scandal sheet.

The third is obviously somewhat tongue in cheek, especially for a deep-pocketed broadcast network. I agree that CBS can and should make a clear decision as to which way the Evening News goes: try to build a new reputation for evenhandedness, or embrace the Left the way FOX has embraced the Right. On the other hand, the departure of Rather, who after all brought this story on himself in his capacity as a 60 Minutes II correspondent rather than as Evening News anchor, offers a third way: start splitting the brand, letting 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II go their way as crusading liberal newsmagazines, while attempting to play it straight on the Evening News. This can work in the newspaper business - the Wall Street Journal has had success with both a highly ideological opinion page (which hires its own reporters) and a news section with a high reputation for evenhandedness and balance. Would it work in TV? If CBS tries to rebrand itself as a network that distinguishes between a balanced newscast and an openly left-wing newsmagazine, of course, the network would have to decide which side of the line they want to dominate the morning show, the coverage of big events like the conventions (where FOX, for example, has prospered by stacking its panels with conservative commentators who draw in right-leaning viewers). Splitting the two sides makes some sense: while the Evening News has floundered in the ratings, 60 Minutes remains healthy and can profit by enlarging its reputation as a vocal critic of all things Bush (although they might do well to stop shilling books sold by Viacom).

I've also got an outside-the-box suggestion for Rather's replacement: CNN Headline News anchor, technology reporter and former Tech TV anchor Erica Hill. Hill would bring a number of advantages to the anchor position. First, and most obviously, she's drop-dead gorgeous, better-looking than most of the actresses on CBS' prime-time schedule, let alone in the news business. That never hurts in the ratings department, and before you gripe about looks as a job qualification, remind me again why Brian Williams is succeeding Tom Brokaw, and why John Roberts has been mentioned as a replacement for Rather: first and foremost because they are big, good-looking guys with reassuring voices. Let's not pretend otherwise.

But there are other women on TV who could look good reading the news; what's additionally noteworthy about Hill is her background as a tech reporter. If you've seen her reports on CNN, she clearly comes off as someone who understands and enjoys new technologies and, frankly, spends a lot of time on the internet; she's been reporting for months on the influence of blogs and the internet on campaigns. That's precisely the fresh perspective towards newsgathering that CBS badly needs. I don't know how smart she is - her bio says she's a summa cum laude graduate of BU, which is nothing to sneeze at - but she comes off as intelligent on the air, which is important.

Granted, there would be internal resistance at CBS to bringing in someone with minimal experience (she can't be more than 30 years old, and looks younger than that), although again, the CNN bio does say she anchored the now-defunct Tech TV's on-air coverage all day on September 11, which is a real baptism of fire for any anchor. And maybe shaking things up would be a good in itself, sending a message that the way things have always been is part of the problem and bringing in someone not so set in her ways that she can't take the program in new directions. In any event, part of CBS' problem, even above and beyond bias, is age: Rather and Bob Schieffer and Mike Wallace . . . these guys are fossils, and whatever their other virtues they can't be expected to connect with younger viewers or change with the times. Maybe CBS, with an older-skewing audience, is happy with that dynamic, but it's unsustainable long-term. A young, fresh-faced anchor would change all that. With Brokaw leaving, there will be a window of opportunity for a new anchor to capture market share if CBS can make a splash. Erica Hill in Dan Rather's chair would make a splash.

UPDATE: You can catch a flavor of Hill's style with her online "Hot Wired" columns at CNN.com here (from January, discussing campaign blogs), here (marveling that she could survive a few days without internet access) and here (discussing procrastinating online).

And the Democrats wonder why they lost even normally Democrat-friendly states like New Mexico:

Democratic legislators too often seem hostile to suburban concerns, and indifferent to the aspirations of those who would like to buy a home and a small green place to call their own. In Albuquerque, for example, planners working for the local Democratic regime advocated banning backyards, an essential part of the middle-class family lifestyle. One even told a local developer that his having four children made him "immoral." A small--and probably extreme--example? Undoubtedly. But it speaks to a stereotype that Democrats have been battling for years now: that they disdain suburbia and the families who live there. It is long past time for Democrats to start undoing that perception.

Oh, and to repeat a point we Republicans keep making: you take the people who abort their children, and we'll take the families with four kids, and we'll see in a generation which of us has more voters.

One last spleen-venting legal case for the day:

A California teacher who teaches his fifth-grade students with the aid of primary source documents like the Declaration of Independence has been ordered by school administrators to stop using such artifacts of American history because the material contains references to God.

I heard about this one during the significant amount of time I spent stuck in traffic on I-95 over the holiday weekend, while flipping past Sean Hannity’s radio show. Not considering that the most reliable source and more than a little skeptical, I decided to check it out and, lo and behold, The Smoking Gun had the documentation, including the teacher’s complaint.

Politically, this is an example of Democrats needing to better police their fringes. I can’t imagine that the mainstream of that party is really opposed to the Declaration of Independence or shares such absolutist hostility to religion, but the cumulative effect of stories like this, fairly or unfairly, pushes a lot of otherwise undecided people into the Republican camp. It’s hard to get anyone to trust their children to people who think the ideas of people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are unfit for public schools.

This Nicholas Kristof column in last Wednesday's NY Times, denouncing the "Left Behind" series of novels popular among evangeical Christians, rather perfectly captures a misunderstanding of religious tolerance that is found too often on the Left, and one I've dealt with before. Here's Kristof:

The "Left Behind" series, the best-selling novels for adults in the U.S., enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter everyone who is not a born-again Christian. The world's Hindus, Muslims, Jews and agnostics, along with many Catholics and Unitarians, are heaved into everlasting fire: "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and . . . they tumbled in, howling and screeching."

Gosh, what an uplifting scene!

If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hatemongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard.

[snip]

I accept that [the authors] are sincere. (They base their conclusions on John 3.) But I've sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they're just applying God's word.

. . . [I]f I praise the good work of evangelicals - like their superb relief efforts in Darfur - I'll also condemn what I perceive as bigotry.

See, here's the problem. Kristof isn't just asking the authors of these books to allow for people of other faiths to practice their own faiths in peace; he's demanding that the authors change what they themselves actually believe to be the Word of God. That's not a plea for religious tolerance; it is, in fact, religious intolerance, as Kristof is saying that the beliefs of these Christians are so offensive to him that they must be branded as "bigotry" and driven from public expression.

Let me put this another way to explain why the comparison to radical Muslims is so offensive. I have no problem with people who believe that God is going to send me to Hell for being a Catholic. They believe their thing, and I believe mine. I have a major problem with people who think that they, rather than God Himself, should send me there. It is right and proper and necessary to denounce religious extremists who are unable to accept the peaceable coexistence of people of different religions, who call for earthly violence and political opression against those of different faiths. But to demand that people give up the tenet of their faith - a central one in many faiths - that says that they are following the one and only path to salvation, that's what Stephen Carter has referred to as demanding that people treat "God as a hobby" rather than taking faith seriously. While it may in some circumstances be rude to say it, I wouldn't want to live in a country where people could not feel free to profess that theirs is the only true faith; such a country would be one in which no one really believed in anything at all.

The "Left Behind" guys aren't asking that anyone be harmed in the here and now; they are content to wait for Jesus to take care of that. By failing to distinguish between the two, Kristof shows that he still views religious beliefs as something that can be bent to the needs of human society rather than the other way around. Which is to say, not religion at all.

*Patterico has a tremendous idea: Senate Republicans should introduce a non-binding resolution of support for each of the filibustered judicial nominees, so as to put on the record the fact that they would be confirmed if granted a floor vote. Would the Democrats filibuster this as well, so as to prevent the public from finding this out? (Link via Bashman).

*If you liked my marginal vote analyses, Patrick Ruffini has a map that captures a lot of the same type of stuff in graphic form. I take it that some of the swing towards the Democrats in Montana may have been aided by the victory of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate there.

*Speaking of cool charts, check out this piece with its charts of blog activity during the campaign.

*This "Email of the Day" to Andrew Sullivan pretty well captures the Democrats' image problems.

*Two more from Ruffini, who's on a roll: first, this:

President Bush carried 97 of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties, most of them "exurban" communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas.

The counties with the most population loss (from people picking up and leaving) voted for Kerry 68.6% to 30.4%.

Mmmmm, 2010 census. And Ruffini also has a link to this must-read analysis over at Kos' place:

A top Kerry staffer (one of five who had been with Kerry from the very start of his primary campaign and who claimed he talked with Kerry almost daily on the phone) told me: "To be blunt, this is a fat-cat top-down campaign. The campaign staff doesn't really get grassroots." Those were his exact words (I wrote them down because I was startled he would admit this--I haven't told ANYONE this quote because I didn't want it to get into GOP hands prior to the election). He did think a grassroots strategy was crucial, but he may have been among the very few Kerry staffers there at the time to think that way; he and one other staffer were pushing to get me hired and create a real grassroots strategy. He called me daily with updates. On the fourth day, he apologized that Mary Beth Cahill was concerned I could be a "Republican mole." He told her I had been a volunteer with the Dean campaign and that he trusted me based on our phone conversations, but that didn't prove anything to her. She couldn't imagine hiring someone who lived in California that she'd never met. Instead, she hired a former Emily's List staffer with experience sending direct mail to big donors, whom Mary Beth had worked with previously.

This, of course, echoes many of the things the GOP side was saying before the election. Did McCain-Feingold actually succeed in hamstringing Kerry? Then again, the turnout and exit poll numbers do suggest that Kerry's side didn't do so badly in turning out the Democratic base and swinging Nader voters; where they lost was in high GOP turnout and, perhaps most of all, the defection of something like 10% of the people who voted for Gore in 2000. You win them back with the message and the candidate, not by digging deeper at the roots. Plus, the Republicans have an advantage: new GOP voters tend to stay put in their homes with their children, whereas the Democrats' newly registered voters are often transients - college students, new immigrants - and even if you can still find them four years later, they may start to lean more Republican as they set some roots down, which means the Dems need to reinvent the wheel every four years with their register-young-voters push.

Dan Drezner notes another diplomatic triumph for the Bush Administration, as James Baker hammers out an agreement with Russia, France, Germany and others to forgive 80% of Iraq's debts.

I had to laugh at this exchange on CNN’s Sunday Late Edition between Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) and Wolf Blitzer:

SANCHEZ: …I believe that we made mistakes. The media certainly is not in our hands any longer, and, in particular, radio talk shows where that is completely in the opposition's hands, and they use it effectively against us.

BLITZER: But, Loretta, when you say the media -- when you say the media is not in your hands, are you saying that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN are hostile to Democrats?

SANCHEZ: No, that's not what I said. I'm saying that -- if you would let me finish -- that the majority of people are now receiving a lot of their information out of radio. And the radio isn't in the hands of the Democrats anymore.

Many years ago, the Republicans made a very effective play. They sat down. They made a strategy. They decided they were going to put big thinktanks around, that they were going to fund them. They decided that they would buy radio, that they would use that to talk to people. And people drive in their cars, they're listening to the radio all the time. They're getting a lot of information that way.

You know, networks are losing -- you know, they're getting less and less viewership.

The transcript doesn’t quite do justice to how depressed Sanchez sounded when she said “the media is not in our hands any longer.” But the interview did make me want to learn more about this sinister, so-called “radio” device and how the government can curb its pernicious influence.

Seriously, though, isn’t it overstating the case - and more than a little rude to Al Franken, who was on the very same panel – for a Democrat to say that radio is “completely in the opposition’s hands.” Comments like these would also seem to belie Sanchez’s claims.

Drum notes a program at Santa Clara University to give preferential treatment to male students and huffs:

I'm hopeful that the principled folks over at National Review will condemn this practice. And please: not just a desultory acknowledgment or two to prove you care. I expect a stream of outraged posts and crosstalk at least equal to the recent torrents about Arlen Specter, the lack of conservatives among humanities faculties, and the shocking tolerance of liberalism at the University of Chicago.

I'm counting on you, Cornerites. The eyes of the blogosphere are on you.

Well, if Drum wants us conservatives to say that preferences for less-qualified male students in university admissions are bad, he can relax; obviously, this kind of discrimination is not justified. But, in the Kleiman style, he wants instead to paint conservatives as hypocrites for not dropping what they are doing and writing what Drum tells us to write.

But he can't be serious; this is one isolated and possibly unique feature of one not terribly prominent university. To say that it is deserving of the same attention as the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee - a matter that affects the court system and legal reform issues as a whole - is unserious at best and disingenuous at worst. Even to compare this to conservatives' principled opposition to racial preferences misses the fact that the latter are pervasive, perhaps universal, in higher education admissions. That doesn't make one more or less wrong than the other, but it certainly suggests why the emphasis falls naturally on the more prevalent program. A little perspective would go a long way.

Ricky West reminds us, graphically, that a major focus of George W. Bush's budget-busting spending increases compared to Clinton has been in education spending, an area where he's been criticized relentlessly for not spending enough.

You know, some jokes just never get old.

*Real subtle, that Zarqawi:

In video shot by an embedded CNN cameraman, soldiers walked through an imposing building with concrete columns and with a large sign in Arabic on the wall reading "Al Qaida Organization" and "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger."

Inside the building, U.S. soldiers found documents, old computers, notebooks, photographs and copies of the Quran.

*Jay G has an amusingly profanity-laden tirade (you were warned!) about critics of Hardee's new super-fatburger.

*While what he did may well have been wrong, I'm loath to sit in judgment of the Marine who shot what appears to be a wounded and non-threatening sniper in Fallujah. I believe very, very strongly that a man who wears the uniform is entitled to the benefit of every doubt. But Dale Franks explains why sometimes soldiers have to be punished for reasons that have nothing to do with justice and everything to do with discipline.

*David Frum lays out options for blockading Iran and has some helpful history of the words "Palestine" and "Philistine".

*NZ Bear reminds us that we still need a loyal opposition.

*Kevin Drum notes that the exit polls always overestimate support for the Democrats.

*What are these "morals" you speak of?

*Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post on the centrality of corruption to Arafatistan. Jeff Jacoby, of course, had the definitive Arafat post-mortem:

In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg.

*How the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign made better use of email than the Democrats.

Part II of a three-part series on what the Democrats need to do from here; Part I, on Communications, is here, and Part III, on Policy, will follow.

1. Governors and State Legislatures

Obviously, the Democrats need to start by rebuilding their hold on governorships, which they lost in the mid-1990s. Republicans presently hold the governor's mansions in the nation's four largest states - California, Texas, New York, and Florida, although New York may be due to swing back their way when Eliot Spitzer runs in 2006, with George Pataki probably wisely choosing not to run again. Republicans have also captured several natural Democratic strongholds - Massachusetts (which hasn't elected a Democratic governor since Dukakis), Maryland, Hawaii, even Vermont. The near-abandonment of the South has left the Dems in a serious bind there as well, although the cyclical nature of governorships, particularly due to the lure of corruption in state government, means that they take one from time to time.

As far as developing presidential candidates, I'll get to that later when I'm handicapping the 2008 race, but they are just at the wrong part of the cycle, with few governors in office long enough and one of their biggest media stars (Jennifer Granholm in Michigan) ineligible to run because she's Canadian-born. It didn't help when Gray Davis was humbled by the California voters, Jim McGreevey stepped down amidst a multitude of scandals, Roy Barnes lost in Georgia, and even smaller-time governors like Gary Locke felt the need to quit and go home. The process of building up governors to run for president or Senate means having someone be successful and popular enough to get re-elected. Even Granholm may face a tough re-election battle in Michigan.

The picture at the state legislature level is much stronger, as the Dems gained a lot of seats this year in seveal states, both red and blue. If they can consolidate those gains, it will be particularly important when another round of redistricting arises after the 2010 census, which seems likely to send still more congressional seats and electoral votes out of the blue states and into the red states.

2. Carville for DNC Chair

I take it he doesn't want the job, and there seem to be too many other people focused on their own self-interest (and on stopping the Hillary juggernaut) for anyone to persuade him, but much as I loathe James Carville, he's exactly what the Democrats need in a party chair - he's a regular-guy type, knows the South, doesn't fall into the trap of believing his own BS, and understands how you craft a message to win elections. You can always have a McAuliffe type as your #2 to work the fundraising - Mercer Reynolds, for example, raised vast sums of money for Bush this year and I'd never even heard of the guy until last week. The party chair winds up on TV a lot, and Carville is good with TV.

More thoughts on the DNC/consultant side: The Dems badly need a new batch of consultants who have cut their teeth in states outside the Northeast and West Coast. They need to permanently banish Bob Shrum and his grim populist message from the party - not just from presidential races, because half the problem is that all their presidential candidates have been groomed from the start by Shrum. Ditto for humorless types like Tad Devine and Chris Lehane who don't know when to stop spinning. On the other hand, Donna Brazile is one of the more sensible types and an expert on turnout among African-Americans, and needs to get a larger role. And as with accepting the loss of Shrum's good record with Senate campaigns, the party needs to cut bait with Terry McAuliffe even if it means losing some of his golden fundraising touch; the guy is a disaster in every other way (McAuliffe was one of the fools whose obsession with Bush's National Guard record led to so many bad decisions this year, from Rathergate to the overdone stress on Kerry's combat record), and his fundraising skills are partly offset by the scandals he engenders.

3. More Chuck Schumer

In developing presidential candidates, the Democrats need to present the face of moderation, bring along people who have the personal touch. Congressional leadership is a different game. That's why, if it was my party, I'd have wanted Schumer rather than the soft-spoken Harry Reid to head the Senate Democrats. Schumer will never be president; as a liberal Jewish lawyer from Brooklyn with an accent to match, he's too NY to be president in the way that Phil Gramm was too Texas and, frankly, Kerry was too Massachusetts (truth be told, in an ordinary year Kerry would never have won the nomination). But Schumer brings to bear a number of advantages that would make him ideal as a party leader in Congress. He's insanely hard-working. He's exceptionally PR savvy; I've noted before his habit of doing a press conference on a consumer-protection issue every Sunday, guaranteeing him a block of time on the Sunday evening local news once a week to the point that the local networks know they can give their consumer reporters the night off. He's actually relatively sane on national security and law enforcement issues. He's tough as nails. And, unlike guys like Daschle and Gephardt, Schumer doesn't talk down to people and doesn't sound like he's reading made-up focus-grouped talking points he doesn't believe in.

4. Say Goodbye To Hollywood

Hollywood stars tend to lean very far to the Left, and tend to spout off their political opinions without being asked and whether they know anything about the subject or not. The Democratic Party can't change this fact. They also give a lot of money to Democrats. The Dems shouldn't want to change this fact. But what the party can and should do is stop being star-struck and just stop making public appearances with Hollywood types. It's one of the tendencies that makes so many people identify the Democrats with the values-free zone that is Hollywood and with unserious dilettante leftism. Take their money? Sure. But don't telegraph to the American people that you take Ben Affleck's opinions seriously.

Of all the celebs who worked with the Kerry campaign and supporting 527s this year, only two seemed like they might help: Bruce Springsteen, because he's a fairly serious guy with an older fan base including a lot of blue-collar types (although as I noted some time ago, Bruce's fans tend by the nature of his music to be more conservative), and Puff the Magic Diddy, because he would help get young urban African-Americans registered to vote. It's not clear even that these two were any help, although it may be that Bruce's appearances in Wisconsin were part of the major Kerry operation that delivered the state by a hair.

5. No More Moore

For many of the same reasons, the Democrats need to walk away from Michael Moore. Yes, his movies and books are beloved by a segment of the Democratic base. But having Moore appear in public with Democratic candidates like Wesley Clark and appear at the Democratic Convention (they couldn't really stop him from appearing at the GOP convention) led to far too close a public association with a shameless and deeply dishonest huckster. And worse yet is allowing Moore's favorite hobby-horses to become Democratic talking points and ad campaigns.

Don't like that advice? Think the GOP has people it should distance itself from? Well, to some extent yes - but as a matter of practical electoral politics, the Democrats lost. They are the ones who disregard such advice at their peril.

6. No More Sharpton

In the current political environment, racial division helps the Democrats. The 2000 NAACP James Byrd ad, promising that a Bush Administration would set off a wave of lynchings, was highly effective. The Bush camp was probably politically wise to give no reason for this election to be racially polarized, even to the point of compromising its principles by signalling to the Supreme Court in the Michigan affirmative action case that it would not attack racial preferences.

More astonishingly, Republicans even held their fire when Al Sharpton, the David Duke of the Democratic party, spoke at the convention in prime time; if there had been a similar speech at the GOP convention, you would have heard nothing else for months. But don't think voters didn't notice: as I noted before, Bush won white voters by a 17-point margin, and while Sharpton may not have been much of a factor in that, the Democrats simply have to suck up the short-term cost of annoying Sharpton if they want, in the long term, to win back the confidence of non-Jewish white voters and stem erosion of voters from two groups Sharpton has targeted with particular bile: Jews and Asian-Americans.

Jim Geraghty, back from vacationing in Italy (and still in need of a new title), has some interesting thoughts on the international press. He starts by surveying various options for someone in Europe looking for more objective coverage of the U.S. This caught my eye:

The International edition of USA Today: Making the domestic version of that newspaper look like “War and Peace.” Three paragraphs and then we punt. I can’t complain about their news coverage skewing one way or another because there was rarely enough to form an opinion about. I do love the sports section, though.

Here at home, I’m a fan of USA Today, because I feel like its aspirations to be a national paper and its famous brevity combine to make it one of America’s more objective publications. USA Today is generally scorned by readers of more hefty papers like The New York Times, but, unlike that paper, it really is a pretty good bellwether for the country. (Of course, brevity does not guarantee objectivity. Down here in DC, commuters are treated to the free Washington Post Express paper, which manages to cram an incredible amount of spin into just a few brief paragraphs every day.)

In fact, I’ve long wondered: what it is the most objective news source in the country?

Read More »

President Bush just introduced Condoleeza Rice as the new Secretary of State.

One question: Rice’s former deputy Stephen Hadley is taking over as the new National Security Advisor. Since one of the main jobs of that position is to coordinate between the often-contentious State and Defense Departments, won’t it be hard for Hadley to take sides against his former boss? While the conventional wisdom is that Rice replacing Powell will move the Bush Administration’s foreign policy to the right, I’m wondering if the interaction between Bush, Rice and Hadley will move the balance of power in Washington towards Foggy Bottom. Which may actually be a good thing, assuming – and it is a big assumption - that that Department has the President’s best interests in mind.

On the other hand, Rumsfeld might increasingly run rings around those two less experienced figures. We shall see.

More thoughts on all of this here, here and here.

You have to take the national exit polls with a grain of salt, but it appears that this poll weights out to the correct result, and if so, a few things jump off the page:

1. Bush won white voters 58-41. He won white males by 25 points and white women by 11. Now, I know white people aren't exactly a cohesive group, and that there's something vaguely distasteful, even, about speaking of a "white vote". But if you're not even competitive with a demographic that constitutes 77% of the electorate, you got problems. Similarly, 81% of the electorate consists of Christians, and while the poll doesn't combine Protestant and Catholic, if my (rusty) algebra is correct, Christians voted for Bush by a margin of 57-42. At the cross-section of the two majority groups, 61% of the electorate is white Christians, and they broke 63-36 for Bush. Again, you can't afford to lose by that kind of margin with a majority voting bloc.

2. 49% of voters trusted Bush and not Kerry to fight terrorism, and those voters broke for Bush 97-3, such a decisive margin as to suggest that this issue was a deal-breaker for nearly half of all voters. In short, all else aside, Kerry was about 99% defeated just by the lack of voter trust in him as a war leader. This is supported by the fact that voters who trusted both candidates on terrorism broke for Kerry 75-24, while voters who trusted both candidates on the economy broke for Bush 61-38.

Since everyone and his brother is giving advice to Democrats, I might as well put in my own two cents as to the features of the Democratic Party that (1) might, possibly, be subject to change and (2) could help the Democrats in the long run if they were changed. I realize a lot of this will read as a criticism of Democratic candidates, but these really are some of the things I've found frustrating about Democratic campaigns, and I suspect that they are also things that turn off voters who are open to persuasion by Democrats; take this for what it's worth. I'll break down my analysis into three parts: Communications, Personnel, and Policy. Let's start with the Communications issue:

1. Obfuscation is a defensive tactic, not a strategy:

Republicans from the mid-1960s down through today have tried to brand Democratic candidates as "liberals," as a way of summarizing attacks on a broad range of positions on crime, defense, taxes, spending, social issues, etc. GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein became particularly well-known for this tactic, which can be very effective. There are basically four ways to respond to this tactic: (a) defend liberal positions on the merits; (b) pretend that the positions are not really liberal; (c) nominate candidates who do not take liberal positions; or (d) be evasive about the candidate's positions.

Following the spectacular failure of (a) in the 1984 presidential election (when Mondale openly advocated raising taxes, among other positions) and (b) in the 1988 presidential election (when Dukakis proclaimed "competence, not ideology" was at issue), the Democrats have had to choose between (c) and (d). While Bill Clinton had sporadic success with (c) (notably on crime and trade issues), the party's presidential and Senate candidates, at least - Clinton included - have increasingly leaned towards (d).

John Kerry is perhaps the pinnacle of this strategy, a man who got burned by the liberal label in his unsuccessful 1972 House race, and has spent the rest of his career dodging the label. He does so in two ways. One is to salt his record with votes that he can use to defend himself against charges of liberalism - which would be a convincing strategy if he actually took consistent positions on those issues, rather than a vote here or there, usually accompanied by his other tactic, weaselly disclaimers that leave you guessing as to where he actually stands. I dealt with this issue here and here. As I've noted, the Republicans have a time-tested counterattack when a Democrat does things like this to avoid taking clear and identifiable positions: call him a flip-flopper.

With each of the last three Democratic presidential candidates there has been endless speculation as to what they believe on a whole battery of issues, and while Clinton was able to eke out victories with this tactic, politicians without his unusual talents have had a much rougher go.

Now, let me make one thing clear: all politicians fudge, straddle, and flip-flop from time to time to create confusion in the public mind as to where they stand on issues. This is a useful tactic for a candidate who does not want to offend potential supporters on a particular issue, and I'm not suggesting that Democrats should avoid it altogether. But here we come to the Democrats' weakness: mistaking a useful tactic for a strategy. You can obfuscate some of your positions so as to emphasize others, and you can obfuscate on small issues so as to emphasize big ones. But once voters start to catch on to the idea that you are playing hide-the-ball on multiple major major issues, you are toast. The place of the Iraq War in the War on Terror was the most central issue at stake in this year's campaign, and nobody but maybe John Kerry himself believed that he had a single, clear and coherent position on the issue. That may have been, under the circumstances, a necessary compromise to keep his base from splitting in half, but it was death in Kerry's efforts to broaden his appeal beyond Bush-haters to people who wanted a leader they could depend on to know where he stands. And the problem hasn't been limited to presidential candidates either, as red-state Senate Democrats like Tom Daschle and Mary Landrieu have struggled to balance their moderate images at home with their fealty to liberal causes in Washington.

If the Dems are going to try to become a majority party, they need candidates who will get out there and lead on issues rather than fudging and trying to be all things to all people. It will require courage, discipline, avoidance of panic at temporary setbacks and the willingness to suffer bad press and risk losing some elections. Of course, this presupposes that their positions are actually capable of attracting popular support. But if the Democratic party has lost faith that its ideas can attract popular support, then this entire conversation is pointless. Isn't it worth a try?

2. Biography is not a substitute for policy:

This is a second and related example of the Democrats taking a tried-and-true campaign tactic and trying to pass it off as a strategy, and another one in which Kerry represents a nadir. Again, all candidates use their biography when possible to shore up both the strong and weak points in their images. But what we've seen increasingly from Democrats is efforts to use biography as a shield to cover the candidate's policy positions. Get asked about gun control? Don't talk about the issue - go hunting! Get asked about war? Talk about your service record!

Leave aside for now the debate over whether the tendency to do this is just a feature of recent Democratic candidates and consultants or whether it's driven by the party's devotion to identity politics. As a practical matter, there are two problems with this approach. First, voters aren't stupid; a dove with medals is still a dove, and a hunter who favors gun control is still in favor of gun control. Second, nobody has enough biography to cover every issue, and the need to have something personal to say on issue after issue is one of the roots of the exaggerations and resume-padding that got Gore and Kerry into so much trouble. Look at Bush and Cheney for a comparison: Bush's bio story is well-known, but he rarely tries to connect it to a particular policy debate, and Cheney only reluctantly talks about himself at all despite having a genuinely impressive up-by-the-bootstraps story.

3. Forget Vietnam:

This goes with the issue above - voters just keep on rejecting combat veterans who aren't right on policy. And I won't rehash the whole Kerry Vietnam story here. But it goes deeper: the constant references to Afghanistan and then Iraq as "quagmires," Ted Kennedy calling Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam" - don't Democratic politicians and their allies in the media realize how sick Americans are of hearing about Vietnam, and how dated their worldview sounds? If there's one rhetorical crutch the Dems need to drop, it's Vietnam.

4. Voters want to be spoken to as adults:

This one is mostly a matter of speaking style, although it's also an issue of substance: too many Democratic politicians (prime offenders include Gore, Gephardt and Hillary Clinton) talk to audiences like they are five years old. With the exception of Lamar Alexander I can't think of a Republican who does this. Again, Cheney is a good model to imitate on this point (not that anyone has to go to his extreme) - you can tell when he gives a speech that he's talking to you exactly as he would speak to a room full of senior advisers. That's respect, and even if voters don't put it into words, we appreciate it.

5. Don't believe what you read in the papers:

The Kerry campaign spent much of the year reacting to newspaper headlines and stories on broadcast networks. On a few occasions, they got burned by believing that anything reported there would be backed up by evidence and widely digested and believed. In fact, a lot of the rage on the Left at the notion of ignorant voters is an inability to comprehend that some people out there don't watch 60 Minutes and don't believe everything they read in the NY Times. Much as Democrats may wish to deny the idea of liberal media bias, eventually they have to accept that they can't just sit back and expect that the media will do their jobs for them and still produce a credible product.

6. Explain programs in terms of incentives:

Government programs are complicated; that's just the way they are. When Democrats propose changes to programs or new programs, they often wind up choosing one of three ways to talk about them: either they oversimplify and just tell us what they intend the program to accomplish without explaining how it will work, or they talk up how much more money they will spend, or they start reeling off complex, wonkish details that put everyone to sleep.

In fact, one reason that I suspect that domestic policy was the dog that didn't bark in this campaign was that John Kerry was never able to explain any of his policy proposals in a way that allowed people to understand them and compare them to President Bush's.

Democrats should look at how Bush explains his proposals and take a lesson. With programs like private Social Security accounts and Health Savings Accounts, what Bush focuses on is how the incentives in the program work in favor of the citizen. People instinctively understand, for example, that a shift to private ownership of funds will give them more control. Of course, one might argue that plans to, for example, impose direct or indirect price controls on medical drugs can not be explained in terms of incentives without revealing their fundamental flaws.

7. People don't like being called bigots:

The same-sex marriage flap is only the most recent manifestation of the tendency of pundits, bloggers, entertainers and the like on the Left - and to some extent politicians as well, notably John Kerry in his speech against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 - to refer to their opponents as driven solely by "bigotry and ignorance." This position is especially sharp with regard to same-sex marriage, since the pro-same-sex-marriage argument depends on the idea that there is no rational basis grounded in anything but irrational bigotry for anyone to want to treat traditional opposite-sex marriage any differently from same-sex unions. The problem, of course, is that - even leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the debate for the moment - people tend to get defensive when their lifelong beliefs, especially their deeply-held religious beliefs, are branded as irrational superstition and bigotry. It's not a strategy for winning hearts, minds, or votes, as the overwhelming rejection of same-sex marriage at the polls even in liberal Oregon showed.

8. Bloggers and pundits matter too:

On some of these points, notably the last one, I'm thinking as much about liberal bloggers, newspaper columnists, TV and radio personalities, and the like as I am about Democratic politicians. But one thing conservatives and Republicans have learned, sometimes to our grief, is that people look at the Right as a single entity, and tend to have trouble remembering what arguments they heard from President Bush and which ones they heard from Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson.

Put another way: for a lot of people, their most regular exposure to liberal ideas comes from the New York Times editorial page, or from Atrios, or from The Daily Show, or from CBS News. If those organs constantly blare the same theme - Bush is a liar and a draft dodger! - people will identify it with the voice of the Left. That doesn't mean people should feel totally inhibited, especially on blogs, but if commentators on the Left think that the recent spate of "Jesusland" bashing, especially from the Times columnists, has no impact on the public's view of Democrats, they are sadly mistaken. And, bloggers: remember, you may not have a huge audience, but your readers include people in Democratic Party circles, both in Washington and at the grass roots, as well as people in the media. You do have an influence on the debate, and don't think that you can push anger and bile all day and pound the table for agendas that are not likely to fly with voters, and then wonder why the candidates you support can't convincingly portray themselves as level-headed moderates, or why your party has a bad reputation on religious issues when you sneer constantly at people of faith. You want to shape opinion? You got it. Use it wisely.

In contrast to Kos, who as I and others have noted backed 15 Congressional candidates and they all lost, the Club for Growth had a pretty decent 19-14 record in Senate and House general election races this year, a record that looks better when you look at some of the longshots they backed (not that Kos didn't back a few longshots, but you'd think in 15 races he'd get one right).

The more I think about it, the more I have to agree with Stuart Buck that, if Chief Justice Rehnquist is the first Supreme Court Justice to step down, Michael McConnell would be the best choice to replace him. As Buck pointed out in an email, this People for the American Way brief against McConnell actually summarizes pretty well why pro-life conservatives should want him on the bench. McConnell is one of the most distinguished scholars in the federal judiciary, having for many years been a leading scholar and court advocate on Establishment Clause issues. He is well-regarded as well in academia as a man of even and judicious temperment, which is one reason why his nomination for the bench in 2001 attracted the broad support of even liberal academics like Laurence Tribe and Cass Sunstein. This is one reason why Senate Democrats, having seen how badly the filibuster issue hurt them in many elections in 2002 (as it did again this year), moved swiftly to drop the filibuster against McConnell, and he was approved by the Senate by voice vote on November 15, 2002. That issue will loom again for 2006, as five Democratic Senators face re-election in states Bush carried in 2004 (although two of those, Robert Byrd and Jeff Bingaman, are likely to be immune to public pressure). Surely, recognizing that a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee will be an unusually divisive and unpopular move - it's only been done once, in the case of Abe Fortas' elevation to Chief Justice, and then only on allegations of improprieties that eventually forced Fortas' resignation from the bench - the Dems may quietly be looking for an excuse not to filibuster the replacement for the conservative Rehnquist but instead save their fire for nominations to replace the moderate Sandra Day O'Connor or liberals John Paul Stevens or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, especially if the nomination comes up right on the heels of the election. McConnell would give them a good reason not to fight, and present major obstacles to having one.

Others who agree that McConnell would be a good choice:

*Michael Rappaport

*Eugene Volokh

*Stephen Bainbridge

*John Hinderaker (although the Deacon has his own suggestions)

In this post, I examined the national popular vote and concluded that, comparing of the increased number of Bush voters from 2000 (about 8.66 million) and the increased number of Kerry voters as compared to Gore voters in 2000 (about 4.56 million), one of two things had happened - either:

1. Bush had won the votes of 65.5% of "new voters," defined as people who - regardless of whether they had voted in past elections - didn't vote for either Bush or Gore in 2000; or

2. Bush had won less than 65.5% of such voters but had stolen away so many Gore voters (even over and above Nader voters who switched to Kerry) that he could approximate the same effect.

As more poll data comes in, I'm more convinced now by some of the commenters to the prior post who argued that it was more the latter than the former, and that the Gore voter switch is particularly pronounced when you consider the likelihood that most of Nader's voters from 2000 went over to Kerry. (I heard someone on TV claim that exit polls showed Bush won 10% of Gore voters). This is a conclusion that should cause ABC's The Note great embarrassment for its now-famous declaration, back on August 11, that "we still can't find a single American who voted for Al Gore in 2000 who is planning to vote for George Bush in 2004."

I calculated the 65.5% "marginal votes" figure by applying the following formula to the national popular vote:

((Bush 2004 votes) - (Bush 2000 votes))/(((Kerry 2004 votes) - (Gore 2000 votes)) + ((Bush 2004 votes) - (Bush 2000 votes)))

As noted, Bush won an additional 8.66 million Republican votes, whereas Kerry won something on the order of 4.56 million additional Democratic votes. I computed these figures by ignoring third-party candidates, figuring that people Kerry won over who had voted Nader last time are, in many ways, equivalent to bringing new people into the process, and by comparing the official FEC tabulations from 2000 and the latest running tallies so far. I would caution that the 2004 figures are still moving targets; returns are coming in daily. The 65.5% figure, for example, is down to 64.5% as of Friday, and may go up or down as more absentee and provisional ballots are tabulated in various states.

Anyway, I thought I'd take a state-by-state look to see where it was, precisely, that all of those 8.66 million new Bush voters came from. The numbers that follow were computed Friday, November 5, following the call of Iowa, the last contested state, for President Bush. It's a particularly interesting question for me, as a New York City Republican listening to my fellow New Yorkers rage at what they saw as the provincialism of the red-staters who gave Bush his victory (See here and here for examples): where was it that all these extra Bush votes came from? What state led the charge to Bush?

New York

That's right, New York. The single largest percentage of marginal voters swinging to Bush came among the benighted, provincial, knuckle-draggin', Bible-thumpin', troglodytes of the Empire State itself. New York was one of only three states in the Union (along with Rhode Island and Alabama) to see an increase in Bush votes and a decrease in Kerry votes as compared to Gore, and the only one in which the decrease was significant. Bush gained nearly 400,000 additional votes in New York while Kerry lost more than 120,000 - a swing of nearly half a million votes. That swing, by the way, all but eliminated Gore's 540,000 advantage in the national popular vote all by itself. Before New Yorkers fume at Bush voters in the South and the Great Plains states they should look around at their neighbors and ask themselves how many of them have been strangely quiet about this election.

It wasn't just New York, of course; the fourth-largest marginal swing was New Jersey, and Bush won over 80% of the marginal votes in Connecticut. Can you say, "September 11"? And, come to think of it - when you combine those states with the nearly 1 million new Bush votes in Florida - there may have been another factor at work in 2000, much noted in the media at the time and much ignored in the media this time: Joe-mentum. Without the presence of the first Jew on a national ticket, Kerry may not have had the same oomph in states with a large Jewish population ("Where have you gone, Joe Lieberman, your party turns its lonely eyes to you . . . ") Of course, these are basically Democratic states, so Bush still didn't win them. But he won over a lot of people here in the past four years, and that showed in the final tallies.

I list the states in order of the percentage of the marginal vote won by Bush:

Read More »

Instapundit links to a post-election item from one of the Daily Kos contributors containing this charming bit:

Marching order #1, therefore, is this: No matter whom you talk to outside our circles, begin to perpetuate the (false, exaggerated) notion that George Bush's victory was built not merely on values issues, but gay marriage specifically. If you feel a need to broaden it slightly, try depicting the GOP as a majority party synonymous with gay-haters, warmongers and country-clubbers. Because I, for one, am tired of hearing whiny complaints from conservatives that, not only do I not have values, but that I fail to properly respect the values of people who are all too happy to buy into, no less perpetuate, inaccurate caricatures of the 54+ million Americans who voted Tuesday for John Kerry.

Criticizing the GOP ain't gonna build us a new national majority. But the process is brick by brick, or perhaps, brickbat by brickbat. We didn't decide the rules of engagement, but that's what they are and so we may as well start firing away.

I have heard this attitude many times, and it always seems to come from the Left. Not from everyone, mind you, but the people it does come from . . . let's back up a bit here: we all know that many people on the Right and on the Left regard some or all of the other side as liars, cheaters, etc. in their conduct of elections and political debate. Leaving aside for the sake of argument who's right about this and in what ways, it can be very frustrating to fight against people you regard as fighting dirty and cheating.

I've read or been party to plenty of bitter wallows after election defeats, from widespread debacles in 1989, 1990, 1992, 1996 and 1998 to more localized issues like Hillary Clinton's senate win in 2000. I've seen plenty of examples of conservatives looking for ways to stop lies, election fraud and other sorts of wrongdoing by Democrats. I've seen conservatives willing to hoist Democrats by their own petards, most notably with the Independent Counsel statute and with he-said-she-said sexual harrassment claims (Paula Jones as revenge for Anita Hill). And yes, I've seen conservatives argue points that were just not true.

But I have never seen anybody on the Right argue that we ought to knowingly spread untruths or create false impressions to win political arguments. What's disturbing about a lot of the reactions from people in the Left's fever swamps and sometimes even in more mainstream venues is the notion that Democrats ought to imitate precisely those facets of Republican tactics that they profess to find offensive. What's particularly damaging is the desire to imitate the GOP without really understanding why Republicans do the things we do and why they are effective, which is how you get what amounts to cargo-cult operations like Media Matters, which purports to be a complement to conservative outlets that decry media bias but instead spends most of its time just taking potshots at conservative pundits.

*Now, They Tell Us: the lead story on the NY Times website yesterday was one that veterans of the 1992 election will find familiar: the discovery, all of a sudden, that the jobs picture is better than it was painted in the run-up to the election. I'm watching carefully for signs of economic revisionism where Democrats and Bush Administration critics who just a few days ago were comparing this economy to the Great Depression start arguing that Bush was hard to beat because economic times are good.

*Kos just topped the "screw 'em" classic, by openly hoping for America's defeat in Iraq:

The big silver lining, and it's significant, is that Kerry won't be tarred for cleaning up Bush's mess. Had Kerry gotten us out of Iraq, he would've been blamed for "losing the war". Now Bush will ineptly lose it for himself.

Kos is taken firmly to task for this by Greg Djejerian:

[S]uch flippant treatment of a major national security issue is also very small; and the American people have smelled this smallness out. That's part of the reason a somewhat embattled American president, with a less than ideal economy and with a tough war on his hands, was handily re-elected (I believe not since FDR has a President been re-elected while simultaneously gaining seats for his party in both Houses of Congress). Americans like to dream of big projects and goals--and the Democratic party is failing them in this--content instead to lazily carp from the sidelines. Worse, some of that party's activists, it too often appears, would wish for some important, declared national objectives to be scuttled. Trust me, that wasn't a winning strategy in the past, it isn't one right now, and it won't be one in the future.

Kos is undoubtedly particularly peeved at the failure of his personal ambition to become a power player in the Democratic party, as all 15 of the House and Senate candidates he backed lost. The list, here, is particularly funny now due to the misspellings and egregious cheap shots, like claiming Jim Bunning's mental health was deteriorating. (Link via Blogs for Bush)

*Speaking of Blogs for Bush, the site will continue in a new format, although it's unclear to me how its function will differ from that of RedState.

*Catch Mark Steyn in something close to full gloat mode here and here. I liked this one:

Michael Mooronification damages everyone who gets it.

Look at the recently resurrected Osama bin Laden. Three years ago he was Mr Jihad, demanding the restoration of the caliphate, the return of Andalucia, the conversion of every infidel to Islam, the imposition of sharia and an end to fornication, homosexuality and alcoholic beverages. In his latest video he sounds like some elderly Berkeley sociology student making lame jokes about Halliburton and Bush reading My Pet Goat.

*Speaking of gloating, while I might divide the group differently, I endorse the general sentiment of John Derbyshire as to the people who deserve to be gloated at and those who don't.

*From November 2: Best Jimmy Breslin column ever.

*Lileks on New Yorkers who are aghast at the supposed ignorance of the red states that voted for Bush:

It's a big country. Please take this in the spirit it's offered: we watch the news that comes from New York, read the magazines that come from New York, see the shows that come from New York. It's entirely possible we know you better than you know us. Nu?

*Tim Blair links to some classic inside stuff from the Bush and Kerry camps. The guy who comes off in this as the real political brains isn't Karl Rove but Bush himself - note that Bush figured out before Rove did that Howard Dean was toast in the primaries. Of course, this is consistent with the theory that Bush's expertise is knowing people, and he knew Dean personally.

*Stuart Buck thinks - and I agree with him - that Justices Rehnquist and O'Connor would have retired before the election if it were not for the legitimacy questions that people raised after Bush v. Gore.

*Where credit is due: Wretchard notes that "[t]he French may have performed a valuable service by admitting Arafat to a military hospital in Europe which will reduce the risk of imputing his death to Jewish poisoning, a rumor that has already made the rounds in the Middle East."

Looking at Slate yesterday, it was unsurprising to see a characteristically Democratic “why do they hate us” debate ongoing among its liberal writers. Two things struck me about this. On one hand, things aren’t quite as bad for the Democrats as a lot of us are assuming. A few more votes in a few of the swing states and we might be talking right now about what’s wrong with the Republican Party. However, on the other hand, this election did turn out to be, in the end, a profound disaster for the Democrats and, as someone who definitely leans Republican, even I am a little bit concerned about the degree to which one party currently has control of our government. So what should the Democrats do? At risk of being greeted with hostility, here is some unsolicited, yet sincere, advice for the minority party for the years leading up to 2008:

Read More »

Here's something I think is really, really interesting, as long as you understand that the methodology isn't so much science as a rough way of measuring the impact of something that might be more accurately measured if you had accurate exit polls. Turnout was up across the country, such that Bush got more votes everywhere than he did in 2000, and Kerry got more votes everywhere than Gore did in 2000 (except California in each case, as far as I can tell, although there may be a bunch of absentee ballots yet to count).

The conventional wisdom was that increased turnout would help Democrats. If this were true, one would expect that, at least in contested states, the marginal voters would break for Kerry - i.e., that when you subtract out the 2000 returns from each side, what's left should lean Kerry. This would be true unless Bush moved so many Gore voters to his column (above and beyond the number of 2000 Bush voters who abandoned him) to negate the benefits of new Kerry-leaning voters. (My own suspicion is that, in general, the people who voted last time and switched sides were close to a wash, although they likely broke for Bush in some places like NJ where he lost decisively last time but closed the gap significantly).

But if you run the calculations of marginal votes, what you get is Bush majorities in the marginal numbers in a lot of places. In some states by big margins - in Connecticut, for example, Bush wins about 88% of the marginal vote. Ohio was an exception, but Bush takes 48% there, enough to hold a state he won by a few points last time. Of course, in New Hampshire, which he lost, he drops to 43%.

I'll run a state-by-state table of these later on when we're closer to having final tallies (including absentees) to provide a good comparison. But let's at least run the table on the national popular vote. Here's the equation I used:

((Bush 2004 votes) - (Bush 2000 votes))/(((Kerry 2004 votes) - (Gore 2000 votes)) + ((Bush 2004 votes) - (Bush 2000 votes)))

For these purposes, I ignored third-party candidates, since people Kerry won over who had voted Nader last time are, in many ways, equivalent to bringing new people into the process. Looking at the official FEC tabulations from 2000 and the latest tallies so far, I get the following:

Bush 2000	Bush 2004	Bush +	Gore 2000	Kerry 2004	Kerry +	Bush Share of Increase
50,456,002	59,117,523	8,661,521	50,999,897	55,557,584	4,557,687	65.5%

When you put the numbers in that context, you see that Bush was actually hugely more successful at the margins in his combination of bringing new voters to the polls and convincing more people to switch to him than away from him. Remember that next time you hear that high turnout always and everywhere favors the Democrats.

Will Collier has the county-by-county map.

By now you've heard a lot about how the partial exit polls that leaked out during the day on Election Day across the internet were skewed to an almost absurd pro-Kerry extent, and you've seen how pro-Democrat pollster John Zogby's final results were the same way just before the election (he projected more than 300 electoral votes for Kerry).

But the state-by-state polls actually weren't all that far off if you knew how to read them. Personally, I was relying on two reliable sources down the stretch: Daly Thoughts and RealClearPolitics, both of which came out with the same Election Day prediction of 296 electoral votes for Bush. Assuming that nothing overturns Bush's lead in Iowa, which looks like the last state not definitively called, Dales and RCP will have each gotten 49 of 50 states right, missing only Wisconsin, which Kerry held on to by the narrowest of margins.

In fact, RCP's national poll average showed a fairly steady lead for Bush throughout the fall, so anyone who put their faith in the RCP guys knew what was likely to happen. Media reports to the contrary were mostly based on cherry-picking pro-Kerry polls and/or on the assumption that new voter turnout would moot all the old polling models. Dales in particular should be explaining over the next few weeks why that was a bad idea (Kaus got in the best cheap shot yet: "Bush 51, Kerry 48: Pollster Ruy Teixeira demands that these raw numbers be weighted to reflect party I.D.!")

Mark Steyn often argues that liberal media bias is a Republican's best friend, as Election Day is the only time that Democrats are forced out of the self-serving illusions given them by the media and compelled to face reality. On this one, he seems to have been right; the evidence was there in the polls, but people who were reading Zogby and the various media outlets that trumpeted a late Kerry surge missed it. Glad I was reading guys who could tell me the score.

We'll see more from exit polls and the like, although one of the ironies of this election is that the exit polls were so wrong about the result, yet they will still be used to break out who voted for who and why. Makes you wonder.

Anyway, here's my best guess on the message of this election as it pertains to the issues (more later on the candidates and the campaigns):

1. The War on Terror: Polls regularly showed that people are split on the war in Iraq, with many Americans having misgivings on the reasons for going there and our progress in winning the war. Ultimately, nothing succeeds like success; I'm confident that in time, we'll have enough tangible progress to get more public acceptance.

But Democratic hopes that unease about the war would sink Bush turned out to be largely unfounded. Even if people weren't so sure they supported the Iraq war, it was clear throughout the campaign that they trusted Bush and his team to carry the broader war through to victory, or at least as far as they could get in four more years. To some people, that may sound irrational: if you don't trust Bush on Iraq, why trust him at all? But most people, I think, understand that the president knows more than they do about any particular foreign controversy; they are perfectly capable of doubting the Iraq war based on what they know, and yet resting comfortably with the more general sense that Bush has proven himself to be a guy who's not going to take potential threats sitting down.

One of the criticisms that has sometimes been made by Democrats is that Bush politicized the war. If they mean simply that Bush sought political profit from his leadership in wartime and his handling of the time of crisis after September 11, well, that's politics; do these people not remember Oklahoma City, or the 1944 election for that matter? But that's not it; what really rankles is not that Bush scored political points off of having handled some uncontroversial things well. What rankles is that Bush found electoral advantages in 2002 and 2004 from the Democrats' own differences of opinion with his policies. As if it was noble of Democrats to attack the president's policies at all turns in the harshest of possible terms and seek to undermine them in Congress, and yet somehow improper for the president to point out these differences to the American people and ask them to decide which side of these various controversies they trusted.

This is the great dilemma for Democrats. Democrats have a set of beliefs about domestic politics (more later on this), and many of them feel cheated in some sense that foreign policy swamped those issues in the campaign. But at the same time, a large segment of Democrats remain harshly critical of the president's foreign policies. A Tony Blair/Joe Lieberman-type Democrat who doesn't put daylight between himself and Republicans on foreign policy and national security issues would make it nearly impossible to politicize those issues and remove deep divisions in our politics. If Democrats are going to bemoan the prominence of national security in our politics, they need to decide: are they willing to go along with Republican policies and attitudes that are popular, at least in broad outline, with the public? If they are, the security issue can be neutralized. If not, then they will have to accept the natural consequences of their own ideas.

2. The Economy: Some Republicans will argue that the president's economic policies have been blessed by the electorate. I'm not sure I'd go that far. Polls seemed to indicate, again, a generally divided view, with Kerry sometimes having advantages on the economy. But it is clear that voters found Bush's economic management at least sufficiently unobjectionable that bread-and-butter issues didn't overwhelm the rest of his message, even in hard-hit places like Ohio and Michigan (Bush did better in Michigan than in 2004). And, of course, there's no question that Bush's fealty to his tax cut pledges helped him hold his base, and that - as in 2004 - a number of House and Senate races went Republican after being fought on economic issues.

3. Social Issues and the Courts: Here, I believe there is a mandate, if one that Republicans need to interpret carefully. Republicans up and down the ticket did exceptionally well with rural and other socially conservative voters, and Karl Rove's prediction that he could bring out millions of evangelical Christian voters who didn't vote in 2000 proved prophetic. Polls regularly showed that voters preferred Bush over Kerry in picking judges, and it's now already conventional wisdom that the same-sex marriage issue played disastrously for Democrats in the heartland. With the Senate now up to 55 Republicans, Bush will be amply justified in appointing conservative judges and in pushing to get through the appellate judges who are already stalled. If Bush is really devious, he could respond to the next Supreme Court vacancy by appointing Miguel Estrada and daring Democrats to complain about his lack of judicial experience after they spent years keeping him off the bench.

But the posture of the same-sex marriage issue should also serve as a reminder: America is a progressive country and a conservative country, and politicians forget one of the two parts of that formula at their peril. Progressive, in the sense that there is a broad, general acceptance of social change. People may fight about particular changes in our society and grumble and groan about the decay of everything, but at a fundamental level, the public is willing to accept that attitudes about race, gender roles, sexual behavior and the like do change over time, and the society changes accordingly. Certainly, efforts to use government to forcibly hold back such changes in attitude almost always result in political setbacks. Bill Bennett had this to say yesterday:

President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal . . .

With all due respect to Bennett - much as I'm sure he and I agree on many values issues - that's not going to work. But if it's important to recognize the progressive nature of social change, it's at least equally important to recognize the conservative impulse as well: people who may be willing to be persuaded to change their minds about things - or who may give way in time to people with different opinions - may not be so enthused about court decisions that take away from the people the development of that process and tie it up in a constitutional straitjacket. In some cases, that straitjacket can actually reverse the direction of the progressive impulse (as any social change can be reversed over time if attitudes change); pro-lifers are optimistic that, if anything, the absolutism of pro-abortion groups like NARAL and their allies in the courts have succeeded in provoking a general trend towards more rather than less disapproval of abortion. If such a trend grows visibly over time, eventually there will not be popular support for candidates like Kerry who swear to appoint judges with a pro-Roe v. Wade litmus test. This election could wind up being seen in retrospect as such a turning point, as Bush (like Reagan) got a larger share of the popular vote than avowedly pro-abortion candidates like Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis and Mondale ever did.

People like Kevin Drum keep telling us that times are a-changing and eventually, issues that favor conservatives will go away. But this dichotomy will never go away, no matter what the particular issue. Liberals are forever trying to use the courts to short-cut or entirely avoid the process of persuading people on social issues, and that will continue to be a self-defeating tendency no matter what the specific issue at hand. As long as conservatives focus their energies on appointing judges who will leave most such issues in the hands of the people and don't try to make major social changes of their own before their time, social issues will remain a bulwark of conservatism.

It is being reported that Senator Kerry has conceded to President Bush and that both men agreed on the need to reunite the country.

Kerry reportedly will be speaking at 1 PM in Boston. Bush will probably speak later today.

UPDATE: It is very interesting, and quite heartening, to hear how much respect Bush and Kerry apparently have for one another. I got the sense in 2000 that Bush and Gore really could not stand one another, something subsequent events have only seemed to reinforce.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Geraghty has a classy salute to Tom Daschle that I completely endorse.

FINAL UPDATE: My take on today’s speeches: I thought Edwards was trying to rally Democratic spirits, but came off all wrong, a little too partisan for the occasion. Kerry was very good, striking just the right tone and doing his best to heal the bitterness of a too-long campaign. Like Gore at the very end in 2000, I'm not a fan of the guy, but it was hard not to feel for him and his supporters (well, most of them). Cheney was Cheney, with a deadpan crack about having “delivered” Wyoming for the ticket. Bush seemed very gracious and relieved. The President proceeded to give a very nice speech about looking forward, serving all Americans and about what he hopes to accomplish. In all, a peaceful and honorable democratic transition all around.

If you’re depressed, Daniel Drezner has some encouraging words for moderates who voted for Kerry.

I stayed up until Edwards spoke at 2:30 (after being announced as "the next vice president of the United States"), so I'm just too spent this morning to do the full what-it-all-means post, or even to fully absorb the meaning of Kerry's refusal so far to concede. My gut tells me that Kerry's refusal to call it last night was only fair, given the traumatic 2000 experience for his party and given how close this one was in the Electoral College, although it's rather sad to see the tradition of Election Night concession speeches fade away. But I would hope he buries the hatchet by the end of today; fishing for an extra 500 votes when you have a popular vote plurality at your back is one thing, but going to war for 146,000 votes is quite another, and with Bush having won a decisive majority of the national popular vote, I suspect the public would run out of patience for a fight that lasts more than another day or so. The Democrats never got closure on the last election because the leader of their party never looked them in the eye and said, "we lost fair and square, it's over" the way the loser of every election had before. Kerry surely must be able to appreciate, particularly with the passions that election and the war have stirred up, why it will be crucially important to the peace of the nation going forward to do that soon.

My feeling this morning is mostly one of overwhelming relief. We got through the election without a terrorist attack, meaning the last thing Al Qaeda might have been holding back something for has passed. Not that they are done, but there was no other reason to wait other than lack of capacity to strike. And the election went well. The Commander-in-Chief will stay at the helm, and we will have the opportunity to carry his strategy through for another four years. The Senate will be more Republican, as we steel for a likely Supreme Court battle and maybe several.

For historical perspective, not only has Bush won a majority of the popular vote for the first time since 1988, but his 51% of the vote is larger than any Democrat has won, other than FDR (who did it four times) and LBJ in 1964, since the Republican party ran its first national election in 1856 (Jimmy Carter in 1976 is the only other Democrat to muster a majority in that period, and then it was 50% in the wake of Watergate). The Republican party remains a majority party at the national level, having won popular majorities now 7 times to the Democrats' two since 1945. It is, of course, particularly satisfying, on an emotional level, to see Bush win a larger share of the vote than Clinton ever did.

On the coverage last night, I was flipping channels continuously. CBS was actually the fastest network to call states early, but only FOX and NBC called Ohio for Bush, and at last check nobody was willing to say 270; it's safe to say that some of the networks just couldn't quite bring themselves to call a winner until the other side had conceded defeat. I do think FOX had the best coverage, for two reasons. First, FOX had the best ticker, packing in useful information on popular vote totals along with the percentages and share reporting for all the major races. Some of the others left out the raw numbers. Second, FOX had the incomparable Michael Barone, whose encyclopedic understanding of every battleground state down to the precinct level gave FOX viewers a decisive informational advantage in digesting the returns from hotly contested states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida.

Furthest-out line of the night, besides some of Dan Rather's Ratherisms, had to be Joe Scarborough discussing why statewide and nationwide elected officials like hurricanes in Florida.

Anyway, I'm tired and I need to get back to work. I'll be back on my usual early-morning blogging schedule wrapping up the election the next two days, and then I'll be resuming baseball coverage next week. I'll also be taking down some of the election-related bells and whistles on the site over the next several days.

I'm done blogging for the night, having done little enough anyway. I may even try to go to bed if it looks like this will drag on all night.

Still no blue states red and no red states blue. And the networks are quivering in fear of calling Florida, which looks very solid for Bush. The bad news is that it looks at the moment like Bush may need to hold Ohio because he's not gaining ground in any blue state, plus Nevada is tight and NH a slight Kerry lead, eroding further Bush's margin for error.

An amusing but almost certainly daft Rove-is-a-genius theory.

Very little blood drawn yet, in the sense of either side losing anything they'd had much realistic hope of winning. The calls so far that are at all interesting:

R: Win WV, Win Senate races for Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Mitch Daniels wins IN gov, defeat Amendment 36 in CO.

D: Win NJ.

Like I said, not a lott of blood drawn as of 9:53 pm. And Isakson and Obama won.

UPDATE (10:17 pm): NBC calling Arkansas for Bush. Another mild heartburn extinguished.

But everything I'm hearing seems to augur well for Bush in Florida, and Florida is the key state. (This sounds particularly good for Bush in FL).

At almost 8pm, everyone on both sides is dying of anxiety right now. But this one sounds good for Bush:

AP also found that 18-24 year olds broke for Kerry by +15 ... but didn't turn out in any greater numbers this year than in 2000. So much for Rock the Vote.

Command Post 2004 page

NRO Kerry Spot

NRO Battlegrounders

Instapundit

Jay Cost

Vodkapundit

And checking in on a few others, but those are the ones to watch.

Will I be in the right-wing coccoon to some extent? Well, Election Day is one day you want the news - even and especially the bad news - from your friends. Besides, there's always the TV.

UPDATE: I'd pass along some of the cautions you'll see elsewhere: I'm trying not to get too excited about anecdotal reports about turnout, fragmentary exit polls, and the like. And that particularly includes voter fraud and similar shenanigans - while my two biggest concerns about this election have been litigation and fraud, I'm hoping as much as possible to keep from thinking about them. Remember that initial reports of any kind of fraud or irregularities coming out on Election Day are likely to be wrong, much the way that initial reports from a war zone (or anywhere else where there's a lot of people, a lot of fast-moving activity and news reports rely on eyewitnesses and hearsay) tend to get a lot of the details wrong. There should hopefully be enough diligent people on hand to record the facts almost anywhere things get dicey.

I voted absentee and took the day off because I had planned on volunteering for the Bush campaign, but I never got a response back despite several attempts; I'm not sure if that means the campaign has enough lawyers, or what. Anyway, I'm home much of the day, although I've been running errands and dealing with work stuff anyway so far. But I'll be chasing the same fragmentary bits of information as everyone else and I'll post as I get the chance.

Two links to start off:

*Rasmussen's final tracking poll showed Bush surging to over 50% for what is, I believe, the first time all year. No time like today!

*The Brothers Judd on Kurds in Iraq keeping their fingers crossed for a Bush victory.

My vote is in.

A few weeks back, discussing Afghanistan’s first democratic election in its history, I trotted out a favorite quote from Churchill. In honor of today’s election at home, it seems appropriate to bring it out again:

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper.

For the slightly more cynical, here is another:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

I believe that America is the greatest country in the world, not because Americans are inherently any better than others, but because we were blessed with the very best constitutional foundation in the world. Today, from Afghanistan to Indonesia to Ukraine to Iraq, democracy is, with our help, increasingly on the rise and the sphere of representative governments continues to expand every year. We should be thankful to live in a country that not just practices democracy, but is willing to sacrifice to promote and defend it.

Whatever the outcome of today’s election, I sincerely hope that never changes.

Latest from the most credible of the GOP optimists:

Jay Cost's final predictions.

Jim Geraghty's conversations with his highly-placed Republican insider and the insider's mentor.

I can't tell you what these are worth, but their arguments have been a principal source of my optimism. Are they spinning, or deluding themselves? We'll know soon enough.

Well, I've put my faith all year in Dales as the best of the poll-watchers. Now, it's put up or shut up time. He's currently showing states solidly behind the two candidates at 222-186 for Bush, 276-238 for Bush - game, set, match - if the candidates each take the states where they are leading only by a little, and just two states (Ohio and Hawaii) too close to call. Electoral-vote.com has Kerry 298, Bush 231, coming to different conclusions (all in Kerry's favor) on Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, and Hawaii, with the sole call more in the Bush direction being New Hampshire, listed with New Mexico as the only tossups.

Looking at the RealClearPolitics 3-way polling averages, 11 out of 12 have Bush with between 47 and 51% of the vote, and 8 of 12 have Kerry with between 47 and 49% of the vote. The latest Rasmussen tracking polls are consistent as well, showing Bush leading 47.9-47.1, 48.1-47.1, and 48.8-47.4 over the past three days (the most recent listed last). Which means, essentially, that we have both an incumbent and a challenger who have a fairly solid base of support entering the last two days of the campaign. I think most of us will agree that it is highly likely that Bush will poll at least 47% on Election Day, and equally highly likely that Kerry will poll at least 46% and probably at least 47% - thus, at least a decently close election remains likely, although we could still have a decisive popular-vote majority and/or an Electoral College landslide.

Recognizing the limits of historical analogies, what can we determine from this? I decided to take a look at the final election results for elections dating back to 1824, when they started keeping records of the popular vote. There have been 25 elections in that period in which an incumbent has stood for re-election; 16 have been re-elected, 9 have been voted out of office.

Strong Incumbents, Weak Incumbents
Obviously, a strong incumbent - if we define a "strong" candidate as one who finishes with at least 47% of the vote - is likely to be re-elected. How likely? All 16 who were re-elected had at least 47%, while only two incumbents who polled at least 47% were voted out, those being Ford in 1976 with 48% of the vote and Grover Cleveland in 1888, who won the popular vote with 48.6% and was voted down (if you want to quibble with my line-drawing - and I had to draw it somewhere - the one incumbent in the 46% range, Martin van Buren at 46.8% in 1840, went down to defeat). The only three presidents to be re-elected with below 50% were Harry Truman in 1948 (49.4%), Woodrow Wilson in 1916 (49.2%) and Bill Clinton in 1996 (49.2%).

What's interesting - and, in fact, what shows the limitations of historical analogies - is how few incumbents have lost races without a complete collapse in their support. Besides Ford, the other four incumbents to lose since 1900 got completely abandoned at the polls: Carter in 1980 got 41%, Hoover in 1928 got 39.6%, Bush Sr. in 1992 got 37.4%, and Taft in 1912 got 23.2% and finished third. Besides Cleveland and van Buren, the other two 19th century incumbents to lose also showed weakly, in both cases against candidates who beat them in the popular vote four years earlier: Benjamin Harrison drew just 43% in his 1892 rematch with Cleveland, and John Quincy Adams drew just 43.6% in his 1828 rematch with Andrew Jackson.

The average margin of victory for successful incumbents? 54.9 to 41.1 overall and 54.9 to 40.9 since 1900. The average margin of victory for successful challengers? 49.5 to 41.2 overall, and 48.5 to 37.8 since 1900.

Strong Challengers, Weak Challengers
The flip side is when, as this year, we have a strong challenger: six candidates have drawn at least 47% of the popular vote against an incumbent president, and all of them have won. Of those, only one drew less than 50% of the vote: Benjamin Harrison in 1888 with 47.8%.

Strong Incumbents, Strong Challengers
You can see where this is heading. In the five presidential elections in which an incumbent and a challenger were separated by 5 points or less, the incumbent won two (Truman in 1948 and Wilson in 1916); the challenger won three, Carter defeating Ford in 1976 and the two Cleveland-Harrison matches in 1888 and 1892; or, that's a two-to-one advantage since 1900. Not much you can learn there either way. For what it's worth, the average outcome was 47.6% for the incumbent and 47% for the challenger, or 48.9% for the incumbent and 47% for the challenger since 1900.

If you look at matchups of a strong challenger against a strong incumbent, there's only two historical precedents, both of them bad for the incumbent: 1888 and 1976.

Conclusion
Well, it should be pretty clear from all this that the history isn't all that enlightening; there's really only five campaigns out of 25, and maybe really only two, that give us any examples to study. But I do think the history is a useful caution about reading too much into the study of, for example, how late-deciding voters make their minds up. The fact is, the 1976 campaign is the only one in the last 50 years to look anything like this one, and the polling data from 1976 don't exactly support the notion that voters facing a choice between a strong incumbent and a strong challenger will swarm to the challenger at the end, as Ford's strength came from a late surge after never pulling better than 45% until the final poll of the election, when he pulled briefly ahead at 49-48 with a momentary surge that quickly subsided (link via this analysis). And Ford, you may recall, was a bit of a unique incumbent: he had never been on a national ticket before, and was running on a record of the first election after Watergate and the fall of South Vietnam.

In other words: tomorrow, history leaves us on our own. It's our job to make it.

Will Collier passes on a wise lecture from Jeff Greenfield on why you shouldn't vote if you really can't make up your mind.

How popular is Bush in South Dakota, the state where Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle is fighting for his political life after four years of efforts to undermine and denounce Bush at every turn? Popular enough that Democratic Representative Stephanie Herseth felt the need to pledge that if the Electoral College ends in a 269-269 tie, she would vote to re-elect Bush.

Leave aside the fact that Kevin Drum is obviously living in a different universe from people like Steyn when it comes to the election; that, after all, will be settled at the polls in the next 36 hours. But this post, arguing that this election - win or lose - spells the death of movement conservatism, is just daft. First of all, the idea that Republicans are on the brink of agreeing that it's a good idea to raise taxes is . . . well, I can't even find a principle so central to the Democratic party to compare it to. A Republican Party that believes in higher taxes would be, in short order, a recipe for a one-party state.

It's true, as Drum has said in the past, that Republicans' failure to even try a large-scale attack on government spending shows the difficulty of a frontal assault on spending, although I think it's equally true that the war and Bush's personality have as much to do with that as anything, and I'm on record saying the GOP will be looking for a spending hawk to nominate in 2008 no matter what happens here.

It's particularly hilarious to hear Drum claim that this election is being held in "the most favorable environment imaginable for a conservative tough guy." Well, if Drum is prepared to agree that the economy is booming and the Iraq War is going seamlessly - heck, even I wouldn't go quite that far on either score, and I'm pretty optimistic on both counts - I'll believe him. Talk about reversing your own spin when it's convenient to do so.

As I've said before, if Kerry wins - even if, as I suspect is his only realistic path to victory, he wins by keeping it close enough to be decided by fraud and/or litigation - it will be seen, and rightly so, mainly as a decisive popular rejection of the Iraq War. This is doubly true if - as I also think is likely even in a Kerry-wins scenario - Kerry wins in spite of Bush getting a very impressive turnout by his base and a more-than-respectable share of non-first-time independent voters, each of which would suggest that the appeal of the Republican message as a whole remains in the general 50/50 neighborhood.

My own predictions, for what they're worth, later today.

Mark Steyn's latest Spectator column is vintage Steyn, albeit a bit less laugh-out-loud than usual (and I like the new Spectator layout, for what it's worth, although you can't see it in the printer-friendly format). Steyn concludes by assuring his British audience that if he's wrong they can get a new analyst of the American scene:

My sense is that the 2002 model is still operative, and that the Democrats and the media, talking to each other in their mutually self-deluding cocoon, have overplayed the Bush-bashing. Next Tuesday the President will win the states he won last time, plus Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Maine’s Second Congressional District to put him up to 301 electoral votes. Minnesota? Why not? Nudge him up to 311 electoral votes. Oh, and what the hell, give him Hawaii: that’s 315. The Republicans will make a net gain of two seats in the Senate, one of which will bring with it the scalp of the Democrats’ leader, Tom Daschle. . . . Look for a handful of Republican House gains, too. And Democrats tearing their hair out — or John Kerry’s and John Edwards’s hair, if they can penetrate the styling gel.

The above prediction needs to be able to withstand Democrat fraud, which I’m nervous about. If Tuesday goes off as smoothly as the Afghan election, we’ll be very lucky.

Usually after making wild predictions I confidently toss my job on the line and say, if they don’t pan out, I’m outta here. I’ve done that a couple of times this campaign season — over Wes Clark (remember him?) — but it almost goes without saying in these circumstances. Were America to elect John Kerry president, it would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by the people of American unexceptionalism — that they are a slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom of conventional transnationalism. Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work — Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert ‘Mister Robert’ Fisk, etc., — and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else — organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

But I don’t think it will come to that. This is the 9/11 election, a choice between pushing on or retreating to the polite fictions of September 10. I bet on reality.

Greyhawk, who I believe is still blogging from the front in Iraq, has the details, and a memorable empty throne (via Lileks, who has some as-always-worth-reading thoughts of his own on how Kerry plans to find bin Laden).

As I mentioned, I voted absentee already, and proudly cast my ballot for George W. Bush. If you've been reading this site the past 2+ years, you already know why, and I have neither time nor space here to go through all the reasons. So, I'll just summarize the top three. For a compare and contrast, you can look back at why I voted for McCain over Bush in 2000.

1. The War on Terror: By far the overarching issue in this election is the war. Put simply, Kerry could get me killed. Having been targeted for murder once before on September 11, and given that I still work a few blocks from Times Square, that's something I take rather seriously.

I've written too much about Bush, his leadership and his strategy to recount here, but let's just say this: from the time that he grabbed that bullhorn at Ground Zero to vow that we would be heard from, Bush has gotten it. My philosophy in the war on terror is aptly summarized by the Churchill quote I use as a tagline to the site; the full quote:

Germany must be beaten; Germany must feel that she is beaten. No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong.

Does Bush apply a similar philosophy to the war on terror? I believe he does, and his willingness to absorb endless abuse and wavering support from the public and from some of our allies is, in a wartime leader, a sign of the kind of constancy we desperately need. Bush knows what he wants to do, and he will not be deterred until it is done.

Which brings us to the contrast with his opponent. Can you even begin to picture Kerry insisting that the war on terror does not end until our enemies feel that they are beaten, that it ends only on our terms and at a time of our choosing, that we will not and should not believe we have peace until we have victory? I can't. Not with Kerry's history, not with how he has conducted himself in this campaign. And, of course, Kerry's long history of shifting course with the winds, too well known and extensive to be worth rehashing here, does not inspire confidence in his ability to stay single-mindedly focused on a coherent strategy in the face of obstacles, setbacks and criticism. (For more on Bush's and Kerry's differences as leaders, see here and here).

Even aside from the issue of the two candidates' fundamental differences in philosophy and temperment, there is the question of strategy, which is why this election - which frankly everyone recognizes is a referendum on that strategy - is so critical. Kerry has tried, at every opportunity, to attack Bush on tactics. But even if you agree with some of Kerry's tactical criticisms (which I discussed here), the larger issue is that Kerry rejects the overall strategy of the Bush Administration in fighting the war on terror (including the place of the Iraq war in that strategy), and has not advanced a credible alternative strategy or even convinced me that he would have one other than a return to the do-not-enough policies of the Clinton era. Consider the major strategic doctrines of this administration - each of which I wholeheartedly endorse (see Steven den Beste for more on the grand strategy; the Bush Administration thus far has stuck rather closely by the detailed vision surmised by den Beste) - and how little faith Kerry has in them:

A. The United States is pursuing a "forward strategy of freedom" by which it seeks to encourage reform and/or directly undermine or overthrow undemocratic regimes and replace them with more democratic regimes. Kerry went out of his way in the debates and at the Democratic Convention to avoid saying anything complementary about democracy promotion as a key weapon against tyranny; instead, just as in his dealings with Communist regimes in the 1970s-1980s (think: Daniel Ortega) and his statements about Arafat and Aristede in more recent years, Kerry has shown a disturbing degree of deference to existing regimes that are recognized as legitimate by the international community, no matter how little their legitimacy derives from the consent of their people and no matter how hostile they are to the United States, its allies and its interests. When he does talk about democracy, Kerry says things like this:

"We must support human rights groups, independent media, and labor unions dedicated to building a democratic culture from the grassroots up."

Labor unions???? In countries with huge pools of unemployed young men and no skilled labor? And that's how you propose to topple the region's tyrants? By getting them to join the AFL-CIO? Independent media and human rights groups do have a role to play, assuming they don't get co-opted into carping mostly about the tyrant's enemies (as so many did with Saddam), but most of the region's regimes need stronger medicine than that.

B. States that sponsor, harbor, or encourage terrorists are as culpable as the terrorists and will be treated as enemies; states with past connections to terrorists must be either with us or against us. Kerry, again, seems more concerned with making sure that we are on the sides of our allies than the other way around, and is profoundly allergic to incurring the anger of allies if it is necessary to get people to do what we want. (See here on why I think Kerry is saying he would not have gone to war with Iraq).

C. The United States reserves the right to launch a pre-emptive strike against our enemies when we believe they represent a serious and developing threat to our security, whether or not we have established that the threat is imminent. (As announced, I don't think this doctrine extends to threats to our interests, but more narrowly to direct threats to our physical security). Kerry, as I have discussed, takes a narrower view of when and how we can respond to threats.

(For more on Kerry's overall foreign policy outlook, see here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

On whether Kerry can effectively rally the nation to finish the job in Iraq no matter what the obstacles, just ask yourself: you work for a big company, and a new guy gets appointed CEO after a protracted power struggle. Do you really want to get assigned to a project that the new CEO, all the way through his climb up the ladder, has savaged as a diversion, a waste of money, and precisely the opposite of the direction the company should be going in?

I didn't think so.

Finally, and of grossly underestimated significance in this election season, there's the signal a Kerry victory would send to the world. As I noted recently, when you try to strip Kerry's message down to soundbites - which is how a president's message gets translated to the rest of the world - it can't be seen as anything but a message of retreat and retrenchment and a popular repudiation of Bush's aggressive defense of American interests. Kerry would need to labor long and hard, at great cost in life and treasure, to correct that impression even if he was totally dedicated to doing so. (More on Kerry's credibility and the message a Kerry victory would send here and here).

2. The Courts: I tend to focus my concerns, on the domestic side, first and foremost on those areas where the president's polices, once in place, are most difficult to change. Nothing has a longer-lasting impact than Supreme Court nominations. One reason for the rising temperature of the last three presidential and last five Senate election cycles is that activists on each side have, on each occasion, steeled for battle over the next Supreme Court nomination on a narrowly divided Court, and each time we've gone another two/four years with nothing happening. That can't hold forever, with a couple of Justices past 80 and several suffering major health problems.

As a practicing litigator, I see the many ways in which the composition of the courts affects the progress of litigation and its effects, direct and indirect, on society. And although it's not an ironclad rule, it's true in most cases that conservative judges, even when they err, wind up leaving things in a position that can be changed by the voters; liberal judges tend, when in doubt, to constititionalize more issues in a way that gradually narrows the scope of democratic accountability and control. That's an ominous development.

3. Social Security: The biggest long-term issue in the federal budget is entitlements. Bush took a step backward on that issue when he fulfilled his campaign promise to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. But in his second term, Bush will be looking for a domestic legacy, and he recognizes the importance of changing the fundamental operation of Social Security as the key to his long-range view of an "ownership society" in which individuals have ownership and control over more aspects of their lives. And Bush is a guy who gets things done. (More on the larger themes at stake here). I look forward to the debate on this issue after the election (see here for a key point on the transition-cost issue); if Kerry wins, of course, nothing will change in the way the government does business.

Conclusion: There are many other issues at stake here, and many reasons I have not discussed. But on the biggest of the big things - leadership, determination and strategy at war, the role of the courts in our society, and the long-term structure of the entitlement programs that consume the largest share of the federal budget - the choice of Bush over Kerry is clear. May the right man win; I cast my vote for him already, and hope you do too.

Brett Favre has apparently joined the Bush camp. Not a big surprise, but that?s good news for Republicans in Wisconsin, since Favre is easily more popular there than either of the two candidates this year.

(By the way, if you don?t get the headline above, you're obviously not following the campaign obsessively enough! See here.)

UPDATE: There is now some doubt about that earlier report. Maybe someone in Wisconsin could confirm or deny?

ELECTION EVE UPDATE: This is my final update to this post, which you may or may not find to be a useful resource. May the best man win.

Well, I’ve more or less said my piece about who I’m supporting this year, offering one of the least-coveted endorsements of the season here. The following are just a few of those who seem to agree...

Read More »

Jay Cost, who seems to be one of the most optimistic poll-readers these days, in an item posted yesterday:

Present Probability that Bush will win the Electoral College: 96.36% (This is the probability that Bush wins FL and IA and WI or OH. Thus, we can be 96.36% confident that Bush would receive a minimum of either 271 EVs or 281 EVs).

[snip]

Right now the EV math is looking awfully tough for Kerry. He is definitely behind in FL, IA and, though I do not cover it here, NM. This gives Bush a minimum of 266 EVs. Plus, Bush is likely leading in OH and WI -- and I think Kerry will be unable to hold MN when all is said and done. The word on the ground is that BC04's organization in MN is a sight to behold. The big question on my mind right now is not whether Bush gets to 269, but whether he breaks 300 (which he would do if he carries FL, IA, NM, WI, OH and MN -- that would be 306).

Personally, I continue to believe that Florida, not Ohio, is the real key right now, because winning Florida gives Bush (or, to a lesser extent, Kerry) multiple ways to win, while losing Florida leaves Bush with almost no margin for error and Kerry with none.

*Tonight's final pre-election broadcast of 60 Minutes weighs in, as you knew it would, with a last-ditch Kerry campaign commercial submission for the Bedfellow award with this Steve Kroft piece charging a lack of armor and equipment for soldiers in Iraq. Of course, the show ran late due to football, so it's debatable how many people caught the whole thing.

*More on bin Laden's effort to meddle in U.S. elections - should we read something into this MEMRI translation of one of his statements?

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands, and any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.

Here's a handy scorecard of the poll-closing times in each state on Tuesday night. The first states to close up the polls entirely start at 7pm EST and include two early indicators: New Hampshire and Virginia. Bush is going to win Virginia, but if it's close, that could be a bad indicator. New Hampshire has been fiercely contested; I expect Kerry to take it, but a Bush victory is certainly still possible. Bush taking New Hampshire would not be fatal but it would be a very bad sign for Kerry, as this is the swing state in which Kerry has spent the most time (other than perhaps Iowa) and the one most likely to be receptive to his New England persona.

At 7:30 we get North Carolina and West Virginia, two more Southern states that could be warnings of weakness for Bush but that Bush will win even if he's losing. And we get Ohio, although for a variety of reasons, if Ohio is as close as everyone thinks it will be, it could be a long time before the networks announce a winner. Recall that the networks appear to have absorbed the lessons of incorrectly calling Florida for Gore early on Election Night 2000 (before the polls closed in the most Republican parts of the state, in fact); any state that looks close won't get announced until they are sure.

8pm brings the witching hour for a huge swath of the country, including Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Again, if we're looking for knockout blows, look at MI and NJ; if Bush wins NJ, Kerry is toast in a big way, and if he wins MI, the math gets really ugly for Kerry. And frankly, the more I do the electoral math, the harder it is to see how Kerry can win a close one without Florida, because he then needs to win almost every other state that's even remotely contested. Shortly after 8, in other words, is the first point at which Election Night could for all intents and purposes be over if the networks have clear enough winners to start calling a bunch of states (Bush can win if he loses both Florida and Ohio, but it's hugely improbable).

After that, brace for the long haul, as Wisconsin, Minnesota and New Mexico don't check in until 9pm, Iowa at 10, and Hawaii at 11pm, and of course some states (like Oregon) aren't likely to be declared for weeks.

Josh Marshall, who ought to be an expert on this particular subject, on Democrats' reactions to the bin Laden tape:

[Emails Marshall received] struck me with what is one of the Democrats' greatest weaknesses: their vulnerability to getting knocked off stride by the rush of events, their tendency to fret that all is lost, almost to indulge in it, when the car hits a simple bump in the road.

(Emphasis in original). Note that Marshall has been down this road before. Which party do you trust to stick to its guns when times are hardest?

I have, in the past, threatened to hand out - but never got around to awarding - a "Bedfellow Award" for too-late-to-respond hits in the campaign season, especially (but not exclusively) false ones. The name comes from the comic strip "Bloom County," in which Senator Bedfellow was defeated on the strength of an election-day headline, "WARNING: VOTING FOR BEDFELLOW MAY CAUSE HERPES".

2002 had loads of candidates, including the flap over the Wellstone memorial service; the 2003 winner probably went to the LA Times sexual harrassment story on Schwarzenegger (the accuracy of which never seems to have been examined, although I don't doubt that there was a good deal of truth to it, given Arnold's reputation), although there may be something I'm forgetting; the Kerry-intern story was a good example from the primaries, although the rolling nature of primary elections gave him time to get the truth out before more damage was done.

The simplest definition of a Bedfellow Award nominee is a news story that (1) comes out shortly before the election, and (2) has a much larger impact on the election than it would have if it had come out earlier. Obviously, (2) is particularly true of stories that are false or misleading, since they tend to be easier to explain or debunk if they come out with adequate time to respond. If I get enough nominees, I'll hand out awards for the presidential race, a Senate race and maybe a House race, as well as an award for each party.

Anyway, we've got a battery of candidates so far in this year's presidential election (let alone the Senate and House races), and the late hits - some true, some false, some fair, some inserted by people outside the US political process - keep rolling in fast and furious:

*Will word come out that Kerry was not, initially, honorably discharged from the Navy?

*A new bin Laden video! (See here, link via McArdle, in which bin Laden seems to be relying on "Fahrenheit 9/11" for his talking points, and here, in which a very sad-looking bin Laden sounds like he's cribbing from DNC speeches for material, ripping the "inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance" and accusing Bush of "misleading" the American people. Is it for real? Is it recent? Will there be enough time to tell the difference?

*Another example just from Instapundit's backup singers: Michael Totten links to this FOX News report saying maybe we really did protect and dispose of at least a big chunk of those missing explosives. The whole HMX/RDX story, of course, is a leading candidate for the award at the moment, but there's plenty of time for more.

Anyway, those are just the early entries; we'll get crazier stuff still as we go. Put your favorite candidates in the comments - and I'll update this post as we go - and I'll try to hand out awards after the election.

UPDATE: (And I've also added a little to the text above). From NRO Battlegrounders, word that a Pennsylvania judge has unsealed records from a Heinz family lawsuit over the death of Teresa Heinz Kerry's first husband, records that could potentially shed more light on the family's finances. There probably isn't much news in there, but if there is, there won't be time to give it context.

Saw David Kay being interviewed by Soledad O'Brien on CNN's American Morning this morning on the issue of accounting for Iraq's prewar stocks of heavy-duty conventional explosives HMX and RDX (a link to the transcript should be posted on this page later today). Specifically, they watched a newly-released (as of last night, I think; I confess that this story is unfolding too fast for me to have confidence that I've followed every twist in it). First off, agree with him or not - or agree with him only in part - you have to like David Kay; his bluntness stands in stark contrast to the doublespeak of most international bureaucrats, and he mostly doesn't seem to have a dog in the various fights he weighs in on (recall how his initial report cheered opponents of the war with his declaration that "we were nearly all wrong" about Saddam having WMD, and also cheered proponents of war with his insistence that Saddam was deceiving and evading inspections and that Iraq was even more dangerous, on the whole, than we thought).

Anyway, once again Kay's recollections and analysis of the video gives a little something to everyone. His points, in no particular order:

1. He (Kay) had argued during the 1990s for destroying this stuff, but Hans Blix gave in to the Iraqi regime's demand that they be allowed to keep it for civilian construction purposes.

2. The tape (apparently shot by US media in April 2003, if I heard correctly) clearly shows an unbroken IAEA seal on at least one bunker, indicating that there was still some quantity of the explosives there at the time US troops arrived.

3. To Kay's eye, it's clear that the tape shows the presence of HMX. Kay didn't talk about RDX. Since I, like most bloggers, had never heard of either one until four days ago, I'm still mulling the significance of this, but as I noted below, Wizbang has been looking into the RDX side of the ledger.

4. Kay believes that US troops would and should have recognized these as explosives but, not being professional weapons inspectors, would likely not have recognized them as stocks of HMX.

5. Kay thinks the troops, having located stocks of explosives, should have been responsible for guarding them.

6. Although he didn't discuss the logistics of moving 360 or 380 or whatever tons of the stuff, Kay cautioned that you would be surprised at the things that looters, moving without trucks, can cart away by hand. He noted having seen people literally dismantling and taking away buildings brick by brick.

7. Kay stressed that it's important to keep in perspective the fact that this was just a small percentage of the high explosives in Iraq; he asserted (and this surprised even me) that Iraq possessed approximately 2/3 the amount of explosives as the US military, a staggering quantity for a country the size of California that could barely feed its people.

Looking back over my recent take on the election, I’m actually struck by some of the things I left out. Notably, the things we’re not paying attention to, especially in foreign affairs.

In 2000, Bush and Gore famously never debated the issue of terrorism. Today, the election has focused on the fight against al Qaeda, the insurgency in Iraq and, to a lesser degree, on Iran and North Korea, with a dash of Darfur thrown in. As some have noted, however, that leaves an awful lot of the world undiscussed. Might there not be big things we don’t see coming or big areas that we are taking for granted because things are going fairly well?

Read More »

As you can see below, I’ve paid some attention to who’s been endorsing who, but I confess to being pretty shocked that Germany’s largest, in fact Europe’s largest, newspaper has apparently endorsed President Bush. (Via Michael Totten).

Of course, it would be a little hypocritical for me to put too much stock in this, especially since the paper’s reasoning seems to be that Europeans should support Bush because it will keep them from having to do any heavy lifting in the War on Terror. But it is a nice reminder that world opinion is not as monolithic as some would have us believe. See here for another excellent example of that.

UPDATE (from the Crank): According to the left-wing Guardian, add Tony Blair, who of course won't come out and say it publicly, to the list of world leaders backing Bush:

The Prime Minister fretted to one close friend: 'Whenever Bush weakens in the polls, they start mucking about.'

Who are these 'they' whose 'mucking about' makes Tony Blair so anxious? They are Iran with its sponsorship of terrorism and its ambitions to go nuclear. They are Syria. They are the psychotic regime in North Korea along with the rest of the planet's rogue and risk states.

The mind of Mr Blair was summarised for me in vivid terms by someone who has an extremely good claim to know what is going on inside it: 'Tony thinks the world is a very dangerous and precarious place. Bush is the tough guy who keeps the bad guys under their rocks.'

So, we know Kerry at least met with the ambassador for Cameroon during the run up to the Iraq war. I wonder what they talked about?

Is Jim Geraghty's source in the Bush-Cheney campaign giving him (a) good grounds for optimism, (b) self-serving spin, (c) the results of coccooning self-delusion, (d) certainty about the unknowable based on small sample sizes or cherry-picked polls, or (e) a bit of each?

We won't know until Tuesday.

Paul at Wizbang wants answers. For now, all he has is a potentially plausible working hypothesis: that by January 2003, all but 3 tons of the 141 tons of RDX at Al Qa'qaa was gone from that facility, and that IAEA inspectors knew this and withheld the fact from the UN Security Council during the pre-war debate. If you can help shed light on his analysis, drop by and lend a link or a comment.

I have to say, given that "there were no dangerous weapons in Iraq" was one of the points Kerry had decisively won in this year's political debate, he seems to have shot himself in the foot by placing so much emphasis on the eve of the election on the dangers posed by these conventional weapons that were in Saddam's hands before the war.

Stuart Buck passes along word of an Alice-in-Wonderland decision to prevent the Ohio Secretary of State from investigating what may well be a substantial number of voter registrations - on the grounds that the individuals can't be notified of a hearing on the matter because they don't live at the addresses they used to register! (Coincidentally, the decision is by a Clinton appointee who is the wife of one of Ohio's leading plaintiffs' attorneys - what are the odds of that?)

I'm going to offer a perhaps-unexpected (to new readers, at least) point here and say that now is not the time, and a puff-piece interview on Good Morning America was not the place, for Curt Schilling to stump for President Bush. The stakes in this election are indeed life and death, and of course I welcome Schilling's endorsement. But:

1. I've long been infuriated by entertainers who stick their politics into a venue (interviews, concerts, etc.) where I'm expecting to just be entertained, as opposed to presenting a political argument in a political context. That should go for conservatives in sports and entertainment just as much as liberals. There's a reason why, despite the baseball/politics mix on this site, I labor to keep the two types of content clearly marked.

2. Sox fans are celebrating right now, and, let's be frank, a lot of them are Democrats. Don't spoil that with politics, no matter the cause; just don't (more on that idea here).

Random links:

Commonwealth Conservative on why he loves baseball.

Tim Lambert on - for what it's worth now - home field advantages in the World Series.

The Red Sock of Courage.

Ann Althouse notes that there is really no way to stop a large number of Illinois Democrats from voting for Kerry in Wisconsin following a joint Springsteen performance/Kerry appearance that 60,000 people are expected to attend. Of course, this looks like a prime opportunity for Republicans, for once, to keep a close eye out for ballot fraud without getting accused of racism in the process, as Bruce's fan base is pretty white.

UPDATE: Althouse says not too many people went and voted after the rally anyway. Which is good news.

It's not exactly a surprise, but given the publicity machine that surrounds the handful of September 11 widows who have consistently agitated against President Bush, it's worth noting this open letter of support for Bush from a much longer list of families of people killed on September 11.

I'm sure that there are also plenty of other Bush supporters among those who, like me, were fortunate to survive the attacks.

McQ notes a number of polls breaking down different voting blocs, with interesting commentary. One significant group:

A Rasmussen Reports survey shows that military veterans prefer George W. Bush over John Kerry by a 58% to 35% margin. Those with no military service favor Kerry by ten percentage points, 51% to 41%.

McQ notes one obvious reason for this:

I’m pretty plugged into the vets community and I’ve never, ever heard talk like I’ve heard about John Kerry among veterans. Let me succintly characterize it by saying the comments could easily interchange "Fonda" for "Kerry" if you know what I mean. There are a great number of vets who are still angry about those two and intend to demonstrate that anger on Nov. 2nd.

The line you often hear quoted, from various sources, is about a Kerry defeat being the parade Vietnam vets never had. Of course, consider this in tandem with the 75% or so support that Bush appears to get from both active-duty military and from the Guard and Reserves, and the overall picture is not one of great love for Kerry by his fellow veterans and soldiers.

Rasmussen has the goods:

Among voters who made up their minds in the Spring of 2004 or sooner, Kerry is favored by a 51% to 48% margin. This obviously includes some who decided to vote for anybody-but-Bush since 36% of voters made up their mind before the Democratic nominee was selected.

The candidates are essentially tied among those who made up their minds during the summer. However, those who decided in the past month favor President Bush by a 57% to 38% margin.

Our sample included 136 Likely Voters who made up their mind over the last week. These voters also appear to be breaking in the President's direction but the small sample size prevents any definitive assessment.

There are very few undecided voters today. Those who have recently made their final decision are most likely firming up a choice for the candidate they have been leaning towards for some period of time.

At the moment, 93% of Bush voters are certain they won't change their mind and 89% of Kerry voters say the same. Our daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that just 2% of voters remain undecided at this time (many of whom may not vote).

Also, Powerline links to a great column by Ralph Peters about the 2004 election and its impact on the ground game in Iraq.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt points to a 51-47 Bush lead among the most-likely voters of all: the 9% of all respondents to an ABC poll who say they have already voted by absentee ballot or early voting. I cast my own absentee ballot for Bush on Friday, to free myself up to volunteer on Election Day.

*Lileks on Andrew Sullivan's Kerry endorsement. The closing line, which Lileks has delivered by Tony Blair, is deadly.

*The Sultan of Snark on Ron Suskind: "If Suskind misreads his own facts wrong in order to (willfully? subconsciously?) pander to New York Times readers' fear of Christian fundamentalism, what other facts has he misread? And what kind of 'empiricist' is he?" I also liked the line about the "imperturbable" Andrew Sullivan.

*Ricky West has another video up, and reminds us of Clinton's magic coattails.

*Will Collier on heavy early-voting turnout in Georgia, nobody's idea of a battleground. High turnout in Georgia, of all places, tends to undercut the idea that it's Kerry's supporters who are fired up. Remember, you have a lot of people out there who support the war and have had to keep silent as the media has poured hot boiling scorn on the war effort for the past couple of years.

Either way, I predict that the loser of this election will get substantially more votes than any prior presidential candidate in history. And if Kerry wins, Bush would break with a long tradition of incumbents losing only if they have a severe split in their party, a major third party candidate and/or a catastrophic setback on the order of Watergate, the Great Depression or the one-two punch of stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis.

*Jay Cost (link via NRO Battlegrounders) on why he thinks the Bush-Cheney campaign has a decisive advantage in the Ohio ground game that will show up on Election Day. I'm prepared to believe, among other things, that the GOP's get out the vote (GOTV) effort benefits from being an integrated organization as compared to the alphabet soup of "independent" groups working for the Dems, but I'm more skeptical about the idea that there's some enormous hidden advantage here that Karl Rove knows about and we don't.

Who controls the British pound? Who keeps the metric system down?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!

Who leaves Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!

Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!

Who robs cavefish of their sight? Who rigs every Oscar night?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!

The latest and apparently last theory that Kerry and his media allies have settled on is to attack Bush's execution of the War on Terror, including both the Iraq war and Afghanistan; the theme of the attacks has been that Bush is incompetent, which is taken now as received wisdom beyond challenge by fact. Go read Greg Djerejian's long essay on this point, and yesterday's shorter Wall Street Journal op-ed (for a similar analysis, see Dan Darling on the Washington Post's effort to argue that the Iraq war and anti-Iran hardliners undermined the al Qaeda manhunt). Both contribute to a few of the key points that need to be borne in mind in evaluating the Bush Administration's performance:

1. War is a difficult and complex endeavor, requiring the making of scores of decisions large and small. Many of those decisions are, by their very nature, made on the basis of severely incomplete information, fraught with uncertainty and likely to have lethal consequences if they go wrong - and often if they go right, as well. The military acronym SNAFU got that way for a reason. Bush, by leading the nation in wartime, is certain to make more mistakes, and with worse consequences, than any peacetime president.

2. The history of wars, in fact, is almost unbroken in the making of catastrophic misjudgments by even the best of wartime leaders. Certainly if you review the records of Lincoln, FDR and Churchill, three of the models of civilian leadership in war, they and their generals and civilian advisers made numerous errors that cost scores of lives, many of which in retrospect seem like obvious blunders. I'd like the critics who formerly supported Bush and have now abandoned him to at least admit that on the same grounds, they would have voted for Dewey in 1944 and McClellan in 1864.

3. More specifically to the issue at hand, in almost all cases, the decisions by Bush and his civilian and military advisers involved avoiding alternatives that had their own potential bad consequences, and the critics are judging these decisions in a vacuum. The decision to disband Saddam's army and undergo a thorough de-Ba'athification is a classic example, cited incessantly by critics on the Left. But what if Bush had kept that army together, and they had acted in the heavy-handed (to put it mildly) fashion to which the Ba'athists were accustomed, say, by firing on crowds of civilians? Isn't it an absolute certainty that all the same critics would be singing "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," accusing Bush's commitment to democracy as being a sham and a cover for a desire to set up friendly tyrants to keep the oil pumping, that we'd hear constantly about how we've alienated the Iraqi people by enabling their oppressors, how we showed misunderstanding of the country by leaving a minority Sunni power structure in place over the Shi'ite majority? Wouldn't we hear the very same things we hear now about Afghanistan, about using too few US troops and "outsourcing" the job, or the same civil-liberties concerns we hear when we turn over suspects for interrogation to countries without our restraint when it comes to torture? Don't insult our intelligence and try to deny it.

The same goes for many decisions. More troops? We'd hear that this is a heavy-handed US occupation. I mean, we heard something like that when Giuliani put more cops on the street in New York, let alone a foreign country. Like most conservatives, my preference would have been to go hard into Fallujauh in April. But even if the alternative decision to hold off until there could be significant Iraqi participation in the assault was wrong, it was not an illogical one, but rather a decision made with the patience and foresight to consider the long-range political consequences in Iraq of differing military approaches.

4. Many of the decisions at issue here, from specific ground commanders' decisions to secure particular sites to Tommy Franks' call on Tora Bora, were decisions principally made by people lower in the chain of command, many of them in the military. This is not to say that Bush, as the head of that chain of command, is not ultimately responsible to the voters for those decisions; he is. But it is to remind people that they are not second-guessing solely the judgments of a small coterie of the president and civilian advisers, but the entire chain of command. Tom Maguire makes this point explicitly with regard to Tora Bora:

[I]f the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chose not to overrule his subordinate, why should Bush? This . . . actually strenghtens Bush's case - the issue was identified, alternatives were weighed, and a decision was made. We all wish the right guess had been made, but I, at least, am glad that the decision making team was aware of the issues and the alternatives.

If Kerry is campaigning on a promise to make the battlefield decisions and always make the right ones, good for him. Say Anything, John.

5. Much of the criticism has focused on the idea that Bush needs to admit more errors, and that Kerry would be better at recognizing and admitting mistakes. Djerejian zeroes in on an argument made by David Adesnik and Dan Drezner:

[P]eople like Drezner and Adesnik are asking: maybe Kerry's a gamble--but at least he's not a proven train wreck. While Adesnik think "accountability", in the main, is the issue that has gotten waverers on board for Kerry--the real core grievance appears to be best reflected, instead, in this Adesnik graf that Drezner approvingly links too:

As a professional researcher, I think I simply find it almost impossible to trust someone whose thought process is apparently so different from my own. In theory, I am sure that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld all believe in evaluating the relevant data and adjusting their decisions to reflect reality. Thus, when I say that I object to the way that this administration makes decisions, I am saying that I do not believe that it has lived up to the intellectual standard it presumably accepts. [emphasis added]

Let's put all this in plainer English, OK? What Dan and David are saying, I think, is: When this Bush team effs up (and they have effed up a lot), are they able to (on a bare-bones constitutive level, say): a) even recognize they have effed up and b) then move to redress the eff up?

As an initial matter, admitting mistakes, especially in wartime, is overrated, particularly if that means (1) admitting a decision was wrong before you have all the information to reach a final conclusion about it, or (2) making a public self-analysis that gives useful information to the enemy. How often did Churchill, battling daily to keep up the fighting spirit of the British, go on the radio to say, "sorry folks, I blew it again and got a bunch of people killed"? I tend to think that Bush made a big mistake of this kind when he conceded the point last summer on the inclusion in the State of the Union Address of British charges that Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa; as it turned out, the Brits stood by their report, and Saddam really did send an envoy there to do precisely that.

The more important point in wartime is the ability to recognize what's not working and change tactics or, if appropriate, strategies. Djerejian cites several examples of Bush doing precisely that, most notably with the firing of Jay Garner but also extending to expanding the number of troops on the ground.

In any event, where, I would ask, is the evidence that Kerry is better at admitting mistakes than Bush? This is a guy who brought all sorts of political grief to himself by stubbornly refusing for three decades to admit that he was wrong to repeat false charges, under oath and on national televison, that smeared his comrades in Vietnam as guilty of pervasive war crimes. Has Kerry admitted he was wrong to oppose nearly every aspect of the foreign policy strategy that President Reagan pursused to great effect in the closing and victorious chapter of the Cold War? Has he admitted he was wrong to oppose the use of force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991? Maybe I missed something, but I don't even recall him admitting he was wrong for trying to slash the intelligence budget in the mid-1990s following the first World Trade Center bombing. Indeed, one of the most common threads throughout Kerry's behavior in this campaign has been his unwillingness to take any personal responsibility for mistakes, from blaming his speechwriters for things that come out of Kerry's own mouth to picayune things like blaming the Secret Service when he falls down on the slopes. As Jonah Goldberg notes, Kerry's "liberal hawk" backers may argue that the decades of bad judgment in Kerry's past are rendered inoperative by September 11, but Kerry's stubborn insistence that he hasn't changed in response to September 11, and that he had the right answers all along even when he wrote a book in 1997 that barely mentioned Islamic terrorism, gives the lie to the notion that Kerry is a model of self-reflection. Even the man's own supporters can't seriously defend the proposition - on which many of them heaped well-deserved scorn during the primary season - that Kerry has been consistent from the start on whether Saddam was a serious threat that justified a military response. Yet there Kerry stands, insisting to all the world what nobody believes, that he hasn't changed his position. Preferring Kerry to Bush because Bush won't admit mistakes is like preferring fresh water to salt water because salt water is wet.

In any event, will Kerry somehow change, grow in office, shed a lifetime of bad judgments and blanching at the use of American power, suddenly stop valuing diplomacy as an end and the status quo as the highest virtue? Just because Bush changed in office means nothing. First of all, Bush was a guy who had already proven his willingness to change and admit his problems when he quit drinking, had a religious awakening and basically overhauled his whole approach to life in his forties; Kerry can show no similar example of a willingness to change. And Kerry is now in his sixties, six years older than Bush in 2000, and while Bush may count September 11 as a life-changing event, Kerry had already had his, in Vietnam. Kerry's foreign policy world view was set decades ago, both by the example of his diplomat father and by Vietnam. The fact that Kerry has been malleable and vascillating over the years, clear a pattern though that may be, is no reason to think that he will suddenly re-examine his approach to accept the need for the United States to lead a continuing effort to overturn the corrupt, rotten and deadly status quo in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

6. The final charge is that Bush's errors would be forgiveable if he had done more, earlier, to explain the risks and burdens of war to the American people. Of course, this has nothing to do with the execution of the war, but political leadership is important, and in many ways it's much more the president's job than is the decision to use X number of troops to seal off a particular location. First off, the charge that Bush argued the war would be easy is refuted by virtually all his speeches, in which he said over and over and over again that we were in for a long haul, and there would be difficult times ahead. Of course, that has long since become obvious from events, and in any event we really were not in a position before the war to know precisely how it would all play out. But I will agree that he never gave a Churchillian "blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech specifically about Iraq, and that many hawks in and out of the administration underestimated in their public arguments the difficulties of a post-conquest insurgency (then again, many doves told us that we'd be bogged down with thousands of casualties taking Baghdad). Of course, the war itself, up to and through the fall of Baghdad, was as much of a "cakewalk" as a real life shooting war against a substantial enemy can ever be; the problem is simply that we didn't broadcast the coming insurgency (which, by the way, would have had the effect of greatly encouraging the insurgents).

In the end, that's what this argument is all about - not the difficulties of war, which are well-understood, but simply a political argument about the use of speeches to predict the unpredictable. Moreover, on that ground, again, there's no reason to think Kerry would be better; after all, Kerry is the guy who won't even admit to this day that his war vote was a vote for war. Kerry's the guy who wasn't able to predict that his campaign would have to prepare for attacks by people who'd been holding a grudge against him for 30 years.

No, Bush hasn't been a perfect war leader, but show me who was. He's had tough calls to make, and unlike Kerry he can't shift with the wind without consequence. Progress has been frustrating at times, because our overall enemy - the forces of terror and tyranny, of radical Islamism and fascist gangsterism - have recognized that an American victory in Iraq would be a defeat for them in the war on terror. You know that, I know that, they know that. But that just makes it all the more urgent to stick with a guy who believes in the mission, and who has proven that he will keep on trying new approaches until the job is finished, rather than looking for the door.

OK, we've heard both sides say it over and over again, and I'm compelled to agree: both sides in the presidential campaign are appealing to fear. Of course, if your fears are rational, it may be a very logical thing to vote your fears. So, let's just get on with it:

Kerry and Edwards want you to believe that George W. Bush is plotting to bring back the draft, stop Social Security benefits from being paid to today's senior citizens, and turn firehoses on African-Americans who try to go vote. If you believe those things, you should vote for Kerry and Edwards.

Bush and Cheney want you to believe that Islamist terrorists are plotting to kill large numbers of Americans with terrorist attacks. If you believe that, you should vote for Bush and Cheney.

In 1987, Dukakis staffer John Sasso sank the presidential aspirations of Joe Biden by distributing a videotape demonstrating that Biden had plaigarized parts of speeches. Dukakis fired Sasso for his troubles, although most observers today regard this as standard opposition research rather than a dirty trick.

Today's New York Sun reports that Sasso's candidate, John Kerry, stands accused of plaigarizing campaign materials and even parts of the 1997 book "The New War" that he used to burnish his image as a deep thinker, chunks of which bear strong resemblances to uncredited newspaper and magazine articles. Unlike in 1987, the charge is not likely to do much damage to Kerry - plaigarism scarcely seems to dent scholars these days, let alone politicians - and maybe it's of a piece with the by-now well-known fact that Kerry's idol, John F. Kennedy, had ghostwriters draft large sections of his award-winning book Profiles in Courage. But the irony should not be lost, at least.

Libertarian Jane Galt quotes Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik at length, on his theory that paying federal income taxes is not legally required, as proof that Badnarik is a fringe nut. If you vote for Badnarik, you are doing nothing to advance the cause of liberty.

If further proof were needed of the impracticality of doctrinaire libertarians, check out this revealing Reason Magazine symposium. Even Glenn Reynolds wasted his ballot in 2000 on Harry Browne. And Richard Epstein is voting for Badnarik!

The GOP has, in fact, committed sins against small-government libertarianism, some by wrongly buying in to big government and some by taking pro-law-enforcement and pro-life stances that I, as a conservative, approve of. But libertarian ideas are taken seriously in Republican circles, while they are scorned at every turn by the Democrats. And in the real world, if there is ever to be progress away from Big Government, it will require that the public accept fewer guaranteed entitlements and more individual decisionmaking. With his plans for private accounts in Social Security and Health Savings Accounts, Bush is far further out on the limb in favor of such progress than any presidential candidate since Goldwater. And whether Bush wins or loses, the GOP will be under pressure to nominate a spending hawk in the next campaign; that candidate's job will be much easier if Bush has laid the groundwork for changing an entitlement system that dwarfs the size of any discretionary spending. And yes, Bush wants conservative judges; but conservative judges will do no more on social issues than leave them to the people's elected representatives.

If libertarians can't support Bush, faults and all, they are simply not interested in testing their ideas outside a laboratory.

UPDATE: The Mad Hibernian points me to Dale Franks' endorsement of Bush as a counter-example of a libertarian (actually a neolibertarian, as the QandO guys call themselves) who understands the stakes:

It is utterly pointless and shortsighted to calculate about the future of the GOP when our primary concern right now is the threat of radical Islam. A retreat in the War on Terror that results in a decade of threats to American security like those that appeared in the 1970s could very well make domestic political calculations about the relative libertarian-ness of the GOP moot.

[snip]

. . . [I]n an election like this one, facing the Islamist threat, I simply don’t believe that any victory in this election can be taken as a referendum on domestic policy. It might say volumes about how the American people wish the War on Terror to be fought, but I doubt any case can be made that it would constitute a general expression of approval about, or predicts the future of, the L[ibertarian]/C[sonservative] idea in American politics.

In any event, I’m far more concerned with keeping the USS America from slipping beneath the waves than I am about watching the GOP sink. Maybe, once the last terrorist’s head is stuck on pike, I’ll be more concerned with the fate of the GOP’s L/C direction.

Until then, I want a president that I’m sure will pull the trigger, when it needs to be pulled. That president is George W. Bush.

Mommypundit has advice for single women contemplating voting for Kerry. (Link via Irish Lass)

Brilliant column by political science professor Mathew Manweller (found in the comments at Jane Galt's place), on the stakes in this election:

America is at a once-in-a-generation crossroads, more than an election hangs in the balance. Down one path lies retreat, abdication and a reign of ambivalence. Down the other lies a nation that is aware of its past and accepts the daunting obligation its future demands. If we choose poorly, the consequences will echo through the next 50 years of history. If we, in a spasm of frustration, turn out the current occupant of the White House, the message to the world and ourselves will be two-fold.

First, we will reject the notion that America can do big things.

Once a nation that tamed a frontier, stood down the Nazis and stood upon the moon, we will announce to the world that bringing democracy to the Middle East is too big a task for us. But more significantly, we will signal to future presidents that as voters, we are unwilling to tackle difficult challenges, preferring caution to boldness, embracing the mediocrity that has characterized other civilizations. The defeat of President Bush will send a chilling message to future presidents who may need to make difficult, yet unpopular decisions. America has always been a nation that rises to the demands of history regardless of the costs or appeal. If we turn away from that legacy, we turn away from who we are.

Second, we inform every terrorist organization on the globe that the lesson of Somalia was well learned. In Somalia we showed terrorists that you don't need to defeat America on the battlefield when you can defeat them in the newsroom. They learned that a wounded America can become a defeated America.

Twenty-four-hour news stations and daily tracking polls will do the heavy lifting, turning a cut into a fatal blow. Except that Iraq is Somalia times 10. The election of John Kerry will serve notice to every terrorist in every cave that the soft underbelly of American power is the timidity of American voters. Terrorists will know that a steady stream of grizzly [sic] photos for CNN is all you need to break the will of the American people. Our own self-doubt will take it from there. Bin Laden will recognize that he can topple any American administration without setting foot on the homeland.

Read the whole thing. Jay Nordlinger makes the same point:

Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Michael Moore are not supporting Kerry because they think he'll continue the War on Terror — certainly not because they think he'll do a better job of it. They are supporting him because they think he doesn't mean it. I bet they're right.

In my view, this election is not a contest to determine how we'll fight the War on Terror; it's a contest to determine whether we will fight it at all. And the decision made by the Americans will be fateful.

George W. Bush and his people think that our security requires wholesale changes in the Muslim world — changes that we must abet. The other side — which includes a portion of the Right — believes that we can just hunker down, lashing out when some occasion demands. And if only Israel weren't so damn troublesome, perhaps the Arabs would be calmer.

I have never liked the terms "pro-war" and "anti-war," certainly the former. None of us is pro-war. It's just that some of us think that it's necessary to wage, while others do not. The Bush side thinks the war is a matter of self-defense; the other side thinks it's a matter of belligerence, or arrogance, or utopianism, or servitude to "Sharon," or something else bad.

As I have said before, I wish this election weren't so important. But I'm afraid it is. If the Americans elected John Kerry in, oh, 1992 or 1996, that would be one thing. If they elect him in 2004 — that will tell us something disheartening.

A little story: Some time ago, England had what was called "the Metric Martyr." This was a fellow — a grocer or a butcher, I forget which — who sold his goods in imperial measures: pounds, ounces, etc. But because England is now beholden to Brussels, he was prosecuted for not using the metric system (hence, Metric Martyr).

I asked our senior editor David Pryce-Jones (a Brit), "How could the British people permit this? I mean, it's their system — the imperial system, or the English system — to begin with." David answered, "The British people wouldn't permit it. The question is whether they remain the British people."

(Nordlinger has some other godd stuff, including this gem from a reader: "Did you see that Fidel Castro took a fall? I wonder if Jimmy Carter broke his nose.")

Roger Simon has a related point about how the anti-Israel, anti-democracy pro-status-quo "Arabists" have found their home in Kerry's Democratic apparatus, as evidenced by Kerry's top foreign policy adviser, Richard Holbrooke, specifying that a Kerry administration would put the screws on three countries in the region: Syria, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Krauthammer, if you missed his latest must-read column, explains how and why Kerry would sell out Israel, which remains our most unpopular ally among the Europeans, the UN, the Arab dictators and others whom Kerry feels the need to please.

Call me naive, but I still have more faith in the voters than that. But I remain worried that the election will be close enough to be swayed by fraud and litigation, and that's bad news for Bush - and for the nation.

Stuart Buck thinks we should aspire to imitate the voting procedures in Afghanistan.

The NY Times - with the assistance, predictably, of 60 Minutes - is pushing a story about explosive stockpiles in Iraq that have been unaccounted for since the invasion. Why now? I'll leave that to the reader. But the relevant questions about what's missing from this story are asked by Captain Ed, Geraghty, the Minute Man, Henke, and John Cole.

UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy at NRO argues that the existence of the explosives in question constitute yet another example of Saddam's violations of UN resolutions, one UN inspectors apparently decided to let slide because Saddam's regime told them that the explosives could conceivably have non-military applications. And remember, this particular cache was just a small proportion of Saddam's explosives stockpiles, in addition to all the other problems with his regime. Oh, but "the sanctions were working," right?

ONE MORE UPDATE: Geraghty, who's been on this story all day, quotes NBC News Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski saying that the NBC News crew embedded with the 101st Airborne during the war confirms that the missing explosives were already gone when the 101st Airborne arrived at the site on April 10, 2003, the day after the fall of Baghdad. More here from what appears to be a contemporaneous report of what some parts of the 101st (recall that a division is more than 10,000 troops) was tasked with that day:

U.S. Army soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division began an offensive to root out the Fedayeen paramilitary fighters loyal to Saddam Hussein from Hillah.

The troops encountered resistance almost immediately on entering the city. About 200 Fedayeen fighters on pick-up trucks counter-attacked with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Several Iraqi tanks also fired rounds at U.S. tanks.

U.S. forces responded with tank fire, artillery, and air strikes. Scores of Iraqi troops were killed during the four-hour battle. Three U.S. soldiers were wounded.

A lieutenant colonel with the 101st Airborne, Rick Carlson, says his soldiers, conducting a building-to-building search of the city, discovered what he called a "gigantic" warehouse full of weapons and ordnance.

Other weapons were found inside schools. He says the soldiers searched school buildings because that is where U.S. troops in neighboring cities of Najaf and Karbala have uncovered large weapons caches:

"Every school that we have encountered in those three regions has been used as a weapons depot. So, whenever we have gone into a (militarily) built-up area, we go straight to a school."

Powerline points us to the much-hyped story of the weekend, a Washington Times piece by National Review's State Department correspondent, Joel Mowbray:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

This contradicts Kerry's assertion at the second presidential debate that he had such a meeting:

This president hasn't listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable.

Kerry was even more emphatic in one of his big prepared foreign policy speeches:

Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein."

Kerry is now backing down:

When reached for comment last week, an official with the Kerry campaign stood by the candidate's previous claims that he had met with the entire Security Council.

But after being told late yesterday of the results of The Times investigation, the Kerry campaign issued a statement that read in part, "It was a closed meeting and a private discussion."

A Kerry aide refused to identify who participated in the meeting.

The statement did not repeat Mr. Kerry's claims of a lengthy meeting with the entire 15-member Security Council, instead saying the candidate "met with a group of representatives of countries sitting on the Security Council."

Asked whether the international body had any records of Mr. Kerry sitting down with the whole council, a U.N. spokesman said that "our office does not have any record of this meeting."

Great work by the bloggers who got this story rolling and by Mowbray for putting it all together. What does it all mean? This is a lot bigger deal, at a minimum, than Dick Cheney forgetting that he'd ever run into John Edwards; the problem with some of Kerry's fabrications is that they tend to be complicated, self-important embellishments that are hard to square with a simple trick of memory. That's how Roger Simon, who compares this to the "Christmas in Cambodia" fairytale, views the story. Jason Steffens is less impressed with the electoral significance of yet another "Kerry made stuff up" story, as apparently are some of Simon's readers.

I doubt myself that this will be a game-breaker, but then, anything that puts Kerry on the defensive for even a day at this late stage can be a big momentum-suck, and this is a legitimate question, and one that Kerry would have to answer if we had a press corps that demanded answers from Kerry, which it often has not. Of course, the ultimate test is whether other news agencies will pick up this story - as they would if it were a claim that Bush had lied and ran on CBS or ABC or in the New York Times - or if this will get buried in the right-wing media ghetto. This morning's Drudge Report is not encouraging: there's a small headline, totally eclipsed by the blaring coverage of Bill Clinton's triumphant, press-oxygen-sucking return to the campaign. We know which story Big Media would rather cover; Matt Lauer last week was worshipfully comparing a Clinton return to Willis Reed hobbling onto the court in the 1970 NBA Finals (which is a humorous analogy because it puts Kerry in the Clyde Frazier role). Stay tuned.

UPDATE: INDC Journal has more, including links to other commentary. Bill also considers a possible justification:

A commenter brings up a reasonable point - Kerry "meant to communicate" that he only met with the permanent members of the Security Council, not "all of them," as he specified on two occasions. I don't believe that this interpretation completely invalidates the significance of Kerry's statements, but in any case, I've been told that verification regarding the permanent five is in the works. We'll see. I await further detail with everyone else.

Captain Ed finds this unhelpful and telling of Kerry's attitude towards our allies in Eastern Europe:

[T]he reality of his paltry and meaningless diplomacy also shows what a lightweight Kerry is on the world stage. He went to the UN to meet with diplomats about Iraq, and who did he choose? Singapore, Cameroon, and France: two countries that could have no earthly effect on enforcing the UN resolutions, and one that Saddam had bribed into submission. He didn't bother with Bulgaria, one of the nations that Bush convinced to support the liberation of Iraq and one with troops on the ground helping to support its democratization.

Above all, we are at war. This will be the first Presidential election since the September 11, 2001 attacks, which nearly killed the primary author of this site and which claimed the lives of almost 3,000 innocent Americans whose only offense was going to work or getting on a plane in a free country. It is essential that we never forget that day and that we affirm our commitment to seeing the War on Terror through. President Bush is the best candidate to do so and offers the best plan to lead this country for the next four years.

I am not a blind supporter of the President. Were there a George Washington or Winston Churchill running against Bush, I?d be quite happy to vote to replace him. In fact, in 2000, I supported John McCain and that year, as John Kerry might say, I voted against Bush before I voted for him. But, over the last four years, I believe Bush has been an excellent wartime leader and that there is simply no credible alternative offered in this election.

Read More »

A big, campaign-moving story needs no introduction. Thus, for all the Josh Marshall-style hype here, here and here about a Washington Times story breaking Monday "that the Kerry campaign will be forced to address regarding a previous criticism of Bush's foreign policy" and that constitutes "another chapter in the story of John Kerry making stuff up," I'm doubtful that whatever it is will move the needle much in the campign, especially since Big Media outlets often take several days to check into stories from the Washington Times.

The bloggers in question are pushing this story in part because they apparently did the research on the issue, which is one of numerous reasons to think it's not a game-breaker like the status or whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. But if everyone is playing the speculation game, the hint that Kerry will be forced to address the story suggests to me that it could be something about Cuba, which has obvious electoral significance.

Amusing article from The New York Times, of all places, about the likelihood that the young President Bush had higher IQ and SAT scores than the young John Kerry (Via Instapundit). No wonder the Times is opposed to standardized tests!

I loved this line:

Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.

Anyway, take that for what it’s worth - I’ve always thought leadership and management ability trump raw intelligence as a measuring stick for the Oval Office - but I’ve also long wondered how many of the people who take it as an article of faith that Bush is an idiot scored below what he did on the SATs.

UPDATE: Here is the Steve Sailer article, in case you are interested.

Tom Maguire on why there doesn't need to be a draft:

In the late 80's, we had 2.2 million folks on active duty. Now it is down to about 1.4 million. The notion that we couldn't add several hundred thousand troops without a draft seems to be contradicted by our past experience.

As Maguire notes, this sort of higher math is apparently beyond the capacity of Paul Krugman. By contrast, Geraghty has numbers that explain why Kerry will win Pennsylvania:

The total number of eligible Philadelphia voters now stands at 1,066,222. That is close to the 2003 U.S. Census estimate for the number of people of voting age - 1,025,259 - living in the city.

This is repeated in several areas - like Milwaukee and St. Louis. In each place, of course, the fact that there are more registered voters than eligible people of voting age means that there is a high potential for voter fraud. In each case, this is occuring in a Democratic-dominated city in a state that otherwise seems primed for the GOP picking. I haven't followed the voter-fraud and election-related violence beats on this site the way Bill Hobbs or the Powerline guys (among others) have (see this for a good example), but it's a major concern. A lot of us Republicans are very worried about this election entirely because of the threat of fraud and/or litigation; the way the national and state polls are going, I can't see how Kerry supporters can be optimistic unless they are depending on fraud to carry the day.

After all, the internals on various polls consistently show that large majorities (1) recognize that the nation is at war and (2) trust Bush better to prosecute that war, while the same polls measure the candidates as about even on economic issues and place Bush decisively ahead on leadership and sharing the voter's values. Add in Bush's structural advantages in the Electoral College, the difficulty of Kerry replicating Gore's voter-turnout miracles among African-American voters and unionized voters, and the fact that the GOP totally overhauled its own get-out-the-vote drive after 2000 (to great effect in 2002), and all Democrats are really left with, besides the always-hoped-for surge of young liberals (recall how they didn't show for Howard Dean this year), is shenanigans at the polling places.

Yes, I know - many Dems will claim that this is overstated or whatnot. But, tell me: how can you be optimistic if you aren't banking on it?

Am I the only one who read this item and thought of that classic Garret Morris SNL skit where he sings to his parole board, "gonna get me a shotgun, and kill all the whiteys I see . . ."

Probably not the association Kerry was looking for.

The fun never ends: an alert reader sends this link to a "Football Fans For Truth" item on John Kerry apparently having falsely claimed to have been at Shea Stadium for Game Six of the 1986 World Series, when he was apparently at a fundraiser in Boston that night (although he appears to have been at Game Seven two days later).

UPDATE: I should add a caution for new readers: not every story of a politician saying something that's not true is (1) hugely significant or (2) proof the guy is lying. People forget stuff and embellish their own memories all the time. I don't expect anybody to change their vote over this trivia; it's mostly just funny. Still, (a) if baseball were all that important to Kerry . . . well, I sure know where I was for Game Six, and I'd particularly remember if I'd been there or not, and (b) what this suggests is less that Kerry is some sort of liar as that he's a prototypical braggart, the guy who has to put himself at the center of things when he wasn't. The type, of course, is a familiar one and all too prevalent in politics.

SECOND UPDATE (10/26): Kerry campaign says he flew to the game after the fundraiser; Thomas Galvin runs the timeline on this and finds it unlikely. I can't speak to when the shuttle runs, but I can add a few points to Galvin's analysis that suggest that Kerry's account is not necessarily implausible:

1. Galvin discusses the game time; the game definitely ended after midnight; I vividly recall debating whether the 10th inning ended "before" the 9th and what the true end-of-game time was, because it was the night we set the clocks back (I know now you do that at 2am, not midnight).

2. Galvin includes 45 minutes for Kerry to get from from LaGuardia to Shea. You could walk there faster.

3. It's not odd for VIPs like Kerry to fly around just to catch part of a game (or to duck early out of a fundraising dinner), especially if he thought it would end with the Sox ending their streak of defeats.

So, it may be that Kerry is telling the truth here.

Kerry, on Tim Russert's Meet the Press, May 6, 2001:

[W]e have to be honest about the mistakes we made [in Vietnam]. We don't have legitimacy in the world, Tim, if we go to other countries, in Bosnia or China or anywhere else, and not say, "You know, we made some terrible mistakes."

And that honesty, that lack of a sense of honesty is part of what is driving people's anger toward the United States today. That's why we have the vote in the U.N. That's why people--our allies, too--are disturbed by this defense posture. You can't abrogate the ABM treaty and move forward on your own to build this defense in a way that threatens the perceptions of security people have. And if you build a defense system, Tim, that can do what they say at the outside, which is change mutual assured destruction, you have invited a potential adversary to build, build, build, to find a way around it. The lesson of the Cold War is, you do not make this planet safer by moving unilaterally into a place of new weapons. Every single advance in weaponry through the Cold War was matched by one side or the other, and that's why we put the ABM treaty in place, and that's why we need to proceed very cautiously and very thoughtfully.

First of all, this insistence on national apologies is very one-sided. Does China have "legitimacy in the world"? When does China apologize for anything?

More importantly - I know I harp on Kerry's past a lot, particularly his views of the Cold War, but a man who could not or would not take the unambiguously pro-American position whenever that conflict got difficult - and who, to this day, can not or will not admit his mistakes in opposing President Reagan's winning strategy at every turn - is never going to understand this war, in which we will often be called upon to make hard decisions. Who on earth thinks that the "lesson of the Cold War" is that we built too damn many weapons systems? Kerry has learned nothing.

All of this is based on the naively dovish theory that strengthening one's defenses is a provocative act, and its necessary corollary that one can make peace by remaining weaker. People on the left, like Kerry, have (retroactively, after all of their Doomsday Clock and "The Day After" talk of the 80s) fallen in love with "mutually assured destruction" as a peacekeeping deterrent. But MAD kept the peace because Russia was afraid we could destroy them if they attacked us; the fact that they could also destroy us was not in any way a good thing. The fact that Kerry still views strengthening our military as a dangerous thing is best demonstrated by his argument, repeated in two of the debates, that it's a bad thing that the US is developing "bunker-busting" nuclear weapons. From the first debate:

Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense.

You talk about mixed messages. We're telling other people, "You can't have nuclear weapons," but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using.

Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down, and we're going to make it clear to the world we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation.

Note that he doesn't even say he will do this through negotiatons - just a unilateral shutdown. The second debate:

[T]he president is moving to the creation of our own bunker- busting nuclear weapon. It's very hard to get other countries to give up their weapons when you're busy developing a new one.

This is Kerry going all wrong again, thinking that nations lead other nations by example. It's just not realistic, and it's a dangerous way to proceed in a dangerous world.

Memo to the Guardian: please stop printing columns openly calling for the assassination of the President of the United States. I would add some commentary here, but if you’re not already disgusted after reading that, nothing I can say will make you feel that way.

For a less hate-filled take on our election from across the pond, see here.

UPDATE: Perhaps the Guardian is in an ill-tempered mood because of the unintended consequences of its letter-writing campaign to lecture the people of Ohio.

There would indeed be a little bit of humor, in this election season, if we were to see an Astros-Red Sox World Series, Texas vs. Massachusetts. Here's a little quickie trivia (answers to follow later):

1. Who was the last team from a major party presidential candidate's home state to make the World Series in an election year?

2. Who was the last team from a successful major party presidential candidate's home state to win the World Series in an election year?

("Home state" here meaning the conventional view - the state where the candidate spent his adult life and won elective office, rather than, say, considering Bush from Connecticut and Kerry from Colorado, the states of their birth)

UPDATE: The first commenter gets it, so think of your answer before you check the comments.

I was very favorably impressed with President Bush's speech in New Jersey yesterday, which really honed in on Kerry's biggest vulnerabilities on national security. I've got more on the speech over at RedState.

Kevin Drum reviews the various possibilities for why we are dependent on a single company with British-based facilities to make flue vaccines. (Link via Instapundit). Drum's answers are reasonable - he focuses on the burdens of FDA regulation as compared to British regulations - although I think he discounts the product liability lawsuit problem and the incentives it creates to have vaccines manufactured by an overseas subsidiary. In either case, the landscape Drum reviews - narrow profit margins squeezed by fluctuating demand, a demanding regulatory regime and serious litigation risks - is entirely irreconcilable with the picture of drug companies commonly painted by Democrats in general and the Kerry campaign in particular.

With the election getting ever closer, I’m uncomfortable with a lot of criticism of President Bush’s or Senator Kerry’s respective religious convictions (or lack thereof). It seems to me to be entirely possible that either man could be far more or far less devout than they outwardly appear or present themselves. Inquiring about the issue seems unduly speculative, presumptuous and even invasive. However, the actions and stated beliefs of each candidate are fair game.

In that vein, you may want to read Rich Lowry’s column from Friday on Kerry’s approach to issues of concern to Catholic voters, such as myself. Here is a key section:

Kerry's straddle is to have (nominally) socially conservative positions, so long as they won't actually serve any socially conservative ends. He opposes gay marriage, but won't do anything that might stop it from coming about. He thinks life begins at conception (or so he has said, at least once), but won't do anything to stop its destruction. He opposes partial-birth abortion, but votes against banning it, and supports parental notification, but votes against requiring it.

I think there can be little doubt that on issues of abortion, gay marriage, federal funding for stem-cell research and related “family values” issues, Bush’s positions are far closer to the Catholic Church than are those of Kerry. This might explain, why, despite unsavory attempts by surrogates of John McCain to tar Bush as an “anti-Catholic bigot” during the 2000 primary season, Bush appears to have significant support among the Catholic community, even though it his opponent who is Catholic.

Three primary issues strike me as areas of potential divergence between Bush and Catholic voters: the death penalty, policy towards low-income individuals and the Iraq War. It’s worth considering all three.

Read More »

Looks like The Great Diplomat needs to work on his diplomatic skills:

The commander of the UN peacekeepers in Haiti has linked a recent upsurge in violence there to comments made by the US presidential candidate, John Kerry.

Earlier this year Mr Kerry said that as president he would have sent American troops to protect Jean-Bertrand Aristide who was ousted from power in February.

The Brazilian UN general, Augusto Heleno, said Mr Kerry's comments had offered "hope" to Aristide supporters. Much of the recent unrest has centred on areas loyal to Mr Aristide.

More than 50 people have died over the past fortnight.

In fairness, blaming American politicians for chaos in Haiti is like blaming them for the sun being hot. There are far deeper problems to blame. Of course, were the situations reversed (i.e. were this Dole challenging Clinton in 1996), would the challenger be held to a higher standard?

Speculation abounds: why did both Edwards and Kerry bring up the fact that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter? Some think they were trying, clumsily, to get religious conservatives to feel disenchanted with the Bush-Cheney ticket. I'm doubtful that will work; if anything, conservative Christian voters who already like and agree with Bush and Cheney are more likely to see this as personal family business that shouldn't be used in a campaign.

But they may not be the target audience. Connsider: the Kerry campaign seems very worried that African-American voters, who by large margins (especially the majority of African-Americans who are regular churchgoers) are opposed to same-sex marriage, might be less motivated to show up and vote for Kerry on Election Day. This is compounded by the fact that Kerry, unlike Clinton and Gore, doesn't have much experience appealing to black voters and doesn't seem to have the same emotional rapport with them. This concern is almost certainly why you never hear Kerry compare the same-sex marriage fight to the civil rights movement (as Andrew Sullivan does on a daily basis), since African-Americans are understandably touchy about diluting the moral weight of their struggle for equal rights, and doubly so for a cause many of them don't sympathize with.

Perhaps bringing up the gay daughter won't work with people who are already fond of Bush and Cheney and likely to respond by circling the wagons around them. But it could be savvy politics in trying to neutralize the issue with a bloc of voters Kerry badly needs who are predisposed to dislike the Republican ticket. I don't know how this gambit played with African-Americans, but if you think about it logically, they seem like the most likely target audience.

The Big One is on in Iraq, as US forces are finally doing what, at least in retrospect, they should have done back in April, cordoning off Fallujah and opening a major offensive against the heart of the insurgency. I can't offer any insights on the military angle, but here's what's interesting: the Bush Administration was quite happy to leak word earlier this week that it had no intention of any major offensive actions in Iraq until after Election Day. The left, predictably, went nuts over this report (see Kevin Drum, Mark Kleiman, Matt Yglesias, Atrios, Brad DeLong, and, yes, even the Kerry campaign), claiming that Bush was putting politics over national security by not launching an offensive in mid-October. Which raises four possibilities:

1. Something changed between Monday and today. Unlikely, given the amount of preparation that goes into something like this.
2. The media stories were wrong and/or based on reports from people who knew nothing. Always a possibility.
3. This was a head-fake to throw off the enemy in Iraq.
4. This was a head-fake to throw off the Bush Administration's domestic political opponents so they'd demand that Bush go on the offensive, which would make it more difficult for them to immediately switch course and cry "October Surprise".

Without discounting the other possibilities, #4 sure sounds like typical Bush political strategy, with #3, of course, being an added bonus. And the usual suckers fell for it, for the same reasons they always do.

And maybe now we know why Bush wanted to talk to Kerry after the debate.

Yes, even with two classic baseball games on, you knew I had to watch the last presidential debate. Now, I called the first debate a narrow Kerry victory and the second a clear but not decisive victory for Bush.

Maybe I've just let my biases cloud my judgment. But I really thought Bush cleaned Kerry's clock tonight, regularly outmaneuvering him, projecting superior charisma and humor and landing a number of body blows that Kerry really wasn't able to react to, while Kerry stepped in a bunch of holes on social policy that he really wasn't even forced into.

From the top:

Kerry always does this long throat-clearing opening that means nothing; Bush gets right to work.

Wow, Kerry's forehead is enormous.

X-raying cargo holds . . . Kerry is in reruns.

Reagan again! When will Bush smack him for embracing Reagan today after denouncing him in the 80s?

Bush is giddy when Schieffer and Kerry mention foreign policy, so he can talk about Afghanistan's elections.

Kerry voted against the Homeland Security bill? Even I didn't know that.

Kerry is becoming a big Tora Bore. Bush has obviously decided never to respond on this. But it draws the first Bush smirk of the night.

Flu season? Schieffer decides to make the night's second question about flu shots? Bush gives an answer that's good public health and bad politics . . . until he decides to blame John Edwards. Kerry sounds hoarse, decides to just blame Bush for everything. Wellness? Remember the Department of Wellness? I guess Bush won''t mention that.

Bush: A plan is not a litany of complaints. Good line.

Kerry: The Jobs Fairy is coming! Jobs for everyone!

McCain-Kerry, Kerry is slipping into Washingtonese again. Dingell-Norwood, anyone?

Bush is calling for the Fiscal Sanity Fairy. Nice try, George.

Bush again: "Here's some Trade Adjustment Assistance money" is not a winning slogan. Keep moving.

Kerry compares Bush to Tony Soprano. Classless move, doesn't accomplish anything.

Kerry says he supported a Reagan tax cut?

"Far left bank of the mainstream - makes Teddy Kennedy the conservative Senator from Massachusetts." Amazingly, Kerry essentially lets this stand with just some flapdoodle about Gramm-Rudman. It's all he's got.

My wife points out that Bush isn't always using his whole time. Yeah, but he says one thing and then stops. By the end of a Kerry answer, just try remembering what he was talking about at the beginning.

Homosexuality. Bush has an even-handed answer he obviously prepared. Slams decisions made by judges. Kerry jumps on Dick Cheney's daughter. Why that again? Kerry talks about gay people living in straight marriages. Did anyone not immediately think of Jim McGreevey? This is a train wreck for Kerry.

Rebuttals? There seem to be no rebuttals.

Abortion. Kerry says choice involves woman, doctor and God. Who's missing from this picture? "I will defend the right of Roe v Wade". Kerry should hope that polls well, because he's unambiguous on this point. Harks back to JFK - when abortion was illegal!

Kerry says 56 bills, not 5. Does that include commemoratives?

The jury will disregard Bush's potshot at the networks, when he starts to slam Kerry for relying on network reports and then drops the point. Point is made.

Rationing healthcare. Bush is doing the best he can on this. Also mentions health savings accounts. He'll lose this issue, but he's battling.

Social Security - better ground. Bush preempts the attacks by saying they said checks wouldn't come 4 years ago, and they came just the same. Problem in the trillions - status quo not an option. Bush promises to front-burner this issue - dare I hope he means it?

I missed - did Kerry say Greenspan supported the Bush tax cut? Why admit that?

Kerry may like saying "tTop experts in the country" but I doubt it warms the heart of swing voters.

[Phone rings. Miss some immigration stuff].

Kerry wants to speed up border crossings by fingerprinting everyone?

Minimum wage hike. Bush fudges rather than point out how this would harm small business.

Kerry on judges: "Yes, I'll have a litmus test."

[Phone rings again]

"Countrypeople"?

Bush drops the hammer on the 1991 Gulf War. Kerry fails to respond. Stop the fight!

Bush blames Tom DeLay on assault weapons ban expiring. Not a high point.

Affirmative action. Kerry goes for his base, to heck with people who don't like it. Both candidates agree to lie and pretend Bush is against quotas.

Bush says nice things about aetheists. Good answer on faith and prayer. Kerry's "faith without works" line will play well with Northeastern Catholics, not so well with Protestants.

The Daschle hug is defended! Kerry plays team!

More campaign finance reform? No!

Bush draws laugh from audience deprecating his English. Kerry says he married up, has to say it twice to get anyone but Schieffer to laugh.

Closings. No minds changed here, just closing the book.

UPDATE: Why do I think Bush won? On style, he was just more accessible, while Kerry seemed tired and hoarse. On substance, Bush wanted to define Kerry as a conventional liberal, and Kerry offered little resistance and helped Bush's case by giving a number of conventional liberal answers. Bush is much more at home with social issues, and he's less apt to fall into Beltway-speak on how programs work.

The voters, of course, will be the final judge. But Bush did about as well as I could have hoped, and in a number of cases Kerry gave worse answers than I would have expected. That's how I scored it.

*Take McQ's advice and put down your drink before you read this.

*It's not too late to read Jane Galt's hilarious blogging of the second debate ("K[e]rry: I was there when the budget was balanced! Me: I was there when the World Trade Center site was cleaned up! I claim full credit!" "Memo to Mr Kerry: Pro-life voters don't want you to respect them--they want you to not spend their tax dollars on abortions!")

*Smash on Kerry and the anniversary of the USS Cole bombing: "My problem with Kerry isn’t that he sees Iraq as a diversion from the War on Terror, but rather that he sees the War on Terror as a diversion from his domestic agenda."

*Hitchens on Saddam's nuclear program ("Of course, we could always have left Iraq alone, and brought nearer the day when the charming Qusai could have called for Dr. Obeidi and said: 'That barrel of yours. It's time to dig it up.'")

*Matt Welch, who disdained the whole Swift Boat story, nonetheless rips the media for not diving into the merits of the story earlier.

*More on the Swift Vets' latest campaign, including the words of Medal of Honor winner Bud Day ("Shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, Maj. Day suffered numerous injuries, managed to escape from his prison,