Category: Politics 2002-03

Bob Novak’s column this morning is about . . . well, about Bob Novak:
To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson’s wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret.
* * *
During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA’s counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: ”Oh, you know about it.” The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.
If you’re keeping score at home, Novak is dropping some minor hints on who the leakers were . . .
The Washington Post also has a profile of Wilson with some more personal details.

France revises the death toll from August’s heat wave upward to 14,000. The methodology (counting as heat-related any number of deaths beyond the deaths in the same period the prior year) still seems a bit flimsy to me, but a spike of a few hundred over prior periods could be chance; a spike of 14,000 means that probably something over 10,000 is the real number actually caused by the heat.
This is a Bangladesh-size humanitarian disaster. Maybe we can get a benefit concert going to buy air conditioners for elderly Frenchpersons. Call it Cool-Aid.

Yesterday’s big news was retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Hugh Shelton’s statement at a college forum hinting at why he wouldn’t support his former colleague Wesley Clark for president:
“I’ve known Wes for a long time. I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. I’m not going to say whether I’m a Republican or a Democrat. I’ll just say Wes won’t get my vote.”
(Emphasis added). Now, this is a little too tantalizing, and while General Shelton may not have expected the Drudge Report to circulate his comments nationally, he should have known this could be newsworthy. He can’t stop at this statement, because he’s left us with two possibilities:
1. Something in Clark’s record of service as Supreme Commander of NATO – beyond what we already know – reflects poorly on his “integrity and character” and resulted in his unceremonious termination from that post. If this is the case, given that Clark now seeks the most powerful job on earth on the basis of a resume that is painfully thin on conduct that has been subjected to public scrutiny and at a time of great danger for the nation, Shelton’s got an absolute responsibility to the public to tell us the whole story. (I should add that, if there’s something unsavory or just unflattering here, some people who have been falling over themselves to line up behind Clark are going to have some mighty big egg on their faces, especially people from the Clinton Administration who’d be in a position to know such a thing).
2. Shelton’s vague reference is just a value judgment on what we already know about Clark’s sometimes bristly relationship (typical of many civilian-military relationships) with the political branches or with other generals, in which case Shelton’s statement has the effect of unfairly smearing Clark’s reputation by implying something darker. I’ve made this point before about publicly floated rumors about Tom Cruise, Barry Bonds and Mike Piazza: don’t imply something if you’re not willing to come right out and say it, and don’t do either if you don’t have some evidence to back it up.
(UPDATE: Instapundit quotes Spoons quoting Ramesh Ponuru making basically the same point. So does Kevin Drum. So I’m in good company here.)
On another note, Shelton also related a story that reflects very, very badly on an unnamed (probably Republican, I’m guessing) member of Congress:
Three days after Shelton took office as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his commitment to the integrity of the military was tested. When U.S. planes in the Iraq no-fly zone were attacked, a member of Congress suggested that perhaps “we” could fly a U-2 spy plane so low over Iraq that it could easily get hit. Then we’d have a reason “to kick Saddam out of Iraq.” After Shelton responded that he would order that “just as soon as you are qualified to fly (it),” he was not asked again to compromise his office.
“Sometimes people in a position of power lose perspective on right and wrong,” Shelton said.
You could say that.

Josh Marshall has noted the unsavory tendency of Howard Dean backers to tear into fellow Democrats who aren’t Clean for Dean, or whatever. Kevin Drum, reviewing Dean’s reaction to the Wesley Clark boomlet, picks up the same theme, and frets that Dean himself is showing signs of confusing himself with the greater good of the Democratic Party.
I’ve been saying this for a while now: Dean’s campaign and personality have so much in common with John McCain’s, that the real test of whether he’s got what it takes to win the nomination will be his ability to avoid McCain’s fatal mistake, which was turning his guns away from the opposing party and on to his own party’s troops. Dean’s followers have been escalating the friendly fire already, but things will unravel for Dean very badly if he responds to the Clark phenomenon by opening a second front against the Clintonites who control the party machinery and who have been none-too-subtly pushing Clark precisely as an alternative to Dean.

Looks like another collection of Reagan’s writings is about to be published, this time his letters.

Now, I’ve known only two Rhodes Scholars in my time (at least that I can think of offhand), and neither particularly well, but doesn’t Andrew Sullivan appear to be overgeneralizing a wee bit, in his haste to attack Wesley Clark, when he says that “[a]lmost to a man and woman, they [Rhodes Scholars] are mega-losers, curriculum-vitae fetishists, with huge ambition and no concept of what to do with it.”

About the only thing worth examining on Wesley Clark’s resume — at least as far as his qualifications for high executive leadership are concerned — is his leadership of the Kosovo war. For this reason, attention has focused on the charge that Clark risked starting a war with the Russians with aggressive operations at Pristina Airport until cooler heads prevailed. The charge is deeply ironic, since it casts Clark as precisely the hot-headed, unilateral, overly aggressive cowboy that his supporters love to caricature George W. Bush as being.
Sergeant Stryker has taken an enlightening closer look at this incident, and while there remains fair grounds for dispute over Clark’s judgment, it’s clear that he showed good instincts — not backing down from aggression just to keep the allies happy — and that his reaction was one of the reasonable options. Where you ultimately come out on the proper resolution of this particular crisis depends in large part on what you think of the whole murky Kosovo operation, a subject that I admit I paid little attention to at the time and on which I never bothered to form a strong opinion.
Andrew Sullivan, by contrast, has a much more damning take on Clark’s 2002 article in the Washington Monthly, in which he lauds the value of running foreign policy by committee.

Ted Kennedy has gone off the deep end with a recent interview in which he bellowed about the Iraq War that
There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud, . . . [Referring to costs of the war, Kennedy added that m]y belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops . . .
Yup, Ted K, he knows his frauds. Hey, wasn’t Vietnam made up in Hyannisport? Just asking . . . . the Democrats keep raising the stakes with all this vitriol, and maybe they need to; people don’t generally vote out the incumbent if they aren’t mad at him. But they seem hell-bent on alienating anybody who isn’t steaming mad at the president, and that is how they could wind up with an Alf Landon-sized disaster.

The Sacramento Bee’s Daniel Weintraub has some advice Ronald Reagan might give Arnold Schwarzenegger:
I remember how Reagan almost never used the word �Democrat� when criticizing his opponents. I always assumed that this was because he wanted every possible Democrat to vote for him, and he figured that blasting the party by name would make its members defensive and less likely to support him. So he always said things like �there are those who would undermine our security�� or �my opponents say��

Man, you can just smell the desperation in the comments by Democrats lining up to support Wesley Clark for president:
It’s very bad for me as a Democrat to be tagged as somebody who doesn’t support the military,” said Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind. “He takes that issue back for us.” Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., a decorated veteran of the Korean War who is backing Clark, said the former NATO supreme commander “is Teflon to the question of being a patriot.” Democrats “need someone who’ll stand up with Bush and doesn’t have to say, ‘I’m as patriotic as you are, now let’s debate the issues,'” Rangel said.
Translation: “we don’t care if he can win, at least he won’t make us look like America-hating, stuck-in-the-Sixties, tie-dye and Birkenstock-wearing peacenik wusses in the process.” Of course, it’s a ridiculous canard that Republicans question the patriotism of anyone with dangerously bad judgment in foreign policy, but then a good chunk of Howard Dean’s support comes from people who really are unpatriotic, in the sense that they can’t or won’t agree with James Lileks’ simple mantra about Iraq: I hope we win.
Tennessee Rep. John Tanner, a member of the Blue Dog coalition, said many in the group like Clark’s emphasis on fiscal discipline as well as his military background. Tanner said Clark brings a perspective that needs to be heard in the presidential race. When asked if he would support Clark, Tanner said he already pledged to support Gephardt early in the race.
Translation: there’s nobody in the race like that now.
South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, whose support is being sought by several presidential candidates, said Clark called him Tuesday night to let him know he was entering the race. Clyburn said he will consider endorsing Clark.
“I think having Wesley Clark demonstrates very forcefully that we are soldiers, we are patriots, we are lovers of this country,” Clyburn said.
Translation: you couldn’t get that from the other Democrats in the race. Note that Clyburn all but comes out and says that Clark is really just there to cast a warm protective glow of military experience around a party that has been more than a little cool towards the military.
[Long Island Democrat Steve] Israel said no other candidate in the race can confront Bush so effectively on national security.
“When the president is debating Wesley Clark and has to call him ‘General,’ it becomes highly problematic for the president,” Israel said.
In other words, nobody else even causes a ripple in the president’s support on national security. Of course, what’s more relevant experience: being a general or being the Commander-in-Chief?
The problem for the Democrats is the down-ticket issue: if Bob Graham and John Breaux don’t run for re-election, the Dems could wind up defending open Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana, plus an incumbent in Arkansas. Who wants to be a “Howard Dean Democrat” in those races?
(Then again, things aren’t going perfectly on the GOP end in the Senate races either)
Finally, the quote of the week, from Mickey Kaus, on the other celebrated military veteran in the race:
Watching [John] Kerry thrash, flip-flop, and nuance his way to humiliating primary defeat will be one of the few pleasures of the upcoming presidential campaign.
There hasn’t been a train wreck that was this much fun to watch since Mark Green.

Continuing from yesterday:
2. Spending
This is the part of Dean’s record that is the subject of the most contested talking points on each side. Dean’s backers, eager to show that he is really more fiscally conservative than President Bush (I’ll leave the issue of when the Democrats became the green eyeshade party for another day), love to point out that he repeatedly balanced Vermont’s budget and even ran surpluses, despite the fact that Vermont (unlike most states) does not have a constitutional requirement of a balanced budget.
At first glance, it’s a good record. McClaughry grouses that some of this was smoke and mirrors:
On several occasions during those years he was forced to make some spending cuts. In his earlier years, he favored directing his department heads to reduce their spending. In later years, he became adept at fund raiding and cost shifting. On the former point, Jack Hoffman, the longtime liberal commentator for the Vermont Press Bureau, observed in 2002 that “Dean’s proposal to squeeze the education fund looks less like an exercise of fiscal restraint and more like an old fashioned raid on the one account that’s still healthy.”
This, to me, sounds like par for the course for state governors; Al Gore made essentially the same charge about Bush’s budget-balancing record in Texas. Let’s accept, for now, the idea that Dean kept a close eye on discretionary spending. There are still two caveats here.
First, of course, there are a variety of reasons why balancing the Vermont budget in the 1990s is a lot easier than balancing the federal budget today. Vermont has just over 600,000 inhabitants, a fact I still find shocking; New York City has a third of that in a single police precinct, and Texas has 21 million people. Like the Scandanavian countries it chooses as a model, Vermont is heavily rural (Dean has never had to contend with the problems of a major city), almost absurdly ethnically homogenous (96.8% white and just a third of the national average speaks a language other than English at home), which reduces a number of the social frictions that create government headaches, and of course, Vermont has no defense budget. You could institute Platonically ideal policies for Vermont that still wouldn’t work at the national level. The stock market boom of the 1990s made everyone’s job easier. Also, as Kevin Drum noted the other day, it’s easier to balance your budget when your state is a net recipient of federal tax payments, as is Vermont (again, unlike, say, Texas).
Second, and far more significantly, while it’s true that the GOP has not been diligent about policing spending, the real gripe conservatives have with the Democrats is that their policy proscriptions invariably involve creating big entitlement programs that, once set in motion, can never be cut or eliminated. As Steven Moore notes, that’s exactly what Dean seems to have done in Vermont, creating:
a state-funded universal health care system (which as president he would take nationwide), government-subsidized child care (even for the rich), . . . a mega-generous prescription drug benefit for seniors with incomes up to four times the poverty level, . . . and taxpayer-funded campaigns.
The NR piece I noted yesterday contended that Vermont’s new Republican governor had found it necessary already to trim the sails of Dean’s healthcare plan to keep the budget in balance. And, as with taxes, that is the question voters have to ask themselves about Dean: what does he propose to do? The answer, of course — as I’m sure we’ll discuss in more detail as the campaign goes on — is still more big entitlement programs.
Dean kept the budget of a tiny state in balance during boom years. That’s not nothing, but it bears about as much resemblance to balancing the federal budget as does balancing your checkbook.

If you turn on CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN right now, you’ll see that Wesley Clark is being interviewed on all four at the same time.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article some weeks ago by John McClaughry, a conservative former Vermont state senator who twice ran very unsuccessfully for governor against Howard Dean (in 1992 and 1994; the first time, Dean won 202,115 to 62,805), criticizing Dean’s record as governor. The National Review ran a big piece a few months back that was largely sourced from McClaughry, and a Google search reveals him as probably the main critic of Dean’s Vermont record. There’s nothing wrong with that — McCalughry is obviously the most prominent of the state’s few conservatives — but there’s a danger in letting all the anti-Dean memes arise from one man’s point of view.
So, what’s McClaughry’s line? I haven’t gone back to Vermont sources myself; I’m just evaluating what McClaughry, the NR piece and some the major pro-Dean articles (including a surprisingly favorable review from supply-side firebrand Stephen Moore) have cited as Dean’s major pros and cons. Let’s start with:
1. Taxes. Dean apparently never raised income taxes in his years as Vermont governor, and even managed an across-the-board 4% cut in 1999. That’s a major plus, one that shows a guy willing to work outside his party’s usual rut and who isn’t enamored of high progressive tax rates simply for their own sake. (The fact that Dean may have done this with one eye on his political future is not a knock on him; a Democrat who at least thinks that cutting taxes is in his political best interests is halfway there). McClaughry blasts Dean for using the income tax cuts as cover to hike other, less visible taxes:
During his last eight years Mr. Dean signed into law increases in the sales and use, rooms, meals, liquor, cigarette, and electrical energy taxes. In 1997 he raised the corporate, telecommunications, bank franchise, and gasoline taxes. Dwarfing all of these was his approval of a state education finance “reform” built on a new 1.1% state real property tax.
Moore, who pulls no punches even in attacking Bush on tax and spending issues, is less charitable:
This is the second-highest taxing-and-spending state in the country, with collections about $600 per person above the national average . . . At one time or another, Dean raised just about every tax he could get his hands on. During his 12 years as governor, he upped the corporate income tax rate by 1.5 percentage points, the sales tax by 1 percentage point, the cigarette tax by 50 cents a pack, and the gas tax by 5 cents a gallon. Sure he balanced the budget every year–by digging deeper into Vermonters’ wallets.
This is actually a common gripe raised at tax-cutting Republican governors, but it’s a fair criticism. McClaughry doesn’t give us perspective on the relative sizes of the various tax hikes and cuts.
In the end, though, none of this really matters, because whatever credit Dean deserves for his state record on taxes, he’s made a crystal-clear promise to repeal every jot and tittle of Bush’s tax rate cuts, and I take him at his word on that promise. Dean may be hoping that he can use his mixed record on taxes in Vermont to convince the public that because he’s a reasonable guy, his belief that we need to jack taxes back up to pre-2001 levels should be taken seriously. But then, Dean’s campaign persona comes off as a lot less sober and reasonable than Walter Mondale’s, and look where the tax hike pledge got Mondale (I haven’t seen polling on the issue lately, but I suspect that the Bush tax cuts mostly remain popular and that most people don’t favor repealing the whole thing). Raising taxes isn’t just bad policy, it’s bad politics as well.

Eugene Volokh has an amusing story with links to a groveling apology Al Franken had to issue to John Ashcroft after sending him a bogus survey mocking the idea of waiting for marriage to have sex. Franken’s contempt and incomprehension at the concept and anyone who would practice it is, unfortunately, all too typical of the political Left.

The GOP’s hopes of picking up Senate seats to solidify the majority got brighter today when John Edwards announced that he would not seek re-election so he could focus on his campaign for the presidency, notwithstanding his complete failure to get any traction in polls in the first three primary states (including neighboring South Carolina). Of course, Edwards was far from a sure thing to get re-elected anyway, but the Republicans now have to be favored to pick this one up.

Another item from last week that I meant to comment on at the time — an entry from CalPundit, linking to South Knox Bubba, on the charge that a corporation fought efforts to rename the street its headquarters is on after Martin Luther King. Kevin Drum’s sarcastic comment:
STILL SOME WORK TO DO….Racism? A thing of the past. And everybody loves Martin Luther King these days, right?
Apparently not quite everybody.
This is a typical entry in left/liberal bloggers’ campaign to keep alive the charge of racism (although in fairness to Kevin Drum, he at least has had a healthy skepticism about racial preferences). But it’s one heck of a weak example; if you scan the comments at the two sites, you’ll see among other things that this happened in 1981.
But there’s a larger point at work: if stuff like this is your Smoking Gun proving the continuing existence of Racism in America — given that it happened 22 years ago, there are other not-entirely-racist reasons why one might do this, and that nobody was personally affected by this decision — it might well be that you are grasping at straws. I don’t think that anybody really believes that racism is dead and gone; stories like the now-infamous whites-only prom in a small town in rural Georgia are reminders that it is not. But it’s a totally false choice to make one side bear the burden of proving that it is. The fact is, it is the Left that makes the argument for governmental and private initiatives, including but not limited to racial preferences, that are designed to fight racism. Nearly everyone agrees that these initiatives would be stupid, unfair or a waste of taxpayer money if there is not a significant amount of racism to combat in the particular case of each such initiative. And yet, the evidence that racism exists in the US today in sufficiently extensive scale and effect to justify the measures being proposed is almost always laughably thin, based on fairly isolated anecdotes, based on bald assertions that it is racist to even question the evidence of racism, or extrapolated from statistical differences in the situation of groups without any consideration of possible alternative factors. But the party proposing a government solution to a problem always has the burden of explaining why the problem is so big that we can’t fight it any other way. (The lack of proportion and reliance on faulty statistics and overblown anecdotes to justify government programs is hardly limited to race — the same tactics are too common in debates about the environment, for example.)
In other words, saying that racism exists is like saying that a disease exists, people have it and people are dying of it. Well, OK: but before you propose to do something about that, it makes sense to question how many people have the disease, and what proportion of them are actually dying of it. Otherwise, you may wind up using a hammer to swat a fly.

Liberal Slate writer (as if there’s any other kind) Will Saletan is just brutal in his assessment of John Kerry, calling him a political coward who’s less animated than a triple amputee. If anything, Saletan hates Kerry even more than Mickey Kaus does.
Hypothesis: liberal writers who lived through the Gore campaign don’t want to spend another year with a Democratic candidate who shares essentially all the same faults.

Yes, it’s too early to win a race like this — but it’s not too early to lose.
New polls showing Howard Dean with a commanding lead in New Hampshire have convinced me: John Kerry is toast. He’s losing ground and losing press coverage and trailing badly in native-son territory. Kerry doesn’t excite anybody; he had relied on the aura of a frontrunner, and that’s history now.
This shocks me, since I have suspected for some time that Kerry would win the nomination by virtue of most nearly straddling the middle of his party. I still think that can be done, but not by a guy so obviously trying to do so. Maybe the Dems have learned something from the Gore fiasco.
Lieberman can’t win the nomination, unless he gets a real miracle in support from African-Americans, because he’s become the symbol for party activists of the DINO (Democrat in Name Only) on taxes, war, religion and business regulation. Dean, on the other hand, remains vulnerable because non-Chomskyite Democrats over the age of about 23 realize his stances on taxes and war and possibly his identification with gay marriage and general Vermontism would make him poison in a national election. That creates space in the middle, and Kerry’s implosion and Bob Graham’s dullness and ill health leave that field mostly to Edwards, Gephardt and now perhaps Wesley Clark.
But Edwards, who I predicted to win the nomination back in January, has been a disaster, running in fifth place at 4% (to Dean’s 38%, Kerry’s 17% and Gephardt’s 11%) in New Hampshire and fifth place at 6% (to Dean’s 25% and Gephardt’s 21%) in Iowa, and (in a poll done about a month ago), tied for fourth with 5% (to 13% for Lieberman and 8% apiece for Gephardt and Al Sharpton) in neighboring South Carolina. The only obvious explanation for this is Edwards’ obvious unreadiness to be commander-in-chief, even when compared to someone like Dean, who would be a foreign policy disaster but at least has strong opinions on the subject.

Jeff Quinton, the Backcountry Conservative, has a roundup of links to an assortment of attacks on Wesley Clark from the Right, the Left, and sources in between (especially his record in Kosovo, which after all is his sole claim to fame), although I’m not sure I would grant a lot of credence to far-Left sites like zpub.com. I guess this is a sign that people are starting to think seriously about Clark as a presidential candidate riding to rescue the Democrats from Howard Dean.

This is probably good news for the Democrats, actually — it’s a sign that Nancy Pelosi hasn’t made a big impression on the national scene when the NY Daily News can run headlines about “Pelosi” and they’re talking about somebody completely different. It’s one thing to not have reached the status of being identified by one name, but when somebody else claims your name, you haven’t made it yet with the public.

So the Democrats have fanned out accross the airwaves, telling us that recalling a sitting governor is a terrible idea; commentators on the left (and even skeptics of unbridled democracy on the right, like George Will and Jonah Goldberg) have told us that the sky will fall if the people can up and pull the rug out on an incumbent who only just got re-elected, out of pique over the budget.
I am reminded of Jane Galt’s comment about the French election fiasco of 2002: “They’re completely missing the point, which is that it’s hilarious.” The fact that the recall is an expensive, complicated three-ring circus full of celebrities and celebrity wanna-bes, many of whom know nothing of politics or even decency, and that even the guy who lost to Davis less than a year ago is running again — that’s actually all for the good, for two reasons. First, how much bigger a signal of anger can the public send to a special-interest-captured political class than to mock them by making us listen to Larry Flynt and Gary Coleman and making them run in fear of a bodybuilder with a thick Austrian accent? And second, the farcical nature of the recall is also a useful reminder to voters that nobody really wants to go through this again if it’s not really necessary.
Shouldn’t recalls be saved for the most extreme cases, like corruption? I agree that a recall should be sparingly used (although there have been recall petitions circulated against every California governor in memory). But this is a situation that calls for it: Davis’ record as governor is entirely indefensible, and his popularity (30% approval rating on the day he was re-elected, down to around 23% now) is so narrow that a plurality candidate really wouldn’t have measurably less support anyway. And his integrity, while not about to get him out of office via indictment, is also a serious problem, given his long rap sheet of skirting the ethical limits of obsessive fund-raising.
Is the recall badly designed? Well, yes. There ought to be a runoff. But, like the fact that Bill Simon turned out to be a dreadful candidate, this isn’t really an excuse to make Californians and the nation live with Davis for three more years. The McLaughlin Group’s Tony Blankley gets this right.
The recall is California’s only remaining weapon against Sacramento. It can’t help but produce better government than what the Golden State has now.

A George W. Bush action figure can lead to many jokes. Personally, I wonder if “Actual figure may vary slightly from item shown” means they may ship yours in a Vietnam-era Air National Guard aviator uniform.

OK, this has been linked to all over the place, but you must read Mark Steyn’s analysis of Arnold’s campaign in California; highlight (emphasis added):
Yes, he’s not a professional politician. And that’s a disadvantage? The professional politicians are the ones who got California into this mess. This is a “throw the bum out” election, so the successful challenger will be the one who looks least like the bum. Gray Davis has been on the public payroll his entire adult life: he represents the full-time political class. Arnold represents the other California: entrepreneurial energy, wit and invention, the California that understands that if Hollywood and Silicon Valley were run by “qualified” people like Davis we’d still be watching flickering silents and you’d need union-approved quill-feathers to send e-mail.
Arnold made his first business investment at 19, using savings from his bodybuilding contests to buy a failed Munich gym. He turned it around. The first really big money he made in America in the early 1970s came when he and a fellow bodybuilder started a bricklaying business. He’s one of a very few actors who was a millionaire before he ever acted. And, if you think it’s no big deal being the world’s highest-paid movie star, you try it – with a guttural German accent so thick you can barely do dialogue and a body frame so large you’re too goofy for playing love scenes. From his gym to his mail-order company to his masonry business to his shopping malls, Schwarzenegger has shown a consistent knack for exploiting the fullest financial value from even his most modest successes. Who would you say best embodies the spirit of California? The guy who has made all his own money? Or the fellows who’ve squandered everybody else’s?

John Fund discusses Arnold Schwarzenegger’s remarkable ability to keep the real truth about his plans to run for governor quiet until the last minute. But here’s something I didn’t know about his consultants: “Several played a pivotal role in Boris Yeltsin’s come-from-behind re-election campaign for Russian president in 1996.”
Go back to 1984. You are leaving the theater after watching “Terminator”, and somebody tells you that in less than 20 years, not only will Arnold be running for governor of California, but he’ll be using campaign consultants with experience in Russian elections.
What a world.

If you want a picture of a party that has gone mad with its purism, look at what labor demands of the California Democrats.

From Drudge:
Hillary Says Buying Books A Luxury For Most People
Tue Aug 05 2003 10:25:18 ET
Hillary Clinton on NBC Leno: “But people have been terrific. You know, they come to the line, they have stories, they tell me this is the first book they’ve ever bought or they bring their daughters to meet me.”
Leno then asked whether “if they’re an adult and this is the first book — doesn’t that say something about our education?”
Clinton replied, “Well, it might say something about their income. You know, books, for a lot of people books are a luxury. You know, maybe they go to the library instead.”
Discussing protestors at her book signings, Leno said, “And for most of them, it would probably be the first book they ever bought.” Hillary replied, “Or read.”
What’s really depressing here is the thought that some of these folks are going to come away with the idea that all books are like this one. I opened it at random in a bookstore at Penn Station a few weeks back, and within a few sentences, the thing was just unreadable — a thick soup of cliches and trite sermonettes. No human being talks like this. A nonfiction book needs to take one of three approaches: (1) a conversational tone, (2) a stirring polemic, or (3) a gripping yarn you could tell over a campfire. Hillary’s book is none of the above. At least nutjobs like Ann Coulter and Michael Moore can write.

In fine form: “If Arnold is the savior of California, I guess that means that Jesse Ventura was his John the Baptist.” Plus, his thoughts on the new Episcopal bishop.

One of the questions political people ask about a candidate — especially a presidential candidate — is, “would you want to have a beer with this guy?” It may be unfair, and it may be a male-oriented question, but the political reality is that the voting public tends to look for a relaxed, easygoing manner in their president — partly as a signal of some fundamental stability, partly because we are inviting this guy into our living rooms for four years, and don’t want to wind up like that Saturday Night Live sketch where President Al Gore is giving droning lectures and pop quizzes to the nation. This phenomenon crosses party lines; Reagan and George W. Bush benefitted from the perception that they were guys you could have a relaxing chat over a beer with, and so did Clinton and JFK.
So how do today’s Democrats survive the brew test? Here’s one man’s ranking:
1. Joe Lieberman. Lieberman suffers with Democratic voters from the perception that . . . well, as Jon Stewart put it, “Lieberman is the candidate for people who like George W. Bush but think he’s not Jewish enough.” Conservatives like me tend to like him for the same reason, although Lieberman’s actual voting record, at least on domestic policy, is fairly conventionally liberal. (In fact, outside of the Big Two issues of national security and taxes, Lieberman may be more liberal than Howard Dean).
But Lieberman’s personality may actually be one of his secret weapons; he seems like a fundamentally sane guy (his religious upbringing is undoubtedly a plus), and yet he’s got just enough dry humor to avoid coming off as dull as, say, Bob Graham.
Of course, this isn’t a consensus. Will Saletan of Slate finds Lieberman as dull as dishwater, and he’s seen a lot more of him on the stump than I have. And some people find “pious Joe” and his moral pronouncements grating. But I still think he’s a guy you wouldn’t mind having a normal conversation with.
2. Dick Gephardt. First of all, you can see the Geniality Gap in stark relief when Dick Gephardt is my second choice to share a beer with. This is totally subjective, but while Gephardt speaks in soundbites, you get the sense that he’s not so much a focus group guy as more like a high school debater who thinks politicians are supposed to sound like this if they want to push their constitutents’ buttons about “The Rich.” The fact that Gephardt comes from a fairly humble background also gets some points for normality here.
3. John Edwards. Ditto on that last point for Edwards, but by now we’re already into the territory of people I would actively dislike even if they weren’t running for president. Edwards just seems too damn satisfied with how smooth he is, and doesn’t seem like a guy who could turn that “off” to stand around a barbecue grill on a summer day and just shoot the breeze.
4. Al Sharpton. OK, I really, really hate Al Sharpton; you have to be from New York to truly understand why. But at least he’d tell some entertaining whoppers. Downside: you’d have to pick up the tab.
5. Carol Mosely-Braun. By default. Her personality doesn’t make much of an impression.
6. Bob Graham. 7-7:15: Consumed beer with blogger. 7:15-7:20: Took a leak.
7. John Kerry. Kerry has cornered the market on the elusive Al Gore Grand Slam of personality traits: he manages to come off as simultaneously mean, boring, condescending and insincere. Try it sometime — it’s not easy. Like Gore, you get the sense that Kerry — also a son of privilege — decided to run for president by looking in a mirror and thinking, “I really look presidential.”
8. Howard Dean. The New Hampshire Primary has historically been very good to angry candidates and scrappy insurgents. Not so for the general election, as Andrew Sullivan notes. It’s easy to get caught up in the guy who’s angriest at the other side; I did myself in 2000, when I backed McCain in the primaries. You may have forgotten this, but McCain’s campaign took off at the precise moment when his stump speech turned up the heat on Clinton and Gore and their lack of integrity in ways Bush seemed afraid to do. One of the risks, of course, is that like McCain, Dean will turn his anger against his own party (we’ve seen the beginnings of this with his sniping at Kerry and now Lieberman; wait and see if he goes after the DLC the way McCain went after social conservatives).
Ever seen Dean try to smile? It’s frightening (Jon Stewart did a good bit on this last night). And everything I’ve read about Dean’s career as Vermont governor backs up the idea that bristling anger is his default mode and not just some act for the benefit of the primaries.
9. Dennis Kucinich. Nothing spoils a good beer like a stern lecture about how our society cruelly oppresses hops and barley.

For years now, libertarians have been promising us that they have a better way, superior to the two major parties. The blogosphere in particular is home to many, many well-known self-identified libertarians. And the Libertarian Party keeps telling us things like, “Don’t be a sellout, vote your principles.”
But all of this can be advocated from the safety of the sidelines, as true libertarians — as opposed to libertarian-leaning Republicans — are rarely in any danger of assuming substantial public office. No longer. Because we now have the ideal situation brewing in California for a libertarian to assume the governorship of the nation’s largest state, one that’s suffering terribly from an addiction to Big Government, and prove that a libertarian can actually govern.
The recall in California, especially if there’s a crowded ballot, will present the ideal conditions for a third-party run: a candidate with a well-honed message could win the race with just 15-20% of the vote. The Democrats have yet to put a major, big-name alternative candidate on the ballot, and the Republicans may split the vote between conservatives like Bill Simon and more liberal GOP candidates like Richard Riordan (it remains to be seen if Ah-nold will jump into the race this week, but if he doesn’t, the field remains more open).
The Republican dilemma in California has, for some time, been based on two problems. First, the GOP’s social conservatism, on issues like abortion, has been a major handicap; pro-lifers may be popular in most of the country, but not California. Second, lingering bitterness over Proposition 187 and other divisive issues — some of it unfairly, but for these purposes that’s beside the point — has made it nearly impossible for the GOP to reach not only the ever-growing Latino community, but many moderate white and Asian-American voters as well, who have bought into the Davis machine’s rhetoric about the “right-wing” menace.
A libertarian candidate could overcome these obstacles. There’d be other problems, of course: You’d need to pick just one candidate; you’d need someone who’s got some name recognition from business, show biz or some other field; you’d probably need a candidate who could fund much of his or her candidacy, in the absence of an established libertarian fundraising network.
And you’d have to be practical. Instead of calling for repeal of the drug laws, focus more narrowly on fighting the Justice Department’s position on medical marijuana and advocate more limited reductions in some drug laws and penalties. Offer other ways to cut back government that go deeper than GOP remedies without getting locked into debates about privatizing the fire department. A libertarian would have the burden of proving that he or she could actually go to Sacramento and get something done.
But if it can’t be done in California now — when the state Democrats are thoroughly discredited, the GOP is divided and not entirely innocent of the whole mess, and the electorate is irate — it can’t be done. It’s the libertarians’ moment — will they take it?

I chuckled when USAToday’s headline after Bush’s press conference was “President Defines Marriage”. Imagine that headline for his predecessor.

Byron York has the scoop over at NRO: that nutty Berkeley study about how conservatism is a form of mental illness (1) was heavily underwritten by you and I and (2) relied heavily for its governing assumptions about today’s Republicans on — I swear I am not making this up — that noted scholar of conservatism, Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times.

It never ends.

Just another day for the front page of the New York Times: an article on the recall in California quotes numerous Democrats griping about democracy “run amok,” the difficulties of dealing with initiatives, and calling the recall supporters “right wing” before it gets to quoting a lone Republican, who is quoted describing himself as a “wacko.” The article also quotes unnamed “experts” (presented without rebuttal) supporting the Lieutenant Governor’s strange theory that he doesn’t need to let the voters pick a replacement for Gray Davis but can just step in himself.
Then there’s the front page article on the shooting at City Hall, which conspicuously omits the fact that the shooter and the victim were both Democrats. (The article also ignores the fact that both men — as well as the hero cop who killed the assailant with five direct hits from 45 feet away — were African-American, although I can’t fault the Times for being color-blind for once).

The Weekly Standard has a great interview on Dennis Miller’s journey to conservatism; Miller has too many great lines to excerpt here. A sampling:
I knew [John] Kerry was going to have to run for president because his features are so chiseled, his actual skull could be on Mt. Rushmore. The guy looks like an Easter Island statue in a power tie. Howard Dean can roll up his sleeves in public all he wants, but as long as you can see that heart tattoo with Neville Chamberlain’s name on his right forearm, he’s never going to get off the pad. I hope they send Howard Dean out to do battle with Bush because he’ll get his ass handed to him quicker than someone who just got out of liposuction surgery.
(Link via Jane Galt)

With the (forced) retirement of Cynthia McKinney, the title of “worst member of Congress” is up for grabs. I nominate Fortney “Pete” Stark, who cemented his reputation last week by calling Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas a c___sucker, repeatedly calling Congressman Scott McInnis a “fruitcake” and challenging him to a fight, and generally acting in a sufficiently threatening manner that Thomas (probably overreacting to the situation) called the Capitol Police.
(FOX News, by the way, says that McInnis “is married and by all accounts not gay.”).
It turns out that Stark has an incredibly long history of picking up the nastiest slur handy for whomever is in his way:
Stark has a long history of making outrageous remarks. He once called Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson “a whore,” and said former Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan is “a disgrace to his race.”
Sullivan, wisely, responded, �I don�t live on Pete Stark�s plantation.�. But wait, there’s more:
+In 2001, Stark “called the Bush budget ‘the embodiment of the anti-Christ,’ saying that it was ‘infamy’ to use the Easter season to release a budget ‘that flies in the face of all Christ’s teachings.'”
+Later that year, he “falsely accused House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of having children who ‘were all born out of wedlock.’,” and The Washington Times recounted more history: “Mr. Stark is something of a legend in the House for making offensive remarks. He has accused Rep. Nancy L. Johnson, Connecticut Republican, of learning about health care from ‘pillow talk’ with her husband, a doctor. In 1991 he blamed ‘Jewish colleagues’ for supporting the Persian Gulf war and called Rep. Stephen Solarz, New York Democrat, as ‘Field Marshal Solarz in the pro-Israel forces.'”
+Earlier this year, Stark argued that any U.S. bombing in or around Baghdad would be “an act of extreme terrorism.”
George Will also had some fun with Stark’s excesses during the Iraq debate:
During the House debate on authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Rep. Pete Stark, a paleo-liberal from northern California, cried, “Rich kids will not pay; their daddies will get them deferments.” He meant draft deferments. It is almost unkind to awaken Stark from his dogmatic slumbers to notify him that there has not been a draft since 1973. And the Beatles have broken up.
Where exactly is Stark’s district? Gee, I’ll give you one guess — “the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay”
I know he’s not in the leadership, but there comes a point when even a back-bencher merits some sort of rebuke from his party. This guy’s a disgrace.

No, not on the Republican side; Washington Governor Gary Locke, who delivered the Democratic response, has decided not to run for reelection, citing the desire to spend time with his family. You’ll recall my vigorous fisking of Locke’s response at the time. I guess I won’t have Gary Locke to kick around anymore.

Teachers in Lowell, Massachusetts are outraged that they are being required to speak English as a condition of employment. The horror!