So I'm ready to throw in the towel and say that we're seeing the death-throes of the coverage of this story. On the 19th, "National Guard" adds fell from 233 to 72, the lowest amount since the 7th (on the 8th the "NG" adds went from 23 to 593). This precipitous dip was masked a little by a small surge in "AWOL" adds on the 19th (they went from 34 to 132, their highest since Friday 13th), but there's no hiding the fact that, baring something to kick up the amount of coverage once more, all the count lines are flattenting out and the adds lines trending towards zero.

I very much hope that the fact that there's been nothing from the Democrats on this for over a week now is an indication of a positive strategy on their part (i.e. that they feel they need to wait a bit and not appear over-eager to smear Bush, or something like that) and not simply due to the fact that they aren't paying any attention to nurturing this story along. As I wrote yesterday, perhaps they think they've gotten out of it everything they could, but the White House document dump doesn't answer all the outstanding questions, and indeed raises some new ones (check Calpundit), so it would be a shame to allow them to get away with quelling the public interest in this issue by simply throwing paper at it. No trial attorney worth his salt would allow an adversary to do that, and the Democrats needs to be the advocate for this story, pushing it forward until it is resolved one way or the other. That seems, now, unlikely to happen unless something new breaks and the opportunity to comment again appears unbidden.

I think that not being pro-active about this is a big mistake, but what do I know?

We love it when TV talking heads pretend they haven't seen exit polls. Chris Matthews and company keep referring to what might happen after Wisconsin ends up a "close two-man race," and then backpedaling, "I mean, if that's what happens."

As I've written before, you can pretty much tell what the exit polls have told the networks by how they frame their coverage, which is why withholding the data from the public for their own good is something of a crock. I mean, it's only human that if I have information that says that candidate X is going to cream candidate Y, but I can't talk about it, I'm not going to precede the release of that information with teasers suggesting that candidate Y is going to win in an upset, because doing sowould make me look ridiculous when the real stuff comes out. Instead, I'm going to frame my coverage in the way that makes me look as smart and as knowledgeable as possible without actually giving anything away. That's just human nature, and smart business sense.

It's a little like old-style Kremlinology, determining who is in favor and who's on the outs by who's standing next to whom at the May Day parade, but watching the news channels in the hours before the polls close can definitely give you a strong inkling about what's going to happen. (Given what Wonkette wrote about Chris Matthews' inability to hold it in, I guess I'll have to hold my nose and watch some more of MSNBC the next time.)

Postscript: Of course, the exit polls have been available in various places, Slate and National Review Online, and then reposted on the blogs, but usually they only give percentages and not analysis of the whys and wherefores, which you can sniff out by watching how the news channels are setting up to report the results.

[T]he logic behind Kerry's appeal goes something like this: Even though Democrats aren't particularly excited about Kerry, they're voting for him because they think he could beat Bush. So, they're voting for him because of the perception of electability. Thus, Kerry's only appeal is the perception that he can beat Bush. Period. Here's the problem with that logic: The Democrats' strategy - picking someone with no real appeal only because they think he can beat someone they hate - is a great strategy for selecting a candidate who can win 45% of the vote. It's a horrible strategy for picking someone who can win 51%.

What Democrats fail to grasp is that not everyone hates Bush. Let me say it again - not everyone hates Bush. One more time - NOT EVERYONE HATES BUSH. Perhaps 45% do, but not 51%. And to get to 51%, a candidate must have some appeal other than "I can beat Bush." That's the flaw in Kerry's "electability" logic. It pre-assumes Bush hatred. Kerry gets a free pass from Democrats who don't really like him just because they have succumbed to the herd mentality that he's the most electable. But to beat Bush, a Democrat has to win independents and some Republicans. And these latter groups will not vote for someone who lacks appeal just because he could possibly beat Bush. And why not? BECAUSE NOT EVERYONE HATES BUSH. And that, in a nutshell, is why Kerry cannot beat Bush. He has no appeal other than the perception that he can beat Bush - and that's an insufficient justification for being President. It might get him 45% of the vote, but not 51%. Look, I live in the South - I read conservative blogs and magazines. And I actually talk to real Republicans every single day. And as hard as it is for liberals to get their fat heads around it, not everyone hates Bush.

The Democratic voters - so historically savvy in picking nominees - are making a tragic error by assuming that 51% of Americans hate Bush. It's flawed logic. People won't vote for a candidate who has no appeal. And independents and Reagan Democrats will not abandon Bush for a candidate whose only appeal is the perception that he can beat Bush. That won't be enough to convince them because they don't hate Bush. Independents and moderate Republicans must be given a reason to leave Bush - they need to be inspired. They need to hear a compelling meta-theme that speaks to them.

Candidates need themes - meta-themes. What's Kerry's? Right now, it's "People Think I Can Beat Bush - Have you seen my polls?" Candidates need to be inspiring. [Emphasis in original. -- Ed]

Obviously, I post this because I agree with it entirely and it's been something I've been saying for a while now. The Democrats voting for Kerry (or Edwards for that matter) because they believe he's more "electable" than the other candidates have been sucked into the downward spiral of a feedback loop, and it's one in which the noise has already begun to drown out the signal. The initial idea is a good one, that the Democratic candidate should be able to defeat Bush, but instead of using actual real-world information to decide which one of the candidates has a better chance of doing that, the whole concept gets reified into something called "electability." Then, once Kerry has been annointed as the candidate with the most amount of this new attribute, voters latch on to him, so Kerry wins primaries, which means that voters in the next state are even more convinced that he's got more "electability" mojo and they vote for him and so on and so on to create a mass illusion about Kerry's "electability".

I also want the Democratic candidate to be the person who has the greatest chance of beating Bush, because beating Bush is the paramount consideration in this election, but I want to make that decision based, as I said, on some real-world information. In the real-world, Presidential elections aren't decided by the popular vote (and usually not by corrupt decisions byt e Supreme Court), they're decided in the Electoral College.

The hard fact is that demographics and voting patterns being what they are, many states will be next to impossible to move from one party's column into the others: New York and Massachusetts aren't all of a sudden going to vote for a Republican presidential candidate, and Montana and Kansas aren't going Democratic. The states in which the election will be decided are those in which either party has a chance of moving the vote to their advantage. This means that what we need to base our decision on is "How well will this particular candidate do in the swing states?" and not "Does this candidate outpoll Bush in national match-ups?" and certainly not "Do I and other Democrats think this candidate is 'electable'?"

What, really, is so wrong about [gay marriage]? What is the horrible threat about two adults who love each other so intensely, so purely, that they're willing to commit to a lifetime of being together and sleeping together and arguing over who controls the remote? And what government body dares to claim a right to legislate against it?

It is a question no group, no homophobic senator, no piece of antigay legislation, no BushCo stump speech, no Bible-humping pastor has been able to answer with any clarity or conviction.

They can only mumble about immorality and quote some vague Scripture about sodomy that makes them all tingly, as wary biblical scholars all over the world roll their eyes and point to a thousand proofs that demonstrate, over and over again, how the Bible is basically a reinterpreted regurgitated piece of classic patriarchal misogynistic mythmaking that says exactly what the church rewrote it to say.

But I might have part of an answer. From what I can glean from some of my hate mail and the general conservative outcry, here is what the homophobes fear about same-sex marriage: bestiality.

That is, they are utterly terrified that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope of permissive debauchery that will lead to the utter breakdown of social rules and sexual mores, to people being allowed to marry their dogs, or their own dead grandmothers, or chairs, or three hairy men from Miami Beach.

In short, to the neocon Right, a nation that allows gays to marry is a nation with no boundaries and no condoms and where all sorts of illicit disgusting behaviors will soon be legal and be forced upon them, a horrific tribal wasteland full of leeches and flying bugs and scary sex acts they only read about in chat rooms and their beloved "Left Behind" series of cute apocalypse-porn books.

You know, just like how giving blacks the right to own their own land meant we had to give the same rights to house plants and power tools, or how granting women the right to vote meant it was a slippery slope until we gave suffrage to feral cats and sea slugs and rusty hubcaps.

It seems so clear and obvious to me, so matter-of-fact, it's always a wonder that everyone doesn't see it that way.

The link to the Morford column came from Eschaton, where Atrios also makes the very telling point that prior to the Supreme Court decision that ruled anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional, 94% of whites opposed interracial marriages.

This really one of those cases of what's right, is just right, and no amount of popular opposition will change that.

(Which is not to say that purely as a matter of strategy it might not be better to try to get civil unions more widely legitimatized before tackling the thornier problem of same-sex marriages, but that doesn't change the fact that the end result should be equality for gay couples who wish to marry.)

A new poll conducted by Zogby International for The O’Leary Report and Southern Methodist University’s John Tower Center from February 12-15, 2004 of 1,209 likely voters with a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points found that if the election for president were held today, Democrat John Kerry would edge George W. Bush 46% to 45% in the “blue states” – or states won by Al Gore in the 2000 election. In the “red states,” or states won by George W. Bush in 2000, however, Bush wins handily by a 51% to 39% margin.

This is better than the head-to-head national beauty contest match-ups, which are basically irrelevant because of the Electoral College, but it's still too general. We need to take those states that are projected to be "in play" (i.e. states in which the percentage spread between the candidates was in single digits, or states which went to one party's candidate despite a history of voting for the other party, or states in which demographic changes might be expected to move it one way or the other) and get polling data from those states. Then we'd have a little better idea of who can actually beat Bush in the real world, as opposed to the fantasy world we like to live in where the national popular vote means something.

Bush did receive an honorable discharge, but such a document is the lowest common denominator of military performance--it takes a lot of bad behavior to earn anything other than an honorable discharge. [Emphasis added -- Ed]

[via Tapped]

• Billmon's win for Best Writing, which I think is richly deserved, (he also won for Best Post and Best New Blog)



• David Neiwert's award for Best Series for "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism"



• the win for Daily Kos as Best Group Blog, and another for Best Design



• Juan Cole's win for Best Expert Blog

(I do wish that Kevin Drum had won something for Calpundit, though.)

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot slightly off the floor and make clockwise circles with your foot. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction..... counter clockwise...

You can't help it!

How many of you think you are too smart to fall for ads and blatant sales pitches? You probably are, and that is the problem that I am trying to write about today. The very fact that you are reading this means that you get your information online, and that you seek out alternative sources of deeper information than you get from your newspapers and TV. I am trying to say that you and I are informed and that blinds us to some realities. The very fact of OUR awareness can mislead us about most voters because most voters are NOT particularly informed at all. And they are busy or have other reasons that they are not likely to ever become highly informed about what is going on. Our state of informedness causes us to lose sight of what it is like to only hear what I call the “surface” messages that circulate – messages like “Dean angry” and “Edwards nice.” I think THIS is the reason that 50% of Americas STILL believe that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attack – because what news they DO hear has the President using 9/11 and Iraq in the same sentence repeatedly. Things like that. It isn't going to change. We need to learn to hear what THEY are hearing, and understand how those things are going to affect them.

This truth ties into the needs for liberal infrastructure on a par with that built by the right-wing over the last 30 years, the Heritage Foundations and Weekly Standards. It is from these places that policy ideas are born, scrubbed, refined, and finally packaged in ways that are consumer-friendly and effective for selling. It is there that the Estate Tax becomes the Death Tax, and we need an equivalent that will counter and turn the Death Tax into the Billionaire's Tax.

Through our emphasis on rational policy making we have allowed a deadly Political Marketing Gap to develop, and to a large extent that's what killed us recently. You can take "Compassionate Conservatism" and riddle it with holes by use of rational analysis and reasonable argument, but it won't kill it because once it's out there it's out there, it's in people's minds and can't be erased. (Lawyers would say that you can't unring the bell once it's rung.) The only thing you can do when a meme gets stuck like that is to override it with another meme that is catchier, stickier and altogther more powerful, and that's what we've been missing and are still missing to a large extent.

Edwards gets it -- "Two Americas" is a powerful idea, but more than that, it's catchy, it simple to understand and easy to regurgitate, it come packaged with powerful images which stick in the memory and can be recalled without even willing it. Where's the equivalent meme for Kerry? "Bring it on" is a slogan, a battlecry for the faithful, it's not meaningful unless you're already on Kerry's wavelength, and it won't win over any voters wondering who to vote for.

If Kerry's going to be the guy, Kerry desperately needs a meme.

[L]et's assume that Bush and Cheney are not consciously making decisions that they think are bad for America. In other words, let's assume they're not evil, as many of my friends seem to think. The truly interesting question is epistemological - how does Bush come to know what he thinks is good for America. Upon what evidence does Bush come to a conclusion that a given policy will either hurt or help working class families? These questions form the heart of my critique of this administration. It's not that they are consciously making bad decisions, it's that they are incapable of knowing what's good. The world of Bush and Cheney is a bubble world - a privileged existence in which they are never forced to interact with ordinary Americans.

Let's take Bush - and let's assume that Bush sits down in the Oval Office and says to himself, "How will this policy affect working class Americans." So here's the problem - because Bush has never interacted with ordinary Americans, how can he possibly know? He was born into one of Connecticut's most presitigious families. He attended East Coast prep schools. He went to Yale and Harvard Business School. Then, he worked for big business and for the Texas Rangers. As both Governor and President, he spends his time around rich businessmen and lobbyists. He crisscrosses the country attending $2,000-a-plate dinners. He doesn't go out and interact with voters. In part because of legitimate security concerns, protestors are blocked from his fundraising trips. And when he does give a speech, it's usually a very controlled environment where his views will not be challenged. So I'll ask again - how does he know a thing about the needs of ordinary Americans? I'm not saying this as a campaign talking point and I'm not arguing that Bush is bad or doesn't care - I'm asking how Bush comes to know, in an epistemological sense, what Americans need. What's his evidence and where does he get it?

He told Brit Hume he doesn't read the papers. O'Neill portrays him as a man who depends upon the political wing (i.e. Rove and Co.) for all his information. So, if Bush gets everything secondhand, the secondhand sources must be trusted to convey the needs and fears and concerns of ordinary Americans. I'm not sure Rove can do this. Again, even if I concede that Bush is a "good guy," I question whether his bubble-world of privilege can provide him with the raw data points that are necessary to determine what will help people. It's for this reason that he can satisfy himself that free trade is good for people - because it looks good on the Wall Street Journal front page. It's for this same reason that Cheney can say that deficits don't matter - because higher interests rates don't affect anything other than his stock portfolio. If you had to mortgage a house or finance college, then deficits would sure as hell matter. But Cheney, like Bush, now lives in a world of fund-raising and lobbying where he only interacts with people who are disproportionately wealthy and favor pro-business policies. This isolation skews the data he uses to make judgments.

That reminds me of this, from Michael Tomasky's New York Times review of Ron Suskind's book The Price of Loyalty, about Paul O'Neill's time in the Bush administration:

When O'Neill worked in the Nixon and Ford White Houses, Suskind writes, he served presidents whom he respected as policy makers, whatever their other faults, for two reasons: first, they were knowledgeable about the details of policy; and second, they made it a point to have their aides present them with different, and sometimes starkly warring, points of view. Nixon called on the Office of Management and Budget (where O'Neill worked) to prepare so-called Brandeis briefs, named after Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court, that presented thorough analyses of opposing arguments and made everyone ''really think deeply about the ideal of good government and how to get there,'' in O'Neill's words. The people in the room may have all been from one political party or shared a general world view. But they understood that when spending the people's money and acting on behalf of the entire country, including that segment that did not vote for their president, their obligation to fact-based inquiry and rigorous testing of hypotheses was self-evident.

This book serves as that standard's obituary notice. First, Bush himself is portrayed as disturbingly unengaged. From O'Neill's first meeting with him through his last, Bush asked some questions here and there about politics and perception, but he rarely asked a specific question on a policy matter. The weekend after the Sept. 11 attacks, when O'Neill was among the group invited to Camp David to discuss responses, he espied a large stack of intelligence briefings brought by the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and found himself thinking, ''I hope the president really reads this carefully. It's kind of his job.''

Second, O'Neill smelled at many high-level meetings the odor of a conversation set up in advance to drive the discussion toward the conclusion that Rove and the political team had already settled upon. One example: At a meeting on steel tariffs, which the administration put in place in 2002 against all free-market principle, O'Neill could tell where things were going when the United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick, ''made several oblique references to 'political realities.' '' The pattern repeated itself over and over, on tax cuts and the economy and energy policy and Iraq. In time, O'Neill grew aghast, and went to his old friend Cheney to suggest that the administration try Brandeis briefs. But Cheney -- the book's chief villain and, if Suskind and O'Neill are to be believed, our functional president -- just sat passively. ''He thanked Paul, as always, 'for his sharp insights,' '' Suskind writes. And that was the end of it.

"Brandeis briefs" are one kind of mechanism that a president (or any executive in danger of being isolated by virtue of the necessities and perquisites of office) can use to make sure they get as rounded and complete a view of things as possible, and the rejection of those mechanisms, in favor of more incestuous sources of data, typifies all that is wrong with this administration.

To further compound the problem, even if the president's advisors wanted to give him honest and frank appraisals from various viewpoints, they are incapable of doing so by the nature of who they are and how they were selected, since they administration insists on both intense loyalty (or, actually, fealty) and on lockstep adherence to accepted ideology with only a small amount of variation permitted. Those are hardly conditons which lend themselves to frank and open discussion, such as a president more secure in his intellect and manhood would not only allow, but actively encourage.

I don't necessarily think that Bush is evil. Weak, yes. Intellectually stunted, yes. Uncertain about his virility, yes. But not necessarily evil per se. (About Cheney I have some reservations, but let's say for the sake of argument that he's not inherently evil either.)

Still, it hardly matters, because it does not require evil people in order that evil things be done. History is rife with evil that resulted from the actions of people who carried with them nothing but the very best of intentions, or who acted as best as they could under the circumstances, by the standards of their time and with the information available to them. So if evil can be done by good men, then certainly it can also be done by ethically- and morally- challenged men like Bush and Cheney, whether or not they intend it.

Which is to say that we should judge their administration by what it does and the results that come about from their actions or failures to act, and by this standard one could certainly make a case that evil has resulted from the works of Bush & Cheney, regardless of their intentions. We will likely be digging our way out of the various economic, political and international morasses they've gotten us into for many, many years to come.

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not even done in concentration camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters (1943)

"A thoroughly nasty business concern" is as good a short description of the Bush administration as I've seen for quite a while.

FORMER President Bill Clinton, stung by how poor a presidential contender Wesley Clark turned out to be, worked aggressively behind the scenes late last week to pressure John Kerry to pick the retired general as his running mate.

"The former president has been calling people, including elected officials in New York, saying that Clark would make a great vice-presidential candidate," a well-known Democratic activist told The Post.

"He's pushing hard because this is a credibility issue for Clinton since everybody knows Clark was the guy he created, but yet Clark did so poorly when he ran."

Look at the source of this before giving it any great due.

Personally, I've been going back and forth in trying to decide who I think would be the better choice for Kerry's v.p., Clark or Edwards (ignoring the strong possibility that it won't be either of them), and I'm not ready yet to come out in favor of one over the other. Clark would obviously make for the strongest national security team that the Democrats have fielded in my lifetime, but he's such a poor campaigner (not due to anything but lack of experience) that he might well be a detriment overall. Edwards is, clearly, a great campaigner, and could bring with him his neo-populist "Two Americas" message, which perhaps makes him the strongest contender, assuming that he isn't tempted to go after Kerry in the next couple of weeks.

Probably the best scenario would be to have Edwards as veep, but keep Clark signed on and campaigning by announcing Kerry's intention to have him in his cabinet as secretary of defense or state, using him as this year's Colin Powell. (I've seen it suggested that Clark be made Ambassador to the U.N., but that's such an inside baseball position that I don't think it would have any great impact on the race. But if that's what Clark wants to sign on -- despite my feeling that he's not really qualified for the job -- Kerry could certainly afford to promise it.)

Postscript: Political Oddsmaker is listing Edwards as 4 to 1 (20%) and Clark as 10 to 1 (9.1%). He rates Bill Richardson (governor of New Mexico, at 9 to 2, or 18%) and Ed Rendell (governor of Pennsylvania, at 9 to 1, or 10%) as having better odds than Clark.

Also in his "Top Tier" of potential v.p.'s are Senators Bob Graham (Florida, 10 to 1, 9.1%), Evan Bayh (Indiana, 12 to 1, 7.7%) and Bill Nelson (Florida, 15 to 1, 6.3%) and Dick Gephardt (20 to 1, 4.8%).

Notable "Long Shots" include Diane Feinstein (30 to 1); Sam Nunn, Max Cleland, Lieberman, Hillary, Dick Durbin, ex-Treasury Secretary Ron Rubin, and Joe Biden (100 to 1 each); as well as Howard Dean, Eliot Spitzer (crusading Attorney General here in NY), Arizona Senator Blanche Lincoln, John Breaux (NO!) and Al Gore (200 to 1 each).

He also rates the possibility of someone not on his list being chosen at a fairly high 30 to 1.

Kerry 47
Dean 23
Edwards 20
Kucinich 2
Sharpton 1

I have a feeling Edwards will surge and Dean will fall, if only because that's what Dean's been doing all along.

Update: Jerome Armstrong has more analysis of Wisconsin on Daily Kos.

Former Green Party candidate Ralph Nader is poised to declare that he will seek the presidency again this year, this time as an independent and despite a vigorous effort by the left to dissuade him, according to friends and associates. "I think there's very little doubt," said Micah Sifry, author of a book on third-party politics and a longtime Nader watcher. "I think he's going to run."

[via Taegan Goddard's Political Wire]

The title of this entry says all that I want to say about a man who once worked diligently for the common good, but now...

At least he won't have the Green Party infrastructure (such as it is) to help him, so maybe be his candidacy will die on the vine. (In how many states will he be able to even get on the ballot without an organization to help?) And maybe people who voted for him in 2000 have had enough of the administration they helped to put into place and won't be tempted to make the same mistake again.

And maybe we need to take a closer look at Nader's early career to determine how much of what he did was in aid of helping society and how much was pure ego aggrandizement.

[spoken] It's January twenty-six. I'm freezing. Ed Fitzgerald, Age nineteen. five feet ten inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston Massachusetts, It's four p.m., and I'm hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man.

[sung] Going home to Boston, yuh-huh, Massachusetts. It's four p.m., and I'm hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man -- Oh-- O, I'm going home-- to Boston, yuh-huh, Massachusetts.

This came to mind because someone, I don't know who, got here to unfutz by doing an MSN search on my name, Ed Fitzgerald, and when I checked on it, I was surprised to find that "edfitzgerald's unfutz" was the first hit returned. So, being curious, I Googled myself and was disappointed to find that I was only sixth (my Playbill bio).

So, having had a mild hit of egoboo, I looked over the other returns to the Google search and came across a reference to the Patch lyrics. I like Partch's music quite a bit, and, for some time, I tracked down most of the limited number of available recordings, including LPs put out by Partch on his own Gate 5 label, but lately I've lost track of some of the new stuff that's been released on CD, a situation I really should correct. I should also find the time to read the Gillmore biography of Partch, which sits neglected on a shelf with many other books on various topics, all waiting to be read. (Belated New Year's resolution: Less Internet, more books.)

Favorite Partch pieces: "Daphne of the Dunes" and "Castor & Pollux"

Favorite Partch memory: I never saw Partch perform or conduct his music, but when I was (briefly) in college, I spoke on the phone with Danlee Mitchell, Partch's protege about Partch in order to do an exercise for acting class based on him. (I'd also read his amazing book, Genesis of a Music, in which his irascible and idiosyncratic character comes through quite clearly. I especially loved that Partch destroyed all his juvenalia by burning them in a pot-bellied stove in what he called an artistic auto-da-fe. This enabled him to start writing the unique music he's now known for.)

The self-satisfaction [of the press] begins in the [its] claim to have mastered presidential campaigns, in the sense of knowing how the system works, "what it takes" to get elected. Journalists see themselves as political realists who don't have a horse in the race. They tend to identify with those who have a disciplined, professional interest in campaigning-- and lots of inside knowledge to share. Psychologically, this puts them closer to the professionals they write about than the public, whose bombardment by message the professionals are busy planning.

That's how political consultants became media stars. When you look at elections and see a horse race, you also see a consultant, handler, manager, or pollster as rich in the sort of knowledge you need to understand what's going in this election cycle. But it is only professionals who live elections as "cycles."

Common experience isn't like that. By absorbing, broadcasting and recycling the political insider's take on things, journalists have taught themselves to look at the public as a semi-predictable mass of potentially swayable voters, who will respond to the right message. Drip by drip, drop by drop, this acidic way of understanding people begins to influence the journalism you give them.

Strange information loops result. The public is told how the candidates plan to position themselves ("He's running as...") News stories appear about candidates trying to influence news stories about candidates because newsy expectations in Iowa are themselves making news in Iowa. Things like that.

Insiders can explain this (sometimes absurd) world best because they make their living from trying to win in it. Journalists, who are making a living at this too, have to report the race. The two groups understand each other, need each other, and see each other on the campaign trail. They know how to work together to glamorize inside knowledge without conspiring to do so. Maybe it's simpler. They have drinks together, and talk politics. It has an effect.

The national press has claimed mastery of the presidential campaign, not because it knows all, but because it knows--and it quotes--the people who really do know politics, from the inside. These are the pros. The rest of its knowledge comes from trooping to New Hampshire and Iowa and other places the candidates are found to see them live and watch them interact. Inside Baseball and Boys on the Bus: the self-satisfaction [...] is partly a complacency about these two knowledge streams.

[...]

The national press lives in a bubble of expectations [...], and it did in Iowa. It has its own aging "software"--the horse race, inside baseball, the boys and girls on the bus, spin alley, polls upon tracking polls, the money race, the endorsement derby, the Russert primary, the expectations game, the gotcha question, "he's running as..."--all designed to take the mystery out of campaign politics, to smooth it out, make it more predictable and thus reportable with existing tools. And with ideas carried over from previous campaigns going back at least to 1976 and Jimmy Carter's surprise in Iowa.

But the journalist's software (I also call it press think) sent all the wrong signals, and this led to system failure. The master narrative flunked its Iowa test. Everything you heard and read from us was wrong, said Howard Kurtz on January 19. ("The Pundits Blow It.") [Clay] Shirky wrote of the Deaniacs: "The way the campaign was organized helped inflate and sustain that bubble of belief, right up to the moment that the voters arrived." And the way campaign coverage was organized helped inflate and sustain a news bubble that lasted the same length of time. Clearly, the two bubbles influenced each other.

This came from Rosen's weblog, PressThink, which was unfamiliar to me, but which I'll be visiting again, soon. (In fact, I'm heading back right now to read "Why Are You Such a Loser, Dennis Kucinich?".)

[T]he hard thing to explain is not how the Dean campaign blew such a huge lead, but rather why we ever thought that lead actually existed. Dean's campaign didn't just fail, it dissolved on contact with reality.

The answer, I think, is that we talked ourselves, but not the voters, into believing. And I think the way the campaign was organized helped inflate and sustain that bubble of belief, right up to the moment that the voters arrived.

[...]

Howard Dean had the best-funded, best-publicized bid to be the Democratic nominee; he was so widely understood to be in the lead that the inevitability of his victory was a broad topic of discussion. (Google "Howard Dean"+inevitable if you need independent confirmation.) Even the people disputing the posited inevitability burnished the idea; no one bother debunking the idea of, say, Kucinich's inevitability.

I've had a hard time processing his Iowa and New Hampshire losses because I'd spent months hearing about how well he was going to do. It has taken me two weeks to decide that my mental model - how could such a successful campaign suddenly do so badly? - was the problem.

Dean's campaign was never actually successful. It did many of the things successful campaigns do, of course - got press and raised money and excited people and even got potential voters to aver to campaign workers and pollsters that they would vote for him when the time came. When the time came, however, they didn't. The campaign never succeeded at making Howard Dean the first choice of any group of voters he faced, and it seems unlikely to do so today. [UPDATE: Dean did no better than third place in any of the 7 states voting on February 3rd; his added delegate count was closer to Al Sharpton's than to Kerry, Edwards, or Clark's.]

If this thesis - call it the 'mirage' thesis - is too strong for you, consider its cousin, where the campaign was doing well until the last few days. In this version, one New Hampshire voter in three dumped Dean after no event more momentous than a third-place showing in Iowa (rarely known to track to New Hampshire elections) and a little hootin' and hollerin' in the concession speech (to use Sharpton's memorable phrase). Not one Dean supporter in three, mind, one voter in three.

In this view, Dean's support was real, but so thin and vulnerable that a mere political pin-prick was enough to cause the whole thing to collapse. Call this the 'soap bubble' thesis; the only difference between it and the mirage thesis is that in some other version of the election, if Dean had done everything perfectly, he could have performed well. I leave the likelihood of a primary race going perfectly as an exercise for the reader, but neither model suggests a campaign prepared for the real world.

[...]

Prior to January, "Howard Dean" was pronounced "Anybody but Bush." The thing Dean did spectacularly right was to pick a fight with the President, a hugely polarizing and therefore energizing figure, on the issue most Democrats wanted to keep quiet about. Even if you'd been only been following politics casually, you would have known that Dean was the person who had most directly challenged Bush. For any Democrat whose primary motivation was not a bundle of particular policy proposals but the chance to send the current President home, Dean was the man of the hour.

In this view, the change in the poll numbers in January reflected not a transfer of votes from Dean to Kerry but rather from the general to the specific. Voter's polled as to their choices last year were not bound by their answers, and nor had most of them bothered to sort out the candidates positions from one another. (My wife and I, both deeply interested in the primaries, couldn't always remember all of their names.) A couple of weeks before the primaries, though, voters in those states started to have to make some real decisions, transferring their sense of "Anybody but Bush" to a specific Democratic candidate. And sometimes that candidate was Howard Dean. But mostly not.

[...]

The easy thing to explain is why Dean lost - the voters didn't like him. The hard thing to explain is why we (and why Dean himself) thought he'd win, and easily at that. The bubble of belief, which collapsed so quickly and so completely, was inflated by tools that made formerly hard things easy, tricking us into thinking that getting votes had become easy as well - we were all in Deanspace for a while there.

Shirky's got a lot more, including some pitfalls to be avoided to help keep future Internet-based campaigns from imploding (or dissolving, as the case may be). He lists of a number of things which aren't votes, and cannot substitute for them: support, effort, fervor, money, and sometimes even voters (when the right criteria isn't used to categorize and count them). For anyone interested in the potentially far-reaching effect of the Internet-based techniques introduced by Dean and Trippi, it's worth a close read.

It's been a shock, but it doesn't have to be a fatal one. Lowering coordination costs and making it easier for citizens to create media and distributing fundraising to the masses are all good things. This year, however, to the surprise of many of us, pasting those things on to relatively traditional campaigns has worked better than the Dean campaign's organic strategy did. The biggest difficulty for whatever version of next time comes around will be remembering not to believe our own PR.

[Link via PressThink]

Suffrage doesn't please female Kansas state senator

By FINN BULLERS - The Kansas City Star
Date: 09/27/01 22:15

A prominent female state senator has said that she does not support the 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote, and that if it were being considered today she would vote against it.

Sen. Kay O'Connor recently told the co-presidents of the Johnson County League of Women Voters that the amendment was the first step in a decades-long erosion of traditional family values.

The Olathe Republican was in the audience at a public affairs forum on juvenile justice at Johnson County Community College on Sept. 19, when league co-president Delores Furtado asked her if she was planning to attend the league's "Celebrate the Right to Vote" luncheon.

"You probably wouldn't want me there because of what I would have to say," O'Connor told Furtado after the forum had ended.

"Wasn't it in the best interest of our country to give women the right to vote?" Furtado asked the senator.

"Not necessarily so," O'Connor said.

Although she does vote, O'Connor said in two subsequent interviews with The Kansas City Star that if men had been protecting the best interests of women, then women would not be forced to cast ballots and serve in the state legislature. Instead, they could stay home, raise families and tend to domestic duties, she said.

O'Connor, the Senate's vice chairman of the elections and local government committee, said she could not help celebrate the 81-year-old piece of legislation, even though it gave her a statewide soapbox to share her views on everything from tax policy to school vouchers.

Asked if she supports the 19th Amendment, the Republican lawmaker responded: "I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women (today) we wouldn't have to vote.

"I'm sorry women have not been taken more care of," she said. "We have gotten the short end of the stick."

If the measure were up for ratification today, she said, she would not support it.

Furtado said she was dumbfounded by those views.

There's more, but that's about the gist of it.

They both come from upper-class, privileged backgrounds and they both project a sense of entitlement. Like Bush, Dean seems to get pissed-off when he doesn't get his way, which is not attractive to people. People like nobless oblige not petulance from the privilaged and powerful. Different in all other ways from Bush - intelligent vs dumb, constructive vs destructive, I think this is the personality component in Dean which like Bush, makes a lot of people not like him.

And Workingdog also thinks that the tone of the Dean campaign turns people off:

You don't really feel you have a choice when you talk to many Dean 'believers.' Instead they project the sense that you better like their guy or you're not a real democrat - accompanied by put-downs of Kerry. Too Messianic. He's not Jesus. People are very passionate about their right to choose a candidate, and quickly get turned off by coercion. Especially when the guy being pushed on them, created a lot of his own troubles.

Edwards is the first politician who, when he talks to a room full of middle-class people, doesn't necessarily seem to be promising something to them. Sure, he's a little vague about just where the line is between the "Two Americas" -- it's "the rich and powerful" and "everyone else." But when he gets specific, when he starts talking about the ten-year-old girl who goes to sleep hoping that it isn't as cold tomorrow as today because she doesn't have warm enough clothes -- it's got to be apparent to any audience that he's not talking about what he's going to do for them. He's making a moral claim about what our country owes to those who have the least, not promising something to everyone who "works hard and plays by the rules." And, shocking as it is, that's a big deal. And it matters that it comes from a candidate who is generally perceived as a moderate -- if only because he's a southerner -- rather than the leftmost candidate in the race. [...]

[...]

Dean's transformation of the Democratic party was largely procedural, though not unimportant. He helped the party see that enthusiasm could be as valuable as converting a swing voter at the 50th percentile. He showed that money could be raised from supporters of any age, income or background, that the only contributors were not those on the Democratic National Committees official list of proven contributors. And he showed how giving up control of a campaign, letting it be driven by its supporters, could generate tremendous enthusiasm. Edwards' campaign has been more conventional in procedure, and in the end, while doing "better than expected," he is still unlikely to be the Democratic nominee. But if Democrats hear his language, the willingness to make a moral claim about what our country should be like, not just what he will do for the middle of the middle [class], it will be a powerful voice.

I'd say it's still an open question how much of the tone of Edwards' campaign gets adopted for the general election -- perhaps it depends on whether Edwards is on the ticket or not -- but a campaign that provides both a strong practical rationale to vote against George W. Bush (based on his dismal record of massive disachievement, the mendacity of his administration and its general incompetence), and a strong moral reason to vote for the Democratic alternative could be very successful. It seems to me that what's driving Democrats right now is the former, hence the votes for Kerry on the dubious "electability" rationale (i.e. he can beat Bush). This is fine for the primaries when more of the voters will tend to be committed Democrats, but doesn't do anything to provide reasons for the voter in the general electorate to go for the Democrat. It's not going to be enough to knock down Bush, people have to be given a positive rationale as well.

(Paradoxically, Bush's "positive" rationale will be a highly negative FUDdy one: the world is a dangerous place, don't change horses in mid-stream. That's a strong argument to many people and one that has to be rebutted head-on. That might mean that Kerry, even Kerry the war hero, would prefer to have a vice president with good national security credentials, someone like Clark, rather than someone who "speaks to the people" like Edwards. After all, Edwards' neo-populist message can be taken up by the Kerry campaign without bringing on the salesman, whereas it's the specific person of Clark that would provide an advantage.

The best plan would be to integrate them both into the campaign, but that may be impossible unless Clark is willing to settle for something less than v.p.)

Postscript: On Daily Kos, Trapper John also considers, a lot more coherently than I did here, the need for Kerry and the Democrats to find an overarching theme for the campaign:

Instead of just shouting "AWOL! AWOL!," we need to begin tying the micro issue of Bush's military misadventures into a larger theme about privilege and, yes, [Edwards'] "Two Americas." We need to make the AWOL issue part of a seamless metanarrative about the fundamentally elitist vision of the GOP.

I think there's a danger here, however, of always returning to the negative, to the attack on Bush and the GOP. That's understandable, given their malfeasance and misdeeds, but it also holds the strong possibility that it will just turn people off entirely if something positive isn't provided at the same time.

• Why do people dislike Howard Dean so much? I have more than a little trouble understanding it, but obviously they do -- his "unfavorable" rating in a recent poll in Wisconsin was an extraordinary 54%. I have friends who have almost the same kind of negative visceral reaction to Dean that I do to Bush, and they can't really explain why. There's some talk about how he won't attract swing voters, but that's really the whole circular "electability" argument in another guise. There's talk about his temper, how angry he is, but there really isn't any public evidence to back up that bit of conventional wisdom, not that I know of, anyway, so it's hard to accept that as a reason for disliking Dean, especially when the feeling is so virulent.
  
  It's a mystery to me, I don't read him the way other people obviously do (people who agree with me on my reading of the anger and hardness that lies underneath Bush's faux exterior), so I really don't get it. I can't deny it, and it would be foolish for the Democratic party to put forth as a standard bearer a man who sizable numbers of people dislike and would vote for only because the alternative was so utterly objectionable (not that there's a chance in hell that Dean's going to be the nominee, something he'll be coming to grips with quite soon, I think.
  
  Anyone who has any good ideas on what it is about Dean that incites people against him, let me know via e-mail and I'll post them.



• I worry a little that the media, in evaluating the service records that Bush & Co. dumped on them on Friday, is not going to notice if something that should be there is missing. I assume (and hope) that there are consultants out there consulting with the press, ex-military people familiar with what the file of a Texas Air National Guardsman from that period should look like, to help determine what's been held back (aside from the full medical records, and why weren't they part of the dump?).
  
  Maybe, to make things easier and provide a standard for comparison, some enterprising journalist should get one of the people who served at the same time as Bush, and in the same Texas unit, to waive their privacy rights and allow their entire file to be released to the press in response to an FOIA request. That would provide the exemplar (or exemplars if several men could be convinced to go along) against which Bush's record can be compared and contrasted.

Most marks come from the upper strata of society which, in America, means that they have made, married, or inherited money. Because of this, they acquire status which in time they come to attribute to some inherent superiority, especially as regards matters of sound judgment in finance and investment. Friends and associates, themselves social climbers and sycophants, help to maintain this illusion of superiority. Eventually, the mark comes to regard himself as a person of vision, and even of genius. Thus a Babbit who has cleared half a million in a real-estate development easily forgets the part which luck and chicanery have played in his financial rise; he accepts his mantle of respectability without question; he naively attributes his success to sound business judgment.

You can see this psychology at work elsewhere, of course, like in the scion of a powerful political family who's been closely shepharded throughout his life, gotten out of jams, provided with unearned opportunities and windfalls, every step totally managed by handlers and keepers. Because he's been, in effect, kept, he never develops any humility or awareness of his own deficiencies and attributes his great good fortune to his own innate abilities, which are, in actual fact, substandard in almost every respect, except perhaps for his capacity for conning people into voting for him.

Once the emperor's lack of clothes has been pointed out, though, it's almost impossible to restore them.

The Big Con is good reading, well worth picking up used at Amazon or Half.com. It supposedly inspired The Sting, and I kept seeing in it the mechanisms behind Jim Thompson's The Grifters (or the movie version) and David Mamet's House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner.

Update: Back to Bush, Bob Herbert says it well:

Mr. Bush's experience in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam years is especially relevant today because it throws a brighter spotlight on who he really is. He has walked a charmed road, with others paying the price of his journey, every step of the way.

[Via Suburban Guerilla]