Pretty much everyone in both parties has been discounting the results of the Time poll giving President Bush a ten point lead coming out of the convention -- for various reasons having to do with the methodology of the poll and two other polls giving a different result.
But now, according to pollingreport.com at least, Newsweek has a poll out with almost identical numbers: Bush 54%, Kerry 43%.
--Josh Marshall
Karen gets results!
A little more on the boo-a-rama, <$NoAd$>from a reporter on the scene ...
Karen Hughes went totally apesh-t at the AP when that dispatch hit the wire.She stormed up the bleachers and starting screaming at the AP writer (who took it in stride). "They didn't boo! Were you and I in the same rally! What is this crap?" or something along those lines (it was loud in there). The AP writer then canvassed his colleagues, who all said they hadn't heard any boos.
Say what you want about McClellan ("dreadful briefer," "talking points only"), I don't think he's ever screamed at a reporter.
The innards of a campaign ...
--Josh Marshall
From a story in Saturday's Washington Post, we now have more evidence that the Larry Franklin investigation goes well beyond Larry Franklin.
According to the Post, FBI investigators are looking at people in Feith's office (Harold Rhode), Cheney's office (David Wurmser) and on the Defense Policy Board (Richard Perle).
I'm swamped at the moment working on another project. But note that the people in question track almost exactly with the list of the most ardent supporters of Ahmed Chalabi in the administration.
Be sure to read this article.
More later.
--Josh Marshall
I take this as a final, definitive word on the back and forth about whether there was booing at the Bush rally.
This comes from a reporter on the scene whose judgment <$NoAd$>and honesty I completely trust ...
They didn't boo. More accurately, the overwhelming number of people didn't boo (I heard maybe one or two, and even those died with "hospitalized.") AP got it wrong.When Bush said "En route here we just received news that President Clinton has been hospitalized in New York," there was a big intake of breath and some loud "oohs" in the crowd. It was unmistakably shock. No boos.
Bush then followed up, and the official transcript has it right: "He is in our thoughts and prayers. We send him our best wishes for a swift and speedy recovery. (Applause.)"
End of story. I give Bush and the crowd their due.
--Josh Marshall
Time Magazine's poll of likely voters, conducted over the course of the convention: Bush 52%, Kerry 41%, Nader 3%. Zogby, over the same period and also of likely voters, Bush 46%, Kerry 44%. ARG, covering through Wednesday Sept. 1st, also among likely voters, Bush 48%, Kerry 47%.
--Josh Marshall
From the Associated Press, via Atrios and others ...
President Bush on Friday wished Bill Clinton ``best wishes for a swift and speedy recovery.''``He's is in our thoughts and prayers,'' Bush said at a campaign rally.
Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wis., booed. Bush did nothing to stop them.
A leader ...
Late Update: The AP has now apparently retracted the part of this article about booing. So presumably the reporter didn't hear what she thought she heard. A number of readers tell me they saw video of the event and heard no booing. Kevin Drum has a link to a audio clip that seems to confirm those accounts.
--Josh Marshall
Two perspectives ..<$NoAd$>.
Our strategy is succeeding. Four years ago, Afghanistan was the home base of al-Qaida, Pakistan was a transit point for terrorist groups, Saudi Arabia was fertile ground for terrorist fundraising, Libya was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons, Iraq was a gathering threat, and al-Qaida was largely unchallenged as it planned attacks. Today, the government of a free Afghanistan is fighting terror, Pakistan is capturing terrorist leaders, Saudi Arabia is making raids and arrests, Libya is dismantling its weapons programs, the army of a free Iraq is fighting for freedom, and more than three-quarters of al-Qaida's key members and associates have been detained or killed. We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer."
"As speakers at the GOP convention trumpet Bush administration successes in the war on terrorism, an NBC News analysis of Islamic terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, shows that attacks are on the rise worldwide — dramatically.Of the roughly 2,929 terrorism-related deaths around the world since the attacks on New York and Washington, the NBC News analysis shows 58 percent of them — 1,709 — have occurred this year.
In the past 10 days, in fact, the number of dead has risen by 142 people in places as diverse as Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel. On Tuesday, the number of civilians killed by terrorists totaled 38 — 10 at a subway entrance bombing in Moscow, 16 in a bus bombing in Israel and 12 Nepalese executed in Iraq.
Moreover, the level of sophistication is increasing. Terrorism experts point in particular to the attacks apparently carried out by Chechen rebels during that 10-day period. The rebels, whose top military commanders have been Arabs, are operating at a whole different level."
NBC News
September 2nd, 2004
--Josh Marshall
Breaking News from CNN: "Doctors tell former President Bill Clinton that he needs heart bypass surgery, sources tell CNN. Details soon."
Says AP: Clinton to have quadruple bypass.
--Josh Marshall
The Post has a piece today fact-checking a number of these distortions about Kerry's record, statements and positions, which I referred to last night.
--Josh Marshall
A key passage from today's article by Warren <$NoAd$>Strobel on the Knight Ridder wire ...
Several U.S. officials and law enforcement sources said Thursday that the scope of the FBI probe of Pentagon intelligence activities appeared to go well beyond the Franklin matter.FBI agents have briefed top White House, Pentagon and State Department officials on the probe in recent days. Based on those briefings, officials said, the bureau appears to be looking into other controversies that have roiled the Bush administration, some of which also touch Feith's office.
They include how the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group backed by the Pentagon, allegedly received highly classified U.S. intelligence on Iran; the leaking of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame to reporters; and the production of bogus documents suggesting that Iraq tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger. Bush repeated the Niger claim in making the case for war against Iraq.
"The whole ball of wax" was how one U.S. official privy to the briefings described the inquiry.
Read the whole thing.
--Josh Marshall
Looking back over the RNC one of the clear objectives was to reconstruct the picture of the last four years in which the previous administration left the country vulnerable to the 9/11 attack and President Bush revolutionized our defenses and doctrines in order to combat the threat.
That view of matters was the conventional wisdom until roughly a year ago when it started to be pulled apart by a series of official investigations and belatedly aggressive journalism.
In fact, the president ignored the terrorist threat during his first months in office. After the war in Afghanistan he pulled resources away from the war against al Qaida to fight the war in Iraq -- which played a key role in allowing bin Laden and other key AQ leaders to slip the noose. And along the way he used systematic deception to game the country into the conflict.
(The Senate intel Report tries to work its way around that fact. But I suspect that Report will be taking a bit of a hit in the next few weeks.)
I don't mean to rehash all that's come out in the last eighteen months. But there was an effort to deny all of it through the use of effective rhetoric without rebuttal. The Dems will have to start deconstructing it again now.
--Josh Marshall
From Reuters .<$NoAd$>..
Sen. Zell Miller, whose scathing speech at the Republican convention outraged fellow Democrats, was so booked with television interviews that he could not sit in President Bush's guest box at the convention on Thursday as first planned. The Bush re-election campaign initially intended for the Georgia senator and his wife, Shirley, to sit among the honored guests with first lady Laura Bush and other VIPs as the president accepted the Republican nomination to a new term in office.The campaign later released a guest list that dropped Miller and his wife from the list. Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said Miller was not in the box because the Bush campaign had scheduled him to do too many television interviews.
Stanzel said the campaign was delighted that Miller, a conservative Democrat, participated at the convention.
From NBC ...
After gauging the harsh reaction from Democrats and Republicans alike to Sen. Zell Miller’s keynote address at the Republican National Convention, the Bush campaign — led by the first lady — backed away Thursday from Miller’s savage attack on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, insisting that the estranged Democrat was speaking only for himself.Late Thursday, Miller and his wife were removed from the list of dignitaries who would be sitting in the first family’s box during the president’s acceptance speech later in the evening. Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Miller was not in the box because the campaign had scheduled him to do too many television interviews.
There was no explanation, however, for why Miller would be giving multiple interviews during Bush’s acceptance speech, or what channels would snub the president in favor of Miller. Nor was it made clear why Miller’s wife also was not allowed to take her place in the president’s box 24 hours after his deeply personal denunciation of his own party’s nominee.
The change was made only a few hours after Laura Bush, asked about Miller’s speech, said in an interview with NBC News that “I don’t know that we share that point of view.” Aides to President Bush and his campaign said.
--Josh Marshall
Let me share with you some quick and hastily-assembled thoughts about the evening just concluded.
I thought the president tonight was better than his speech. And what I mean by that is that he seemed confident, assured, and at ease -- all the qualities that he should have conveyed and embodied. But the speech itself, while good, seemed like less than it could have been. In many ways I thought Cheney's was better.
I trust you'll understand that it's a given that I didn't think much of the content of either speech. But purely evaluating them in terms of political effectiveness, I thought the president's speech left unaddressed issues that I thought he should have and could have dealt with more effectively.
My watching of the speech was disrupted in a jarring way because I happened to be sitting two seats away from one of the protestors who was hustled out of the arena during the president's speech. An unassuming women had been sitting on our press row for the couple hours prior to the speech. And about half way through out of the corner of my eye I saw a plainclothes police officer lunge in our direction. I looked back to see the woman who -- without my having noticed -- had tossed on a pink slip over her dress and I guess was about to start some sort of chant or statement.
He grabbed her; there was a brief commotion. Other officers rushed in our direction. And then before I could even figure out what was going on, she was gone.
There are some more details to the story, including the journalist sitting next to me, who started yelling at the woman -- or perhaps better to say, aggressively scolding her -- as she was dragged off. But I'll leave that till tomorrow.
--Josh Marshall
Remember how President Bush has said, any country that looks at me the wrong way, that's a country I'm going to wipe from the face of the earth? And do you remember how he said that if he didn't read the August 6 PDB that that wasn't his problem and people should stop complaining about it?
I admit that I probably can't point to a direct citation for those things the president says. But then I don't know if George Pataki or the others can point to where John Kerry said he would only attack terrorists after they attacked us first.
--Josh Marshall
"The whole week was double-ply, wall-to-wall ugly. The tone was set early on ... Allowances should be made for rhetorical excess ... But, even so, the Republican Party reached an unimaginably slouchy, and brazen, and constant, level of mendacity last week ... [President Bush] is in "campaign mode" now, which means mendacity doesn't matter, aggression is all and wall-to-wall ugly is the order of battle for the duration."
August 31st, 1992
Newsweek
--Josh Marshall
"Our tribe will attack their tribe. And then we will kill their men, make their livestock our own and take their women to mate."
This, I'm told, is from the draft version of Zell Miller's speech, before word came down that Zell really shouldn't hold back.
After all the grief Howard Dean got way back when, I'll be watching to see how much follow-on there will be after Miller went from delivering that speech to going on Chris Matthews' show and challenges him to a duel.
(The transcript is really worth reading, if you didn't see it live.)
It's also worth glancing at this CNN interview that they did with Miller just after the speech, in which they pointed out that most of the factual assertions he made in the speech were false.
(CNN's still in awfully bad shape; but credit where credit is due.)
Kevin Drum has a nice run-down of responses from across the web.
Actually I think Atrios get props for the best out of the box response to Miller when he said: "Wow, I never thought Zell would be able to improve on the original German version of Pat Buchanan's '92 speech, but he did."
--Josh Marshall
An important story, though one we're likely to hear little about: former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim was released today after his (by all accounts trumped up) sodomy conviction was overturned by the country's high court.
--Josh Marshall
The latest numbers from ARG ...
John Kerry and George W. Bush remain tied nationally. Among all voters in a survey conducted August 30-September 1, Kerry is at 48% and Bush is at 46%. Among likely voters, Bush is at 48% and Kerry is at 47%.With Ralph Nader in the race, it is Kerry 46%, Bush 45%, and Nader 3% among all voters and Bush 47%, Kerry 47%, and Nader 3% among likely voters.
Kerry has lost support among Independents <$NoAd$>in the past month.
Among all Americans, 48% disapprove of the way Bush is handling his job and 45% approve. When it comes to handling the economy, 51% of all Americans disapprove and 43% approve.
Again, as I said before, Kerry has lost ground -- as ARG notes, among independents, which is the only fluid part of the electorate this year. But you can't really say he's out of it as he's not even clearly behind.
--Josh Marshall
Be sure to check out NewDonkey.com on Zell Miller. "On an evening supposedly devoted to defending the administration's economic record, the two big prime-time speakers, Zell Miller and Dick Cheney, unloaded a truckload of bile against John Kerry's national security record. I'm not sure I've ever heard so many slurs, misleading inferences, and bold-face lies in the course of an hour of rhetoric." (Just between us, the author of this blog is a Georgian who knows Zell like the back of his hand.)
--Josh Marshall
A friend of mine from across the aisle wrote in this morning, saying that however much of a whacko Zell Miller might have sounded like last night, the GOP has a message for this election, and Miller pounded that message again and again. The message, of course, is Bush will keep you safe; Kerry won't. The Democrats, he said, have no message other than that Bush was AWOL in Texas and Alabama.
There's some real truth in that analysis, or at least in part. The Democrats do have a message but it's been submerged for most of the last three weeks. And that is the main reason why they've lost traction over that period.
The message is straightforward and explainable in ascending levels of specificity.
At its simplest: President Bush has screwed everything up.
A tad less simple: President Bush lied the country into war and then screwed up Iraq. He's racked up huge deficit numbers but no good jobs numbers. He's blown a lot of stuff up; but he's made America less safe.
In that second version, I've made no attempt to craft the whole thing together like a good message maven would do. But that is the essence of it -- accountability, a simple look at the guy's record. Most of his policies were sold on dishonesty and pretty much all of them have failed. In the real world the consequence of screwing everything up is getting canned. Little of the president's life has been lived in the real world. But we have to. So he should be fired.
Here's just one point the Dems could start off on today. For all the mumbo-jumbo about the 'success' with Libya, the two biggest nuclear dangers to America are North Korea and Iran -- Iraq never was one. President Bush has completely screwed up both of them. He's let both of them cruise right along to becoming nuclear states without doing anything of any consequence except barking some occasional tough talk and letting his more gonzo supporters whip up some Spy vs. Spy ridiculousness on the fringes.
Keep the focus on the president's manifest record of failure and he loses this election. Simple as that.
That's why this whole Republican convention has come down to Zell Miller with a shotgun in hand, out in front of the cabin, holding the A-rabs and other outsiders at bay until President Bush can come save the day. Save the womenfolk. Cherish the household gods. I may die but if I do my finger will be clenched on this trigger.
--Josh Marshall
While Zell Miller was speaking this evening, I was sitting in the radio section of Madison Square Garden, down a few floors from the main level, crouched in a pocket where I managed to find some available connectivity to finish up some reporting. That's a fancy way of saying that I didn't hear the thing word-for-word, only the tenor and certain passages and the various talk radio hounds whooping and cheering for this line or that.
But just on a pure political level it didn't seem to me like the sort of speech the planners would want in prime time. There's a lot of rage and anger in that man -- and I can't imagine a viewer coming to that speech with an open and politically-uncommitted mind who wouldn't wonder where it was from. The tone struck me as a bit ranting and wild, barking and angry, with Miller channeling some mix of Heart of Darkness and Deliverance, which I can't quite decipher but did not want to be near.
Andrew Sullivan captures Miller's craggy and curdled mix of lies and blood and soil. A senator from the other party willing to endorse your party's nominee is something that would be hard for either party to pass up. But I think the Republicans let this one go to their head.
Three years ago Miller called Kerry one of the "nation's authentic heroes." Now, he seems to think differently.
I mentioned in a previous post these quotes from Mitt Romney's speech, which came earlier in the evening. And even though his speech -- in some superficial sense -- probably didn't seem like such a red-meat endeavor, to me it captured the imagery of foreboding, fear and lies which is at the heart of this convention, but seldom stated so crisply.
First, of course, there were the back of the hand slaps at Kerry’s military service. Romney said he “respect[ed Kerry's] four months under fire in Vietnam.” But then there were these lines: “America is under attack from almost every direction.” Not just from the terrorists, it seems. But everywhere and by everyone. Everyone wants to get us. We're in danger on every front. And of course the inevitable kulturkampf or stab in the back dimension of the story: “American values are under attack from within.”
If one weren’t so level-headed one might think someone was trying to whip up mass-hysteria.
Along those lines, I’ve been listening closely to the way these speakers talk about war – its immanence and ever-presence, often in ways that don’t jump out at you. In his speech on Monday Sen. George Allen --- current head of the Republicans’ Senate campaign committee --- called this election “the most important since 1980” and then went on to describe this one and that one both as “elections decided in the midst of war.”
The ‘war’ he was talking about for 1980, of course, was the Cold War. But the tenor of the comparison to me had an ominous feel, a retrospective redefinition of the past aimed at making war seem like a permanent, ever-present condition.
Was 1980 a war-time election? I don’t think most people at the time would have said so. Indeed, I think that’s an understatement. Was national security a major issue? Yes. But an election decided in time of war? 1980 was a peacetime election. 1968 and 1972 might fairly be called wartime elections. 1944 was definitely a wartime election. Not 1980.
After Miller left the stage I hustled my way up to the seventh floor to listen to Vice President Cheney’s speech in the hall itself. My first thought was, bold words for a man whose office is the subject of an on-going criminal inquiry. But apparently that’s not the subject of polite conversation.
As I walked around the hall --- in a circle from the left side of the stage all the way around to the right --- my sense was that the crowd was not quite as raucous as I might have expected. Not that it fell flat of course. There were plenty of applause lines. The audience got plenty animated with the advance-choreographed flipflop routine. And to his credit Cheney had much, much less of the swaggering militarism of Miller's diatribe. But the crowd didn’t seem to have the roar in it that I remember for Cheney’s speech four years ago.
It won't surprise you to hear me say that I'm no great fan of our Vice President. So perhaps it's telling -- or at least I found it telling as I walked back to Chelsea after I left the Garden -- that his speech struck me as one of the more level-headed ones I'd heard. This whole confab has been built around militarism, the seductions of the mentality of seige and insecurity both from without and within, and the sort of no-rules-win-at-all-costs-lie-if-it-works mentality that will lead this nation to grief.
--Josh Marshall
Thank you, Jack.
In Slate, Jack Shafer gives a nice run-down of Denny Hastert's low-rent smears of George Soros. He also points out that famed whack-job Lyndon LaRouche is a probable source of Hastert's information.
My only slight disagreement with Jack is on his global analysis of the matter. He calls Hastert a "nut job." I think he's just a smear artist, like some character out of a noir-ish movie from fifties, only he's Speaker of the House of Representatives.
--Josh Marshall
I've got to head upstairs to the hall to catch the Cheney speech with the full measure of Sturm und Drang. But let me leave you with these quotes from Mitt Romney's speech for future discussion ...
"i respect [Kerry's] four months under fire in Vietnam"
"america is under attack from almost every direction"
"american values are under attack from within"
--Josh Marshall
A little later we'll have more on the Ben Barnes story.
But for now, we seem to have a bit more detail on what the president was doing in Alabama in 1972. The president's story is that he got an opportunity to serve on a political campaign in Alabama and then put in for a transfer to serve his Air National Guard duty in that state. But the timing of what he did when has never added up. Nor are there any records to document the president's service. And there's never been anyone who seems to remember what Bush was doing -- or rather anyone who remembers and has been willing to go on the record.
And now Salon has some details that clears up part of the picture.
Jimmy Allison, was a campaign consultant and newspaper owner from Midland, and he was very close to the Bush family. In 1972 he was managing the Senate campaign of Winton Blount in Alabama.
According to his widow, that spring the president's father, George H. W. Bush, called up Allison and asked if he could find his son a job on the campaign to get him out of Texas and out of trouble. "The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing ... I think they wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him."
Asked if she'd ever seen the younger Bush in uniform during his time in Texas, Allison's wife Linda said, "Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way."
--Josh Marshall
The radical right's cynical pitch to the Jews: "My friends, there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There is only the global war on terrorism." Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Aug. 30, 2004, New York City.
--Josh Marshall
An amazing update on the rapid decline of CNN. Now, apparently, only intolerant Republicans can get a fair shake.
The pro-gay rights Republican group Log Cabin Republicans is running a thirty-second ad in favor of an inclusive, rather than an intolerant Republican party. The ad's running on other channels. Even Fox News has agreed to run it nationally, according to Christopher Barron, an LCR representative.
But CNN has refused to run it, calling it "too controversial."
--Josh Marshall
Denny Hastert just sent a letter to Soros in which he writes that groups that support drug legalization, which Soros has helped fund, are "the drug groups that I referred to in my comments on the Fox News Sunday program. Chris Wallace said, 'drug cartels.' I did not."
A couple problems with this comment. First of all, Hastert spoke of where Soros gets his money, not which groups he funds -- a rather important distinction, and not an accidental one, given what Hastert was trying to imply. If Hastert doesn't recognize the distinction, I'm not sure we want him voting on the nation's economic policy. More seriously, this was not an accidental slip, but clearly an intentional one. See the original exchange.
What's more, Hastert quite clearly responded with the same 'who knows?' response when Wallace put him on the spot, forcing him to stand by or not stand by what he was clearly implying. From the exchange ...
WALLACE: You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?HASTERT: I'm saying I don't know where groups--could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know. The fact is we don't know where this money comes from."
Again, 'where this money comes from'. The nugget of this one is really clear. Hastert goes on Fox raising questions about the source of Soros's money; and when he's called to account he responds by pointing to groups to which Soros gives his money. Hastert was trying to be cute with his words but that's the way slimesters always operate.
And in his letter there's even more dreck like this: "I also believe that 527 political organizations set a dangerous precedent for political discourse because we don't know where the money comes from. For all we know, funding for some of the 527s might come from foreign sources or worse."
Foreign funding or worse? A different angle on the same slime. It is certainly legitimate for Republicans to note that Soros has given financial support to groups which advocate drug decriminalization. It's not legitimate for them to lie about it or indulge in textbook-style McCarthyism.
And to think this man is second in line of succession to the presidency.
--Josh Marshall
Does the Political Director of the <$NoAd$>Republicans' senate campaign committee really see the Carson/Coburn race as a battle between "good" and "evil"?
This is the first graf of a press release put out this morning by the Carson (D)campaign ...
Following up from a debate on Monday where Tom Coburn called this race, “as the battle of good versus evil”, Patrick Davis, Political Director for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee (NRSC), echoed those comments today speaking to a breakfast of Oklahoma delegates at the National Republican Convention saying, “we also view this race as good versus evil”.
Perhaps the original quote from the candidate contains some ambiguity. But Davis' comment seems to remove all doubt. Where did they get this guy?
Apparently, Davis' comments are going to be in the Oklahoma papers tomorrow. For context on Coburn's remark, see these first few grafs from a story that ran yesterday in the Tulsa World ...
With the stakes high, the U.S. Senate candidates focus on their differences.With control of the U.S. Senate at stake in this political year, the race for one of Oklahoma's Senate seats heated up Monday when Republican Tom Coburn came face-to-face with Rep. Brad Carson, D-Okla., and called it "the battle of good versus evil."
A noon downtown Tulsa Kiwanis Club forum, which was aired live on talk radio station KRMG (740 AM), featured the leading candidates in the quest for the Senate seat that Republican Don Nickles will vacate at the end of this year.
Republicans control the Senate with 51 members to the Democrats' 48, plus one Democrat-aligned independent, but 34 Senate seats are up for grabs this year.
"If you don't recognize it," Coburn said, "you must. This is a battle for the culture of America and its future, and I would describe it as the battle of good versus evil."
If elected, Carson would vote to put liberals such as Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., in committee leadership positions if Democrats win control of the Senate, Coburn said.
Campaigns always have the game of catching each other out on awkward quotes. But it used to be that if one got caught calling the other 'evil', that meant some staffer was about to get tossed out on his ear. No more apparently...
--Josh Marshall
A bit more on Ben Barnes, the guy from Texas who got President Bush into the Guard way-back-when.
Apparently, the attacks on Kerry's war record just proved too much for him. As we've noted previously, for almost a decade now Barnes has gone to great lengths to avoid causing trouble for the president on the Guard matter. And the Bush folks in Texas have made it clear to him during this election cycle that if he spills the beans about the president that they'll do everything in their power to put him out of business in the state (Barnes is now a lobbyist). And that heat has, I'm told, increased dramatically in recent days.
But apparently those threats haven't done the trick because he has already taped a lengthy interview slated to appear in the not-too-distant future on a major national news show in which he'll describe the strings he pulled to keep Bush out of Vietnam and apparently more.
(Between you and me, according to my three sources on this, Barnes told his story to Dan Rather -- remember, the Texas connection -- for 60 Minutes.)
--Josh Marshall
Of course, he doesn't think it's true. But he won't apologize for suggesting it. That's the new line from Denny Hastert.
Over at Forbes.com, Michael Maiello got Hastert spokesman John Feehery to concede that the Speaker doesn't really believe George Soros gets his money from drug runners.
"Of course the Speaker doesn't think he gets money from drug cartels," Feehery told Maiello.
That said, Hastert won't apologize for suggesting he does.
--Josh Marshall
More on Soros and Hastert.
The Hill has a piece in Wednesday's paper in which the reporter asked Hastert's spokesman John Feehery whether he had any evidence of Soros' ties or funding by drug cartels. Feehery makes clear that he and his boss have no evidence for this whatsoever but insist that they stand behind the vaguely but ominously worded accusation.
(See this link for actual video of what Haster said. It's worth taking a moment to watch it because the bare words of text don't really do it justice.)
These are scary times. And it's an ominous sign of the times that the Speaker of the House can float such a false and extremely defamatory charge and have the behavior go almost unnoticed in the press.
Think about it.
--Josh Marshall
There's been a lot of back-and-forth on the state of the Franklin investigation in the last couple days -- whether it's serious and whether it extends beyond this one individual. But notwithstanding what some are reporting I hear the FBI says the original CBS report had the facts just right.
--Josh Marshall
Covering conventions always puts me in a sort of media bubble -- this one even more since I've been pretty much keeping to myself. But that leaves me with little sense of what the 'buzz' is on the shows and with the major columnists and so forth. And today I realized -- somehow suddenly -- that what had been a congealing sense that the second half of August had been a bad couple weeks for Kerry had turned into a galloping panic that his campaign is in disarray and hope for his candidacy may be close to over.
There are articles about a possible shake-up among high-level staffers, blind quotes from Democratic insiders saying that after a couple more days it may be too late; and I've gotten a slew of emails from readers either asking me if I still think there's hope or ranting that they've had it with Mary Beth Cahill or Stephanie Cutter or someone else.
All I can say is, really, really, shut up and calm down.
Politically, this is one of the worst things about Democrats -- and it has many sources. As a group they seem to have a great tendency toward becoming disheartened, turning on their candidate, doubting his strategy, doubting his advisors, and so forth. Unfortunately, the candidates and advisors have an equal tendency to be open to that kind of fretting. And with the media playing the handmaiden to the synergizing anxiety, the whole thing can become very demoralizing and damaging for campaigns.
Many folks look back and say Al Gore ran a terrible campaign. Maybe. Maybe not. For me, I look back and see something different. I remember a campaign that was far too sensitive to the spin and CW of the moment and thus capable of being buffeted by the smallest political squall. This, rather than any particular tactic or strategy, has always struck me as its greatest failing.
The Bush 2000 campaign was wholly different. They had many reverses. But there was never any serious question that a Rove or a Hughes would get canned. And if there was, the campaign sent out a clear signal that it would never happen. On many levels they were more disciplined.
That difference made a big difference in consistency of strategy and morale among the troops.
If you're a regular reader of this column, you'll know I've been very critical of the rapid-response from the Kerry campaign (wherever it may have gone to) as well as their seeming disinclination to go on the offensive and stay there.
But the difference between the race today and where it was two, three or four weeks ago is still very small. The difference in the national polls is very slight. The last nine major national polls have ABC (tied), ICR (+3 Kerry), Time (+2 Bush), Fox (+1 Kerry), CNN (+2 Bush), NBC/WSJ (+2 Bush), LAT (+2 Bush), NPR (+4 Kerry), IBD/CSM (tied).
(Those numbers are from the graphic on the front page of Pollingreport.com.)
Let me be clear: Those polls tell me the momentum of the race has clearly moved in the president's direction. And some of the state-by-state numbers (like PA, for instance) show that even more clearly. For all that, though, it is difficult to say that Kerry has lost the race when it's not even clear that he's behind.
Again, this is not a Pollyannaish post. The Kerry campaign needs to get control of the debate back from the president. And they need to start hitting much harder. But Democrats themselves need to be a lot tougher and hardier about the cycles campaigns go through. And that applies to self-serving Democratic 'insiders' too.
Discipline pays rewards.
--Josh Marshall
I'm here in Madison Square Garden and I just heard the head of the South Carolina delegation announce their votes and add that South Carolina is the "most patriotic state" in the country. But of course South Carolina was also the seedbed and the leader of the only organized treason in the country's history. But I guess I'm just picky.
--Josh Marshall
From the Times on Hollinger ...
" Hollinger wasn't a company where isolated improper and abusive acts took place," said the report, largely written by Richard C. Breeden, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Rather, it said, Hollinger was "an entity in which ethical corruption was a defining characteristic."...
The report was particularly critical of the audit committee of the board, which it said had not performed its duties to monitor what was going on. But the report saved its harshest criticism for Richard Perle, the former Reagan administration official and current member of a Pentagon advisory board. It said it did not consider Mr. Perle to have been an independent director and called on him to
return $5.4 million in pay he received after "putting his own interests above those of Hollinger's shareholders."
And in <$NoAd$>the Globe on Franklin ...
Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and current adviser to the Pentagon, said the investigations are baseless and politically motivated."It's pretty nasty, and unfortunately the administration doesn't seem to have it under control," said Perle, calling on the administration to defend Feith more vigorously.
And from a few weeks ago in the LA Times on the Chalabi arrest warrant ...
Richard N. Perle, a former top advisor to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and a leader of the so-called neoconservatives who embraced Chalabi and the war, said in an interview that he believed the warrants were part of an effort against Chalabi undertaken by the Iraqi government with the support of the U.S. government."I'm sure it's been encouraged by the U.S.," Perle said in an interview from Europe.
He said CIA and State Department officials have long opposed Chalabi and have convinced others in the government to move against him. Now officials in the White House oppose Chalabi as well, Perle said.
"It was those reports that led to a decision to destroy him," Perle said, adding that he believed there was no basis to the reports that Chalabi passed classified information to Iran.
And from The New York Sun in May on the investigation into Chalabi's passing US intelligence to Iran ...
A scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Richard Perle, said, "I don't believe he has ever been given top U.S. classified information, let alone anything of a highly classified nature....I believe the whole operation is politically motivated. The accusations, the embellishment of the accusations, I believe this is fundamentally malicious and politically motivated by people who became fearful that Ahmad Chalabi might emerge as a major figure in Iraq."
Sic Transit ...
--Josh Marshall
You'll remember a couple days ago we noted House Speaker Denny Hastert suggesting that George Soros may get his money from drug cartels or other such groups.
I've talked to reporters who've asked Hastert this around the convention hall. And he's been aggressively restating the 'charge.' I'm told he even shoved his finger in the chest of one of them when repeating it.
Now Soros has written this letter to Hastert, asking him to put up or shut up, or, more specifically "either substantiate these claims -- which you canont do because they are false -- or publicly apologize for attempting to defame my character and damage my reputation."
Whatever you think of Soros, this is the sort of slur that only comes from a real pig. And to think that the author of it is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and out in the light of day.
--Josh Marshall
April Bush mocks August Bush ...
"One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we're asking questions, is, can you ever win the war on terror? Of course, you can."
--Josh Marshall
A new clarification from Scott McClellan: We can't "win" the terror war. But we will "prevail."
--Josh Marshall
Okay, we've got our new 'terror <$NoAd$>war' strategic concept of the day from President Bush.
We can't win the war on terror actually means we can win but our victory won't be memorialized in a peace treaty ....
I should have made my point more clear about what I meant. What I meant was that this is not a conventional war. It is a different kind of war. We're fighting people who have got a dark ideology who use terrorists, terrorism, as a tool. They're trying to shake our conscience. They're trying to shake our will, and so in the short run the strategy has got to be to find them where they lurk. I tell people all the time, "We will find them on the offense. We will bring them to justice on foreign lands so we don't have to face them here at home," and that's because you cannot negotiate with these people. And in a conventional war there would be a peace treaty or there would be a moment where somebody would sit on the side and say we quit. That's not the kind of war we're in, and that's what I was saying. The kind of war we're in requires, you know, steadfast resolve, and I will continue to be resolved to bring them to justice, but as well as to spread liberty ... There's no doubt in my mind, so long as this country stays resolved and strong and determined, and by winning, I just would remind your listeners that Pakistan is now an ally in the war on terror.
The president deserves every whack he gets for changing his position twice in three days on the issue he has made the centerpiece of his campaign. But folks should also start using his bobbling to make the point that the issue is less whether the president thinks the 'terror war' is winnable than the fact that he doesn't even have any clear idea of how to fight it.
(A reader makes a good point: Reading the above, you can see why President Bush doesn't 'do nuance.' It ain't his strong suit.)
--Josh Marshall
It's not quite 'I sing of arms and the man.' But it'll do.
Don't miss Dana Milbank's piece in the Post today -- "This is a story about Swift boats and FastShip."
FastShip is the lobbying client of one of Kerry's new accusers, which just bagged a $40 million contract from the federal government.
--Josh Marshall
"We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war (i.e., the war on terror) we did not start yet one that we will win."
"I don’t think you can win it (i.e., the war on terror). But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are — less acceptable in parts of the world."
Come to think of it, this may be an ingenious way to pump up viewership for the president's speech on Thursday night. Tune in to find out his final answer: can we win or can't we? We'll be on the edge of our seats.
We're told that later today the president will be commenting on whether the war between Oceania and East Asia is winnable.
--Josh Marshall
MSNBC question of the day: Did Giuliani's speech make you love George W. Bush or did you love him already? It's pretty much that bad. Check it out right here.
Gives new meaning to the phrase 'anti-choice.'
Late Update: MSNBC has now changed the question to: Did Rudy Giuliani's speech move you to support the Bush-Cheney ticket? Yes, No.
Originally, it was: Did Rudy Giuliani's speech reassure you or move you to support the Bush-Cheney ticket? Reassure, Move you to support.
--Josh Marshall
I notice that in Elizabeth Bumiller's story on President Bush's 'can't win the war on terror' remark she suggests that he may merely have misspoken: "It was unclear if Mr. Bush had meant to make the remark to Mr. Lauer, or if he misspoke. But White House officials said the president was not signaling a change in policy, and they sought to explain his statement by saying he was emphasizing the long-term nature of the struggle."
I'm having a difficult time figuring out what prompted his remark. But the idea that he misspoke seems pretty improbable since the statement was followed by a detailed elaboration of what he meant.
--Josh Marshall
Two days ago Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel wrote: "An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday."
Strobel, you'll remember, was one of the few reporters to have written in advance about the problems with the administration's evidence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and ties with terrorist groups. Until recently, press critics and ombudsmen -- writing mea culpas for their own organizations' work -- have been pointing to Strobel's reporting in 2002 as an example of the sort of skepticism they should have given to many of the administration's claims.
In any case, if you have not already, read Strobel's article. Then also read this article from tomorrow's Washington Post.
It's a follow-up on the Franklin story focusing on the fact that in the last few days the FBI has interviewed several senior Pentagon officials, including Doug Feith and Peter Rodman, as part of their probe. (The Times, meanwhile, says the meeting with Feith was to brief him on the investigation rather than to interview him for it -- though they seem to have gotten that information from a Pentagon source, rather than someone at the FBI, which makes it less reliable.)
The Post piece is an odd article -- not a bad one but an odd one since various parts of the piece seem to point such different directions. Some passages imply that investigators are simply jotting their 'i's and crossing their 't's before wrapping the whole thing up; others suggest the probe is much broader, reaching far beyond Franklin.
The key seems to be -- and this has been reported in other articles -- that Franklin has been "cooperating with investigators for several weeks", as the Post puts it. There's only utility in getting someone like Franklin's cooperation if there are other people in the mix. I trust Strobel's reporting on this one: something bigger than just Larry Franklin is involved here.
Another point worth mentioning: The piece in Tuesday's Times seems to rely much more heavily on DOD sources than the Post, which seems to be working more equally from DOD and law enforcement sources. Needless to say, too great a reliance on DOD sources in this case is inherently problematic since there seems to be a good chance that this investigation covers a lot of ground in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Another sign of the tilt in the Times reporting in this graf toward the end of the piece ...
Mr. Franklin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency for most of his government career until he transferred to the Pentagon policy office in the summer of 2001 to deal with Iranian issues. In his current job, he is one of two Iran desk officers who work in the policy office's Northern Gulf directorate. Mr. Franklin is one of about 1,500 employees who work under Mr. Feith in the policy office.
Narrowly speaking, this is factual. But it's pure spin. To say that Franklin is simply one of 1500 people working under Feith, i.e., just one cog in a vast bureaucracy, is quite misleading. He's an important person in Feith's operation -- which isn't surprising really since he's an analyst on a topic -- Iran -- at the center of Feith's concerns. And Iran policy is already a dicey matter since this is the same shop that used to be the main locus of Chalabism in the governmnet. And of course Chalabi later ended up to have been feeding US intelligence to the Iranians.
Feith's operation has been at the center of a number of bizarre intelligence snafus and embarrassments -- at least two of which have now spawned criminal investigations. One of the more memorable ones was being in charge of post-war planning for Iraq, which didn't pan out that well. Feith's office is also closely tied to Vice President Cheney's office, which is the focus of the Plame investigation.
At some point you'd figure it might draw some actual investigative scrutiny.
--Josh Marshall
Sen. Kit Bond gave a short speech this afternoon which differed substantially from the 'prepared remarks' sent out to journalists in advance. If I'm not mistaken one of his ad-libs was a charge that former Kerry foreign policy advisor had gotten caught "putting the president's PDBs into his BVDs."
A class act, that Kit Bond.
I'm a little embarrassed since Bond is the Senator from the state of my birth. But setting his smarminess aside, the accuracy of his riff on Berger is actually apropos of the rest of his remarks.
Bond's remarks were focused on claiming that President Bush had been vindicated in the '16 words' he used in his 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger.
I can't quote his words specifically because they included so many ad-libs from the prepared text. But the substance of it was that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had discredited the charges against the White House on this point and found that the president's statement was "well-founded."
Though Bond is on the Intelligence Committee, I doubt he had much involvement in the Committee's work or the Report. But if he did, he certainly knows that the Report intentionally left out a number of facts that came out of the committee's investigation, which -- had they been revealed -- would have placed the Niger matter in a very different light. Many of them center around a particular country that goes almost unmentioned in the Senate Report.
A lot more should be coming out about that Report in the next couple weeks and on the Niger matter. Make a note of Bond's remarks for future reference.
--Josh Marshall
The Bush retreat?
"We have a clear vision on how to win the war on terror and bring peace to the world."-- George W. Bush
July 30th 2004."I don’t think you can win [the war on terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are — less acceptable in parts of the world.”
-- George W. Bush
Aug. 29th, 2004.
We've had such reverses in one month?
[ed.note: thanks to sleuthing from this site for the first quote.]
--Josh Marshall
An update on Republican charges that Democratic 527s are accusing President Bush of "poisoning pregnant women."
I ran into Bush campaign chairman Gov. Marc Racicot this morning after I picked up my convention credentials. So I asked him what 527 ads he was referring to as accusing President Bush of "poisoning pregnant women."
Racicot told me that he believed he was referring to ads on mercury run by the Sierra Club. You can see the
scripts of those ads and RNC analysis of them here -- scroll down to the Sierra Club ads from April. You be the judge of whether that's an accurate characterization of what they say.
On top of that, the ads don't even seem to have been funded by a 527. A Sierra Club spokesperson this afternoon told me that those ads were funded by Sierra's regular 501c3.
Gov. Racicot is going to be interviewed by every TV show under the sun in the next four days. Ya think maybe someone could ask him about this?
--Josh Marshall
A nice find by Andrew Sullivan on President Bush's Freudian slip about the Swift Boat Ads ...
I loved Bush's comment yesterday about the smear-ad: "I can understand why Senator Kerry is upset with us. I wasn't so pleased with the ads that were run about me. And my call is get rid of them all, now." "Us"?? I thought Bush had nothing to do with it.
Nice catch...
--Josh Marshall
Convention Assignment Desk ...
Which reporter up here will <$NoAd$>press House Speaker Denny Hastert on whether he'll be slandering any other US citizens this week, as he did when he suggested, on the basis of no evidence, that financier George Soros is a front for drug cartels?
Check out this passage from Lloyd Grove's column today in the Daily News ...
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert - having already enraged some New Yorkers with his remarks about local office-holders' "unseemly scramble" for federal money after 9/11 - yesterday opened a second front. On "Fox News Sunday," the Illinois Republican insinuated that billionaire financier George Soros, who's funding an independent media campaign to dislodge President Bush, is getting his big bucks from shady sources. "You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where - if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: "Excuse me?" The Speaker went on: "Well, that's what he's been for a number years - George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." Wallace: "You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?" Hastert: "I'm saying I don't know where groups - could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."
No depths they won't sink to.
--Josh Marshall
Isn't the press going to bludgeon John Kerry over this remark this morning?
When asked whether we can "win" the "war on terror" Senator Kerry said: "Can we win? I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that the — those who use terror as a tool are — less acceptable in parts of the world.”
Oh, sorry. That was President Bush who said that.
So forget what I said about press bludgeoning ...
--Josh Marshall
Today Scott McClellan went on the offensive against Ben Barnes for describing the "shame" he feels over helping President Bush duck service in Vietnam.
"It is not surprising coming from a longtime partisan Democrat," he said. "The allegation was discredited by the commanding officer. This was fully covered and addressed five years ago. It is nothing new."
It turns out that Barnes is such a down-the-line partisan that he supported Texas's Republican State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn for reelection in 2002.
Strayhorn is Scott's mom.
--Josh Marshall
A bit more on the Ben Barnes thing.
After the tape of Ben Barnes saying he was ashamed of helping President Bush duck Vietnam came out a couple days ago, Bush spokeswoman Claire Buchan said "It is no surprise that a partisan Democrat is making these statements."
It's a funny attitude considering how appreciative the Bush clan has always been for his being discreet about the issue. But Buchan's right, as far as it goes, Barnes is a "partisan Democrat." He is in the sense that he's a Democrat; he's an ex-pol who remains heavily involved in politics; and he's actually a major fundraiser for John Kerry.
He just happens to be a major fundraiser for Kerry who is also the guy who helped Bush bend the rules to get out of Vietnam, which is inconvenient -- to some degree for both sides.
You'll notice that President Bush just had this exchange with NBC's Matt Lauer ...
Lauer: Did John Kerry serve heroically in Vietnam, in your opinion?President GEORGE W. BUSH: I think his service is heroic, yes. I think he's--and should be proud of it. And I think that we ought to move beyond the past. I mean, he's proud of his service, I'm proud of mine. And the real question is, who best to lead us forward.
Nice try. After that the president's people have been softening Kerry up for three or four weeks, now he wants to look to the future. That's a pretty nice little scam, isn't it? Lauer might have done better to ask the president why he's only saying that now a day before the convention, as opposed to in early August. (Actually, why didn't you ask that, Matt?) This is right out of the Bush family playbook: have your people savage your opponent and once the damage is done try to take the high road.
But it's too late. As Max Cleland said a few days ago, President Bush's "moment of truth came and went."
And as for the Barnes thing, I think we can be pretty confident we'll be seeing something a good deal more public in the next several days.
--Josh Marshall