Week of: |
10:04 PM
Covering the convention
It's been widely noted - and clucked about - that this year's party conventions will get less play from the networks than at any time since the events were first televised in 1948. Cable is going for all-out, gavel-to-gavel coverage, but the nets will show only three hours.
How come? Well, partly because most people aren't interested -- and rightly so, notes the Christian Science Monitor:
[F]or most Americans, the Democratic National Convention will be but a blip on the radar screen - if it registers at all. Political conventions are now designed to be news-free zones; expect no platform fights, no multiple ballots to settle on the nominees, no smoke-filled rooms."Apart from the acceptance speeches, the only people watching will be base Democrats, hard-core political junkies, and Republican opposition researchers," says [a political scientist].
In fact, the depth of public apathy toward the conventions is unclear. Of respondents to a Marist College poll last week, 65 percent said they plan to watch some or "a great deal" of the proceedings in Boston. But a Harvard Kennedy School survey released the same day found only 31 percent planning to watch.
The networks are obviously betting on the Kennedy School scenario, on the thinking that there just isn't a great appetite out there for convention coverage. But as this Washington Post piece suggests, this logic is self-fulfilling.
[Thomas E. Patterson of the Kennedy School] thinks the networks should carry more of the convention to fulfill their officially mandated "public service" requirements. He thinks the networks' argument against more coverage -- that declining ratings don't justify it -- is a self-fulfilling one. "They are as much leading" the viewership decline as following it, he says. To back that up, he points to statistics from Nielsen Media Research that show that the networks have cut their convention coverage hours at a far faster clip than the corresponding decline in the audience. Observes Patterson "There's a market out there, but if you starve it, it shrinks."
And make no mistake, it will shrink. The same piece notes that "during the 2000 conventions, the audience ranged from 15 million to 27 million households when the broadcast networks carried coverage. With cable-only coverage, the audience never exceeded 10 million."
OK, so if media coverage is down, and--let's assume--public interest is waning (even admitting that this may be a result, not a cause of the reduced coverage) how come there are 15,000 journalists (yes, that's right, three times the number of delegates) at the convention this week? What are they up to? Nicholas Von Hoffman, writing in The New Republic in 1988, came up with this intriguing explanation, which, if true then, must be far truer now.
If the convention has ceased to have a political function, it has its uses for journalism. The mass media has moved into the politicians' spot like a cowbird in a thrush's nest and turned it into journalism's equivalent of the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, where the nation's teachers of English come to look for jobs. Every four years this is where thousands of media executives, editors, reporters, public relations firms, and who knows what all else come to network their little heads off, making contacts and cruising for job offers. The numbers of media people and the money spent for entertainments bear no relationship to the importance of the story they have ostensibly gathered to cover. They, indeed, will be the only dynamic force at Atlanta and New Orleans, for the national convention itself is a political cultural lag, a government subsidized anachronism living on from the time of the Pullman car and the telegrapher's key.
Well, come to think of it, the the "Momentum" party thrown in honor of the media--which kicked off Convention Week on Saturday night in Boston--was, by far, the biggest bash of the entire week, featuring a drum and bugle corps that "led the crowd through glass doors into a massive room with lantern-lit cabanas, a seemingly endless line of cocktail bars, even a Ferris wheel."
If that's a taste of what convention week's all about, no wonder journalists find it so compelling. But some people will always find something to complain about:
''We were wondering what 'Momentum' was all about," said conservative commentator Ann Coulter. ''The drinks are excellent. But too many journalists."
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2:01 PM
Senate hopefuls give the Dem convention a miss
Most of the nation's top Democrats will gather in Boston next week. But as today's Boston Globe reports, some of the party's Senate hopefuls will be nowhere near the convention.
Four candidates with viable chances of winning Senate seats in heavily Republican states - Erskine Bowles in North Carolina, Inez Tenenbaum in South Carolina, Tony Knowles in Alaska and Brad Carson in Oklahoma - will spend their time campaigning at home. While a spokesman for Knowles said it was an "easy decision," a Tenenbaum spokesperson said the candidate is just prioritizing voter outreach and not avoiding the national ticket:
''There are a lot of undecided voters in South Carolina, and we're trying to take advantage of every minute we have to talk to them. Next week, there are 10 different 'meet and greets' scheduled in South Carolina."
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12:05 PM
Teachers need a pay raise
In the upcoming Washington Monthly, Jonathan Schorr takes a look at one of John Kerry's overlooked policy proposals: teacher reform. Kerry is proposing to offer federal grants to schools to pay their teachers more, on condition that the local teacher unions agree to allow easier firing laws.
On the merits, it's a great idea. Hiking up teacher pay will entice more-qualified folks to enter the field. Plus, No Child Left Behind is going to create a dire demand for great teachers in failing schools. And let's face it, there needs to be better accountability for bad or incompetent teachers -- at the moment, the firing process can take years, and thousands of dollars.
Schorr also notes that the idea is politically shrewd. Parents should, in theory, swoon over a Democrat taking on the teachers unions.
Now, as Matt Miller has argued elsewhere, in order to have a real impact, a plan like this would need to be much larger. Kerry is proposing $3 billion a year; $30 billion is Miller's target. (To pay for it, we could always start by shuffling Title I federal funds, which are too often diverted away from the poor schools for which they were originally intended.) But even if Kerry stuck with a scaled-down teacher program -- limited to the worst-performing schools -- it would be a step in the right direction.
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11:52 AM
Engage Iran?
In The New Republic, Lawrence Kaplan writes that John Kerry's idea of "engaging" Iran is distasteful. Seems he much prefers President Bush's track record, which has been "a mix of good and bad":
[I]t's not so clear the Bush team has abandoned engagement, either. Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Blackwill refuses to surrender hopes for a nuclear deal, as does Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who lauds Iran as a "democracy." To be sure, the president vows Washington will side with Iran's pro-democracy movement and that the "development of a nuclear weapon in Iran is intolerable." But long gone from the administration's rhetoric is any talk of regime change.
Kaplan's big scruple, it seems, is that we shouldn't just coddle up to evil theocracies like Iran. But as long as President Bush prattles emptily on about democracy and the like, his engagement policy is better. The idea, I suppose, is that idealism counts.
That's a nice fantasy, but in reality, Bush's much-lauded "moral clarity" has really hindered our Iran policy. After a bit of mutual cooperation following the invasion of Afghanistan -- where Iran helped broker the Bonn agreement -- Bush practically cut off relations with Iran, preferring to live in the hope that a student uprising would overthrown the clerics. And now we've lost a lot of time. Iran will, in all likelihood, develop nuclear weapons. As I explained here, we're probably going to have to live with that. We can't invade, we can't bomb, we can't topple. The only option left, then, is full and steady engagement with an unsavory regime -- exactly what Kerry is proposing.
(Incidentally, for another example of how Bush's "moral clarity" led to disaster, see Fred Kaplan's essay on how we let North Korea go nuclear. Sometimes you have to negotiate with horrible dictators -- not because it's the best option, but because it's the only option.)
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5:43 PM
A tax cut Bush didn't like!
One of the more bizarre news stories today: President Bush scuttled a tax cut. And -- surprise! He did it for political purposes:
The White House helped to block a Republican-brokered deal on Wednesday to extend several middle-class tax cuts, fearful of a bill that could draw Democratic votes and dilute a Republican campaign theme, Republican negotiators said.
The New York Times captures some of the cynicism surrounding the White House move, but not all of it. Here's how the story went: Basically, Congress was looking to extend some of the provisions in the 2001 tax cut favoring middle-class and low-wage earners that were set to expire in 2005. These provisions included keeping the bottom tax bracket at 10 percent, preserving the $1,000 child deduction, and extending some of the married-couple deductions.
Seems harmless enough. Of course, none of the papers noted that the White House only wanted a five-year extension to these cuts because that would reduce deficit projections. It's a cute trick! The administration also wanted to scale back the AMT (which would cancel out some of the upper-class tax cut), and give child credits for families making up to $250,000.
Well at that point, fiscally responsible Senators (R and D alike) balked at straining the bank even further over upper-class tax cuts, and instead came up with a reasonable alternative. Because even John Kerry would have supported this reasonable alternative, the White House decided to call the whole thing off. Moral: what good is a sensible tax cut if you can't even beat your opponent up with it?
Remember this the next time our president starts crying about there being "too much politics" in Washington.
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5:36 PM
Passage to India
India's has been blamed for the outsourcing of white-collar U.S. jobs, but some American students are passing up high-paying internships stateside for the opportunity to train in India. As the Boston Globe reports:
"Spurred by the growth of India's information technology services sector, universities are tapping Indian know-how to help teach students how to manage operations between domestic and offshore sites. The trend coincides with American firms' increased outsourcing activities. Eighty-six percent of US software firms are sending work abroad or will do so in 2004, according to Sand Hill Group, a San Francisco investment and research firm."
On top of housing and meal expenses, students earn several hundred dollars a month. But the real allure of these internships is the opportunity to work on challenging assignments and rub shoulders with senior officials -- not exactly the lot of interns in the U.S. Americans have yet to form a sizable expat community in India, though. As the New York Times writes of Bangalore, the country's tech hub:
"The city is full of foreigners - 10,000 to 12,000 are registered here with the government's office of foreign registration. At some bars, the crowds are so mixed they look as if they could be in London.
Few Americans are among them, even though previous generations of young American graduates have pursued literary careers in Paris or tried to take capitalism and democracy to Russia and Eastern Europe. India would seem a logical next choice, given an economy that grew by 8.2 percent last year, a software and services sector that grew by 28 percent last year and the way outsourcing is rewriting the rules of the American and the global economy.
But most Americans still feel India can teach them more about spiritual practices than business models."
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4:35 PM
Kerry on Iraq
Ruy Teixeira tells John Kerry to get a grand plan for Iraq:
Just-released Annenberg Election Survey data show that, while only 34 percent believe Bush "has a clear plan for bringing the situation in Iraq to a successful conclusion" and 61 percent do not, Kerry fares no better in the public's estimation: just 25 percent believe he has a clear plan and 57 percent do not. In fact, Kerry's net negative on this question (-32) is actually worse than Bush's (-27).
That's a pity because evidence continues to mount that voters--particularly independent and swing voters--have lost faith in Bush on the Iraq issue and are eager to embrace a clear alternative, if Kerry articulated one.
Now I've written before that, from a policy perspective, Kerry doesn't necessarily need a new plan -- competence alone would make all the difference. I'm not sure that holds anymore. With the unemployment rate in Iraq in the high 70s, troops dying in high numbers, and insurgents taking hold of entire Iraqi cities, Kerry's competence alone probably won't be enough to fix this disaster. Something different needs to be done.
The downside is that, practically speaking, very few, if any, "master plans" exist. Internationalize the situation? Bring in the U.N.? Alas, member nations have shown themselves wholly unwilling to enter the fray. There are certainly little things we can do: secure Iran's co-operation, reduce the role of U.S. security contractors, continue those high-profile reconstruction projects, focus on job creation, accelerate the creation of local governing councils, etc. But what would happen if Kerry gave a speech ticking all these detailed little ideas off? Would voters think him clear, bold and determined, or simply arcane, aimless, and overly-wonky?
Plus, it seems like every time the Kerry camp shoots out a bright idea -- getting, say, a new U.N. resolution -- the administration takes it up. That makes it hard for him to differentiate himself. Finally, any plan he put forth would likely need to be altered after a few months of shifting facts on the ground, opening up Kerry to further silly "flip-flopping" charges. At this point, yes, Kerry needs to say something. But it's not obvious that he could simply conjure up a "clear alternative" if only he put his mind to it.
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2:45 PM
The cruelty of war
At next week's convention, John Kerry will (of course) share the stage with colleagues from his Vietnam tour, reminding voters that he knows something about war and leadership, etc.
Margie Mason of The Associated Press visited the area around the Mekong River where Kerry patrolled, to see what impression he made on people there. And she struggled to find people with memories of the young Kerry:
"Along the coffee-colored river on a placid, humid afternoon, Vietnamese old enough to remember the fighting shake their heads when asked if they've heard of Kerry. Many know of the Americans who plied this river in wartime, but few have more than passing memories of seeing them."
But many of those who have heard of the Massachusetts senator support him for his later opposition to the war and his efforts to normalize relations between Vietnam and the U.S.:
"I would vote for Kerry," said Nguyen The Cung, 68. "He knew about Vietnam and he knew about the cruelty and brutality of war."
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11:00 AM
Bobbing and weaving on 9/11
I haven't read the full report yet, but by all preliminary accounts, the 9/11 Commission went relatively easy on President Bush. My first question, then, is: Why was the White House so adamant about bogging down, jerking around, and generally stonewalling the entire commission in the first place? When you think back on it, their behavior was utterly bizarre.
First the president strongly opposed the commission. When he finally relented, Bush tapped the oh-so-conflicted Henry Kissinger to chair the investigation, who eventually resigned. Later on, Bush denied the commission's request for additional funding, according to Time; and he refused to grant the commission a time extension, only to change his mind later. Plus, we all remember "Condi won't testify," followed by "Condi will testify." Not to mention "We won't / okay we will hand over the Clinton documents." And so it went, flip after flop, muck-up after muck-up.
Throughout it all, there's no evidence that any particular revelation about 9/11 hurt Bush in the polls. Even at the fevered height of the Richard Clarke imbroglio, voters considered Bush "more honest" than John Kerry 45-40 percent. But on aggregate, the whole ordeal really hurt Bush's credibility -- between July 2002 and now the percentage of voters who considered Bush "honest" slipped from 71 percent to the mid-40s, and continues to fall. It appears that the White House's schizophrenic handling and stonewalling of the whole ordeal hurt them much more than the investigation itself. And it's truly unsettling that this administration will go to such self-destructive lengths to try to avoid any criticism whatsoever.
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12:43 PM
Halliburton is not going away
Violating U.S. laws is in most cases, um, illegal. But apparently no one told Dick Cheney, whose Halliburton firm apparently "violated anti-terror sanctions" by operating illegally in Iran through a subsidiary. The Treasury Department has finally handed their three-year investigation of the matter over to the Justice Department, something that is done "only when there is evidence 'intentional or willful' violations have occurred." All this occurred, mind you, while Cheney was CEO of the company.
For its part, Halliburton has gone to painstaking, contract-parsing lengths to exculpate itself. The Wall Street Journal explains:
Halliburton said its subsidiary, which provides oil-field services, didn't violate sanctions because it is based in the Cayman Islands and wasn't overseen by U.S.-based managers. Since 1995, U.S. companies and individuals have been banned from conducting commerce with Iran, but the sanctions allow "independent foreign subsidiaries" of U.S. companies to do so.
Get it? They were allowed to operate in Iran because they it was all done through a subsidiary in the Caribbean. But in January on 60 Minutes, CBS reporters poked holes right through this excuse. They actually went down to the Cayman Islands to find this "subsidiary":
60 Minutes was expecting to find a bustling business, but, to our surprise, Walker told us that while Halliburton Products and Services was registered at this address, it was in name only. There is no actual office here or anywhere else in the Caymans. And there are no employees on site.
We were told that if mail for the Halliburton subsidiary comes to this address, they re-route it to Halliburton headquarters in Houston….
Does that mean the head office is calling the shots? If it is, that would be against the law, which says the subsidiary must be completely independent of the U.S. company. But 60 Minutes' attempts to ask headquarters in Houston about this were rebuffed.
Oh what a tangled web we weave… Keep in mind that back in his days as Halliburton exec, Cheney led a group of lobbyists trying to lift sanctions against Libya and Iran, according to the New York Times. Now there may be some merit to that policy, but regardless, it certainly does fly in the face of Cheney's purported hardline stance against Iran.
As a footnote, I also see that the Boston Herald has discovered that Teresa Heinz Kerry once briefly owned Halliburton stock. (It was bought and sold within two months.) I can't wait to hear conservatives try to argue that standard day-to-day trading on the stock market will magically take away Kerry's right to criticize the former CEO of a law-breaking company.
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12:15 PM
Blame Canada
Despite Medicare chief Mark McClellan's best efforts to regulate international drug imports and online pharmacies -- and thus to keep drug prices sky high in the U.S. -- it turns out that one of the drug discount companies the administration has touted as kosher illegally offers cut-price drugs imported from Canada.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that Sav-Rx, an online mail-order pharmacy, offers savings of 20 to 30 percent on mail-order prescriptions through its "Canadian Mail Order Pharmacy."
Sav-Rx moves the drugs into the U.S. by way of an "agent." In other cases, of course, seniors -- or their family members -- are going directly to the source. The Post reports today, for example, that Senator Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), has been donating his Senate salary to fund the "Rx-Express," a bus service for Minnesota seniors that takes them from St. Paul to Winnipeg, Canada to fill their prescriptions at a rate 40 percent lower than they’ll find in the states.
The demand for affordable prescription drugs -- and the willingness of seniors to bend the law to get them -- is only going to increase. According to a Department of Health and Human Services estimates, 3.8 million, or one-third of all retirees' who receive prescription drug benefits through employee-sponsored drug coverage will have them reduced or eliminated in 2006. So far, the administration is refusing to foot the bill, leaving them to pay out of pocket or, presumably, forego treatment.
And although McClellan, in an interview with AARP , allowed that it's "unfair that Americans pay much more than anyone else in the world," and recognized that imported drugs provide an a less costly alternative, he has done little to loosen the stringent FDA restrictions limiting such drug imports. He and the FDA are too busy tracking down illegal importers to provide a real low-cost alternative for seniors.
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5:24 PM
Bush bombs
Political predictions are always a mug's game. But Bush's campaign really seems to be sputtering these days. Mark Schmitt, a former Bradley staffer and now blogger, has some interesting insights on the subject:
Running for president the old way almost always depended on how smoothly you can execute a difficult maneuver: cut as far to the right or the left as you need to win the nomination and secure the base -- but no further -- then accelerate out of the turn and get back as deftly as possible to the center.… Often, the fundamental analysis of presidential races comes down to who made that transition more smoothly. In 1980, for example, Reagan cut beautifully from his announcement in Philadelphia, Mississippi (apparently at the specific encouragement of Trent Lott, who knew the signal it would send to his constituency), to a tamer, optimistic and acceptable conservatism a few months later. …
Bush is still stuck in the first turn, while Kerry has long ago come through it. That just should not be. Bush doesn't need to appease the right to win the nomination, as his father did. He can certainly take their votes, though not necessarily turnout, for granted in the general election. This seems to be a tactic not borne of necessity, but of choice, like the Iraq war. And it is a strange and inexplicable tactic, one that, like the war, we take seriously only because they do, and which almost certainly cannot succeed. As Ruy [Teixeira] demonstrates, to make up for a failure to reach independents and swing voters this year, the Republicans would have to find an unbelievable number of non-voting conservative whites.
In a presidential election, where turnout is automatically 10-20 percentage points higher than in an off-year like 2002, there is much less upside potential for this tactic, that is, fewer Bush-base white non-voters available. And if it requires divisive social conservatism to motivate that limited base, that tactic will almost certainly infuriate and motivate the larger Democratic base… The 2004 election will be decided on turnout, but for the Republicans, it cannot be won on turnout alone.
Interestingly, Schmitt seems to think that Bush is courting his base out of choice. But Noam Scheiber might be closer to the mark in arguing that disgruntled social conservatives have forced Bush to pander to his right. Combine that with the fact that voters aren't falling for Bush's economic message, along with steadily declining support for the Iraq war, and suddenly Karl Rove doesn't look like such a genius anymore.
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5:16 PM
Bill Frist goes after Tom Daschle
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, be it noted, is not best buddies with Tom Daschle. He broke with years of precedent by actively campaigning in South Dakota for Daschle opponent John Thune, and used his political action committee to raise more than $150,000 for Thune in the first quarter.
But as The Hill explains, new fundraising reports filed with the FEC show Frist less effective at combating Daschle in the second quarter, raising less than $50,000 for Thune:
"Frist twice sent fundraising letters to supporters in the second quarter alerting them that Thune's campaign was a top priority, saying: 'If you only can make one more contribution to one of our Republican Senate candidates this cycle, you should make that gift to John Thune.'"But the majority leader did not follow his own advice. He funneled $93,000 in the second quarter to the campaign of Rep. David Vitter (R), who is running for Senate in Louisiana. More than $90,000 passed through his PAC to embattled Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and more than $70,000 went to Rep. Richard Burr (R) who is running for the seat being vacated by Sen. John Edwards in North Carolina."
Frist's tactics against Daschle haven't done him any favors, Robert Novak writes, as Democrats have rallied to successfully block key parts of Frist's agenda such as the Federal Marriage Amendment and a bill curbing class-action lawsuits:
"The added factor is the worst hostility between Republican and Democratic leaders since I began Senate-watching in 1957. Frist broke precedent by traveling to South Dakota to campaign against Democratic leader Tom Daschle's re-election. Republicans who must deal with Daschle regard him as one of the coldest men they have met in politics, who truly subscribes to the Kennedy clan's axiom of 'Don't get mad, get even.' Daschle could not conceal his glee two weeks ago in humiliating Frist on the class-action. bill."
And to think, when Frist was promoted to replace Trent Lott, he was seen as a moderate who could get the Republican agenda through. At the time, George W. Bush said, "Senator Frist has earned the trust and respect of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle." Instead, his vendetta against Daschle has left one side of the aisle squarely blocked.
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3:40 PM
Economic turnaround
Big changes are afoot in the GOP's economic message. Thus the Washington Post:
GOP pollster Bill McInturff, in a Saturday briefing for the Republican Governors Association, presented survey results showing that voters are far more responsive to Sen. John F. Kerry's economic message that talks about a middle-class squeeze than to President Bush's efforts to change public perceptions by talking up recent economic statistics…
He urged Republican governors -- and by implication the president and his team -- to avoid talking only about the current health of the economy. "You have to tell people the economy is getting better but have to quickly say more is being done and you have to provide the idea of the kinds of things you're going to do," he said.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the GOP can promise voters who are upset over the dreary recovery. Presumably, if these folks are tuning in to Kerry's economic message, then droning on about further tax cuts simply won't do. And proposing a few worker-friendly programs -- minimum wage hike, anyone? -- might prove a tough sell with fiscal conservatives. Bush is already having a hard time shoring up his reportedly disillusioned base. As The New Republic's Noam Scheiber argues, conservatives tend to be considerably more inflexible -- and less politically pragmatic? -- than liberals, making it hard for Bush to tack to the center.
Meanwhile, one of the few tax bills that could actually help lower- and middle-class Americans is being held up by Senators fed up with the president's profligate ways. Bush will no doubt try to blame Congress for deep-sixing his agenda, but as always, it's a bit odd to blame the lawmakers when you control all branches of government.
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11:29 AM
Sticker shock
If George W. Bush wants to make this campaign about "values," he might want to distance himself from some supporters in Kentucky.
The Republican Party offices in Jefferson County -- the state's most populous, and home to Louisville -- distributed a bumper sticker reading, "Kerry is bin Laden's Man. Bush is Mine." Naturally, Democrats reacted angrily, protesters gathered outside the office and the Kerry campaign denounced the sticker as "over the line."
County GOP chairman Jack Richardson told the Associated Press he'll stop distributing the sticker, and a copy has been removed from the office window. But he inexplicably refused to apologize, saying "I believe in the question this bumper sticker raises." And the state's Republican chairman - after making sure to say the party didn't produce it - gave a similar unapologetic statement and followed the Bush playbook in trying to link Iraq and bin Laden:
"I think most rational people understand that John Kerry is not a terrorist as bin Laden is. But I do think it highlights the fact that John Kerry did not support our troops in Iraq with his votes."
Republican Rep. Anne Northup took the high road Tuesday, saying she doesn't want to see these stickers distributed, and hopes the campaign will "focus on ideas." But John Kerry can now join Max Cleland on the list of decorated Vietnam vets the GOP has smeared in this way.
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11:16 AM
The missing link: found!?
With the forthcoming 9/11 Commission report expected to offer new evidence of ties between Iran and al-Qaeda, U.S. policy towards Iran will likely be a hot topic this summer. President Bush recently put forth a few preliminary remarks on the matter:
"As to direct connections with September the 11th, you know we're digging into the facts to determine if there was one," he said. "We will continue to look and see if the Iranians were involved."
He also said: "I have long expressed my concerns about Iran. After all, it's a totalitarian society where free people are not allowed to, you know, exercise their rights as human beings." He said that "this has been an issue that I have been concerned about ever since I've been the president."
I'm not sure how much to read into this. On the one hand, the president sounds like a man with three divisions bogged down in Iraq and nowhere to go. Let's just hope he doesn't start climbing aboard the "Bomb Iran now!" train, conducted by Michael Ledeen and the folks at National Review. Bush may not have any Iran policy whatsoever right now, but as I've written elsewhere, the Iran hawk camp lies somewhere between incoherent and just plain crazy.
Yesterday a Council of Foreign Relations task force, led by Zbigniew Brzezinski, released its more thoughtful recommendations for Iran policy. As per their usual moderate approach, CFR advises gradual engagement. The key here, it seems, is to draw Iran into the international economic order, so that the country becomes more responsive to economic pressure and U.S. "soft power". I also found interesting a remark made by Brzezinski during the CFR press conference, as recorded by national security journalist and blogger Laura Rozen:
Brzezinski… pointed out, that with Iran's nuclear program gaining broad political and public support, who's to say regime change would lead to Iran relinquishing its nuclear ambitions?
Wisely noted. Remember, Pakistan pursued its nuclear program under a succession of democratic governments in the '90s, proving highly resistant to international sanctions all the while. So it's not even clear that Ledeen's hoped-for "democratic revolution" will "solve" Iran for us, whatever that means.
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4:40 PM
Relaxing standards
With the country at war and the economy still struggling, George W. Bush is going on vacation. But at least he's scaling back.
Today's New York Times reports Bush will spend only two weeks at his ranch in Crawford instead of his usual four:
"The 2004 campaign has ruined Mr. Bush's Texas vacation. Or put another way, if Mr. Bush doesn't give up a lot of his summer holiday, the fear at the White House is that he could be on a permanent one after the first of the year."
To that end, Bush is expected to visit the ranch during the Democratic convention and for the first week of the Olympics - periods when those events will dominate the news cycle.
Only two weeks on holiday is a big step for Bush. He famously spent 27 days on vacation in August 2001, a move criticized even before the Sept. 11 attacks. Never one to let perceptions get in his way, he took equally long vacations each of the next two summers. But, the Times reports:
"As with all decisions at the White House, politics was paramount. In a summer when Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 is attacking Mr. Bush for spending 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation instead of worrying about Al Qaeda … the image of Mr. Bush lazing away August on his 1,600 acres was not one that Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, particularly relished."
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2:33 PM
Purposely missing the point
Over on Townhall.com, conservative columnist Michael Barone unloads on the Bush critics:
Official reports issued the last two weeks have conclusively refuted those who have been arguing that "BUSH LIED" about the dangers from Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction programs. The first report was that of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That committee has been rent by partisan divisions over the last year, but the report was unanimous.
Barone goes on to blame everything on the CIA and harps on and on about how Joseph Wilson, sadly enough, hates America. (Note that the SSCI report was not "unanimous" in the sections on Joe Wilson. But hey, why let a few inconvenient facts stop you?)
What's notable is that Barone -- like most conservative commentators these days -- focuses entirely on the Wilson story while omitting another, more important, storyline. The Senate report, remember, concluded that the CIA has said all along that there was no "formal relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Yet for the last two years, Bush has insisted on a dark and ominous connection between the two. It's a lie, plain and simple. And more disturbingly, Bush got everyone so focused on a link between Saddam and bin Laden that he completely neglected the actual links between Iran and al Qaeda. Unfortunately, conservatives are opportunistically using the Joe Wilson story as a proxy for the entire intelligence debate, when really it's only a sideshow.
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1:40 PM
The new Reagan Democrats?
Given her public clash with George W. Bush over stem-cell research, it's not so surprising that Nancy Reagan will skip the Republican National Convention in New York next month. That means both parties will have the same number of Reagans in attendance, with Michael (Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman's adopted son) joining the GOP shindig while Ron Jr. gives a prime-time speech in favor of stem-cell research to the Democrats.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Republican planners wanted to invite Mrs. Reagan to the convention, but "word came back" that she would not attend. (She cited a need for time to herself.) Meanwhile, though GOP loyalists are teeing off on Ron Jr., his mom seems to be okay with his decision. He told MSNBC:
"She's OK with it. She supports the issue. She's aware, as I am, that there is a political aspect to this, and we need to be careful about that…"I'm aware that some people will say … I'm being used by the Democrats. Maybe to some extent that's true. But then I'm using them too."
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1:22 PM
Iraq: right track/wrong track?
Take a peek at this encouraging story on Iraq's reconstruction:
David Nash is in a quandary. He has an $18.4 billion U.S. grant to help rebuild Iraq. But an unhappy public could mean two years before the impact of those huge US-funded reconstruction projects kick in.
The solution of the retired U.S. Navy admiral, in charge of one of the largest rebuilding projects in history, is for his Iraq Project and Contracting Office to launch hundreds of smaller projects that will have a quick impact on public expectations.
Smaller projects? Public expectations? It's brilliant! Why, you'd almost think they heed our advice here at Mother Jones.
Anyway, the story above comes by way of Arthur Cherenkoff's op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, spotlighting all the positive news in Iraq. Although some of Cherenkoff's data is factually misleading -- electricity is still not up to prewar levels, for instance -- his general point stands. The major media does tend to overlook most of these smaller, encouraging stories in favor of the latest car-bombs and assassinations.
Of course, Cherenkoff's "outrage" over this is kind of petty. Neither type of story really gives a fail-safe indicator of how post-Saddam Iraq is shaping up. Judging the war isn't a matter of tallying up bombs in one column, painted schools in the other, and then comparing the totals. Among other things, it's about trying to figure out what will happen a year, two years, down the road. Whether, say, Moqtada al-Sadr is going to enter politics peacefully or force a long protracted split with the mainstream Shiite clerics. It's about whether the two main Kurdish parties will clash over support for Turkey. It's about whether Iyad Allawi will lead a Baathist revival or not. Whether far-right Sunni groups in Saudi Arabia will be further radicalized by a Shiite regime up north.
That's the question: In the long term, what kind of situation are we creating? At the moment, it's hard to tell -- though the Bush administration's track record isn't at all encouraging. Witness today's news that the interim government is allowing Sadr's newspaper, al-Hawzah, to re-open. Remember how miserably that little episode was handled by the CPA? So it's hard to have confidence that everything's going to be okay, upbeat anecdotes notwithstanding.
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1:07 PM
Committed Commission
While the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will release its report this week, its members, the New York Times reports, won't be fading away anytime soon.
Unlike most "blue-ribbon commissions," which simply make their recommendations and leave it at that, this group will lobby aggressively to get the White House to implement its suggestions:
"Members of the Sept. 11 commission say they have decided that given the gravity of terrorist threats that the nation continues to face, they cannot allow their recommendations to be ignored, especially since President Bush has already said he is willing to consider a shakeup of intelligence agencies and Congress is already considering several proposals that mirror the commission's expected recommendations."
Though the commission members aren't allowed to discuss the report's recommendations at this point, other government officials told the Times that they include "major restructuring of intelligence agencies and the creation of a cabinet-level national intelligence director to oversee the government's 15 intelligence agencies."
Presumably, the commissioners hope public pressure will help get the changes implemented, helped along by commission members' planned speaking engagements. To that end, the report will be posted online, and a book version will be available at a discounted rate.
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12:04 PM
Supreme loophole?
If there weren't enough potential problems with the upcoming election, law professor Peter Shane explains in today's Washington Post that the Supreme Court's infamous Bush v. Gore ruling opens the door for electors to vote against the candidate the people of their state select:
"Under that decision, there is no guarantee that the electors who are decisive in choosing the next president of the United States will themselves be selected by the people of the United States. That's because the justices ruled in that case that state legislatures have unlimited authority to determine whether citizens in their respective states shall be allowed to vote for president at all."
Shane goes on to point out that 19 states - including four major battlegrounds - have one-party rule at the state level. So, in theory, partisans in those states could just usurp the voters' will. He explains that the "outrage factor" of alienating voters is the most likely check, but says Florida in 2000 shows how a state could deem the risk worthwhile if it can provide a justification:
"One hopes, of course, that for the time being, the outrage factor and common sense will still any move in state governments toward such hyper-partisanship. What's disquieting is the number of recent occasions on which neither common sense nor the prospect of citizen outrage was sufficient to elicit responsible leadership from those who govern us."
Just three and a half months to go.
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