Afghanistan's troubled presidential election was thrown into further turmoil Tuesday when a U.N.-backed complaints panel charged widespread fraud and ordered a partial recount, just as election officials announced that President Hamid Karzai appeared to have gained enough votes to win.
The growing political crisis threatens to set off a direct confrontation between Karzai and his Western backers, who have been increasingly alarmed by mounting evidence of ballot-box stuffing and other irregularities, much of it reportedly benefiting Karzai's campaign.
In the days immediately following the Aug. 20 vote, U.S. officials were uniform in praising what President Obama called "a successful election." Obama said he looked forward "to renewing our partnership with the Afghan people as they move ahead under a new government."
But the widening fraud issue now seems likely to further prolong the slow election process, leaving the country without a clear leader for weeks or even months while tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops are battling the Taliban alongside Afghan forces. Obama's strategy also includes major economic development initiatives, improved delivery of services and a crackdown on corruption -- all of which will be difficult to implement without a valid Afghan government.
It puts the military in an unwinnable situation, trying to win hearts and minds over to a government which is clearly corrupt. And if riots break out, would the military come to the aid of the government against protesters against a stolen election?
Meanwhile, the situation is getting more dangerous for Americans over there. New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell barely escaped from the Taliban after a commando raid (his Afghan interpreter was killed in the melee). Insurgents trapped and killed four US soldiers yesterday in a firefight witnessed by McClatchy's Jonathan Landay:
"We will do to you what we did to the Russians," the insurgent's leader boasted over the radio, referring to the failure of Soviet troops to capture Ganjgal during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation.
Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to arrive, despite earlier assurances that air cover would be five minutes away.
U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines — despite being told repeatedly that they weren't near the village.
"We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We've lost today," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, said through his translator to his Afghan counterpart, responding to the latter's repeated demands for helicopters.
Four U.S. Marines were killed Tuesday, the most U.S. service members assigned as trainers to the Afghan National Army to be lost in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Eight Afghan troops and police and the Marine commander's Afghan interpreter also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle that raged from dawn until 2 p.m. around this remote hamlet in eastern Kunar province, close to the Pakistan border.
With the government having lost legitimacy, the Taliban has become emboldened, and its forces tied up with nationalists fighting occupiers. And our mission has become increasingly scrambled. Liberal hawks (like Howard Dean!) need to come to their senses and realize how far we've strayed from the mission in Afghanistan, and how little hope we have of a turnaround.
Past national chairmen of political parties have gone on to be longtime Senators, Governors, even Presidents. This Michael Steele really is single-handedly destroying that legacy.
Steve Inskeep is not exactly the toughest interviewer in the world, and even he bats him around. My favorite part:
INSKEEP: Here's another thing that I'm trying to figure out: Within a couple of paragraphs of writing we need to protect Medicare, you write that you oppose President Obama's, quote, plan for a government-run health care system.
Mr. STEELE: Mm-hmm.
INSKEEP: Now you're a veteran public policy official. You're aware that Medicare is a government-run health care program.
Mr. STEELE: Yeah, look how it's run. And that's my point. Take Medicare and make it writ large across the country, because here we're now - how many times have we been to the precipice of bankruptcy for a government-run health care program?
INSKEEP: It sounds like you don't like Medicare very much at all...
Mr. STEELE: No, I'm not saying that. No, Medicare...
INSKEEP: ...but you write in this op-ed that you want to protect Medicare because it's politically popular. People like Medicare.
Mr. STEELE: No, no, no, no, no. Please, don't...
INSKEEP: That's why you're writing to protect Medicare.
I think the trained dolphins at Sea World could have pulled off those backflips better.
I know I've made this statement before, but in 2005 every news outlet in America told us that Howard Dean was a ticking time bomb, that he had to watch his mouth or it would get the Democratic Party into trouble and he would destroy it utterly.
I would say that Howard Dean's message, arguing strongly for a choice in health care and saying that the only element in the entire bill that can be credibly called health care reform is the public option, makes a lot more sense in this environment than Bill Clinton's "accept half a loaf" speech last night. Somebody has to make this argument, and if we don't, absolutely nobody will and there will be no progressive counterweight to the manic-obsessive centrism that too many Democrats are kind of dying to perpetuate.
Dean's also talking about the psychology of anger among the right wing in these town halls, and how it's not about the bill, but a major generational change in America, and the sense among a certain element that things are slipping away. This of course doesn't totally help us right now unless that new generation advocates for something worth doing.
...I'm glad Tanya Tarr talked about reproductive rights in the bill. Dean correctly argues that an independent panel of experts will decide the benefits package in the public insurance options, but obviously there can be some advocacy around that.
"We're doing good on this bill, the press never covers substance so you'd never know it..."
A very good point from Dean: nurse practitioners can perform about 60% of what he did as a primary care physician, and they should be able to work independently from primary care operations. We're just going to need to do that, because adding 30-35 million people to the health insurance rolls and emphasizing prevention will require so many doctors, probably much more than we can muster. So empowering nurse practitioners would help this out pretty well.
I'm very hopeful about Gov. Dean's remarks about ending fee-for-service medicine. He thinks the primary care physicians who make less than their counterparts in Britain right now will demand it.
He's also big on moving us from an illness system to a wellness system. The best groups doing this are the self-insured corporations like Safeway, who get crappy food out of the break room and give health club memberships and essentially emphasize prevention because it's better for their bottom line.
I just saw Howard Dean on The Ed Show asked about "taxing health benefits" (which is an oversimplification), and while he corrected Ed Schultz by saying that the reform discussed is capping the employer deduction, he said "I don't want to get into a debate about paying for this." Sigh.
If progressive advocates aren't willing to talk about how the hell we're going to pay in the short term for health reform, it won't happen. Period. The Administration has committed themselves to a fiscally responsible approach that is deficit-neutral in the short term. Peter Orszag talks about "Medicare and Medicaid savings" without explaining that as ending these lunatic Medicare Advantage payments where insurers get to privatize the system. To the average person that rightly sounds like paying for health care by cutting Medicare and Medicaid. That just won't play politically. And nobody agrees on the other revenue raisers. At some point this will all break down.
This belt-and-suspenders approach means we are not just banking on the long-term impact from the game changers to protect the budget. We also are demanding quantifiable cuts, efficiencies, and revenue-raisers so that the budget is not adversely impacted in the medium-term. That is to say, if the long-term savings from the game-changers materialize as expected, we wind up with a more efficient health care system and a better fiscal position. If they don’t, then at worst, we have a deficit-neutral plan that will not worsen our fiscal situation.
Everyone is talking in generalities about those cuts and efficiencies and revenue-raisers, in a way that will surely doom this reform when the specifics arrive. The Council of Economic Advisers report today is great, and it states very clearly the savings to families and the general budget from enacting meaningful health care reform.
We estimate that slowing the annual growth rate of health care costs by 1.5 percentage points would increase real gross domestic product (GDP), relative to the no-reform baseline, by over 2 percent in 2020 and nearly 8 percent in 2030.
For a typical family of four, this implies that income in 2020 would be approximately $2,600 higher than it would have been without reform (in 2009 dollars), and that in 2030 it would be almost $10,000 higher. Under more conservative estimates of the reduction in the growth rate of health care costs, the income gains are smaller, but still substantial.
Slowing the growth rate of health care costs will prevent disastrous increases in the Federal budget deficit.
Slowing cost growth would lower the unemployment rate consistent with steady inflation by approximately one-quarter of a percentage point for a number of years. The beneficial impact on employment in the short and medium run (relative to the no-reform baseline) is estimated to be approximately 500,000 each year that the effect is felt.
Expanding health insurance coverage to the uninsured would increase net economic well-being by roughly $100 billion a year, which is roughly two-thirds of a percent of GDP.
Reform would likely increase labor supply, remove unnecessary barriers to job mobility, and help to “level the playing field” between large and small businesses.
All of this is true, and makes health care pay for itself. One that doesn't appear in the bullet points of the executive summary is that wage growth would likely ensue because your raise is being plowed into paying for unaffordable employer-based health care.
But as long as the commitment to deficit-neutral policies in the short term remains - and there aren't 60 Senate votes for an unfunded mandate, regardless of what the President wants, which is why Orszag is saying this - you're going to have to find the money. And everyone shies from that debate. You see Ed Schultz, who plays a liberal on TV, get all worked up about "taxing health benefits" because the unions, frankly, don't want their hard-bargained health care benefits touched. In truth, capping the tax exclusion makes sense because it's a huge cash windfall ($246 billion in 2007 alone on this subsidy), but it runs into dicey politics. So does capping the charitable deduction. So does a value-added tax. So does any revenue-raiser, and so do cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, especially when they're explained so horribly.
Howard Dean needs to talk about how the hell we're going to pay for this. So do progressives generally. We always shy away from the responsible taxation argument, and it's about to kill health care reform.
Ted Kennedy's committee will try and influence the debate on health care with the release of their comprehensive legislation, which includes some pretty solid proposals.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) is circulating the outlines of sweeping health-care legislation that would require every American to have insurance and would mandate that employers contribute to workers' coverage.
The plan in the summary document, provided by two Democrats who do not work for Kennedy, closely resembles extensive changes enacted in the senator's home state three years ago.
In many respects it adopts the most liberal approaches to health reform being discussed in Washington. Kennedy, for example, embraces a proposal to create a government-sponsored insurance program to compete directly with existing private insurance plans, according to one senior adviser who was not authorized to talk to reporters.
The draft summary also calls for opening Medicaid to those whose incomes are 500 percent of the federal poverty level, or $110,250 a year for a family of four.
If you're looking for the left-most counterpart to whatever happens in Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee, this is it. MassCare is doing decently, but not getting the job done on its subsidies because a small state has no chance to drive down costs in any meaningful way. The cost controls - and how to pay for the subsidies - are the two keys here.
But it's notable that Kennedy includes a robust public option. Howard Dean today painted Chuck Schumer's compromise public option as the limits of where he would allow the conversation to go.
As a sticking point, he's insistent that any reform effort include a public plan. The public entity would provide insurance that, by avoiding the demands of the private market, could help control cost and expand coverage. Cognizant that such a proposal will engender stiff -- if not universal -- opposition from Republicans in the Senate, Dean said he had no objection to Schumer's modified version.
"If we can get Schumer's proposal out of the Senate, I think that would be a very good thing," he told the Huffington Post. "It can't be any weaker than that though. We don't want what would be a fake public option."
As one of the leading progressive voices on health care reform, Dean's endorsement of the Schumer proposal is no small thing. The New York Democrat has envisioned a plan for insurance coverage that, while run on public funds, is self-sustaining and subject to private market rules. Money would come from the payments and premiums of consumers. The same officials who ran the plan would be forbidden from regulating it. And a reserve fund would be set up to handle a potential influx of claims.
The stipulations, Dean said, would assuage critics without actually diminishing the public option itself.
"[Schumer's proposal] is still run by the public," he added. "But it is subjected to insurance rules that are there in order to protect the public from for-profit institutions, which is obviously not necessary if you are running your plan on the public side. Because the consumer needs the protection because of the profit-motive, but they don't need protections from a non-profit or the government. So Chuck has those things in there to level the playing field. I understand that. And I don't think we need to be doctrinaire about this. But I think, the bottom line is a public option is run by the public and financed by the public, it is not administered by the private sector."
I'm not quite as sanguine as Dean about Schumer's public option because it would act much like a nonprofit, without getting the Medicare bargaining rates needed to drive down costs. It would represent an improvement, but only a slight one. However, framing the conversation as a choice between Schumer's version or Kennedy's, not Schumer's version or nothing, is crucial. That's the importance of the Kennedy bill.
This has been a very interesting week in the fight for health care reform. Let's take a look at some of the major developments.
• Single-payer: Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced S.703, a single-payer health care bill (called the American Health Security Act of 2009), in the Senate. While this would be a companion bill to HR676 on the House side, it's the first time I can remember, and apparently the first time since the death of Paul Wellstone, that anyone in the Senate has carried a single-payer bill. Sanders in the release calls the bill "the most fiscally conservative option for reform" because private insurance overhead would be eliminated, saving over $400 billion dollars annually. Now that such a bill has been introduced in both Houses, there should be a demand from single-payer advocates to get the CBO to score the bill. Without numbers that Washington trusts, and sadly the CBO is the only number-crunching body with that authority, single payer will not be taken seriously. But a true accounting of the cost savings could spur reform. You can find the bill here.
• The Public Option: Howard Dean has jumped squarely into the health care debate from his perch at DFA, advocating strongly for a public insurance option to compete with the private market. Dean has gone so far as to say that without a public option, health care reform essentially doesn't exist.
Obviously, the insurance industry wants no part of a public option, that would force them to compete on price and quality of coverage, instead of the current system of competing to deny care to their customers to maximize profits. They say such a system would put them out of business. To which I say, YAY! What's important to understand is that there are public options and there are public options. Ezra Klein explains the structure of the three most common proposals:
• Single-Payer Lite. This was the rationale you heard during the primary campaign. A public insurance plan able to use Medicare's bargaining power to secure deep discounts for its customers and ensure the maximum possible network would be cheaper and more efficient than private insurers. Over time, this increased efficiency would make the plan more attractive because it could offer more coverage for less money. As consumers recognized this fact, they would increasingly migrate towards the plan, and the public insurer would become, if not a de facto single payer system, something close to it. The public insurer, in this scenario, is a game changer. But it's a game-changer because it's a form of single payer using a mild version of monopsony buying power.
• The Level Playing Field Plan. Insurers, predictably, howled that a public insurer with access to Medicare's market power would put them out of business. (Generally speaking, liberals agreed with that.) The messaging they settled on was conceptually odd but has proven pretty effective. A public insurer, they argued, would not be competing on a "level playing field." This might have caused someone to wonder when, exactly, the market had ever cared about "fair." But instead, this frame has been widely adopted, with Obama telling Chuck Grassley, "I recognize that there's that concern. I think it's a serious one and a real one. And we'll make sure that it gets addressed." In answer to this, Len Nichols proposed a public insurance plan that doesn't have access to Medicare's bargaining power, and this is the policy that CAP's paper advocates. This is not single-payer lite. It's just an insurer without shareholders or highly-paid executives. (I should note that some, like Harold Pollack, believe you could begin with this plan and end with the single-payer lite plan. I'm not convinced, but its possible.)
• The Catch-All. I've heard that the insurance industry and some advocates are interested in a compromise that looks a lot like Medicaid choice. Here, you'd have a public insurance option, but only for people making under a certain income level. It's a way of folding Medicaid into the new system.
If the single-payer lite plan is jettisoned, with the "level playing field" plan offered, such a public option would not achieve the kind of bargaining power to make it cost-effective. You reduce a bit of overhead and eliminate the profit motive to a certain extent, but you will not have done much to force private industry to heel. So if Dr. Dean wants to advocate for a public option, it had better be the right kind. For his part, Max Baucus, who has as much power over health care reform as anyone in Congress, characterized the public option as more of a bargaining chip than an actual policy point:
"Essentially, it's to keep it on the table to encourage the private health insurance industry to move in the direction it knows it should move toward—namely, health insurance reform, which means eliminating pre-existing conditions, guaranteed issue, modified community ratings. [TRANSLATION: Measures that would force the insurers to cover the sick as well as the healthy, at a cost that everyone could afford.] It's all those actions that insurance companies must take in order to provide affordable coverage. And the public option helps encourage the private companies to move in that direction, because they're worried. We might have to modify the public option to get enough votes. I hear some concerns among Republicans about the public option. The main purpose is to keep the health insurance feet to the fire."
Which leads us to...
• Industry Concessions: The insurance industry has offered what I imagine they consider their grand bargain: they will agree to both guaranteed issue (no more denial for pre-existing conditions) AND community rating (charging a flat rate for a community regardless of medical history) in exchange for an individual mandate that forces everyone to buy health care. This would be significant, but the devil is in the details:
The companies left themselves several outs, however. The letter said they would still charge different premiums based on such factors as age, place of residence, family size and benefits package.
"If the goal is to make health care affordable, this concession does not go far enough," said Richard Kirsch, campaign manager for Health Care for America Now. "It still allows insurers to charge much more if you are old." His group, backed by unions and liberals, is trying to build support for sweeping health care changes.
Importantly, insurers did not extend to small businesses their offer to stop charging the sick higher premiums. Small employers who offer coverage can see their premiums zoom up from one year to the next, even if just one worker or family member gets seriously ill.
Ignagni said the industry is working on separate proposals for that problem.
"We are in the process of talking with small-business folks across the country," she said. "We are well on the way to proposing a series of strategies that could be implemented for them."
Lots of outs for themselves, particularly age, which is intimately tied to increased need for care. It's good in the abstract because the industry clearly feels the need to move in the direction of reform. But they sang a lot of this tune in 1993 as well. Kevin Drum has more.
• Massachusetts Debate. One of the more interesting arguments among health care reformers concerns Massachusetts' "universal health care" policy adopted in 2006. It included an individual mandate and shared responsibility for stakeholders to provide subsidies to ensure everyone signed up for insurance. Monica Sanchez took a look at the MassCare plan relative to Barack Obama's principles for health care reform and found it lacking. A sample:
1. Does it protect families' financial health?
NO - Of those surveyed in a fall 2008 survey of Massachusetts residents on healthcare conducted by the Boston Globe and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation: in a recent survey 13% of insured said they were unable to pay for a health service; 13% said they were unable to afford to fill a prescription; and 33% ranked the cost of care their biggest health concern.
2. Does it make health coverage affordable?
NO - not for the middle class and not even for some people with low incomes. According to the report released last month, "Massachusetts' Plan: A Failed Model for Health Care Reform," by Drs. Nardin, Himmelstein, and Woolhandler, in fiscal year 2009, to bring cost increases down from more than 15.4% to 9.4% for CommCare, the state cut benefits and increased copays.
Read the whole thing. Jon Gruber argues that cost control was not entirely a part of the Massachusetts reform, as it focused more on universality. Thus it created what amounts to an entitlement in the hopes that the political dynamic could be changed to focus on bringing down costs once the plan was in place. In other words, there is, as Ezra Klein put it, an embedded political logic to doing coverage first.
States don't really have the bargaining power to bring down costs, nor can they deficit spend, so I don't know how building the political advantage for cost control really helps them, actually. And while this would possibly make sense on the national level, the Obama plan seeks to do everything at once, so it's not really germane.
• Budget Reconciliation. Harry Reid says he is completely open to using the budget process for health care reform, meaning that such legislation would only need 50 votes. Others violently disagree, not just Republicans but people like Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson. In steps Steny Hoyer, of all people, as a mediator.
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did earlier Thursday, Hoyer defended the House’s decision to include budget reconciliation in its budget.
“Reconciliation on healthcare is a fallback position. It is not the preferred option. The preferred option is creating a bipartisan consensus,” Hoyer said [...]
Republicans argue that Democrats, by having reconciliation in their hip pocket, can pull out of any negotiations, whenever they want, making those talks potentially pointless for the GOP.
Hoyer said that if Democrats acted in that way, the Republicans would have a right to complain.
“If they are negotiating in good faith and then we pull the rug out from under them, I think that would be harmful to our objective of passage with a degree of bipartisan support and therefore credibility in the public,” he said.
Without reconciliation as a fallback, Republicans wouldn't even come to the table. So I do think it's a vital tool and shouldn't be set aside just yet. Hoyer had some interesting things to say about single payer and the public option, as well.
You Don't Want Your Leader Cooperating With The FBI
I don't think it's ever good for a political party when the chairman you just elected last week is in the papers saying he will cooperate with the FBI. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele said Sunday that he would provide records from his 2006 U.S. Senate campaign to the FBI in an effort to speed an apparent investigation into allegations of improper campaign spending.
Steele confirmed that his sister was recently contacted by FBI agents looking into allegations that his campaign paid a company she owned more than $37,000 in 2007 for campaign work that was never performed. The allegations were made by Steele's former campaign finance chairman in an attempt to gain a more lenient prison sentence after he was convicted of fraud in an unrelated case [...]
"I want to clear up my good name. This is not the way I intend to run the RNC, with this over my head. We're going to dispense with it immediately," he said.
I seem to remember a lot of stories when Howard Dean first won the DNC chair about how he was going to be a wreck for the party (as opposed to soundly winning two election cycles and growing the party in every state), especially because he would make some unfortunate statements and get in the newspapers sullying the image of the party all the time.
When I saw the boomlet for Howard Dean as HHS Secretary, I didn't think it was plausible. I certainly didn't think a high-profile Senator would come out and back him.
Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who endorsed Dean's presidential campaign in 2004 and is rumored to be in the HHS running himself, applauded the idea of the former DNC header taking over the cabinet post vacated by Tom Daschle.
"I think that would be a very good move," Harkin told the Huffington Post. "He brings all the background and experience. He's very strong on prevention and wellness, which I'm very strong on. I think he'd make an outstanding secretary of HHS."
Asked if he had spoken to White House on the matter, Harkin demurred: "I'm not going to get into that," he said after a pause.
The thousands on Facebook, I expected, but not this. Color me surprised, and good for Tom Harkin.
By the way, here's a short list of Vermont's health care picture after Dean's leadership. As a small state Vermont has different issues than the rest of the country, but this is an indication of what Dean has done and can do.
Under Governor Dean's leadership, Vermont developed one of the best health care systems in the country.
• 96% of Vermont children have health insurance and 99% are eligible for coverage under Governor Dean's Dr. Dynasaur program.
• More than a third of Medicare recipients in Vermont receive state help in paying for prescription drugs.
• Vermont was ranked the "Healthiest State" in the U.S. in 2001, 2002 and 2003 by the Morgan Quinto Press.
• In 1997, Governor Dean signed a law requiring insurance companies in Vermont to provide the same coverage for mental illness and substance-abuse treatment that they provide for physical conditions.
• As a result of early intervention programs established by Governor Dean, 89% of pregnant Vermont women enter prenatal care in their first trimester and 91% of families with newborns receive a voluntary home visit.
• Vermont has the lowest teenage pregnancy rate in the country – teen pregnancies decreased 49% during Governor Dean's tenure.
• Child abuse dropped 45% under Governor Dean. Vermont was the first state to institute a statewide protocol for abuse investigations.
• Vermont ranks second in the nation in child immunizations -- 81% of children are fully immunized by age 2 and 97% are immunized before kindergarten.
In the wake of the Daschle mess, there are a lot of possibilities for both HHS Secretary and the newly created "health care policy czar," ranging from the sublime - Dr. Dean - to the ridiculous - anyone else that the corporate-owned media can come up with.
You have Marc Ambinder and Karen Tumulty ringing the bell for Mitt Romney, because he "can claim the provision of universal health care as a resume line." Which isn't true at all, he sought to derail MassCare at almost every opportunity, it bubbled up directly from the state legislature, and the usual fallacy of attributing everything to the executive is at play. By the way, if you want to go that route, you could mention that Howard Dean provided universal health coverage for children and pregnant women, and unlike Romney he actually drove the policy and did it well before MassCare ever started.
Gingrich? Now before you lefties have a collective heart attack, think about it. Something as big as overhauling our entire health care system will be tougher to get done on a purely partisan basis. There are Republicans who want to play.
As much as it would infuriate liberals, picking Gingrich would be a hyper-bipartisan move. Would it confound the GOP into submission on health care? Maybe not, but it would be a bold move to change the political dynamics that has killed reforms in the past.
This is the stupidity of Washington on full display, being conned into thinking a movement conservative like Gingrich would want to do anything but derail an Obama Presidency, believing that bipartisanship for its own sake is the highest good known to man, etc. And Obama has enabled this to a large extent, and now in many ways he's trapped by it, as Republicans use the "bipartisanship" talking point to block fundamental change.
The history-making moment unfolded in the White House press room on January 23, when the topic open for questioning was President Obama's proposed economic stimulus package and whether the administration, which was hoping for a bipartisan effort on the legislation, would be disappointed if the bill passed with little Republican support. And that's when Todd asked if Obama would veto his own bill if it didn't garner enough Republican votes.
If nothing else, though, Todd's absurd query helped highlight the unheard-of double standard that's been constructed by the press specifically for the new Democratic president with regard to the pressing issue of bipartisanship. Virtually all the news accounts are stressing the same story: If there's little or no bipartisan support for Obama's stimulus package, then it's Obama fault, and his fault alone. (No surprise, the media narrative echoes the latest GOP talking point, as dutifully pushed by RNC writers like Peggy Noonan.)
A bit ironic, isn't it? While addressing the issue of bipartisanship (i.e. "involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties") the press holds only one party accountable: the Democrats. Apparently, that's how the press now views the issue of bipartisanship -- it's something Democrats must bring to fruition.
Meanwhile, by the grand poohbahs in DC, Dean is seen as "too partisan" even though he won in Vermont with 70% of the vote including lots of Republican support, was elected chair of the bipartisan National Governors Association, and was a deficit hawk who balanced budgets in Vermont even though he wasn't constitutionally obligated to do so. But he's out of bounds.
This is a great piece by Ari Berman of The Nation about Howard Dean. For all the thoughts in early 2005 that Dean would be an erratic chair of the DNC, he came in with a very tightly focused plan and he enacted it brilliantly. He wanted to strengthen state parties, implement the technology necessary to reach voters, and put organizers in the field throughout the country, surmising that most of life is showing up and that you have to offer Americans everywhere a choice. It succeeded pretty well.
It almost feels like ancient history, but "four years ago the Democratic Party was in a very different condition," Doctor Dean says at the beginning of his talk at the Y. Republicans had just retained the White House, gained four seats in the Senate and three in the House, and held twenty-eight governorships. Bill Frist was Senate majority leader, Dennis Hastert was House Speaker, George Bush's approval rating was at a healthy 50 percent and Karl Rove planned a "permanent Republican majority." It was "not a fun time to be a Democrat," Dean cracks.
How quickly things change. Four years later Democrats elected Obama with 67 million votes. They picked up seven seats in the Senate (with Minnesota still pending at press time)and twenty-one in the House, and they hold sixty of ninety-nine state legislative chambers. Obama's extraordinary campaign and Bush's remarkable mishandling of the country's domestic and foreign policies deserve much of the credit for the Democratic Party's resurgence, but so does Howard Dean. Before virtually any major politician, Dean not only sensed that the era of Republican ascendancy could be stopped but also how to do it, first through his trailblazing though unsuccessful presidential campaign of 2004, and then through his forceful stewardship of the party as DNC chair since 2005. "Dean gave the party a mission and a focus," says Paul Tewes, a top Obama strategist who ran day-to-day operations at the DNC during the general election. "That's a big deal when you're out of power." DNC member Donna Brazile calls Dean "one of the unsung heroes of this moment."
So unsung, in fact, that he has nothing to do now. Dean was never well-liked by the Beltway press (it's shocking how little he appeared on television despite being the DNC chair) or the Democratic establishment, and with people like Rahm Emanuel (who publicly sparred with Dean) back in power, Dean has basically been nudged out. The organizers in the states are on a leave of absence and nobody knows if that investment will continue. Obama basically emulated Dean's 50-state strategy and he might feel he can do it by himself now without any use of the former chair's strategies (I think the states like having the organizers, and the state party chairs will be very vocal in asking for it to continue).
It would be a mistake. Dean not only has a continued following among the grassroots, but he obviously has the skill to recognize how to pull off a national strategy to take back the country for Democrats and progressive values. That would come in handy as a governing strategy, don't you think?
I haven't seen the circus-tent media reaction to Obama's latest statement on Gov. Blagojevich, but hopefully this will calm the hounds for a while:
At his presser today, Barack Obama said he'd directed his advisers to assemble all the information about any contacts his team might have had with Governor Blagojevich about his Senate seat, and reiterated that he'd not had any direct contact with Blago himself.
"I've asked my team to gather the facts of any contacts with the governor's office about this vacancy so that we can share them with you over the next few days," Obama said [...]
"I am confident no representatives of mine would have any part in any deals related to this seat," Obama said.
That this even has to be said is depressing. Blago asked for money or a spot in the cabinet or a spot for his wife on a state board in exchange for placing Obama's preferred candidate in the seat. He was rebuffed. He called Obama a motherfucker. Then Valerie Jarrett took her name out of consideration. How could anyone with Obama have any part in deals related to the Senate seat when they shut Blago's request down flat?
Meanwhile, Howard Dean has now joined the chorus calling on Blagojevich to resign. This, of course, proves that the Democrats are completely in the tank for the Illinois governor.
UPDATE: Shorter Ed Morrissey: Here's a picture of a two-second handshake at a Governor's meeting where every Governor and Barack Obama was present, PROVING that Obama and Blagojevich were scheming to trade 80,000 pounds of gold buillion and a pancake recipe for the Deputy Undersecretary for National Parks and Monuments! UPDATE to the UPDATE: Here's an undated photo sent out by Blagojevich after the election proving, once and for all, that at one time, the junior Senator from Illinois and the Governor of Illinois talked to each other!!!!
The only positive thing about this is that the Senate Democrats are off the hook for the decision. Obama takes the heat all for himself.
But heat he should take, without question. First of all, he inserted himself in the middle of a negotiation.
Obama's decision could tie the hands of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has been negotiating to remove Lieberman as chair of the Homeland Security and Government Reform committee while keeping him within the caucus. Lieberman has insisted that he will split from the Democrats if his homeland security position is stripped.
There doesn't seem to be a way he can lose his Homeland Security spot now, so any subpoenas issued by Lieberman against an Obama administration, any fishing expeditions, they're on his head. He invited them. Lieberman may have eaten his gavel during the Bush years, but he'll find it anew. Enjoy that, Barack.
Then there's the matter of Lieberman consistently attacking Obama negatively throughout the general election. I guess Obama considers that this makes him the bigger man. But I'm with Digby. This is one enemy you ought not keep closer.
It's a huge mistake to keep him in the caucus where he will have knowledge of their strategy and legislative tactics. He will be the first one called upon to "speak for" Democrats who are unhappy with Obama's inevitable "overreaching." He is a mole for the Republican party.
This also comes at a time when progressives were ramping up efforts to push activism on behalf of jettisoning Lieberman. Firedoglake has a Just Say No To Joe tool that will call your Senators for you and let you deliver a message that he should not keep his committee assignments.
And Bold Progressives had set up events at Senate offices in three states. That activism can continue, as the Senate decides its own committee assignments, but clearly Obama is going to have a lot of pull here.
So the shitting on the base begins. This is a relatively benign shit, since the only person who's going to end up harmed is Obama himself - it's a self-inflicted wound. But it's definitely shitting. And if the 50-state strategy is truly dead, about which there are conflicting reports (Howard Dean is definitely stepping down as DNC chair), that one is much more malevolent. There's simply no reason to stop organizing at this point, and put into storage the program that benefited state parties so much over the last two campaign cycles.
His odds of bagging an electoral vote in Nebraska grew stronger this morning, with word that 10,000 to 12,000 early ballots and 5,200 provisional ballots are left to count in Douglas County.
Obama won about 61 percent of the early votes counted before Tuesday's election. If that percentage holds with the early ballots left to count, Obama stands a strong chance of winning the Omaha-area 2nd Congressional District.
Republicans did not concede defeat this morning, but they acknowledged the long odds.
This would be the first time any state has split their electoral votes, and it would get Obama up to 365 EVs with Missouri still uncalled (though McCain is likely to win there). Obama won pretty much all the swing states, by the way, some with very narrow margins. That's the power of the ground game, and it worked to perfection. Indiana and North Carolina and NE-02 would not have gone to Obama without those efforts.
They all laughed when Howard Dean said we could change the map and compete in places Democrats never competed. 90% of this was just showing up, saying who you were and what you stood for, and letting people make up their own minds. They chose against fear and division, and chose Barack Obama.
Now he must be worthy of their choice. But at some point, you'd think somebody would thank Howard Dean.
Years In The Making - The Ground Game Hits The Road
Chris Bowers says that Obama has already won the election. Thanks for depressing turnout, Chris Bowers! But looking at his methodology, he may well be right.
However, I know that the Obama campaign is not going to bask in the glory and all go for spa treatments this weekend. They're going to work their tails off right through till the last polls close on the West Coast on Tuesday.
To close the deal, Obama and his campaign must, in some ways, work opposite of one another. The campaign’s ground forces, the likes of which this country has never seen, must make sure that the millions they helped register actually get to the polls. They have to continue knocking on doors to ensure that complacency doesn’t set in. Obama’s workers, paid and voluntary, have not traveled all this way to come up short.
As for Obama himself, he must maintain his steady, cool demeanor, which, ironically, was once viewed as a political liability. But now it has come to symbolize the candidate’s sure hand in the middle of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
“It’s extraordinary,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former Clinton White House press secretary and now a political analyst for CBS. “If you look back, there have been so few incidents where he’s been drawn off message, or resorts to getting involved with the attack of the day. He responds — but he does so in a rational, not emotional, way.
“He’s almost boring,” Myers continued. “He never takes the bait. He never gets into a good side fight for a couple of days. Think how many times Clinton got off course. Think how many times McCain makes news because he has to get something off his chest. Obama never does that.”
Obama will not get in the way of his campaign in these final days. There will be tens of millions of phone calls, millions of houses canvassed, millions of rides to the polls, seeking to extract every last voter and get them to their polling place. And it's going to happen in every state in America. The ground game, which has long been Obama's big bet, is bolstered by a strong union presence, which will do their own work to reach their membership. There are new media initiatives on Facebook and Twitter. But this starts and ends with the Obama campaign recruiting over a million volunteers for these last four days. As opposed to blowing your cash on attack ads and not bothering to expand turnout.
Sen. John McCain and the Republican National Committee will unleash a barrage of spending on television advertising that will allow him to keep pace with Sen. Barack Obama's ad blitz during the campaign's final days, but the expenditures will impact McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts, according to Republican strategists.
McCain has faced a severe spending imbalance during most of the fall, but the Republican nominee squirreled away enough funds to pay for a raft of television ads in critical battleground states over the next four days, said Evan Tracey, a political analyst who monitors television spending.
The decision to finance a final advertising push is forcing McCain to curtail spending on Election Day ground forces to help usher his supporters to the polls, according to Republican consultants familiar with McCain's strategy.
Wow, is that stupid. Especially in a year where turnout will mean everything. We don't live in a culture where the electorate collectively watches TV and experiences the campaign in a one-way manner anymore.
His hypothesis was simple: To be a national political party, you have to compete everywhere. It was called the “50 state strategy,” and it was unveiled in 2005.
Remember 2005?
That’s when Karl Rove was building a permanent Republican majority, and when President George W. Bush was going to save Social Security by privatizing it.
In 2005, Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, campaigned among grass-roots activists to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Campaigned to be head of the DNC? That’s an establishment job, hand-picked.
Howard Dean? What a loser.
But politics is all about a little prescience and a little luck. Dean had both. He had the wisdom to know Democrats could win in a lot of places if they bothered to show up and make an argument. The lucky part: The public has turned on the Republican Party.
It's a simple formula, but this article doesn't fully capture what Dean did. He put paid staffers into those 50 states so he could capitalize on any opportunity. He revitalized moribund state parties and created the neighbor-to-neighbor tool that can make Democrats a presence in people's lives all year round, not just before Election Day. He helped build a voter file that now rivals Republicans' vaunted data bank. He laid all the groundwork for Obama to build on and surpass.
In many ways, Tuesday could be Howard Dean's victory as well.
...Sean Quinn at 538 has more on the McCain campaign's ground game FAIL. They aren't funding it because they don't have anything to fund.
Looks like Barack Obama has a spare few million to spend in West Virginia:
Leading in polls and exuding confidence, Democrat Barack Obama is edging into traditionally GOP states -- now including West Virginia -- as Republican John McCain looks to protect his turf less than three weeks before the election.
On the heels of the campaign's final debate, the Democrat is launching TV ads in West Virginia, which George W. Bush won four years ago and hadn't been on the list of target states until recently, according to two Democrats with knowledge of the strategy.
Obama lost West Virginia in the Democratic primary to Hillary Rodham Clinton as he struggled to win over working-class whites. But Democrats say the economic turmoil in the hard-hit state and TV ads Obama has been running in its neighbors have made West Virginia competitive. These Democrats spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering the campaign.
I'll bet he goes back into North Dakota and Georgia before this is over, too. And the article is talking about Kentucky. Kentucky!
And the improved environment for Democrats generally, combined with the incredible ground game from the Obama campaign, has rallied a late push into state legislative races:
The Democratic National Committee is waging a last minute injection of as much as $20 million into state legislative races in key states, hoping to take advantage of Democratic momentum this cycle.
A senior Democrat familiar with the conversations said: "We are looking at options, races, where we can be helpful, as we did in 2006. This is the time when some races pop."
DNC chairman Howard Dean has made it a priority to help Democrats win down the ballot, so that if Obama wins the presidency, Democrats will have a larger majority in Congress. But with states planning to redistrict their congressional boundaries in 2012, control of state legislative chambers is all the more important, people close to Dean said.
Very sharp strategy. Dean has learned from the bottom-up conservative movement that started in the states.
Drudge can cheer himself with cherry-picked polls all he wants, but this is a bloodbath.
It's very encouraging that Barack Obama recognizes the job Howard Dean has done as the architect of the 50-state strategy and building Democratic infrastructure nationally, and that he's going to keep him in the job through the election. It's also encouraging that he's bringing the same reformist style to the DNC and branding the Democratic Party as the one which doesn't take lobbyist or PAC money.
NEW YORK - Acting swiftly as his party's presumed presidential nominee, Barack Obama is keeping Howard Dean at the helm of the Democratic National Committee, while bringing in one of his top strategists to oversee the party's operations.
The campaign also announced that the DNC will no longer accept donations from lobbyists and political action committees, to comply with Obama's campaign policy. Party officials say they expect the DNC's staff to quickly expand to run an aggressive general election campaign.
Campaign adviser Paul Tewes was dispatched to help lead the changes Thursday.
"Senator Obama appreciates the hard work that Chairman Dean has done to grow our party at the grass-roots level and looks forward to working with him as the chairman of the Democratic Party as we go forward," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said.
I expect Obama to do some major fundraising for the DNC, perhaps pushing out to his list, over the next few days. It's also worth mentioning that Obama actually had to buck conventional Washington wisdom and take the side that building infrastructure across all 50 states is preferable to trying to win a narrow set of swing states and just make it across the line every election. This is an endorsement of a national campaign strategy that Dean has spearheaded since 2005.
And the contrast of one party united in not taking lobbyist or PAC money and the other party's nominee having a campaign full of lobbyists is pretty stark, and Obama knows it:
"I've sent a strong signal in this campaign by refusing the contributions of registered federal lobbyists and PACs," Senator Obama said. "And today, I'm announcing that going forward, the Democratic National Committee will uphold the same standard and won't take another dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs. They do not fund my campaign. They will not fund our party. And they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I'm President of the United States."
It really feels like a weight has been lifted, the internecine bickering is over, and now the fun can begin.
He -- yes, he's in trouble, in that campaign managers, candidates, are really angry with him. He has raised $74 million and spent $64 million. He says it's a long-term strategy. But what he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose. That's not how you build a party. You win elections. That's how you build a party.
Funny, guess what happened in Mississippi yesterday?
No one could've ever predicted that investing in a state's infrastructure would make it easier to win elections in the future.
Ultimately, this is why Howard Dean and the 50-state strategy has been the best thing for the Democratic Party in a long time, and why Paul Begala shouldn't ever be in charge of anything remotely connected to the Party ever again. That investment in state-based infrastructure is worth so much to the future of the Party, it's not even funny. I can't say for sure, but I'm willing to bet that we don't win MS-01 yesterday without those staffers. The goal of the 50-state strategy is to be ready to take advantage of opportunities anywhere they arise.
As a state-based blogger at Calitics, you could say that I'm part of that infrastructure. And I'm proud to say Calitics has been given a credential for the DNC and will be sitting on the floor with the California delegation. 50-state strategy is go.
(This is also ultimately why the Clintonites shouldn't get back the levers of power in Washington. They weakened the party on the first go-round and their thinking is still very backward and reductivist.)
Earlier today I mentioned the Feingold plan for universal same-day registration. Some replied that "Republicans would filibuster it" and I think it's shortsighted to look at what would happen on this bill tomorrow. Increasing the voter base and mobilizing new support is the cornerstone of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, and it's a long-term vision that includes finding the youth vote and taking advantage of demographic shifts.
Step outside of Washington and assessments of Dean are drastically different, and far more favorable.
"I believe the Democratic National Committee should be an organization that is just what its name suggests, a national party," says Steve Achelpohl, the Democratic chairman in strongly Republican Nebraska. "We cannot sustain ourselves, particularly in terms of presidential elections, if we only have 15, 18, 20 states in play. Dean stands for the proposition that we should try to play everywhere."
The plan to do that, dubbed the 50-state strategy, is the fault line that divides Dean's supporters and critics.
Since winning a four-year term as chairman in February 2005, the former Vermont governor has poured tens of millions of dollars into the state parties. Computer systems have been modernized, and voter files -- the information used to solicit money and support -- are constantly scrubbed, expanded and forwarded to Washington, building a national database that should greatly help the presidential nominee.
State parties have also worked to invigorate the Democratic brand, each hiring the basics: a field director, a data manager and a spokesperson. "We've basically gotten people to believe that they can be Democrats in Utah again," Dean says. "That matters enormously."
This is all connected. Making it easier to vote and pouring money into local parties that facilitate that expanded access are two sides of the same coin. Dean knows that the long-term trends are on the side of Democrats, and that by expanding the playing field you dilute the power of big last-minute money and force candidates to compete. And if lots of people are turning out and the party organizations have the means to get them out, we win.
The biggest short-term hurdle to this is onerous election laws like the voter ID ruling. It also manifests in small ways like this outrage.
One of the major demands of may 1 this year was to fight against the disenfranchisement of nearly a million immigrant voters. Despite quadrupling the price of citizenship in the US, USCIS has refused to clear the backlogs of individuals waiting for citizenship- some 2 to 3 years. Nearly a million immigrant voters that have done everything we’ve asked of them in order to become citizens will be denied the vote in Novemeber if we don’t act NOW.
FIRM is teaming up with partners around the country to unite and push for a clearing of the backlog in time to let these people exercise their right to vote!
Yep. I think the DNC ought to be making a MAJOR stink over this. The executive branch has so much control that is off the radar screen - such as little things like this. The Presidency certainly matters. But so does meaningful local action on election reform, which will eventually lead in the direction progressives would like - full access to voting and massive participation.
A lot of focus is on the DNC's devastating new ad about John McCain's Iraq policy, and that's important. But I want to start with McCain's policies outside Iraq and work my way inside.
For instance, it should interest you to know that McCain's foreign policy ideology is to be the worst nightmare to all of our enemies, which is certainly not an adult maneuver, but also misreads the goals of foreign policy itself.
Consider Saddam Hussein. He's a bad dude. And which American president is his worst nightmare? Well, it's George W. Bush. Thanks to Bush, Saddam got booted from power and killed. Compared to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Dubya was a disaster for Saddam. But of course Dubya's Iraq policy has also been a disaster for the United States of America, whereas Clinton and Papa Bush ran policies that made us better off. International politics shouldn't be conceived of as some nutty zero-sum race to the bottom where our goal is to make Hamas cry -- the question is who are we trying to help and do we have ways to do it.
On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.
In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.
We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.
This is madness. Russia's supremacy in oil resources and China's supremacy in the new economic landscape make them the worst countries to alienate in perhaps the entire world. You engage these countries - sometimes through tough talk and desiring to push them in the right direction, like on Tibet - but you do not start acting actively hostile to them!
Of course, this is the only way McCain knows how to relate to other nations - through militarism and belligerence and using massive strikes of American power to dominate the world. McCain is actually more purely neoconservative than even George Bush - he ran on a "national greatness" agenda in 2000 which included "rogue-state rollback" - his plan to start massive uprisings in other countries, decapitate leaderships, and overthrow sovereign governments all over the world. He's the biggest hawk in American politics, and his options for foreign policy usually fall along the lines of "bombs" and "more bombs".
And this gets us to the DNC ad, which is sparking a HUGE Republican hissy fit.
The Republican National Committee wants CNN and MSNBC to stop airing the DNC’s new national television advertisement, calling it “false and defamatory” and illegally coordinated.
“This is a complaint about the facts that are being misrepresented in the ad, and this being a deliberate falsehood, that we are saying, stations have an obligation to protect the public from airing a deliberate falsehood,” said Sean Cairncross, an RNC lawyer.
The RNC provided no evidence to support their change that the communication was illegally coordinated, aside for a few newspaper articles pointing out that some Democrats work for both a candidate and the committee, like pollster Cornell Belcher. DNC chairman Howard Dean said this morning that neither campaign saw or heard the ad before the put it out.
The RNC is ginning up the threat of legal action to give weight to their criticism of the ad’s content. Cairncross would not say whether the party will sue CNN or MSNBC, the two cable networks airing the ad, if they refuse to kill it.
The DNC is in no way backing down, with Howard Dean making the funny statement "I understand the RNC thinks it's illegal to criticize John McCain."
But let's delve into why the RNC and the McCain campaign is so upset. They clearly have some information that endless replays of the "100 years" comments just would totally sink the campaign. This wasn't so much a problem when McCain said comments like this for basically the entire primary season. Here, look:
But suddenly, now, in a general election, it's a big problem. So they want to claim that he was talking about a post-war presence. As Dean says in the above clip, anyone who thinks that we can keep troops in Iraq for 100 years and not have them shot at or attacked is a lunatic. McCain is committed to leaving troops inside Iraq until there is no violence and "the war is won". THEN, he wants a 100-year, or lifetime, commitment in the region. There is no timeline placed on how long it could take to get the violence under control; indeed, this month was among the worst in close to a year. So McCain wants to keep troops in Iraq until the war is over, and would never pull them out a minute beforehand. How is that BETTER than the "100 years" comments? How should that comfort the overwhelming majority of Americans who see no political solution in Iraq and want the war to end? Josh Marshall puts this best.
The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period. He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it's okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there's little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that. We tried this in Lebanon; the French tried this in Algeria; the British even tried it in Iraq. Western countries have a very poor history garrisoning Muslim countries in the Middle East. Iraq isn't like Germany or Japan, not simply because of the history of the country but because both countries accepted decades-long US deployments as a counterweight to threatening neighbors. The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn't change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.
If there is an unfair supposition at work here, there is a simple way to find out. Someone should ask McCain how long he's willing to have us stay in Iraq even if we are sustaining casualties. Since he believes it is in our strategic interests to stay there on a permanent basis I doubt very much he'll say that in that case he'd only be comfortable staying two or five or some other relatively short span of years. That is because he believe we should stay there on a permanent basis, ideally with no casualties but with casualties if that's what it takes.
Plus, McCain has been all over the place on a continuing Iraq presence, saying in 2005 that Iraqis resented the US presence and need their visibility reduced. Then he flipped to advocating a presence like in South Korea and Japan and Germany, then he flipped back in an appearance on Charlie Rose, rejecting such a parallel, and now he's back on it. So who the hell knows what he thinks on that front.
But what we do know is that McCain believes global solutions go hand in hand with military solutions. And his warped sense of "honor" concludes that we cannot show weakness or defeat, even if staying in Iraq, for example, impacts our long-term security goals. He'd rather keep us bogged down in a war with no end in sight. And that is why Joe Klein, ye gods, is right.
...I was thinking about posting yesterday about McCain's cheesy nonsense about Obama being endorsed by Hamas. If McCain wants to go that route, I can suggest another: that John McCain is probably the favorite candidate of Osama bin Laden, just as George W. Bush was Osama's presidential preference.
Why? Because both Bush and McCain have bought Osama's disinformation about Iraq being the central front in the war on terrorism. Of course, bin Laden wants the gullible neocons to take the Iraq bait because Afghanistan really is the central front of the war on terrorism--more precisely the Afghan-Pakistani border areas where the real Al Qaeda lives. The war in Iraq has been a grand strategic gift to Osama, keeping the U.S. military tied down elsewhere and off his tail.
Nice Party You've Got Here, Be A Shame If Something Happened To It
I'm not sure what the Clinton campaign seeks to gain by sending an extortion letter to Nancy Pelosi and the DCCC.
As Democrats, we have been heartened by the overwhelming response that our fellow Democrats have shown for our party's candidates during this primary season. Each caucus and each primary has seen a record turnout of voters. But this dynamic primary season is not at an end. Several states and millions of Democratic voters have not yet had a chance to cast their votes.
We respect those voters and believe that they, like the voters in the states that have already participated, have a right to be heard. None of us should make declarative statements that diminish the importance of their voices and their votes. We are writing to say we believe your remarks on ABC News This Week on March 16th did just that.
During your appearance, you suggested super-delegates have an obligation to support the candidate who leads in the pledged delegate count as of June 3rd , whether that lead be by 500 delegates or 2. This is an untenable position that runs counter to the party's intent in establishing super-delegates in 1984 as well as your own comments recorded in The Hill ten days earlier:
"I believe super-delegates have to use their own judgment and there will be many equities that they have to weigh when they make the decision. Their own belief and who they think will be the best president, who they think can win, how their own region voted, and their own responsibility.'"
Super-delegates, like all delegates, have an obligation to make an informed, individual decision about whom to support and who would be the party's strongest nominee. Both campaigns agree that at the end of the primary contests neither will have enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination. In that situation, super-delegates must look to not one criterion but to the full panoply of factors that will help them assess who will be the party's strongest nominee in the general election.
We have been strong supporters of the DCCC. We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August. We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the Party and hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters.
That's just sad. The big-money boys did this to Howard Dean too, when his 50-state strategy didn't meet with their satisfaction. And he went ahead and implemented it and put us far ahead of Republicans on the ground all over the country. GOP incumbents are dropping like flies because they see the reality of going up against serious political muscle in an election with some headwinds. We have a decent pickup shot in Alabama, for crying out loud. And those Republican incumbents don't want to pay the bills for their own campaign committees because they see it as wasted money. (What's nutty is that even Joe Lieberman gave $100K to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in December - he knows where his bread is buttered - that's money designed to bribe the leadership into keeping him in the party).
Dean defied these big-money morons and beat them all. So they can threaten and intimidate Nancy Pelosi and the D-Trip all they want, and say they're going to take their wallets and go home. They don't own the party anymore and it must be killing them.
The idea that Pelosi should say "How high" when these fat cats tell her to jump, and that she should claim that ALL delegates, not just superdelegates, should exercise independent judgment no matter what the will of the people expressed, is just nuts.
(By the way, those Gallup numbers are in the heat of a primary campaign, and can reasonably be seen as the highest possible point for them. Also, the numbers are FACTORED INTO current head-to-head matchups against McCain. In other words, McCain is getting as many crossover Democrat voters as he can possibly hope to get in November, and he's still generally tied with Obama and Clinton. Meaning that he's doomed.)
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