al-Fubar

al-Fubar

September 3, 2003

Unless something changes big in the next few hours, Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be participating in tonight's California debate. In fact, the only debate he's agreed to is one in three weeks, in which the candidates will be given the questions in advance.

Can anyone say "wimp?"  How long before guys in chicken suits start following the Terminator around on the campaign trail?  (Idiotically, someone threw an egg at him today.)

Update: Arnold has been officially dubbed the Chickenator ...

In fact, not only is Arnold a wimp, he or his campaign managers are stupid to boot. All the candidates who do show up tonight are going to have him in their crosshairs - Bustamante to pull back wavering Dems, McClintock to nail down the GOP hard core, Uebberoth to establish himself as the moderate Republican for grownups, Arianna and Peter Camejo because that's the only way for them to get any attention.

It's a shame the debate organizers backed out of having an empty chair,* but it should still be an entertaining show.

*To be sure, an empty chair in a debate is always a risk. Legend is that a candidate in Texas once debated an empty chair, and the chair won. (Not much chance of that in this case, though even if the chair showed up.)

September 1, 2003 - Honor Labor

Today at our county Democratic picnic, I was talking to a recent county chair and Assembly candidate - about as close as you get to the Democratic Establishment, in a California county that still leans Republican.  I asked him how he looked at the current field for the Dem presidential nomination.  He said, roughly (I'm quoting from memory here), "I like Kerry.  I've liked him for a long time.  But I'm also looking very closely at Dean."

Which came close to mirroring my own feelings.  So, let's talk about this whole Howard Dean thing.

As Dean has picked up momentum through the summer, to become more or less the frontrunner, there's been a fair amount of talk in Democratic establishment circles about whether he can be stopped.  At least, this is what you get from media reports quoting "leading Democratic strategists," and some rather hysterical remarks by DLC head Al From. 

There's also an attitude among some hardcore Dean supporters, for example on the Daily Kos discussion threads, that the Democratic establishment has it in for Dean because they don't control him.  This is a BS theory that doesn't pass the smell test.  For party mover-and-shaker types, any Democrat in the White House - even a maverick / renegade / what have you - would be immeasurably better than having Bush in there.  Even at the most cynical level, a lobbyist with Democratic ties will do better under a Democrat than with K Street ruled by Tom Delay.

The uneasiness about Dean in party establishment circles comes from genuine fear that he can't win the general election.  The fear comes from several things, but most of all his opposition to the Iraq war - exactly the biggest single reason that his supporters are behind him, and that people like me and our ex-county chair are "very interested" in him. 

You don't need to buy into this anxiety to recognize that it has a genuine basis.   It isn't cynicism - these people want a Democrat in the White House as much as I do.  Most of the party leadership comes from the McGovern generation, more or less (so do I), and the experience scarred them deeply, as it scarred me. 

There are two ways to express this concern.  The genteel version is that the American people won't quite have the nerve to vote for an outright war opponent, even if in their hearts they have grave doubts about the war.  The less genteel version is that opposing the war plays right into the GOP's favorite campaign strategy.  You know, lily-livered liberals who won't stand up for America, blah blah blah. 

Dean's New England background (and Kerry's, for that matter) also plays into this, in an indirect way.  Here the argument is that - as someone once said about Dukakis - New Englanders, even tough professional pols, "think a Republican is Elliot Richardson.  They've never had to face real Republicans."  That is, the kind who do the whole Limbaugh red-in-the-face routine.

All of these arguments have some merit, on historical evidence.  Anyone who doesn't worry that Dean might be McGovernized or Dukakisized, hasn't been paying attention for the last 30 years or so.   This is why a good many current Dean leaners are also "very interested" in Gen. Wesley Clark.  The mental calculus is that a four-star Army general - who commanded in the Kosovo war, an unambiguous victory on every level - is just about the only public figure in America who can tell the truth about the Iraq war while effectively countering the GOP attack machine.

(It also doesn't hurt, in terms of political psychology, that Clark comes out of Arkansas, as did a recent president who was also notably resilient in the face of the GOP attack machine.)

But back to Dean.  As said, the worry about his electability is genuine, and grounded in all too much real history and solid political experience.  On the other hand, there's another interpretation that is starting to gain traction even among Party-establishment types.

Elections used to be all about the swing voters - Perot types, soccer moms, what have you.  The nightmare, for either party, was a candidate that fired up your own base supporters, but so scared the swing vote that they all swung the other way - to Johnson against Goldwater in '64, to Nixon against McGovern in '72.

However, this hasn't happened in many years.  Mondale in '84 wasn't trounced because he scared the swing vote away.  He just couldn't get them in the first place, not when 1984 under Reagan seemed like a pretty good year, after a lot of bad ones through the '70s.  Dukakis went down in '88 because Lee Atwater and the GOP whipped him from pillar to post, and he never did turn to slug back at them.

In fact, there aren't even really that many true swing voters left.  About a third of voters call themselves independents, and badmouth the whole party system.  But when they do bother to show up and vote, most of them vote consistantly one way or the other.  

Modern elections are "base" elections.  They are won by the party that fires up its own supporters with enthusiasm.  That was how Clinton and the Dems won in '92 - I remember, in the days before that election, the sheer thrill of thinking we might win one for a change.  Then the GOP took Congress in '94 because the Angry White Males were all fired up, while Dems were dispirited.  In '96, Dems weren't excited, exactly, but GOPers were down in the dumps.  In '98 it was our turn again, to vote against the impeachment outrage - resulting in an unexpected Dem pickup in an election where Gingrich and the GOP expected to gain seats. 

The 2000 election went to a draw, with neither side all that fired up.  Last year the GOP was fired up, while Dems were frustrated and saw no leadership from their leaders - so the GOP picked up seats in what should have been a Dem year.  There were lots of reasons, but the looming war was at the heart of it.  The Dems in Congress wimped out.  There was no real war debate to speak of.  By comparison, the 1991 Gulf War debate was Disraeli v Gladstone.

So now we look forward to '04.  Democrats are mad as hell - jeez, I'm mad as hell! - about the direction that Bush has been taking the country.  It isn't just the war, by any means, but the war does sort of symbolize all the disasters of having Bush in power.  What w need to win is a candidate who can channel this energy, turn it from a dull red glow into a laser beam.  And, the GOP base must be starting to get queasy.   Bush has given them everything they want, from tax cuts to a splendid little war - and none of it is turning out all that well. 

Economic "recovery" has gained back part of the losses in the stock market, but the job market still looks an awful lot like a recession.  Out in Wal-Mart Land, they may like tax cuts and rising stock prices, but they need jobs - and the jobs aren't there.  As for Iraq, the splendid little war has turned into a nasty big mess, and the Bush team is clueless on what to do about it.

This is not an environment that will pump up the GOP base with that extra bit of enthusiasm on Election Day.  They may be plenty mad - they always are - but it's sort of a bummer when your side controls everything in Washington, and you still can't get a job, and your kid's friend who's serving in Iraq wrote his family about how scary the situation is over there, after he thought we'd won.

So.  Plenty of conventional wisdom - based on real experience - suggests that Howard Dean would be a horribly easy target for the GOP hit squads and all-round right-wing political truck bombers. 

At the same time, Dean is the one guy who, right now, is firing up our side with some real enthusiasm.  Maybe that dynamic will change.  Maybe Kerry will come off the ropes swinging, or another candidate like Gephardt will.  Maybe Clark will get into the race and fire up his own wave of enthusiasm.  But right now, Dean is the one Dem candidate who looks like he could generate a tidal wave next fall.

Right now, if I were a "leading Democratic strategist," sure, I'd be nervous as hell about whether the GOP might do a McGovern on Dean.  At the same time, I'd recognize that Dean is firing up our voters in a way that no other candidate has.  No matter what the GOP hit machine does - and it would smear Jesus Christ, if he came back and became the Democratic nominee - I'd sure as hell rather go into next November behind a tough candidate who can fire up our troops and take the fight to the enemy, than behind some sacrificial lamb trotted out only to avoid a presumed debacle.

In American elections today, you win if you have base enthusiasm, you lose if you don't.  From a strategic point of view, that should be the first consideration, ahead of region, specific ideology, or anything else.  And, right now, that dynamic favors Dean.

August 30, 2003

The mess in Iraq just gets worse by the day, with the assassination of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, plus the slaughter of a hundred or so supporters and bystanders, pushing the country that much closer to general sectarian chaos. 

Any of three factions, or more broadly "tendencies," could have a motive for the assassination:

1) Saddam supporters or other Baathists (who may not follow Saddam himself any more), for whom Bakr Hakim was a long-time enemy.

2) Hard-line Shias, such as extremist (and perhaps renegade) followers of Muqtader Sadr, taking out a rival in the Shia community.

3) Al-Qaeda types, who just want to make the pot boil more.

A small tinfoil-hat contingent on the antiwar side has jumped to the conclusion that this might have been some sort of black op by the "Coalition" forces.  This idea flunks the most basic smell test.  Bakr Hakim was a Shia moderate - not exactly on our side (though his brother is on the US-appointed provisional Governing Council), but someone willing to deal with us rather than taking the insurgency route.  For us to assassinate him would be deliberately shooting ourselves in the foot, and exceeds the plausible- stupidity limits even of the Bush administration.

In fact, the fury of Bakr Hakim's followers seems directed mainly at Saddam. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean they'll let us off the hook, much less draw closer to us.   The Middle East is big on conspiracy theories, so a lot of them will probably suspect us, and could care less whether I think it's logical.  Even the ones who don't believe we're behind it will blame us for letting it happen - it's one more brutal example, for them, of our inability to provide any order or safety in Iraq.  They're right, too:  In occupying Iraq, we became responsible for it. 

We are the government of Iraq.  If you're an Iraqi, whether your car is stolen, your daughter kidnapped, or a hundred of your friends, family, and neighbors blown to bit, the United States is the answerable authority.  And we're doing a hell of an indequate job, with no evident prospect or plan for doing a better one.  Al-Fubar, indeed!

On the California scene:  Arnold Schwarzenegger, asked about his, ah, spicy 1977 interview in Oui, said that "I have no memory of any of the articles I did 20 or 30 years ago."

So much for Total Recall, I guess.

August 28, 2003

The morning papers today featured two main Iraq-related stories.  One was that the Bush Administration was prepared to make a half-step back toward the UN.  Under the proposal (the outlines of which were broadly hinted at by Kofi Annan a few days ago), the "Coalition" forces in Iraq would be re-organized as a UN-sanctioned multinational force, which would just happen to have a US general in command. 

On the face of it, this is not an unreasonable idea, and one for which there are plenty of UN precedents.  Other things being equal, it would make sense for the UN-authority command to go to a general from the country contributing the bulk of the forces.  In practice, of course, this is more or less asking the UN for a fig leaf - but that's an improvement, after all, on being bare-ass naked.  It is also the first hint of recognition by the Bush team that yes, they've gotten us into a bit of a jam.  This is progress, Abdul.

The question is how willing our allies will be to provide us the fig leaf - not to mention some boots on the ground to relieve our overworked and under-supported troops.  Now, practically everyone has a real interest in arresting the slide in Iraq before it ends in the restoration of Saddam, the establishment of an Islamist fundamentalist state, or civil war.  In the world of realpolitik, these considerations really should outweigh the annoyance of having to get George Bush's aspect out of a sling.

Unfortunately, the whole process of getting (all of us) into that sling involved a lot of gratuitous dissing of our potential allies.  Remember "freedom fries?"  Most recently, the breathtakingly silly pipeline-to-Israel scheme I mentioned a couple of days ago was highly offensive to the Turks, who also have a pipeline from Iraq.

So, human nature being what it is, a lot of countries are going to be in no hurry to save Bush's bacon, even if it's in their long-term interest to do so.  Which means we're skiing uphill here.

The real sticking point, I suspect, is not going to be the organization of the military side of things.  Professional military people understand the situation, and also tend to respect one another.  We're talking soldiers here, not talk-radio blowhards.   (They know, for example, that those cheese-eating surrender monkeys, AKA the French, have one of the world's best militaries, whom you don't want to screw with.) 

The sticky part will be the issue of overall political authority in Iraq.  Which brings us to the morning papers' other Iraq item - the revelations that fully a third of the $4.3 billion/month we're spending to support our troops in Iraq is going to private contractors, with none other than Halliburton prominent among them. 

The shabby job these corporate hacks have been doing is a whole 'nother story.   The point here is that while other countries have a real interest in stabilizing Iraq, they have no interest at all in lining the pockets of Cheney's pals and other Bush campaign contributors.  To bring them on board, the Bush team will have to surrender some real authority over the political and economic reconstruction of Iraq.   

Tough tahooties.  If the possibility of a debacle in Iraq doesn't get through to them, maybe the prospect of the 2004 election - and Bush's slipping poll numbers - will.

Speaking of the 2004 election, here is a preliminary reconnaissance of the electoral-college map.

August 27, 2003

"Gay marriage should be between a man and a woman."

-- Arnold Schwarzenegger

Umm, thanks for making us clear on that one, Arnold! 

August 26, 2003

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo is high on my daily must-read list.  Still, he's been around the Beltway for a whole, and sometimes it shows.  He still thinks the Dean candidacy is about a "left" insurgency, when really it is mainly about an anti-wimp insurgency.   I was moved to send him an email about it, and to save keystrokes I'll simply repeat it here:

TPM --

You slipped up, in a subtle sort of way. Yesterday, in giving the rationale for a Clark run, you described the Dean candidacy as an anti-Washington insurgency (true enough) and as appealing especially to left-leaning elements of the base. Which is also true, but in a peculiar way that you did not account for.

(I should note that that I am "leaning" Dean, but could easily "lean" Clark if he gets in the race.)

Then, today, you linked an article about how Bill "The Big Dog" Clinton let loose on the GOP with both barrels at an Aspen gabathon. As the linked article described it, most of the high-toned attendees were taken aback at the display of actual fire in the belly. From the very fact that you linked it, though, I take it that you approve of said fire in the belly.

But fire - not leftiness - is at the heart of Dean's support. Anyone politically tuned in enough to be for any candidate at this stage knows Dean's centrist record - and the ones on the party left support him anyway, because he seems like the only one willing to kick ass and take names. Flip side, just about every active Dem I know despises the Beltway Dem establishment (fairly or unfairly), not for its positions on issues but because it comes off as a bunch of wimps.

Party left, right, or center, I could care less - just give me a candidate who will get in George Bush's face.

This really is what it's all about. 

As a side note, the first I've really seen of Dean was his interview on CNN Late Edition last Sunday.  He impressed the hell out of me, which is why I'm now a Dean leaner.

The strange news item on CNN yesterday was an official Israeli government proposal, or some such, about a plan to re-open a pipeline that runs from Iraq to Haifa (closed, needless to say, in 1948).   I'd heard mention of this particular demented idea before, but this is the first time I recall seeing or hearing it anywhere but the Internet.  It is supposed to be popular in the Pentagon (i.e., with Rumsfeld and his pencil necks, not the uniform guys and gals). 

This scheme is implausible, to put it mildly. It is hard to imagine any Iraqi government going for this in the foreseeable future, least of all a democratic one, or even a nominally representative "governing council."  For the Israeli government to even mention the notion is just about guaranteed to further pump up (so to speak!) Iraqi suspicions that the war was all about grabbing their oil.  

In fact, sending Iraqi oil to Israel is so far from plausible, so removed from rational policy discussion, as to invite a cynical interpretation.  So here's mine:

The Israeli right wing does not believe in the peace process, and never has.   Their basic premise is that the Arabs will always hate Israel.  But more than that, their own dominant position in Israeli politics depends on continued violence.  It has long been one of the creepy tragedies of the Middle East that the hardliners on both sides feed off of one another.  Every time Hamas or someone blows up a busload of Israelis, it strengthens the hand of the Sharon crowd, or the even more extreme bunch around Bibi Netanyahu.  Everytime the Israelis blow up some Palestinians, it weakens their moderates and plays into the hands of Hamas. 

It is in the interest of the Israeli right to paint the US into the same corner   -- permanently at odds with the Arab world.  It's doubtful that Sharon (or Netanyahu) or anyone around them ever believed for a moment that stuff about turning Iraq into a thriving democracy and transforming the Arab world.  (And if it ever somehow did happen, they'd be marginalized in Israeli politics.)  From their point of view, it's fine and dandy if the US gets bogged down in Iraq, surrounded by hostiles, resented by the region and the world, able to count on no one except, well, Israel.

All of this also plays into the mindset of US conservatives.  They also have the attitude that pretty much everyone in the world hates us, and they're quite happy for it to be that way.  It makes everything simpler, and avoids messy things like compromise.  Like its Israeli counterpart, the US right wing basically takes a blood-and-iron view of the world.

So, from the point of view of both the Israeli and US right, the Iraqi-oil-to-Israel scheme makes a screwy kind of sense.  Not a drop of oil may ever flow through it, but it keeps the pot boiling, and so keeps the US and Israel fighting back to back against everyone else.  Win-win, in the right-wing world view. 

Okay, this idea is not only cynical but more than a bit demented.  However, it is the only theory that makes any sense at all of the pipeline thing.  On the other hand, a simpler theory is that everyone, American or Israeli, involved in floating this pipeline idea is just plain a blithering idiot. 

August 25, 2003

Okay, so my last try at a blog page fizzled.  The fall of '02 was too damn depressing.   Bush was pushing us toward a war that no one but the full mooners really wanted, and the Beltway Dems punted away an election we could have won because they didn't have the nerve to fire up and turn out our base.

Times have changed. 

This seems to be the week that the Beltway conventional wisdom finally woke up and smelled the coffee:  Things in Iraq aren't exactly going The Way They Were Supposed To.  The tipping point seems to have been the attack on the UN headquarters.  There are at least a couple of layers of sad irony to this. 

The more obvious irony is the contempt the Bush crew has shown for the UN (and anything smacking of international cooperation) since they got - well, not quite elected.   There's poetic justice in this, though it's no justice at all for the victims.   It is at least fitting, though, that blowing up the UN offices should be what brings the chickens home to roost for Bush's war.

The other strange irony is that the UN attack is one thing that could have happened even if everything else in Iraq were going according to plan.   Truck-bomb attacks can be and have been brought off even in peaceful, generally secure surroundings.  Even if Iraqi crowds had lined the streets to cheer our troops, the lights were on and the water was running, and Ahmed Chalabi were all set to be sworn in as President of Iraq, terrorists might still have managed to truck-bomb the UN. 

As it is, though, the bombing brutally underlined the fact that hardly anything has been going right in Iraq.  In fact, we're staring more and more into the worst-case scenario.

It was easy to guess, even before the war, that Iraq would fall into a shambles by and by.  I admit, though, that I assumed we'd have a honeymoon period before it happened.  I even thought that the Bush team might be able to get Iraq out of the news, and bask in the afterglow of Mission Accomplished even as things went to hell in a handbasket on the Tigris and Euphrates.  After all, Afghanistan has been falling into a shambles for months now, and - till just this week, by no coincidence at all - no one in the US media paid much attention.

So now we're in a jam.  George Bush wanted his war, and got it.   Now he's having a problem scraping it off his shoes.  Too bad the rest of us have the same problem.

On a happier note closer to home, this weekend brought the first hint that Gray Davis may actually ride out the recall.  The LA Times poll showed support for the recall as falling to 50 percent, even with a presumed GOP turnout skew.   45 percent opposed, five percent are undecided.  The same poll also showed Bustamante leading Schwarzenegger by 35/22 percent.

Now, granted that turnout in October remains the big mystery.  But chances are that anyone who isn't solidly for the recall now isn't going to end up voting for it as reality sets in.  If anything, a few percentage points of recall supporters are likely to have second thoughts.  They may also have second thoughts - from the poll numbers, are already having second thoughts - about voting for a killer robot, when the robot has been programmed by the Pete Wilson crowd.

True, as Kausfiles noted, that the combined total of the major GOP replacement contenders exceeds Bustamante's numbers.  Simon has already dropped out of the race, presumably after waking up to find a horse's head in his bed.  No doubt Tom McClintock will get one as well, but he seems to be made of tougher stuff.  Since he's at 12 percent, only ten points behind Arnold, and stands to get some of Simon's support, there's a decent chance that he'll decide to tough it out.  That will split the prospective GOP vote.

In any case, the recall is gradually shaping up as a straight partisan fight, which favors the Dems.  The White House will probably be glad they kept their fingerprints off it.  They've got enough other problems as it is.

-- Rick Robinson

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Last revised 11/07/2006 ... by RM Robinson

Email me: Lyonesse@compuserve.com

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