Bush Wars is dead; long live Blotter!

A belated announcement

To those of you who still venture here from time to time even though I haven't posted regularly in months, I say thanks; it was a good run at Bush Wars--over a million page views since we opened up shop in 2003 (thanks in part to co-poster Mark Gisleson, now plying the blogger's trade at Norwegianity)--but now we're shuttering the joint, for the foreseeable future at least.

The spirit of BW lives on, however, and for a change I'll actually be posting items to prove it. In coming days I'll begin posting regularly on the Bush administration and media coverage of same over at Blotter, City Pages' new news-and-links blog. Take a look. It's in a primitive state as yet (read: we're still using the same old Manila blogging software), but before long we'll be sprucing it up; you'll be able to sort posts there by subject and author to get to the news and links you're after.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 15, 2005 6:05 PM

 

The Rise of the Boo-yaa's

In your face, loser: the citizen as fan

Star Tribune, are you ready to rumble? The Belligerent Clown Posse is coming to your town for a very special edition of World Blogging Federation Smackdown! See Preacher Hewitt lead a tag team of conservatism's finest against the legions of liberal media! Can the Star Tribune scrape Nick Coleman off the mat in time to avoid total annihilation? Tune in and find out!

When the Bush era is done, one of the puzzles left to history will be the seeming ease with which the recklessness and radicalism of the president's fiscal and military endeavors, not to mention his gang's open contempt for democratic forms, gained the assent of tens of millions of Americans. The news apparatus and the putative opposition party will come in for very large dollops of blame, along with the precipitous decline of public schools over the past generation-plus (a thoroughly bipartisan effort: under Clinton, federal education spending as a share of GDP fell 24 percent). More abiding factors such as militarism, racism, and clericalism belong in the equation too. But there is something less obvious afoot in the style and attitude of the Bush brigade's apologists, and right now we're seeing it in our backyards.

As Paul Demko reports this week in City Pages, a California radio host and capo of right-wing bloggery named Hugh Hewitt has declared war on the Star Tribune, pledging his minions to the task of parsing the paper's contents line by subversive line until they've stripped it to its bright red carapace and put the remains on public display. Hewitt's fatwa seeks to rehearse the good fun his pals at the Power Line blog had a couple of months ago in lobbing invective at Strib columnist Nick Coleman. Because this battle was waged on the heels of their receiving Time's blog of the year citation, the spat got more than its share of attention and wound up drawing blood when TCF pulled its ads from the paper. Hardly surprising, then, that it occurred to a compatriot of the Power Line boys to have another go at the paper.

It doesn't really matter, to Hewitt anyway, that it's not so. It's true that the Star Tribune's editorialists have been among the most openly anti-Bush, anti-Iraq War in the entire country, and that the paper still has the effrontery to employ not one but two old-school liberal columnists. But neither of those elements has any bearing on the paper's news pages, which Hewitt expressly targets as well. Complaints about the bias of the paper once known as the Red Star go back decades. But in the 20 years I've lived and worked here, it's never been a particularly liberal paper. During the Roger Parkinson-Tim McGuire era, the paper richly deserved its status as a national laughing stock, but that's not because it tilted liberal; that's because it was lousy.

Since McClatchy purchased the paper, it's become more professional and more coherent in its coverage, and published some of the best investigative and special feature work it's ever done. But for all that, the paper is seldom a rocker of important boats. The main bias in its news pages is the same official-source-ism that colors most dailies' beat coverage and causes it to tilt sympathetic to whoever the official sources of the hour happen to be. Right now in Minnesota, those official sources are mostly conservative. The paper is further inoculated against liberalism by the presence of political editor D.J. Tice, who was a let-them-eat-cake conservative as editor of the Twin Cities Reader in the 1980s and remained one throughout his days at the Pioneer-Press. A pretty good case could be made that if there's a slant in the placement and packaging of the paper's politics coverage, it's already a conservative slant.

David Strom of the Taxpayers League, rarely a voice of moderation in anything, got it exactly right in declining to enlist in Hewitt's army: While the Strib's editorial writers and its in-house poll may be repugnant to their crowd, there's scant reason to complain about the way Strib reporters treat conservative sources. (Indeed, Strom assures readers of his personal blog that two of the paper's front-line politics reporters, Pat Lopez and Dane Smith, "are friends of mine." Do tell.)

The internet demi-monde of right-wing bloggers and chat boards is the purest expression of what has happened to political "dialogue" in the 15-year period bracketed by the rise of Rush Limbaugh and that of the Bush gang. Together the forces of radical conservatism have contrived an extreme makeover in the language of politics: They've turned it into the idiot stepchild of sports programming.

What I'm talking about is evident in matters of idiom--the countless times, for example, that "liberal" is invoked as a taunting slur, roughly akin to the way "cheesehead" or "the fucking Yankees" might be tossed off on a sports-chat board. It's more than a matter of style; there's a worldview lurking beneath it, and what the worldview entails is summed up in the (semantically challenged) old Vince Lombardi maxim that winning isn't everything--it's the only thing. Now of course electoral politics has always been about winners and losers in a very important sense. But has there ever been a political moment so openly defined by swagger and triumphalism for their own sake--the will to humiliate the vanquished, grind them underfoot for the sheer pleasure of showing them who's boss? As a popular post-election sweatshirt hawked at the Drudge Report exulted, W is for Winner. Enough said.

What's at stake here is the difference between the moral universe of the citizen and that of the fan, which is to say between that of the participant and the spectator. For the fan, the only crucible that finally matters is being on the winning side. To ask whether what's being won is worth having, or in one's interest, or whether these victories may set the stage for future calamity, is about as interesting and sensible from the fan's point of view as suggesting that the Vikings really ought to think twice about playing the Packers this year (or, more nonsensically still, that bad things may befall them if they beat the Packers). As for the current censorial tenor of politics chat, the most rudimentary piece of fan etiquette is that the spoils and the bragging rights accrue to winners. Trash talk from losers is not endured in good humor. Failing to shut up after your side has been put down is an outrageous bit of bad manners--or, when it's politics we're talking about, an un-American activity.

The mindset expresses itself in a variety of ways. There's the reader who wrote to me shortly after the invasion of Iraq to ask, So what if Bush lied his way into war? It worked. Or the gleeful contempt with which the epithet "losers" was thrown around after the last election, as if it were the only word they could think of that was worse than "liberal." And the party the Power Line crew is throwing itself tonight at the Center of the American Experiment to mark Dan Rather's forced retirement. Will they rent Stuart Scott from ESPN to lead the room in his trademark winner's jeer, "Boo-YAA!"? Whatever else you may say about Bush/Rove, they certainly didn't conjure this impulse into being.

You see this streak of end-over-means, in-your-face triumphalism playing itself out in the political alliances now coalescing on the right, where anti-tax, government-off-our-backs libertarians are seen to lie down with religious conservatives who want a government at least expansive enough to make sure no one out there is doing anything of which Jesus might disapprove. Or consider the right-wing blogs' dueling weapon of choice, a practice known as "fisking" that consists of reproducing whole stories from other media and yelling at them in hectoring, frequently disjointed asides until the fisk-er either reaches the end of the text or passes out from hyperventilating. It's a performance whose outcome is fixed with a wink from the start, like professional wrestling or, more exactly, like the version of pro wrestling Rush Limbaugh brought to the radio so long ago now: heroes-and-villains political entertainment made in a controlled setting, with lots of ranting rhetorical takedowns and no fretting over questions of equal time or accuracy. It's a show, folks.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 7, 2005 7:33 PM

 

The Revolt of the Invisibles

 

After years gone missing from the national stage, the other white America is out for payback and voting Republican

 

All the post-election blather about the composition of Bush's base proves that Karl Rove and the Bush GOP are right: The entire Democratic party establishment, along with the "serious" news outlets (the broadcast networks, the prestige daily papers), have no idea what's become of the white working class. None. They set it aside momentarily a mere 30 or so years ago and now they can't find it anywhere. Maybe this is why they have tended to give fundamentalist churches all the credit for Bush's victory: The Christian right is the only totemic explanation, so far, of where all the people who live off-radar have gone.

 

It's also a formidable part of the answer. Two or three years ago I sat at a middle school baseball game and listened to one mom recount her afternoon. Someone else had given rides to the kids who usually came to games with her. "And it was so weird," she said, "coming over here with their gear spread around the van but them gone. It was like the whole crew got raptured!" I didn't get the joke immediately, but everyone around me did. Until then it never occurred to me that the language of end times was a comfortable facet of everyday life for people I encountered regularly. Of course I knew there were evangelicals aplenty in the land, but I thought they were somewhere else, sitting on hard pews in country churches, not in the bleachers at baseball games near my house. What shocked me was to realize how little I knew about my neighbors, or them about me, and how quietly the gulf between us had grown up. Class is culture now, I thought later, and left vs. right in the usual sense has nothing to do with it; it's all about who's on the inside and who's on the outside.

 

And the most sorely inflamed outsiders in present-day America are the white working class. Over the past generation their lot has been erosion and instability, a state of affairs their country has commemorated by writing them out of the national story. To appreciate the magnitude of this disappearing act, let us try for a sense of proportion in the matter of winners and losers. While the national wealth grew in the '80s and '90s, the gains were passed to the top with a vengeance, so that in the end only about 20 percent of the populace actually made out as well or better from all the heralded expansion. During this time of supposedly boundless triumph, the other 80 percent have seen their real wages stagnate or shrink, with the brief exception of a few years during the late-90s stock market bubble. But since then, computer- and automation-driven productivity gains have only accelerated the thinning of ranks among middle and lower white-collar managers, a longtime redoubt of the white working stiff. The great majority of Americans now 25 to 54 years old are making out less well than their parents, a gulf they seek to bridge by working longer hours at more jobs per household and by taking on impossible levels of consumer debt. Their jobs not only pay less but have been broadly "re-engineered" to involve skills that are more limited and more fungible, and to skirt the necessity of offering employee benefits where possible: the temp-labor racket.

  

Yet in all this time, the crisis of average working Americans has never become a great political issue, and their image and outlook are no longer part of the American identity beamed back at us through media. Throughout the years of Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, the country cultivated a boom-time mythology that exalted winners and rewarded them more lavishly than at any time in American history. From Reagan onward, market values routed all others; whatever the logic of maximum accumulation dictated was the way things had to go. When Bill Clinton and the Democrats came to power after 12 years of Republican rule in 1993, they offered the restive masses--lectures about personal responsibility. Eight more years of The New Normal made it seem a natural fact that you were a winner or a nobody, and in either case you were very much on your own. Mass culture followed the changes in political culture; the mundane, the merely life-sized, gave way to the glittering and fabulous. As for those other people--well, what other people? We don't see any other people around here. Thinking about the welfare of others became déclassé, no to mention dangerous to one's own standing.

 

To be an average, struggling white American in these years has been to feel untethered and neglected, dispossessed from your country's lavish success stories--gains that, according to the old rules of economics and skin caste, you should have been enjoying as well. White working people did not have it as bad as non-white working people, but they felt their marginality much more keenly because they thought they had been promised it would never happen to them. (Left Behind indeed.) As the Bush campaign demonstrated, their sense of exclusion and of betrayal by "the elites" is very top-of-mind these days. While this may sound like a blow-for-blow description of the Christian right, it's bigger than that, and better understood as a class revolt. The chattering classes have failed to notice that the religious fundamentalists are joined by a secular version of similar shape and vehemence, its sensibility honed not in the pulpit but at the sports desk. You can hear it on the radio every day.

 

Do you realize how much Rush Limbaugh and his progeny have done to reshape the way people think and talk about politics? It's fairly staggering. Limbaugh had two seminal insights; they were not his alone, but he brought them to market. The first was that class resentment simmered in the land, and could be harnessed to the purposes of the right by naming "liberals" as the stifling, oppressive elite in their path. It worked because it conjured images of the usual suspects in white working class dislocation--uppity women, people of other colors or national origins, the highfalutin and out-of-touch in Hollywood and Washington D.C. The second was to change the rules of political chatter so as to give the folks a better show. Limbaugh's forum was not a political talk show in the usual sense; there was no pretense to equal time or to respect for opposing views. Calls were screened meticulously, and Limbaugh did not venture into public to debate others in uncontrolled settings. Though it pretended to be spontaneous, his closed stage was part sporting ring and part theater, or in other words a drama not unlike professional wrestling. His métier was ridicule, the get-outta-here-with-that-nonsense! rhetorical body slam, a style that has come to define most of the radio and TV talk shows that are supposed to embody the urgent debates of the day. In Limbaugh's wake, talking about politics has become a lot more like talking about sports, one consequence being that anything done in the name of winning, or harassing the opponent, tends to become its own justification. (So what if Bush lied to secure the invasion of Iraq? a letter writer scolded me shortly after the war's start--it worked, didn't it?)

 

But if the secular, talk-radio right is not really synonymous with the Christian conservative crowd, there is one encompassing sentiment they share: that the world has been hijacked from beneath their feet, taken from them contrary to God's plan or the founding fathers' promise (choose one). They intend to take it back, and they are in an exceptionally nasty mood regarding terms of surrender.

 

"In your re-election," the Rev. Bob Jones wrote to Bush on November 3, "God has graciously granted America--though she doesn't deserve it--a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.... Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ." A former major league pitcher turned radio evangelist named Frank Pastore wrote in an LA Times op-ed, "In the weeks and months to come, we will hear the voices of well-meaning people beseeching the victor to compromise with the vanquished. This would be a mistake. Conservatives must not compromise with the left."

 

In other words, the appointed villains of the uprising (be they liberals, minions of Satan, or both) face the same Manichean spirit visited on the mass of average working folk for a couple of decades now: You'll be one of us, or nobody at all.

Posted by Steve Perry at December 6, 2004 4:40 PM

 

Meet the New Dems

How's the reinvention of the Democrats going so far? A Bush Wars translation guide 

weholdthesetruths.org

1: What is it the Democrats need to do, James Carville?

The purpose of a political party in a democracy is to win elections. We're not doing that well enough. And I think that we can't deny that the problem exists. I think we have to confront the problem. And by and large, our message has been we can manage problems while the Republicans, although they will say we can solve problems, they produce a narrative, we produce a litany.... These guys had a narrative — we're going to protect you from the terrorists in Tikrit and from the homos in Hollywood. That's it. I think we could elect somebody from Beverly Hills if they had some compelling narrative to tell people about what the country is....

The underlying problem here is, there is no call to arms that the Democratic Party is making to the country. We've got to reassess ourselves. We've got to be born again.

Translation: Beats the fuck out of me. Could be we need to talk prettier.

2: Who's going to run the DNC?

An AP dispatch last week named Howard Dean as well as "Govs. Tom Vilsack of Iowa and Mark Warner of Virginia, and former Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia. Harold Ickes, a New York lawyer who was a White House aide in the Clinton administration and has close ties to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has a large following, especially in the Clinton wing of the party. Ickes is a passionate advocate and successful fund-raiser, but his Clinton ties might work against him among Democrats backing other candidates. Other names being circulated: Inez Tenenbaum, South Carolina's education superintendent and unsuccessful Senate candidate; and Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of the centrist New Democrat Network."

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry "I always would rather dance than fight" Reid has gone on record touting Vilsack, a colorless party hack who, with a little luck, could be another Dick Gephardt someday.

Translation: We gotta find someone who will play ball with the cash clientele. We can't give donors the idea we're going a whole new way here.

3: Where's the silver lining in this latest rout?

According to contributors at DailyKos and other pro-Dem bulletin board sites, it's that some moderate Republicans may jump ship and become Dems. Here's a few excerpts from one such thread:

I will repeat what I have written several times: If you are a moderate Republican, the message is clear. Your party does not want you. But, thanks to the conservative group Concerned Women for America, you no longer have to take my word for it. Their chief counsel has made that abundantly clear.

heck yeah, we want them! incumbents are hard to beat! but more to the point, i think we need to take these seats back to Dem either by changing the candidate's party or by getting our candidate in.

Why wouldn't we want them?  There's nothing inherently evil in fiscal conservatism (see John Kerry's record), it makes sense in a lot of ways, we just happen to disagree.  Heck, even on Kos we've been talking about increased states' rights etc (end red state welfare and all that).  I say, it's good that the moderate of the GOP are starting to see things as they are.  We need to make this more and more about the loonies that are still with Bush, after all this. This is even a good meme, even normal republicans (not neocon/religous wackos) are with us!

I want them too.  I think it's become a matter of semantics - that 'liberal' somehow doesn't equate to 'mainstream'.  The democratic party is mainstream, we just let the pubs frame all the issues in ways that make the it sound like we're on the fringe.

And so on, ad nauseam.

Translation: When the Democrats have absorbed enough alienated Republicans to make themselves resemble even more thoroughly the pre-Bush Republican party, the Democrats will be victorious again--booYAA, Republicans!

So there's your DNC post-election roundup: craven, false, same as it ever was.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 17, 2004 10:56 AM

 

CIA Analyst on al Qaeda: Next Time, Nukes?

Scheuer speaks out; Time highlights Mexico

Last night Michael Scheuer, the CIA bin Laden analyst and anonymous author of Imperial Hubris who resigned from the CIA on Friday, appeared on 60 Minutes. Scheuer said he believes that al Qaeda means to attack the US with nuclear weapons or radiological "dirty bombs," and disclosed that in May 2003 bin Laden obtained a fatwa from a Saudi cleric authorizing the use of nuclear weapons against America. (Scheuer also seems to believe that the bin Laden tape released just before the election may have constituted the convert-to-Islam-or-else warning that many Muslims would expect him to offer non-Muslims before a major attack.)

From CBS's written summary of the 60 Minutes report:

"You've written no one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States," says Kroft. "You believe that's going to happen?"

"I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable," says Scheuer.

A nuclear weapon? "A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device," says Scheuer. "Yes, I think it's probably a near thing."

What evidence is there that bin Laden's actually working to do this? "He's told us it. Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions," says Scheuer. "He's told us that, 'We are going to acquire a weapon of mass destruction, and if we acquire it, we will use it.'"

And this morning Time features a dispatch regarding intelligence reports that al Qaeda may be planning to move WMD or the raw materials for making them through Mexico.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 15, 2004 9:24 AM

 

Equal Time: The GOP Sucker Bet

Mind if I borrow this flag?

It's amazing that anyone in the whole wide world takes the talk about Schwarzenegger in '08 seriously. Some do, though, and some journalists dutifully regurgitate it, either because they don't know any better or it's good copy. This is even more fatuous than the establishment Dems' Hillary dreams. Do you honestly think 38 states are going to pass an Arnold amendment to clear a path for the Terminator's first term? Do you think it will even be an unqualified hit in the (nativist, anti-celeb) red states? Enough already. It's more plausible that Dick Cheney will expire in his bunker during the next four years and an animatronic replica will succeed GWB.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 14, 2004 9:31 AM

 

The Sucker Bet for '08: Hillary

The Passion of the Clinton

Aiiiggghh! (hogwild.net)

As if the beaming mugs of triumphal Bushmen were not enough to bear so soon on the heels of the election, now comes the inevitable Hillary talk. The website Readabet.com lists her as the favorite to win the Big House in '08 at 5-1 odds; Rudy Giuliani is second at 15-2.

I rarely give financial advice at Bush Wars, but personally I'd be comfortable betting against her at those odds. Bush on his most unpopular day has not been as polarizing a figure as Hillary Clinton, and she will never occupy the White House. Her insuperable liability is that she excites an arch reaction from cultural conservatives who suppose her to be liberal and uppity, while she is in fact neither and hence cannot call upon the loyalties of any avid backers to counter her opponents' numbers and zeal. (Here's a side bet you should take as well, if you can find it: She would certainly not win the women's vote. Never mind all the working class women who don't like her; she is not even very popular among white middle-class feminists anymore, as the Village Voice reported last year.) Her "base" consists of the most blinkered segment of the Dem intelligentsia, the element that is still bedazzled by Bill or convinced that all the party needs is a star to head its ticket.

I'm not sure any of the above fatally injures her chance of being the nominee, however. Look at the field: John "Cat Got My Tongue" Edwards and the rest. Do you suppose Joe Lieberman sees another big opening?   

Posted by Steve Perry at November 12, 2004 8:56 AM

 

Oh, No: The "Third Way" Again

The Democrats' mandate: Keep polishing the same turd until it shines

Today's Washington Post reveals that there's a new player in Democratic party circles: Third Way, a dead-in-its-cradle alternative to the Democratic Leadership Council that would replace the bankrupt values of the DLC with--the bankrupt values of the DLC. The story is freighted with such telling constructions as "moderate majority" and "progressive centrists." Is this all eerily familiar somehow? It ought to be. It's the siren song of the Clinton era, right down to the "Third Way" clap-trap, which amounts to a repackaging of the first and only way, which is Republican governance dedicated to building armies and facilitating commerce and accumulation. 

In more consequential news, the Bush family has named its new puppy, a Scottish terrier, Miss Beazley.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 11, 2004 9:55 AM

 

Don't Blame the Voters

The verdict on "values": It's a political advantage to have some

 

Whitehouse.gov

 

[Here's a preview of the column that will appear in Wednesday's City Pages (11/10).]

 

Newsweek reports that John Kerry met his fate last Tuesday with a howl of incomprehension: "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot." In the days after the election, the same clatter of fury and condescension rang through blog chat boards and pro-Dem websites, and it was directed ultimately not at "this idiot" but by implication at the tens of millions of idiots who voted for him. As the Mirror of London put it, echoing popular European sentiment, "How Can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?"

 

The tabloid cover bearing that headline has become a smash-hit download in the US as well as the UK. One Floridian member of an email list I receive added this remark by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling to her mail signature: "We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks." So great was the indignation that the empty plaints of a few celebrities who groused about leaving the country in 2000 became a popular badge of outrage last week. It took little imagination to see that the would-be émigrés were not fleeing their government so much as their countrymen, the troglodyte fundamentalist horde that imposed this result on them.  Bush Republicans seemed pleased at this: "Americans Flock to Canada's Immigration Web Site," the Drudge Report gloated. And why shouldn't they be pleased? They recognize the growing polarization of the country and they mean to exploit it. No appreciable number of people is really leaving, but if they are made to forswear any attention to or involvement in the whole sordid mess going forward, something similar is accomplished. 

 

For the opponents of Bushism to vent this way, to think this way, is profoundly dangerous. Also wrong, not just as a matter of principle but as a matter of fact. But it is also consistent with a long line of Democratic apologia whose specialty is blaming the victims of the party's own abdications and failures. To put it another way, it isn't possible to discuss what the voters said last week absent some reckoning with what they were never given the chance to say.

 

But first a little about what the numbers do say. Turnout, in the end, met extravagant predictions: By the time absentee ballots are processed, nearly 120 million votes will have been tallied, reflecting the largest percentage of voter participation since 1960. The evangelicals have been boasting all week that they carried the election for Bush. They certainly helped--in retrospect, it seems clear that Karl Rove's most consequential move was to ensure that gay marriage became a ballot referendum in so many states, and especially Ohio--but to say they won it is a very large stretch. Oddly enough, the percentage of self-identified Protestants supporting Bush declined by 4 points from 2000 to 2004. According to exit polls, 17.9 percent of voters were white evangelicals who voted for Bush. But that number is almost exactly offset by the percentage of voters who said they came to the polls to cast a vote against Bush (17.5). So it's hard to make the case that religious conservatives all by themselves gave the race to Bush. The fabled "middle" had something to do with it too. 

 

The website politicaljunkie.org compiled this list of how the president and the Republicans fared with 19 different segments of the population. Bush, you will note, improved his standing in 16 of 19 common demographic categories. I've tagged the ones where Kerry and the Democrats gained share with an asterisk for easy reference:

 

Bush vote % in 2000/2004

African-Americans:  8/11
Whites:  54/58
Hispanic:  41/44
Married:  53/56
Not Married:  38/40
Union Members:  37/40
* Gays:  25/23
Gun Owners:  61/67
* Protestants:  63/59
Jewish:  19/25
Catholics:  45/52
Republicans:  91/93
Democrats:  10/11
Men:  51/55
Women:  43/48

* 18-29 year olds:  46/45
30-44 year olds: 49/53
45-59 year olds: 49/51
60+:   47/54

 

"Bush's gay base is eroding," said CP's Paul Demko in a sepulchral croak when he got a look at these numbers. And so it is, along with the Republicans' share of the aforementioned Protestants and of 18-29-year-olds (though barely, and by less than the margin of Bush's improved share among 30-44-year-olds). Otherwise most key demographic markers trended slightly more Republican than in 2000. Of course there are countless ways to parse a pool of numbers this large, and one of the most felicitous for Democrats is to note that first-time voters broke for Kerry 53-46. The trouble is, this merely restates a premise to which everyone assented going in: The election had shaped up to be a referendum on Bush and would be settled in part by the magnitude of the anti-Bush turnout among people who don't usually vote.

 

Over four in 10 Kerry voters said their ballot was cast not so much for its recipient as against Bush. What to make of this number? From a tactical standpoint, was the Anybody But Bush vote too great or too paltry a portion of Kerry's total for him to succeed? Applied in retrospect this is a trick question, but perhaps a useful one. Certainly we can say that with respect to the campaign Kerry chose to conduct, it was too low. From springtime until "Kerry the closer" finally reared his head in the October debates, scarcely anything memorable--much less rousing--emanated from the Kerry camp. That was basically the plan: Stand back and let Bush be Bush, then move in to claim the spoils. As for building a sustained case against Bush, well--why? He was far too coarse and obvious to make that necessary, wasn't he? Everyone could see what was going on--the Times and the Post were full of dire stories from Iraq!

 

There is class hauteur in this, but there is also a generation's worth of evidence that something else is in play. The loudest clue is a matter of silence and omission, of all the things Democrats running for president refuse to say even when there is a fairly clear electoral advantage to be had by it. And that gets to this week's most fondled statistic, the values question.

 

 

Early in the evening on election night, network anchors noticed that the number one issue to voters was something called "moral values," not jobs and the economy, not terrorism, not Iraq. It remains the most fruitless obsession of pundits in last Tuesday's wake. Dick Meyer, writing at the CBS News website, put the matter into perspective as a bit of poll-craft: "While the nexus of issues boiled into the words 'moral values' certainly were a big factor in this election, it's being exaggerated... partly because the Big Theory conforms with what Republican strategists want you to believe. If the poll had been worded or constructed only slightly differently, moral values would not have been the top issue....

 

"If, for example, one of the issues on the list was a combined 'terrorism and Iraq,' it would have been the top concern of 34 percent of the electorate and nobody would be talking about moral values. If 'taxes, jobs and the economy' was on the list as one item instead of two, it would have been the topper at 25 percent. If, say, abortion rights, gay marriage and moral values were all on the list separately, the numbers would be very different."

 

But if "values voters" is mostly just a less inflammatory way of saying "Christian conservatives," the phrase still nudges the conversation in the right direction. Last Wednesday morning Vin Weber stood before a gathering of Republican movers at the Center of the American Experiment and told them the Democrats had lost the election over the values question, and not just the cluster of conservative values everyone was talking about. They had lost, essentially, because they didn't have any values: "The Democrats are going to go through a real soul-searching period," he said. "They'll conclude they lost the election because they didn't have a liberal enough candidate." Weber wasn't sneering at the idea, though some of those present were said to laugh. He was serious.

 

There's a reason Republicans win more than their share of close elections: They see the composition and the exploitable wishes and prejudices of the possible voter pool much more clearly. The Democrats are by no means in agreement on the point, however. While there are calls for a putsch to depose the party's old guard once and for all, the dominant institutional voice in the party remains the Democratic Leadership Council, spawned in the Clinton era and nurtured by him, whose credo is that no Democrat ever stands so tall as when he or she is outflanking a Republican on the right.

 

Since the election, DLC chair Al From has been exhorting Democrats to redouble their efforts in this regard: to "do a better job with connecting with those people who go to work every day and play by the rules.... Let's get a message and redefine our party in a way that people will want to vote for us, ... [and] a candidate who eliminates the 'culture gap,' eliminates the 'security gap,' is willing to compete all over this country." In the space of a couple of sentences, that is, From pledges to swallow religious-right values--spitting up, most likely, only a categorical reversal of Roe; continued chipping at access is fine--military budgets (and actions?) in line with the example of Bush, and indeed to run conservative enough to compete in Southern states, places where Kerry scored as little as 37 percent of the vote this year. 

 

Back to values. I can already hear the protests that the people have spoken, they are mean buggers on the whole, and Democrats have to face reality. Yes, but which reality? It's true that surveys of the American populace as a whole (rarer than you think; the voting pool is where all the money lies for pollsters) indicate that we are a more conservative lot in our social outlook than the federal government has been for the past 40 years or so. But it is also true that these same studies show the people as a whole to be considerably more liberal on economic issues--the things for which they are willing to tax and spend--than the federal governments of the post-Nixon era, Republican and Democrat alike. There is an enormous opening to talk about economic values. 

 

But I doubt this news will send Al From or any other Democrat back to the drawing board. They already know it, as do Republicans, which is presumably why Vin Weber drew the conclusion he did. Yet the game plan of the DLC is nothing if not unswerving. It involves tinkering on the margins of the voter pool--while making few if any concrete promises, at least to those who are not major donors--and minimizing any substantive differences with Republicans. To say it boils down to hoping that enough voters will feel like a Pepsi on election day to turn the result would be oversimplifying, but not by much. (Ironically, the Democrats are so deaf to popular concern that they neglected two issues in which they could have legitimately claimed a difference attractive to many voters: the privacy rights of Americans, aka the domestic war on terror, and the future of the court system.)

 

This us-too gambit has really not worked so well, especially if one is honest and admits that the "Clinton era" would never have been but for two factors beyond the Democrats' control: the unique wild card presented by Ross Perot in 1992, and later the incredible public meanness and arrogance of the Gingrich gang, which took the heat off a White House then on the skids in public approval.

 

Why? The answer is not hard to grasp, though so far it has remained absolutely unthinkable to a dwindling but still large number of what you might call the party's emotional loyalists, the lifers who agonize every four years about bringing the party back to its roots. The answer is, Follow the money. The primary object of the Democratic party's efforts is not to win elections, or to secure a future base, or for that matter to secure any base at all. They would like to do all those things, of course, but the first order of business is to build and maintain a party responsive to its cash clients, the donor base, and to work at putting a popular face on the real narrowness of their interests.

 

As New York Times tax writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston said at a Minneapolis luncheon recently, both parties' core policies are dictated by a class of political donors that constitutes about 1/100th of a percent of the US population, Democrats scarcely less than Republicans. The Republicans are already the public face of this group's political interests; the GOP owns the brand, as it were, and to compound the Democrats' troubles, Republicans also do a better job selling it to the working class. The problem of modern electioneering is mainly one of marketing, and the game will continue to tilt Republican until a political party emerges from the wreckage of the DNC, likely as not bearing the name Democrats but somewhat more dedicated to wooing--and earning--voters as compared to dollars. I'm not holding my breath, but don't let me stop you.  

 

Molly Priesmeyer contributed reporting to this story.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 8, 2004 5:04 PM

 

The Post-Election Story of the Year,
So Far

WKMG-TV, Orlando, Florida--

Man Survives Jump Into Lion's Den

46-Year-Old Reportedly Trying To Convert Lions To Christianity

Read the story.

Once upon a time, persecuted Christians were fed to lions. Now, apparently, the Christians are feeling so flush with power that they're accosting the lions. 

Posted by Steve Perry at November 4, 2004 10:58 AM

 

Four More Years

I've been writing for the past couple of days at City Pages' election blog. I'll have a post-mortem column posted here in the next day or so.

Posted by Steve Perry at November 4, 2004 10:10 AM

 

The War at Home

Derail the Vote 2004: A Karl Rove Production

 

The Bush administration's long-anticipated October Surprise is upon us. Are you watching? The real magnitude of the story is not evident, because it's the sum of many local and regional stories. So do this. Go to Google News and type these words into the search engine: voter registration fraud. As of Monday morning, that string yielded 1,940 returns from the previous couple of weeks. You will find mainly three kinds of tales. The first involves numerous instances of seemingly capricious legal and bureaucratic maneuvering by elected Republican officials where election rules are at issue. The second concerns allegations of fraud by paid operatives of the national Republican party working in several states. The third, predictably, consists of blustery accusations by Republicans that the Democrats are preparing to commit election fraud and to falsely accuse Republicans of doing the same.

 

Here in Minnesota the legalistic and political antics of Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer have hewn to a seeming pattern around the country: Take advantage of any unclear or archaic provisions in the law, and of any bureaucratic two-steps available to you, to make it needlessly confusing and difficult to register and to vote. And by all means call into question the integrity of the process itself. Warn about the practically non-existent threat of fraud by individual voters, cluck about the terrorists likely to be lurking nearby on election day. Give confusing or impracticable advice to your polling place workers. All this, of course, can be done within the law. Just last week it was revealed that Madam Secretary had trained some 50 volunteer election "observers" cherry-picked in large measure from the ranks of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota email list to monitor the conduct of election judges and report back to her office through the course of the day. And on Friday, the Minnesota GOP entered the fray by filing a lawsuit claiming an overabundance of Democratic election judges in the Twin Cities metro area. (To lull the dimwitted, they also cited too many Republican judges in Olmsted County--this isn't, you know, a partisan stunt of some kind.)

 

The same sort of obstructionism is being tried, to potentially much greater effect, in the pivotal swing state of Ohio, whose Secretary of State likewise happens to be a politically ambitious Republican hack. Last month the office of J. Kenneth Blackwell tried, unsuccessfully, to decree that all voter registrations in the state had to be filled out on 80-lb. paper stock, citing an obscure provision in the law that dated to pre-computer days when hard copies of registration forms had to be sturdy since they were the primary record retained. What was the practical impetus? Simply that not all new registrations were being collected on 80-lb. paper stock, and the fiat offered grounds for rejecting more of them.

 

Blackwell also sought to make election judges apply the strictest standards of verification to those voters who had moved to a new address. Why? Fraud worries, of course, though the measure also would have served to exclude more Democratic voters. In Ohio's Taft family Republican stronghold of Hamilton County, election registrars have purged some 105,000 "inactive" registrants over the past four years, as they are allowed but not obliged to do under law. In the Columbus area, writes the Cleveland Free Press, "Franklin County election officials are considering a contingent of actions including arrests if the [Republican-appointed] certified election challengers attempt to challenge all new voters and hold up the voting process."  This underscores an important point. A cynic might conclude that there is a Republican electoral offensive whose real object is not just to disqualify and discourage voters, but to make the lines in polling places move more slowly, so that fewer ballots can be cast before the clock runs out at 8 p.m. that day.

 

In Nevada and Oregon and possibly several other states, one paid Republican registration group has been accused of representing itself as non-partisan in order to do registration drives at prime spots such as libraries, and then systematically destroying any forms they received from Democrats.

 

And of course there is Florida, where another Bush administration's allies commissioned the scrubbing of voter rolls in 2000 and attempted to do the same thing again this year before they were caught in July. But there is no end to the shenanigans a resourceful bureaucrat can pull; as Paul Krugman wrote in his most recent column, "Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form."

 

In the broadest sense, the jiggering of the American vote is one of the more routine facts of political life. Typically it's accomplished right out in the open through the vital gatekeeping function of campaign money, which assures that incumbency rates in the U.S. Congress rival those of the old Soviet politburo, and that almost no one who is not on the same page with the money power gets a chance to be heard from. (Paul Wellstone was so venerated because he was, at first, one of the rare exceptions that prove the rule.) The mere fact that Minnesota is one of only six states that use the eminently sensible, eminently workable same-day voter registration system ought to tell you something about the American predisposition to limit the franchise. 

 

But this is different. I believe we are seeing a war over voting rights on a scale no American has seen since the fight that culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and no Northerner has seen since the age of the utterly powerful and utterly corrupt urban political machines. The Rove-led Republicans do not seem to care if they lay waste to public confidence in the ballot box once and for all. They care only about holding on to the White House, and they appear to be making all due effort to render it as difficult as possible for people to turn out in large numbers to vote against them. If they fail in this, they at least will have created a legal foundation for conjuring a crisis of succession that can be kicked upstairs to the Supreme Court once again.

 

God knows I'm no Democrat. I voted for Nader in 2000, and the time before that I was proud to be one of a couple of dozen signers of a New York Times ad endorsing his candidacy on election eve. I think eight years of Bill Clinton played a vital and as yet unacknowledged role in setting the stage for George W. Bush in the first place. But the first order of business now is to understand what the Republicans are up to, and to combat it tooth and nail. At this point our job as small-d democrats and small-r republicans is to turn out for Kerry (the only not-Bush vote that counts this time) in such numbers as to ensure that Bush/Rove cannot hijack the outcome.

Posted by Steve Perry at October 19, 2004 1:04 PM

 

Dayton: What the Fuck?

Shades of the Wellstone memorial service

Yesterday, as BW's local readers already know, Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton made a rather dramatic announcement: He would be closing his Washington office through the election on the grounds that a secret briefing of Congress (two weeks ago...) suggested serious danger of a terror attack on Capitol Hill. So far no official source, even among those speaking on background, has credited Dayton's implication that We Know Something's Coming. According to the Star Tribune, "A separate government official said Dayton and other senators were shown a CIA document that projected a worst-case scenario of a terrorist attack based on an uncorroborated piece of intelligence that did not contain any specifics."

Well, Dayton wouldn't just conjure something like this in his own mind, would he? The truth is, I think he might. 

We'll see what transpires, but two things occurred to me yesterday when I heard the news: Dayton has assured once and for all his status as a one-term senator; and he has provided 11th-hour fodder for Republican 527s: When there's danger, Democrats cut and run!

I expected the item would lead on Drudge. It didn't, which can only mean the GOP brain trust did not want it to lead on Drudge. The Bush administration has to be careful spinning something like this: After all they have done to raise red flags, they can hardly afford to say that Dayton is an alarmist. But if we get on toward Election Day without the attack to which Dayton alludes, expect the episode to be taken up by ancillary attack squads.

Here's hoping that an episode involving Minnesota Democrats doesn't ripple across the country to the benefit of Republicans for the second election cycle in a row. 

Postscript, Wednesday noon:

One of Dayton's prospective foes, Republican House member Mark Kennedy, has issued this manly response.

The right-wing bloggers are predictably going after Dayton.

    

Posted by Steve Perry at October 13, 2004 9:46 AM

 

Why We Fight

What is, and isn't, at stake in beating Bush

allhatnocattle.net

Sometimes the truth just ain't enough
Or it's too much in times like this
--Bruce Springsteen, "Worlds Apart"

Last Tuesday's Vote for Change concert in St. Paul contained a number of scenes I'll never forget: 55-year-old Bruce Springsteen watching with glee and a little awe as 59-year-old John Fogerty bounced around the stage, forgot his own lyrics, and sounded 25 again; Neil Young's surprise entrance, and every note he played that night; Michael Stipe pogo-ing around the audience pit in front during "Born to Run," just another fan, before dashing back to the stage for a last song. But my favorite moment may have been the quietest of the evening. In a between-songs break near the end, Springsteen made a little ceremony of presenting a wrinkled second-hand corduroy sports coat to Conor Oberst, the lead singer of the tour's opening act, Bright Eyes. Oberst, a 24-year-old indie rock cult figure from Omaha, was an unknown to most of the people who came to see Bruce or REM, and the gesture was Springsteen's way of telling Oberst he belonged, that he was as much a part of what was happening there as anyone else on the stage--an actor and not merely an accessory in the proceedings.

It's hard to imagine that the presidential campaign that Springsteen et al. came to speak their piece about has left very many people feeling that way.  Yes, a lot of people are "mobilized," meaning mad as hell, or scared as hell, but for what purpose? The answer is, to rid themselves of George W. Bush. As for that other guy, John Kerry has been at his very best in the two debates held thus far, going after Bush with acuity and even verve. But on the whole he has run the sort of shabby, pallid, Republican-lite campaign to which rank-and-file Democrats have grown too accustomed. Democrat or otherwise, those of us who want to see Bush go at practically any cost will err greatly if we forget the central question that has hung over Election 2004 like a shroud: Why, after four years of egregious lies, failure, and cronyism on the part of a president who is more widely despised than polls skewed toward registered and "likely" voters will ever apprehend, is this a race at all?

There is no way to discuss this matter sensibly without first discarding some of our most treasured myths about American politics. Put simply, the Democrats are not a real opposition party (only consider the ease with which they swallowed Bush's outrages as they were occurring) and the mass media are not remotely critical of power. A huge and mostly invisible segment of the populace is angry and frightened, less by Osama bin Laden than by what might happen if they get sick or lose their jobs. What passes for public discourse washes over them like a narcotic haze and leaves them feeling left out and bamboozled, powerless, as it is supposed to; thanks to the ministrations of media and the steady erosion of public schools for more than a generation now, the American public is probably more ill-informed than at any time since the 19^th century.

This state of affairs informs the real spirit of the Bush/Cheney government, the campaign slogan you'll never see on a bumpersticker--BC04: Because You'll Believe Anything. In four years the only thing the Bush White House has done well is to generate a massive volume of propaganda. As former Marine intelligence officer Andrew Borene says elsewhere in this issue [see 10/13 City Pages], part of the disaster of Iraq stemmed from the Bushmen's obsession with spinning the war to the folks at home. Team Rove has stuck to its stories, or changed them in nakedly peremptory fashion to suit the occasion, with unblinking resolve. (Goebbels pronounced the last word on the subject: "The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.")

 

Karl Rove's image offensive has been defined mainly by his recognition that this is all that really matters. He understands what the people who work in media, ironically, do not: If it isn't on the evening news or the cable talk shows or the first few paragraphs of the local newspaper's front page, then half to two-thirds of the American public will never know it happened. (Or that it didn't: According to a poll I saw just last week, some 40 percent of Americans still believe Saddam played a role in 9/11.) He further knows that the White House can usually manipulate what is said on television and the front pages of newspapers simply by showing up every day to tell the assembled hordes of stenographers and microphone-carriers what is newsworthy that day.

 

This is a horrifying statement about our political culture, especially when you consider that the Bush gang has done nearly everything else wrong, whether one is measuring their actions against the world we live in, against any semblance of decency or "traditional American values," or purely on tactical/operational grounds.

To reiterate, in the broadest strokes: On the eve of a war he was determined to conjure from whole cloth, the president sought and won a tax cut that principally benefited the very richest Americans (and if you've only got $10 or $20 million, you aren't one of them; see David Cay Johnston's book Perfectly Legal) and did nothing to spur job creation. (No surprise: Studies conducted after the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s demonstrated that corporations and individuals tended not to invest their tax savings thus, but to distribute them or pocket them as profit-takings.) Bush passed a schools initiative called No Child Left Behind that, in the guise of ensuring educational progress for every student, actually guaranteed the quickening of public schools' bankruptcy as they strived to meet unfunded and statistically impossible goals.

In Iraq, the president rushed to invade in the knowledge that Saddam's government would topple easily, setting right again the question of Bush family honor, but without any consideration of what would happen afterward. It underscored the bully principle that is ever at work in this White House: Sometimes you do things simply because no one can stop you, and you feel at pains to prove it.

In fact, the Bush administration has created numerous precedents for expanded and still more autocratic executive branch powers. It flouted its own intelligence evidence about Iraq, and now proposes to permanently reorganize the "intelligence community" under the aegis of the president's office, so that its findings can be tailored to the government's objectives with less fuss. To preserve and expand its prerogative, the Bush gang has stonewalled (the 9/11 Commission), threatened critics into silence (Paul O'Neill and others), cast a veil of secrecy over political embarrassments while hiding behind national security (FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds), and lied, lied, lied without getting taken to task for it publicly very often. This is not merely a matter of George W. Bush's style or personality. By demonstrating just how much an American president can get away with, the Bush era has given a new dimension of meaning to "executive privilege," and this is a lesson that will survive the departure of Bush three months or four years and three months from now. 

The meanness and ineptitude of the Bush regime is the cornerstone of John Kerry's eleventh-hour resurgence. Stripped to its essentials, Kerry's claim to the White House is that he would be a more moderate, forward-looking executor of empire abroad and of a more familiar, if only incrementally more humane, neo-liberal austerity at home. This is fairly horrifying too, and we only set ourselves up for another fall if we forget it, but it does not mean that this election is less important than advertised, only that the stakes are different. On November 2 we won't be voting for anything like the measure of change we deserve the chance to vote for. We will be casting our ballots in a referendum on whether we wish to pause and reconsider our march toward a homegrown American fascism.

Posted by Steve Perry at October 10, 2004 10:53 AM

 

Marine back from Iraq says No More Bush

Marine intelligence collection officer Andrew Borene talks about Bush's many failures in Iraq

Earlier today I got a phone call from a City Pages reader here in Minneapolis who was discharged from the Marines some months ago after serving in Iraq during the invasion. He had an interesting firsthand story to tell, and he told it well, so we're going to publish it as a First Person feature in next week's City Pages (10/13).   

Meanwhile, here it is early for BW readers: 

Bush's Awful Mess

I've served in Iraq, and that's why I can't vote for this president again

By Andrew Borene  

I'm a Minnesota guy, born and raised. I'm from Edina, I went to the Blake School in Minneapolis, I was the captain of the Macalester football team. After I graduated from Mac in '98, I spent a couple of years working for Norwest and Wells Fargo as an investment banker. I started law school at the University of Minnesota in the year 2000, and after about two months dropped out and enlisted in the Marine Corps. I was going to become a JAG attorney. But after I got bit by the bug to learn a little bit more about the Marine Corps, I decided I wanted to be a ground officer and go around the world with guns rather than deliver legal briefs in a courtroom.

Not long after September 11, I ended up as an intelligence officer with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. I was an intelligence collection officer, one of several, with the 1st Marine Division, which is the infantry unit of the expeditionary force. Personally, most of my work in intelligence was done during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, here in the United States. I deployed to the Middle East in February of 2003. I was in Kuwait, I crossed over to Iraq the night the invasion began. Made it as far north as the north side of Baghdad, drove into Baghdad the day that Saddam's statue fell down. I basically was there for the events of the invasion and the fall of the regime.

Just after President Bush declared Mission Accomplished and the end of major combat operations, I was sent home because it looked like things were going to settle down, and my wife was pregnant and had some pregnancy issues. That was pretty much the end of my combat phase of the war, but the war was not over for me at that time. When I came back, I was still serving as an intelligence officer. My job was to support the troops in Iraq by putting together a lot of reporting from agencies and assets, and helping in an intelligence capacity through the computer and by communicating with the troops on the ground. It was also my job to call families when there were casualties--not deaths but injuries. That is a story that hasn't really been reported. You don't see those numbers. But there are now over 10,000 young Americans whose lives are forever changed by the injuries they sustained there.

When I left Iraq, fully two-thirds of the Iraqi people supported our occupation of Iraq and wanted us there. Also at that time, the 1st Marine Division, the unit I'd been part of, did occupation duty in southern Iraq for four months, in what are now lawless areas where al-Sadr is. But during that four months, no Marines were killed in action. That's an important thing to note: what happened in Iraq to cause the Iraqi people to suddenly swing to--the last poll I saw said over 80 percent of the Iraqi people want the occupation forces gone tomorrow. And they see the coalition as actually creating more chaos and more insecurity in their country. For me personally, I fully supported President Bush, I fully supported the invasion of Iraq. I still support the liberation of the Iraqi people, but I came around to support John Kerry when I realized that this administration has erred time and time again. Even in the pursuit of their own end of a free Iraq, they're incompetently carrying out the plan.

I started to get doubts as I drove south from Baghdad into southern Iraq where we were going to do occupation duty. The Army forces were coming north at the time. At the time we drove into Baghdad, people were literally hugging and kissing the Marines. We had Marines wearing soft-covers instead of helmets. It was a very permissive environment at the time. I'm not going to say it was safe, but I will say that the Iraqi people genuinely appreciated us. The joy that we felt doing that, I've got to think it's only akin to what the WWII vets marching into Paris felt on the day that they liberated France.

But as we were driving south, there was a Shi'ite pilgrimage going on at the same time. It hadn't happened in over 20 years because of Saddam, but they actually got to exercise their religious freedom. As our Marines were driving south past these Shi'ite people waving and smiling, the Army was driving north, as I said. I expected to see construction equipment, or water, or supplies. Instead what I saw were combat troops--tanks moving up the highway. They had dismounted infantry along the side pushing Iraqi people off to the edge of the highway. It was at that time I started to have some doubts about how the occupation was going to go if we... There was a window of opportunity where the Iraqi people genuinely wanted assistance, and we could have exploited that opportunity and used it to the advantage of the Iraqi people and of the U.S. forces in Iraq.

Unfortunately, the reconstruction funds were never spent. If you just look at the record, I think it was $18 billion appropriated by Congress for reconstruction, of which this administration only spent 5 percent. They spent more than seven times that much money on non-bid contracts to Halliburton. And this is the kind of stuff that got me upset. I think the final screw for me was... there's a Marine general named Anthony Zinni. He wrote a book called <I>Battle Ready<P> with Tom Clancy, who obviously has a following in conservative circles. I read that book, and then General Zinni came and gave a lecture to the Marine officers at Camp Pendleton where I was stationed in which he made a rather scathing indictment of the incompetence with which the White House was essentially interfering with commanders on the ground.

The thing that General Zinni was talking about was that the White House had appointed spokesmen. I don't know if you recall the press conferences in Baghdad, but there was a guy named Dan Senor standing over [military officials'] shoulder at every press conference. They spent more time on the information campaign, on deceiving the American people about what was happening in Iraq, than they did on actually trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. That's a problem. General Zinni is one of the generals who spoke out and said, hey, you need more troops for the occupation. And you need better plans for the stability operations after the invasion.

Because everybody knew the invasion was going to go very well, even with the limited number of troops. However, any of the generals who dissented--like Shinseki, who got basically relieved. If you look what happened yesterday, where it looks like even Bremer on the day he got there said he wanted more troops on the ground, and that what we had was not sufficient to stop the looting. The bottom line is that, even though the argument about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist proliferation was fabricated, the underlying argument, the principle that a free Iraq would be better for the war on the terror, still holds true. But you can't even get that done.

And frankly, myself, I have the opportunity to speak out because I'm kind of an odd case. I got back from Iraq completely in one piece and healthy, and was selected to play rugby for the All-Marine Corps rugby team. And I blew out my knee and had reconstructive surgery, and got a medical discharge from the Marine Corps on August 15.

On August 16 I walked into Kerry headquarters and asked them how I could help out, because I've followed the issues very closely, and Senator Kerry laid out a plan long ago to double the size of the special forces, to increase funding for intelligence personnel and operations, and that's the kind of thing we need to do. It's just common sense. Where do terrorists live? How do they get trained? They get trained in little camps. Or they're a couple of guys in an apartment building. Prior to 9/11, many of them were in Hamburg before the attack happened.

How do you get them? You use special forces, you use intelligence operations, you find a couple of them and drop some black helicopters and guys in black pajamas, and you whack them. And that's the kind of operation we need to launch. This sideshow in Iraq where we send 150,000 teenagers without enough equipment to manage the occupation, and without the kind of international support we needed for that battle on the Iraqi front, it really detracted from our ability globally to stop the spread of terror.

Another issue I had is, in the last 12 months, $3-4 billion worth of heroin has been exported from Afghanistan. So that $3-4 billion, that's illicit drugs, that's illicit money. And who does that money go back to? It goes back to the former Taliban warlords, it goes back to the people who generated the very first terrorist strike on America anyway.

And that $3-4 billion worth of heroin, how does it get exported? It gets exported through clandestine shipping networks, the same kind of clandestine shipping networks that one would need to smuggle weapons of mass destruction. So the bottom line for me is, America is less safe because of the way this administration has prosecuted the war on terror. Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards have laid out real structural plans. They want to add two active duty divisions to the armed forces. They want to double special forces. And they want to rely on the 9/11 Commission, which is something the administration opposed in the first place, to look into those failings and ask how we can make America better.

I guess I used to be what they call "Republican in name only." Kind of a Ramstad Republican, you know--socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Unfortunately the issues in this election are just too big for that.

Also see...

My Twin Cities Babelogue colleague Couch Pundit is back from his long computer-induced respite. One of the better culture & politics blogs out there, and right now he's got a posting featuring Harry Shearer's remix of Bush's Debate I fugue-state chant: "Hard Work."  

Posted by Steve Perry at October 7, 2004 3:46 PM