Category: Politics & Elections

From The Sacramento Bee

Driving Mr. Davis: Gov. Gray Davis faces a surprising challenge when he makes the move from chief executive to Joe Blow. He is clueless when it comes to motoring. Hasn’t owned a car. Can’t drive. “It’s been years since he drove a car,” a Davis friend said. “He has to get driving lessons from his security detail.” CHP officers have been joking about giving Davis and his wife, Sharon, a crash course in driving at the West Sacramento CHP academy. The Davises are looking at Lincolns. The CHP won’t confirm or deny anything. “We don’t comment on the governor’s security,” said CHP spokesman Tom Marshall. “We will have a detail with Governor Davis for several weeks after he leaves office. That’s all.” Davis has avoided driving since 1975, when he became chief of staff for former Gov. Jerry Brown. Gray cruised the streets in Jerry’s famous powder-blue Plymouth. There was always a state cop at the wheel. After that, Davis was in the Assembly, where legislative staffers stood by to haul him around. As state controller and lieutenant governor, he had CHP chauffeurs. As governor, Gray had a highway patrol entourage. Times change. If you see Gray nervously bearing down in his new Lincoln, back off. Way off.

The Bleat

I think it had to do with listening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, and wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world’s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we’d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.

The rants continue — Michael Moore, France, Europe, George Soros, anti-war sentiment.

Newsday.com (Associated Press)

From The New York Times

“The [Rock the Vote] debate made news because it forced Howard Dean to apologize for saying he wanted to be ‘the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.’ And it worked, too. Today, Dean went back to being the candidate for guys with ‘Free Tibet’ stickers on their Subarus….”

From The Washington Monthly’s Monday Morning Monologue

The Polling Company: “The first Shocking Poll found more than twice the number of Americans could cite the number and names of the Rice Krispies Characters than the United States Supreme Court Justices.”

The Polling Company: “Most Americans are unable to identify even a single department in the United States Cabinet, according to a recent national poll of 800 adults. Specifically, the survey found that a majority (58%) could not provide any department names whatsoever; 41% could. Only 4% of those surveyed specified at least five of the 19 executive-level departments…”

Currently, the Federal Government includes executive level departments that advise the President. The heads of these departments are collectively known as the Cabinet. Could you please name as many departments as you can that are part of the current United States Cabinet? (Note: This question was open-ended and multiple responses were accepted, meaning, all respondents were invited to name as few or as many departments as they could. If a respondent provided the specific name of a cabinet secretary or administrator, e.g., “Colin Powell,” they were credited with a correct response.)

Howard Dean

John Kerry’s Blog

Official Clark ’04 Campaign Blog

Easterbrook: “A friend who longs to vote moderate recently told Easterblogg that if the 2004 contest pits George W. Bush against Howard Dean, ‘I will spend the day in my room banging my head against the wall.'”

From Boston.com: “Retired Army general Wesley K. Clark’s campaign announced yesterday that it had reached a milestone — on Sunday, Clark’s website beat former Vermont governor Howard B. Dean’s website in Internet traffic.”

“Based on a web-ranking program called Alexa, Clark’s staff members say they had the 9,027th-most popular website in the world Sunday; Dean’s site was ranked 9,707th.”

NewMexiKen is trying to picture Abraham Lincoln’s campaign website.

From Garance Franke-Ruta at TAPPED

This means we now have polls showing Clark in the lead in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, California (PDF File), Illinois (among those closely following the race), Wisconsin and nationwide. He’s in second place in Arizona and third in New York, where Dean leads. Dean also leads in New Hampshire, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico (though this was a pre-Clark poll) and some polls nationwide. He is tied with or in second to Gephardt in Iowa. Gephardt leads in Illinois.

Kerry does not lead anywhere that I’ve seen — and if you’ve seen such a poll, feel free to tell me about it — though he is in second in New Hampshire. South Carolina was the only state where Edwards was in better than third place. Lieberman is still running a strong second in some states, and leads in Connecticut.

“I KNOW METROSEXUALS. METROSEXUALS ARE FRIENDS OF MINE. AND GOVERNOR, YOU ARE NO METROSEXUAL. He may attract “Queer Eye for the Dean Guy” signs at rallies and boast that a gay man has called him “handsome,” but Howard Dean is no “metrosexual,” as he claimed to be at a breakfast meeting in Colorado yesterday. For the record, no man who “has been known to stuff pretzels into his pockets,” goes anywhere with “shaving nicks on his neck, uneven fingernails and wrinkles from a hanger creasing his suit at the knees” (as has been documented in The Washington Post) and still wears a 20-year-old suit he bought for $125 at J.C. Penny’s (as Dean claimed on The Tonight Show that he does) can call himself a metrosexual.”

From TAPPED

Byron York on Democrats & Terrorism on National Review Online

Citing a poll conducted by Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg:

The survey focused on Democrats who take part in the nominating process in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. And, Iraq aside, what it found was that Democrats, at least those who are most active in politics, simply don’t care about terrorism.

Just don’t care.

In one question, pollsters read a list of a dozen topics — education, taxes, big government, the environment, Social Security and Medicare, crime and illegal drugs, moral values, health care, the economy and jobs, fighting terrorism, homeland security, and the situation in Iraq — and asked, “Which concern worries you the most?”

In Iowa, one percent of those polled — one percent! — said they worried about fighting terrorism. It was dead last on the list.

Two percent said they worried about homeland security — next to last.

In New Hampshire, two percent worried about fighting terrorism and two percent worried about homeland security. In South Carolina — somewhat surprisingly because of its military heritage — the results were the same.

Of course, as other commentators have pointed out, rating something as less worrisome than other things doesn’t mean you “just don’t care.” It is the National Review.

Jonathan Rauch on presidential hopefuls “sell-by date.”

With only one exception since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, no one has been elected president who took more than 14 years to climb from his first major elective office to election as either president or vice president.

George W. Bush took six years. Bill Clinton, 14. George H.W. Bush, 14 (to the vice presidency). Ronald Reagan, 14. Jimmy Carter, six. Richard Nixon, six (to vice president). John Kennedy, 14. Dwight Eisenhower, zero. Harry Truman, 10 (to vice president). Franklin Roosevelt, four. Herbert Hoover, zero. Calvin Coolidge, four. Warren Harding, six. Woodrow Wilson, two. William Howard Taft, zero. Theodore Roosevelt, two (to vice president). The one exception: Lyndon Johnson’s 23 years from his first House victory to the vice presidency.

Talking Points Memo by Joshua Micah Marshall has posted the transcript of a discussion he had with Wesley Clark while riding from Dulles Airport to Capitol Hill yesterday. It’s very informative.

On politics and the military:

The old military tradition was that people in the armed forces didn’t vote at all. Guys like George C. Marshall, they made a passion of not voting. The reason is, they said, “It’s really up to the people, the electorate, to choose the president. I’ll work for whoever, I don’t want to get involved in trying to pick sides. Whoever the president is, I support him.”

In the 1950s it became acceptable and expected — well I shouldn’t say expected because no one ever knew — but acceptable to vote.

On getting by in America:

But when you run it all through, it’s really me. It’s my views that have been shaped by a lifetime of public service, traveling across this country, putting a child through school, worried about how much–or how little–money I made, how to survive on very middle [income] wages while moving every two or three years. The wife would come in and say, “Ah, the towels don’t match the bathroom and you’ve got to buy new bathroom mats. And now what are we going to do for curtains? The curtain rods don’t fit in this kind of the house.” You know, all these expenses of moving on top of not making very much money. It’s just a question of who you are.

On education:

Schools aren’t businesses. Schools are institutions of public service. Their job–their product–is not measured in terms of revenues gained. It’s measured in terms of young lives whose potential can be realized. And you don’t measure that either in terms of popularity of the school, or in terms of the standardized test scores in the school. You measure it child-by-child, in the interaction of the child with the teacher, the parent with the teacher, and the child in a larger environment later on in life.

On foreign policy and the Middle East:

But, why is it impossible to take an authoritarian regime in the Middle East and see it gradually transform into something democratic, as opposed to going in, knocking it off, ending up with hundreds of billions of dollars of expenses. And killing people. And in the meantime, leaving this real source of the problems — the states that were our putative allies during the Cold War — leaving them there.

It’s a solid introduction to Clark.

but according to the Los Angeles Times Republican strategists are Eyeing Dennis Miller for State Politics.

From The Arizona Republic

Barely one-third of Arizona voters say they would give President Bush a second term, a statewide poll revealed Thursday.

The 34 percent support for his re-election, with 44 percent preferring someone else and 22 percent undecided, reflects a dramatic plunge in popularity for Bush. In 2000, he beat Al Gore in Arizona by a margin of 6 percentage points, or nearly 100,000 votes of 1.5 million cast.

Arizona?

Arizona?

Michael Lewis has an article on the California recall in this Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine: All Politics Are Loco!!!.

“…how did California go so quickly from order to chaos? Republicans say it’s because Gray Davis caused and then covered up the state’s financial crisis. Democrats claim the attempt to remove Davis from office just six months after he was legally elected is a right-wing conspiracy. Both are obviously wrong. What we have here is a crime of passion, committed by the people upon their ruler. It demands an investigation.”

Lewis talks to a few of the people behind the recall, Gray Davis’ neighbor, and some of the obscure candidates. The article is about people; its cummulative effect is to explain what’s happening.

[This article is posted in 11 sections. This is, I suppose, to get 11 “hits” to register for all the ads. That’s fine, ads are better than paying, but it’s still annoying. The printer friendly format is an easier way to read the article.]

Jack Beatty at Atlantic Unbound on what reelecting Bush would mean for democratic accountability. I found this paragraph particularly compelling:

You can preside over the most catastrophic failure of intelligence and national defense in history. Can fire no one associated with this fatal chain of blunders and bureaucratic buck-passing. Can oppose an inquest into September 11 for more than a year until pressure from the relatives of those killed on that day becomes politically toxic. Can name Henry Kissinger, that mortician of truth, to head the independent commission you finally accede to. You can start an unnecessary war that kills hundreds of Americans and as many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians—adjusted for the difference in population, the equivalent of 80,000 Americans. Can occupy Iraq without a plan to restore traffic lights, much less order. Can make American soldiers targets in a war of attrition conducted by snipers, assassins, and planters of remote-control bombs—and taunt the murderers of our young men to “bring it on.” Can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on nation building—and pass the bill to America’s children. (Asked to consider rescinding your tax cut for the top one percent of taxpayers for one year in order to fund the $87 billion you requested from Congress to pay for the occupation of Iraq, your Vice President said no; that would slow growth.) You can lose more jobs than any other President since Hoover. You can cut cops and after-school programs and Pell Grants and housing allowances for the poor to give tax cuts to millionaires. You can wreck the nation’s finances, running up the largest deficit in history. You can permit 17,000 power plants to increase their health-endangering pollution of the air. You can lower the prestige of the United States in every country of the world by your unilateral conduct of foreign policy and puerile “you’re either with us or against us” rhetoric. Above all, you can lie the country into war and your lies can be exposed—and, if a majority prefers ignorance to civic responsibility, you can still be reelected.

Boston College Professor Paul Lewis in The [Toronto] Globe and Mail: “With the anomalous and proud exception of New Mexico, Gore states are contiguous either to Canada or to other Gore states.” Should they secede and join Canada?

From Wired essay by Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins on the use of the term bright to describe non-believers:

A Gallup poll in 1999 asked American voters the following question: “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be an X would you vote for that person?” X took on the following values: Catholic, Jew, Baptist, Mormon, black, homosexual, woman, atheist. Six out of the eight categories secured better than 90 percent approval. But only 59 percent would vote for a homosexual, and just 49 percent would vote for an atheist. Bear in mind that there are 29 million Americans who describe themselves as nonreligious, secular, atheist, or agnostic, outnumbering Jews tenfold and all other religions except Christianity by an even larger margin.