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New Book Illuminates Top Levels of Government Heading Into Iraq
Tweet Share on Facebook April 17, 2008 Comment (6)I haven't finished reading Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, but I feel secure in saying that it is an extraordinarily frank and persuasive book. Feith, who served as under secretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005, has been criticized harshly and, I think, unfairly for somehow lying us into Iraq. In War and Decision he presents his view, fortified by generous quotes from government documents, reports, and memorandums. He should be saluted for getting many materials declassified so that we can have a clearer idea of what was actually going on at the top levels of government. I have long been struck by the contrast between what we can read today about the acts of leaders in World War II and what I gather was available to readers at the time. This book provides our first in-depth look at the inside of the Bush administration's national security top leadership from one who was there.
One warning, however: Those who are looking for dirt on Feith's colleagues in government are not going to find it here. He seems to be at pains to relay the arguments of those who had different views fairly and accurately. He concedes some mistakes of his own. And he contradicts much of what has become conventional wisdom about the Iraq war. To whet your appetite, here is an excerpt from the introduction:
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How Obama's 'Cling to Guns and Religion' Remarks Got on the Web
Tweet Share on Facebook April 15, 2008 Comment (11)Kit Seelye in the New York Times and Pajamas Media correspondent Bill Bradley (the California political writer, not the former New Jersey senator) fill us in on how the story got on the pro-Obama Huffington Post. It seems that Arianna Huffington approved it by cellphone while on David Geffen's 454-foot yacht in Tahiti. No, I'm not making this up.
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Can We Have an Old-Fashioned Democratic National Convention?
Tweet Share on Facebook April 15, 2008 Comment (4)My answer, in USA Today, is no.
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Obama's Remarks Are Liberal Snobbery
Tweet Share on Facebook April 14, 2008 Comment (98)Corrected on 4/14/2008: An earlier version of this article had Marc Ambinder's name spelled incorrectly and incorrectly paraphrased an Adlai Stevenson quote. Adlai Stevenson's quip that if a majority of thinking people supported him, that wouldn't be enough because "I need a majority."
Much has been made of Barack Obama's comments at an April 6 fundraiser in the San Francisco Bay Area: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
The account comes from one Mayfill Flower of the left-leaning Huffington Post and was reported on Friday, April 11. Evidently, these remarks were made at one of three Bay Area big-bucks fundraisers that day, at Gordon and Ann Getty's house, portrayed by Zombietime as on "billionaires row." Here's Obama's try at extricating himself from charges of elite condescension and snobbery.
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Obama and Clinton Big Government Economic Plans Need Debate
Tweet Share on Facebook April 11, 2008 Comment (10)"It's the economy, stupid." Those immortal words of the political philosopher James Carville in 1992 have been reverberating increasingly in the 2008 campaign. Polls show the economy as the top issue for voters, far ahead of Iraq. The general assumption is that this helps the Democrats, since the Republicans hold the White House and economic growth has stalled on their watch. But what do voters want done about the economy? And how amenable are they to the big-government programs Democrats are proposing?
Cars line up for gas in Woodbridge, N.J., in 1979.(Steve Klaver/Star Ledger/Corbis)On fiscal policy, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want higher taxes, at least on high earners. They want to let at least some of the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, as scheduled. On trade, they oppose new free-trade agreements and want to renegotiate nafta with Canada and Mexico. As it happens, another president embraced such policies in a time of economic slowdown and financial market turbulence: Herbert Hoover raised taxes on high earners sharply and, ignoring a letter signed by 1,000 economists, signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930. The results were not pretty. Until now, his example has not commended itself to Democrats. One wonders whether voters will agree that tax increases will stimulate the economy.
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McCain's Poll Numbers Are Breaking the Idea of Traditional Red and Blue States
Tweet Share on Facebook April 11, 2008 Comment (13)I've been saying most of this year that it's time to throw out that old electoral map of red states and blue states. Fresh evidence for this comes from Scott Rasmussen's recent state polls. Marist has a John McCain-Condoleezza Rice ticket beating a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket in New York 49 percent to 46 percent and a McCain-Rice ticket beating an Obama-Clinton ticket there 49 percent to 44 percent. I'm pretty sure McCain is not going to ask Rice to be his running mate; he can't approve of her work as national security adviser when the Bush administration refused to follow his recommendation for a surge of troops in 2003 and 2004. But for McCain to be leading the Democrats' dream tickets (at least some Democrats think that's what one of those two is) in a state John Kerry carried by a 59 percent to 40 percent margin is pretty striking.
Then consider the Rasmussen polls in several western states, where Obama is either leading or trailing McCain by narrow margins. I'll put the percentages for Bush-Kerry in the adjacent columns.
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Is America a Good Country or Not?
Tweet Share on Facebook April 10, 2008 Comment (19)Periodically pollster Scott Rasmussen asks voters whether they think America is basically fair and decent or whether America is basically unfair and discriminatory. In the latest survey, 64 percent say America is basically fair and decent, and 22 percent say it is unfair and discriminatory. Men (70 percent) are considerably more likely than women (59 percent) to say that America is fair and decent. As one might expect, blacks tend to think America is unfair and discriminatory rather than fair and decent, by a 47 percent to 37 percent margin. Whites take a positive view (67 percent to 18 percent) and so do "others" (63 percent to 33 percent), a category that I assume is mostly made up of Hispanics. Republicans by a wide margin (78 percent to 12 percent) see America as fair and decent, while Democrats are split (49 percent to 36 percent).
This poll was conducted on March 31 and April 1 (registration required). Rasmussen has asked this question 19 times since November 2006; the fair and decent response peaked at 64 percent then and in early February (because of Barack Obama's showings in the primaries?). The most negative response (54 percent to 32 percent fair and decent over unfair and discriminatory) came in July 2007.
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Clinton's Sag in the Polls Makes Big Pennsylvania Win Unlikely
Tweet Share on Facebook April 8, 2008 Comment (33)A little more than a week ago, I presented some projections for the upcoming Democratic primaries. I projected results that seemed realistic from the then current polling but also optimistic from Hillary Clinton's point of view. Recent polling suggests those projections are no longer realistic.
My projection had Clinton winning 60 percent of the two-candidate vote in Pennsylvania. But in the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent Pennsylvania polls, she's getting only 54 percent of the two-candidate vote. Obama is clearly leading in Philadelphia, where blacks will make up about half of the electorate; Quinnipiac has Obama ahead in the Philadelphia suburbs, but SurveyUSA has metro Philadelphia even, which must mean that Clinton is ahead in the suburbs.
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John McCain Was One Lucky Guy in Primary Race With Romney
Tweet Share on Facebook April 7, 2008 Comment (27)John McCain was one lucky guy. That has been my conclusion as we watched him beat Mike Huckabee in South Carolina January 19 by 33 percent to 30 percent, beat Mitt Romney in Florida January 29 by 36 percent to 31 percent, and then make a huge delegate sweep by winning all the winner-take-all states on Super Tuesday, February 5, including Missouri by a 33 percent-to-32 percent-to-29 percent margin over Huckabee and Romney. In California, which awarded 11 delegates to the statewide winner and three each to the winner in each congressional district, McCain beat Romney statewide 42 percent to 35 percent and carried 48 of 53 congressional districts (it appeared to be 50 of 53 before California finally counted all the votes).
Using Dave Leip's Election Atlas and the Green Papers, I calculated the delegate count if McCain's share of the vote had been exactly 3 percent less in each primary on January 19 and 26 and February 5 and if Romney's share of the vote had been exactly 3 percent more. After all, those results would have been just about as plausible, given the way the campaign and polling were going, as the actual results.
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More on Clinton and Obama's Jacksonian, Academic Divide
Tweet Share on Facebook April 4, 2008 Comment (8)A fellow aficionado of election statistics has directed me to this city-and-town map of the Democratic primary results in Massachusetts. Click on any city or town and you'll get the percentages for Clinton and Obama. Note that Obama does not get extremely high percentages in high-income suburbs. He runs no better than even in Newton, for example. One reason: There are many Jewish voters there, and Clinton has tended to run ahead, often well ahead, of Obama among Jews. In contrast, Obama did much better in college towns—66 percent in Amherst, 60 percent in Williamstown, 63 percent in Cambridge. Clinton won 74 percent in Lawrence, an old shoe manufacturing town with many Latinos; she got 77 percent in Fall River and 70 percent in New Bedford, which has a high Portuguese population. And here's an interesting contrast. Provincetown, where the large majority of single-sex marriages have been of men, voted 63 percent for Clinton. Northampton, where the large majority of single-sex marriages have been of women, voted 58 percent for Obama. Do gay men tend to support Clinton and gay women tend to support Obama?
