Outside The Beltway | OTB » Campaign 2004

Families Off Limits in Presidential Politics?

James Joyner — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:45:36 +0000

Taegan Goddard gives Quote of the Day honors to Barack Obama for this:

I think families are off limits. I would never consider making Cindy McCain a campaign issue, and if I saw people doing that — I would speak out against it. And the fact that I haven’t seen that from John McCain I think is a deep disappointment.

This is clever positioning on Obama’s part in that he simultaneously appears to be taking the high ground while seeking to illegitimate discussion of an issue that’s potentially more troublesome for himself than his opponent.

The fact of the matter is that the candidate’s spouse and close relations are “issues” that voters care about; that’s especially true at the presidential level. People disliked Nancy Reagan, loved Barbara Bush, were polarized over Hillary Clinton, and largely indifferent over Laura Bush.

While I think Gary Langer is largely right when he states that “popularity of presidential candidates’ spouses does not drive vote preferences,” voters use every clue they can to gauge the character of would-be presidents.

The more prominent the spouse or other family member is in the campaign, the more scrutiny they’re bound to receive. Hillary Clinton got more flak in 1992 than was theretofore the norm, not because she was “a strong woman” and the public resented her for it but because of the perception that it was “two for the price of one.” Thus far, Cindy McCain has received less attention than Michelle Obama because she’s largely stayed out of the spotlight while the other has made controversial remarks on the campaign trail.

Obama’s deflection game is nothing new, of course. He’s been telling opponents to lay off his wife for weeks. Republicans tried to make hay over the Kerry campaigns’ allusions to Mary Cheney’s lesbianism in the 2004 presidential debates. Democrats defended it by saying she was “fair game” because she was a grown woman actively campaigning for her father, which yielded another round of criticism.

The bottom line is that campaigns can make issues of what they want, their opponents can cry Foul all they want, and the voters get to decide what to do about the information. Absent something truly monumental coming out, it strikes me as unlikely that the election is going to be decided on the basis of spousal likability.

This Day in History: Kerry Wins Presidency

James Joyner — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:04:26 +0000

Had the 2004 election been held on May 29th, John Kerry would have won handily:

Five years later, it’s Obama 266, McCain 248, Tie 24.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who presumably is trying to illustrate that Obama doesn’t have it wrapped up quite yet and needs to keep pushing on, who in turn got it via Ben Smith, who presumably is hoping to show McCain still has a shot, so we mustn’t give up.

Obviously, a lot can change between now and Election Day. Like, oh, a campaign. Polls are just a snapshot in time, after all.

Further, as Mark Blumenthal notes, our state-level polling is not very good at this stage of the game and is unlikely to be for quite some time. So these averages are based on one or two polls of varying quality.

That said, the best evidence we have available to us right now suggests that Obama should be considered the front runner. If I were forced to bet right now, that’s the way I’d go. But it’s a long way to November.

Clinton Wins Indiana, Obama Takes North Carolina

James Joyner — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:55:56 +0000

While there’s still plenty of counting to be done, it looks like today’s primaries went as expected: a comfortable Obama win in North Carolina and a solid Clinton win in Indiana. The only surprise, really, is the margin of the victories.

Barack Obama swept to victory in the North Carolina primary on Tuesday but fell behind Hillary Rodham Clinton in Indiana, the last big-delegate prizes left in their long race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Obama’s win mirrored earlier triumphs in Southern states with large black populations, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina among them.

That made Indiana a virtual must-win Midwestern state for the former first lady, who was hoping to counter Obama’s persistent delegate advantage with a strong run through the late primaries. Returns from 40 percent of Indiana precincts showed Clinton with 56 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Obama.

In North Carolina, Obama was gaining 64 percent of the vote.

The economy was the top issue by far in both states, according to interviews with voters as they left their polling places.

Indiana exit polls charted a racial divide that has become familiar in a long, historic campaign pitting a black man against a white woman. Obama was gaining more than 90 percent of the black vote in Indiana, while Clinton was winning an estimated 61 percent of the white vote there, running ahead of her rival among white men as well as women.

Much more analysis in the morning once complete results are in.

UPDATE (1008): Clinton is up 52-48 in Indiana with 79% of precincts reporting and Obama is up 56-42 in North Carolina with 64% of precincts reporting, according to YahooNews.

Do McCain’s Medals Matter?

James Joyner — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 11:36:16 +0000

Jake Tapper, notes the contrast between DNC chair Howard Dean’s statements about John Kerry’s military service in 2004 and McCain’s in 2008.

Commenting on John McCain’s new “The American President that Americans Have Been Waiting For” ad yesterday, Dean said, “While we honor McCain’s military service, the fact is Americans want a real leader who offers real solutions, not a blatant opportunist who doesn’t understand the economy and is promising to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years.”

Tapper reminds us that, in March 2004, Dean said, “The real issue is this. Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?” Tapper observes, “McCain, by the way, has been awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Star Medals, a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.”

Of course, the notion that military heroism in one’s youth automatically qualifies you to be president later is life — let alone settles the issue if one’s opponent never wore the uniform — is silly. That Kerry and McCain served when others didn’t and that they acquitted themselves well under extreme stress redounds to their credit and earns them a certain amount of respect and deflects some lines of attack. But it’s not the end of the discussion.

The first presidential election in which I was truly engaged was the 1980 contest between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. On the merits of their military careers, re-electing Carter would have been the obvious choice. He was, after all, an Annapolis grad and had been a rising star in the Navy’s nuclear program under Admiral Rickover. Reagan, by contrast, made propaganda films for the Army. Reagan was nonetheless my choice (although I was not yet eligible to vote for him) and he turned out to be better on foreign and military affairs than his rival.

In 1984, the first election in which I was old enough to participate, Reagan ran for re-election against Carter’s former vice president, Walter Mondale, who served as a corporal at Fort Knox during the Korean War. Let’s just say their respective military careers didn’t factor into my calculations.

In 1988, we had George H.W. Bush, who earned a Distinguished Flying Cross as the Navy’s youngest pilot in WWII, and Michael Dukakis, who had two years of peacetime service in Korea but looked very funny driving a tank during the campaign.

In 1992, Bush was defeated by artful draft dodger Bill Clinton. The contrast in their military service was an issue in the campaign, to be sure, but obviously not a decisive one. In 1996, Clinton handily defeated Bob Dole, who can’t use his right arm because of wounds suffered in WWII.

The 2000 election pitted George W. Bush, who was trained to fly an obsolete fighter jet during the closing days of Vietnam and sort of served in the National Guard afterwards, against Clinton’s former VP, Al Gore, who served as an Army photojournalist in Vietnam. Bush won re-election against Kerry, who served gallantly as an officer with the Swift Boats.

As James Taranto notes, “You have to go back to 1988 . . . to find an election in which the winner clearly had a more impressive military record than the loser.” Depending on your politics, you might think we’d have been better off if some of them had gone the other way. Likely, though, not because of the military service issue.

If, as seems likely, John McCain faces Barack Obama in the fall, he’ll have an easier time making the “ready on day one” argument. He’ll have a credibility advantage in talking about military affairs. But the election, ultimately, will turn on their competing visions of the future and whether Americans trust them at the controls.

Iowa Caucus Results – Signs and Portents

James Joyner — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:48:57 +0000

Mike Huckabee won the Republican vote by a much wider margin than expected and Ron Paul came in a distant fifth place — but ahead of ostensible national frontrunner Rudy Giuliani. Barack Obama won on the Democratic side but one could argue that it was essentially a three way tie, since he got only one more delegate than Clinton, who got one more than Edwards.

So, what does it all mean?

Andrew Sullivan sounds the most optimistic note:

Look at their names: Huckabee and Obama. Both came from nowhere – from Arkansas and Hawaii. Both campaigned as human beings, not programmed campaign robots with messages honed in focus groups. Both faced powerful and monied establishments in both parties. And both are running two variants on the same message: change, uniting America again, saying goodbye to the bitterness of the polarized past, representing ordinary voters against the professionals.

[...]

It is about America. America’s ability to move forward, to unite, to get past the bitter red-and-blue past. That’s what the next generation wants. And they now seem motivated enough to get it.

So, it’s Morning in America. But, as his co-blogger Andrew Sullivan noted just minutes earlier, it’s a dark day for the Republican Party.

Tonight was in many ways devastating news for the GOP. Twice as many people turned out for the Democrats than the Republicans. Clearly independents prefer the Dems.

Now look at how the caucus-goers defined themselves in the entrance polls. Among the Dems: Very Liberal: 18 percent; Somewhat Liberal: 36 percent; Moderate: 40 percent; Conservative: 6 percent. Now check out the Republicans: Very Conservative: 45 percent; Somewhat Conservative: 43 percent; Moderate: 11 percent; Liberal: 1 percent.

One is a national party; the other is on its way to being an ideological church. The damage Bush and Rove have done – revealed in 2006 – is now inescapable.

Somewhere in between lies the truth.

The Immediate Fallout: Democrats

Joe Biden and Chris Dodd have dropped out of the race. Mike Gravel should. Presumably, Bill Richardson needs to do well in New Hampshire to justify staying in the race.

John Edwards missed his best chance to catapult himself into contention. He’s unlikely to do well in New Hampshire and it’s not even clear he’ll take South Carolina despite favorite son status.

While Hillary Clinton isn’t seriously wounded by her finish — she played the expectations game well enough — she needs to come back and win in New Hampshire. If Obama beats her there, she’s in trouble. Charles Hurt reads a bit too much into Iowa but he makes a strong point:

More than 70 percent of Iowa Democrats rejected her bid to get back into the White House. And so, after 15 years of domination, the Clinton dynasty has finally lost its grip on the Democratic Party

The Immediate Fallout: Republicans

Mike Huckabee is a legitimate frontrunner now. Despite a serious of stumbles over the last two weeks, he managed to not only hold off Mitt Romney but beat him by a much wider than expected margin. Still, he’s got a long way to go.

John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin of The Politico are a bit over the top in their overall analysis of the race but they nail this:

Huckabee … must now try to turn what has been a mostly personality-based campaign into an effective national organization with appeal beyond the religious conservatives who formed the basis of his victory here.

That’s going to be hard to accomplish in the four days between now and New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, as WSJ’s Susan Davis notes, this could be the Beginning of the End for Romney. If he doesn’t bounce back and take Michigan or New Hampshire — if not both — it’s hard to map out a plausible path to his nomination.

Fred Thompson edged out John McCain in a photo finish for third. That defied expectations. Still, as Matt Yglesias notes, the press seem to be treating McCain as the one with momentum.

Ron Paul finished in fifth place with double digit support. That’s much better than any of us would have predicted a year ago but far short of the ridiculously high expectations set by his enthusiasts. He’s got the money and fiscal restraint to remain in the race so long as he pleases but a third place finish might have brought him out of the realm of curiosity and gotten the media to frame him as a legitimate candidate. New Hampshire is likely his last shot at that; after that, most people will start to vote strategically.

What it Means for the Parties

The Democrats have three candidates that the base could ultimately rally around, two of whom could well attract strong support from moderates. The third, Hillary Clinton, remains the favorite, I should think, to take the nomination. If any sense of “inevitability” still attached to her prior to last night’s vote, however, it’s now gone. Obama is easily the bigger obstacle in her path.

A Huckabee nomination could conceivably destroy the party. Not only would he be lucky to break 40 percent in the general election against any of the plausible Democratic nominees but many fiscal conservatives and Chamber of Commerce Republicans would bolt. When Ronald Reagan and others mobilized rural Christian conservatives in the 1980s, they never expected that they would take such a prominent role in the party. Gradually, though, they took it over at the grass roots level in much of rural America.

Huckabee’s mobilization of fervent evangelicals, many of whom doubtless had never shown up for a caucus prior to last night, scares the hell out of mainstream Republicans. My strong hunch is that they’ll rally around someone else — probably McCain but possibly Romney or Giuliani — in Michigan and New Hampshire.

What it Means for the Country

Ultimately, I side with Optimistic Sullivan on this one. Democracy is a frustrating thing for elites, who have always feared mob rule. Still, it’s a remarkable thing that a big city black man with a Muslim name managed to beat out the Establishment-backed wife of a former president in one of the whitest, rural states in the country. Adam Nagourney:

Mr. Obama’s victory in this overwhelmingly white state was a powerful answer to the question of whether America was prepared to vote for a black person for president. What was remarkable was the extent to which race was not a factor in this contest.

That Obama was able to do this partly on the basis of inspiring young people, traditionally one of the weakest voting blocks, is also a positive sign.

The elite disappointment with Huckabee’s easy win is palpable. Iowa’s format allows a fervent few to dominate; that structure isn’t in place in most of the states that follow. Still, the fact that a guy that was off the radar screen of even most political junkies a few months ago can stand next to much more famous and better financed men, state his case to the voters, and earn their support is the very ideal of our system.

Further, while the press attention on Huckabee, reasonably enough, focuses on his religiosity, there’s more to his appeal than that, as David Brooks explains at great length. An excerpt:

Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

We have a presidential, not a parliamentary, system in this country. Whereas the latter rewards political experience and working one’s way through the ranks, the former gives more weight to personality and an ability to connect with the people. There’s still a long, long way to go, though, before we face the prospect of a President Huckabee or President Obama.

Other Reactions:

Steven Taylor does quick hits on all the candidates including: “Rudy Giuliani: 4% sucks, even if you are a guy who didn’t campaign in Iowa if you are, in fact, America’s Mayor.”

Jim Henley: “[Ron Paul] raised a ridiculous amount of money last year and owns the internet; he inspired an army of volunteers in a caucus system where being able to concentrate bodies is almost uniquely useful and he still couldn’t beat ten lousy percent. Hell, Fred Thompson barely showed up and he beat Paul.”

Mark Kleiman: “[A]fter Obama’s performance, I’d expect Granite State independents to be flocking to his banner, not McCain’s. And if the Republican primary is left almost entirely to Republican voters, I’m not sure McCain can beat Romney.”

Barbara O’Brien: “[T]he unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties.”

Bruce McQuain: “The first theme, at least for Iowans, was their vote wasn’t for sale. The best financed campaigns didn’t take the win.”

Ed Morrissey: “Hillary has reaped the harvest of two months of self-inflicted wounds . . . she’s no Bill Clinton.”

Libby Spencer: “[T]he race is still wide open and we may well have to go all the way to Super Tuesday before we see a definitive frontrunner on either side and that would be good.”

Vox Day: “I’ve long had the impression that WND reached more Republicans than NRO, the fact that the Chuck Norris-endorsed candidate absolutely trounced the National Review-approved one despite being heavily outspent tends to support this notion, at least for one week.”

Damian Penny: “Huckabee vs. Obama? I’ll take the Senator from Illinois, and I bet many conservatives – even registered Republicans – feel the same way.”

Ron Chusid: “Edwards’ populism won’t sell in many states outside of Iowa, and having lost her aura of inevitability, support for Clinton is likely to hemorrhage.”

Betsy Newmark: “[T]his is a rejection of Bill Clinton just as much. He couldn’t cast his aura over his unlikable wife and usher her to her own coronation. And I predict that it won’t be pretty to watch her flailing away at the new golden boy of the Democratic party.”

Dean Barker: “Check out the total vote percentages – if Iowa is a slice of America, then America just utterly rejected the Republican party.”

Anonymous Liberal: “After tonight, I really don’t understand how anyone could fail to see Obama’s superior virtues as a general election candidate.”

Dan Spencer reminds us that “the Wyoming Republicans will caucus Saturday and choose delegates to the national convention.”

Kerry Takes Pickens $1 Million Swift Boat Bet

James Joyner — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:29:08 +0000

Famed oilman T. Boone Pickens has offered $1 million to anyone who can disprove claims my by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against John Kerry — and John Kerry has taken him up on it.

Sen. John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential campaign was torpedoed by critics of his Vietnam War record, said Friday he has personally accepted a Texas oilman’s offer to pay $1 million to anyone who can disprove even a single charge of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In a letter to T. Boone Pickens, the Massachusetts Democrat wrote: “While I am prepared to show they lied on allegation after allegation, you have generously offered to pay one million dollars for just one thing that can be proven false. I am prepared to prove the lie beyond any reasonable doubt.” Kerry, a Navy veteran and former prosecutor, said he was willing to present his case directly to Pickens, who provided $3 million to bankroll the group during Kerry’s race against President Bush.

Pickens has responded by raising the stakes:

Pickens wrote Friday in a letter faxed to Kerry, “I am certainly open to your challenge,” but he said he would not pay Kerry unless the senator first provided him with copies of his wartime journals, as well as movies he shot while on patrol and his complete military records for 1971 to 1978.

Pickens said such documentation, which the group has previously sought, would be needed to disprove its ads. “When you have done so, if you can then prove anything in the ads was materially untrue, I will gladly award $1 million. As you know, I have been a long and proud supporter of the American military and veterans’ causes,” Pickens wrote.

He also proposed a counter-challenge: “If you cannot prove anything in the Swift Boat ads to be untrue, that you will make a $1 million gift to the charity I am choosing — the (Congressional) Medal of Honor Foundation.”

Jane Hamsher thinks this constitutes “reneging” on the deal and is “cowardly.” Patterico guest DRJ figures he’s merely specifying “the material terms – the rules – regarding how the winner will be determined.”

In any event, it’s a sucker bet.

Many of the more outrageous claims in the book have been rather strongly rebutted. Likewise, the debut ad, which questioned the character of Kerry’s service in Vietnam and implied he didn’t deserve his medals, was “contradicted by the statements of several other veterans who observed the incidents, by the Navy’s official records, and, in some instances, by the contemporaneous statements of SBVT members themselves.” John McCain pronounced it “dishonest and dishonorable” and I pronounced them the Swift Boat Nuts noted that they “sound increasingly like lunatics.” That said, given the passage of time, it’s doubtful the reasonable doubt threshold can be reached.

Still, as I wrote in “Swift Justice,” a July 2004 piece for Tech Central Station, the charges about self-inflicted wounds, war crimes, and undeserved medals weren’t why the Swift Boat ads were so effective. Indeed, if they had continued on that path, the campaign would almost certainly have backfired.

The idea that Kerry’s war medals were unearned is rather dubious and almost impossible to prove. Furthermore, as Bush’s re-election team seems to grasp, the mere fact that Kerry went to Vietnam trumps Bush’s record of halfhearted service in the Air National Guard. And the business about Kerry killing “a lone, fleeing, teenage Viet Cong in a loincloth” is just unbelievable coming 35 years after the fact.

That said, Kerry’s actions after returning home from Vietnam will ultimately hurt him more than his Vietnam service helps him. We should expect to see several ads focusing on his outrageous accusations against his fellow veterans, including the Senate testimony where he put forth numerous documentable lies. As political scientist Steven Taylor has noted, most of the animus of the SBVFT was generated by Kerry’s actions as leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War rather than his actual conduct in theater. It seems quite likely to me that this reaction will ultimately take place in other veterans and in the swing voters who have yet to make up their minds on Kerry’s character.

The second, third, and fourth ads concentrated on those angles. Stories of medals thrown over a wall by Kerry that weren’t actually Kerry’s medals, memories that were “seared — seared!!” into Kerry’s brain but couldn’t possibly be true, and reminders that Kerry had smeared American troops in “a fashion reminiscent of GEN-jis Khan” effectively undermined Kerry’s credibility and he failed to respond effectively. It’s rather odd to suddenly be offering up proof more than three years later.

UPDATE: Jules Crittenden wonders why Kerry would want to remind people of his failed campaign.

Economic Class and Voting Behavior

James Joyner — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:59:14 +0000

Andrew Gelman posts the familiar Red-Blue map of the 2004 election with a twist: What if only poor people’s votes counted? Only the middle class? Only the rich? The results are posted at right.

Visually, at least, it’s a Republican blowout if the poor are excluded and a Democratic landslide if only the poor vote.

Reading inside the data, though, Gelman and his colleagues found something more striking:

For poor voters, there is no systematic difference between rich and poor states. But for middle-income and especially for rich voters, there is a very strong pattern of rich states supporting the Democrats and poor states supporting the Republicans.

Thus, the familiar red-blue divide of cosmopolitan coastal Democrats and heartland-state Republicans shows up among the rich but not the poor.

Henry Farrell weighs in:

Gelman et al. don’t have any hard and fast explanation for this (they note that race explains about half of this disparity, but only half). However, their results do suggest that some of the conventional wisdom of American journalists on class, voting and geographic location stands in sore need of revisiting.

I’d note that half the disparity is a hell of a lot. Further, is it all that surprising that there’s more regional variation in the voting behavior among well-off voters than poor ones? Rich and middle class people on the coasts and in major urban centers live much different lives than their counterparts in the rural and suburban areas. Poverty, meanwhile, tends to look the same everywhere.

UPDATE: A commenter at Matt Yglesias‘ place makes a good point:

In high-cost-of-living states like New York, New Jersey and California, there are a lot of people who qualify as “rich” by national standards, but not by local standards. By local standards, they’re middle class, so we should expect them to vote like other middle class people.

Quite so. That’s the problem with using income as a proxy for social class across a diverse population.

Fred Thompson This Year’s Wesley Clark?

James Joyner — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 12:49:47 +0000

Publius draws some parallels between the Fred Thompson’s current campaign and Wesley Clark’s ill-fated 2004 effort.

The Clark and Thompson campaigns have eerily similar pre-histories. Because the party elites and rank-and-file weren’t very happy with the slate of candidates, Clark and Thompson’s names got floated for months. Party members didn’t know much about them, so they projected their desires on to the idea of them — and expectations ran high. Rather than seizing this opportunity early on, both candidates played footsie for months and months but hesitated to jump in. And then, finally, they did.

And both almost immediately started making embarrassing gaffes.

[R]aising money is not the only reason why campaigns start so early. It’s also important to get your sea legs and work out the bugs well before people start paying attention. People like Kerry and Edwards and Romney and McCain started visiting funnel cake stands in Iowa many months before Clark and Thompson did. It’s not fun, but the experiences gave the candidates a chance to respond to a dizzying range of questions — and tighten their message accordingly.

Clark wasn’t out there doing that. He didn’t get stumped by an Iowa farmer’s question in March of 2003 and go home to rework his responses. Instead, he jumped out when the spotlight was maximally bright (both because of the date and the drama surrounding his entry) and was completely unprepared for what was coming. And it showed — he made a fatal gaffe that completely undercut his campaign on the second day.

Thompson seems determined to repeat Clark’s mistakes — and for similar reasons. Running for President is hard. You get asked a lot of diverse questions. It takes time to hear them all and master good, persuasive, politically-safe responses to them. Thompson, however, clearly hasn’t been thinking about these questions (or let’s hope not anyway). Several months on the stump sharpens your message, improves your bullshit powers. Thompson sounds like I would sound if I jumped into a high-stress presidential campaign 4 months before the primary — like an unprepared idiot.

Indeed.

The gap from any job to the presidency is wider than any other career progression I can think of. Clark, by all accounts, was incredibly talented and accomplished. Supreme Allied Commander isn’t exactly the minor leagues, after all, and it comes with a considerable amount of political and diplomatic responsibility. But there’s no job where you’re expected to have off-the-cuff answers to every conceivable question about policies foreign and domestic, national and local. Even the wonkiest, like Bill Clinton, don’t have those answers as candidates; most don’t have them after eight years as president. The successful ones, though, at least learn how to give vague, intelligent sounding answers or artfully redirect the question.

The new NFL season kicks off in earnest today, so football analogies are especially apt. Perhaps the second hardest career progression is that of a quarterback moving from college to the NFL. The offensive schemes are ridiculously more complicated and so are the defenses. The players are bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter. Even the eventual greats — John Elway, Troy Aikman, Joe Montana, Peyton Manning — are awful as rookies. One of the perennial questions in the game is how to handle the development of rookie quarterbacks: Throw them right in and let them take their lumps or have them sit and watch? Some of the all-time greats have been produced by both methods but there’s a fear of shattering a guy’s confidence by having him do it all at once.

Thompson (and Clark before him), though, are like the rookie who missed training camp because of injury or a contract holdout. I can’t think of a single case where one of those guys did well his first season.

FEC Fines Kerry-Edwards Campaign $1.3 Million

James Joyner — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 05:00:56 +0000

The Federal Election Commission has fined the Kerry-Edwards campaign over $1.3 million dollars for exceeding federal spending limits by about that much in the 2004 campaign. The Kerry-Edwards team plans to appeal and challenges the FEC’s calculations, which are based on some arcane accounting of the value of various donated services.

I have no real opinion on the facts of the case and doubt that the campaign did anything particularly egregious or different from what the Bush-Cheney team did. This does demonstrate, however, yet again, the worthlessness of the FEC as an enforcement mechanism and the silliness of campaign finance laws more generally.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume the FEC is right here. Let’s further posit a scenario where Kerry had received a few thousand more votes in Ohio and been elected president by a slim margin in the Electoral College. Would the election results therefore be overturned? Of course not. In that case, a $1.3 million fine would be a perfectly acceptable cost for gaining the slight advantage needed to win the presidency.

What, then, is the point?

The election in question was decided two and a half years ago. We’re well into the next presidential campaign cycle. If the FEC can not investigate and punish in real time, we might as well scrap it.

McCain Falling into the Kerry Trap?

James Joyner — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:41:26 +0000

John McCain has a new campaign video out, entitled “Service With Honor.” It’s pretty powerful.

As good as it is, I think the letter accompanying it by Marine legend Orson Swindle, who was imprisoned with McCain in the same camp, is even better. (Although the story Swindle tells in the video, about why McCain didn’t become a Marine, is pretty funny.) Here’s an excerpt:

Things could have been very different for John. The son and grandson of Navy Admirals, the North Vietnamese quickly realized when they captured him that they had a special prisoner from a distinguished military family. In an effort to embarrass us and our country, they offered John early release. John consistently refused those offers, understanding that freedom without honor was not worth having. He kept faith with us, his fellow POWs, and stood by the Code of Conduct through which we pledged “I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.” Because of his dedication to principle, the North Vietnamese made his life a living hell for a number of years.

I was fortunate to know John in prison, and we have remained the closest of friends. His refusal of early release, his constant resistance, and his undying sense of humor were traits we all admired. We were inspired by his commitment to honor and encouraged by his sense of humor. His commitment to principles, straight talk, and honesty in Washington continues to inspire us today. I could never have imagined all those years ago that one day the man sharing a concrete slab for a bed next to me would be a candidate for President of the United States. I am very proud to stand next to him today.

As our country battles a new kind of evil and our fighting men and women take the battle to the terrorist, making incredible sacrifices in their efforts, I think back to those days in Hanoi, back to the experiences that have shaped my life ever since. My friend, John, has been tested through circumstance and fire, has met the challenge, and he is prepared to lead America in difficult times ahead. No one is better qualified to be Commander in Chief. He has made me proud over the years, and I know he will do the same for us all as President.

All that said, though, I wonder if McCain isn’t falling into the same trap as John Kerry in 2004: Campaigning as if it’s 1973. Both men earned Silver Stars for gallantry in battle, more than passing the threshold to be called “war hero” without embarrassment. And what McCain went through in that prison camp for five and a half years is unfathomable to the rest of us. Then again, James Stockdale endured that much and more and became a laughingstock in an hour with one bad debate performance; the public is fickle.

John McCain came home from Vietnam in 1973 and retired from the Navy in 1981 after twenty-three years of honorable service. He got elected to the U.S. House of Representatives the next year and then to Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat in 1984. That means he’s been a Member of Congress for longer than he was a naval officer.

There’s not a Republican voter who doesn’t honor McCain’s sacrifices for his country in Vietnam; not too many Americans, period, probably. On the other hand, he’s got a lot of explaining to do about his record as a United States Senator. Ultimately that, not his time in Vietnam, is what voters will judge him on in 2008.

James Hamilton on the Great Gasoline Conspiracy

Steve Verdon — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 22:06:45 +0000

James Hamilton does a pretty good job debunking the Great Gasoline Conspiracy about how the recent decline in gasoline prices is due to a clever Rovian plot.

An Econbrowser reader calling himself “Alan Greenspend” calls our attention to a post by Russ Winter detailing how George Bush might be responsible for falling gasoline prices.

After long shying away from oil, natural gas, metals and other raw materials, investors of all stripes — hedge funds, pension plans, endowments and individual investors — have become enamored with commodity investing. These investors, including short-term speculators, have become key in various markets, sometimes driving prices more than industrial customers who buy the materials to make things or sell services….

For evidence of these investors’ influence, consider the Goldman Sachs commodity index, one of the most popular vehicles for betting on raw materials. In July, Goldman Sachs tweaked the index’s content by cutting its exposure to gasoline. Investors tracking the index had to adjust their portfolios accordingly — which sent gasoline futures prices tumbling.–source ($$)

Undernews spells out what this means for those slow on the uptake:

Here we have Goldman, qua keeper of the commodities index, manipulating markets simply by adjusting index components…. It lends credence to the theory that the current well-publicized commodities decline is just a well-timed, well-orchestrated head fake to benefit the incumbents in the run up to the midterm elections – someone noted recently that Bush’s ratings vary inversely with gas prices.

But although Prof. Hamilton finds the story amusing it isn’t without its problems,

However, there are just a few holes in this theory through which some might try to pick a few nits:

Between July 12 (when Winter says Goldman Sachs announced the change) and August 7, gasoline futures prices did not fall, but instead rose by 3%.

When gasoline futures prices finally did begin to fall, the magnitude of the decline (25%) is far greater than could be attributed to temporary liquidity imbalances.

The most important factor in the drop of gasoline prices has been the drop in the price of crude oil, in which gasoline futures would play no role.

Price effects that result from a flood of sell orders on a market that cannot absorb them are by their nature inherently short-lived, ultimately reversed by the fundamentals of supply and demand. An effect operating through this mechanism in July could not conceivably determine the price of gasoline in November.

Some what related, commenter Anderson points to an article in the L.A. Times where Woodward claims that Bush thanked Saudi Prince Bandar for flooding the market with oil to bring down the prices in 2004 just in time for the election. One wee problem with this, according to the Energy Information Administration data don’t seem to show much of a drop leading up to the November elections in 2004. The price for all grades all formulations declined from a price of $2.104 in May to a low of $1.889 in September 13th, but then the price started to climb again reaching a price of $2.076 in the first week of November.

Maybe the ever clever Rove got the EIA and had them doctor the data or something.

Life in the Alternate Universe

Alex Knapp — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:15:06 +0000

Awww….. it’s so cute when politicians play the “history would have been different!” card.

U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., who was in town Sunday to help Gov. Jennifer Granholm campaign for her re-election bid, took time to take a jab at the Bush administration for its lack of leadership in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

“If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John’s bar and grill in Detroit’s Cass Corridor.

Bush has been so concentrated on the war in Iraq that other Middle East tension arose as a result, he said.

This is one of those things that perpetuate the idea of an all-powerful presidency. It would be perfect appropriate for John Kerry to say that things would have been different if he’d won, so long as those thing were actually in his control. (”If I were President, I would not have vetoed federal funding for stem cell research”, for example.) But last time I checked, the President does not actually control the Knesset or Hezbollah, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s entirely possible that this conflict would have happened anyway. Now it may not have happened, but there is virtually zero evidence either way.

That said, this little bit later in the article irked me.

Hezbollah guerillas should have been targeted with other terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaida and the Taliban, which operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kerry said. However, Bush, has focused military strength on Iraq.

“This is about American security and Bush has failed. He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq.…We have to destroy Hezbollah,” he said.

Good policy or no, I fail to see how the United States military actively engaging Hezbollah would have decreased Middle East tensions, given that it would have almost certainly entailed unilateral action on the part of the United States, and would have involved U.S. troops being stationed in even more Middle Eastern states.

I suppose it’s too much to expect critical thinking from U.S. Senators in this day and age, but still…

UPDATE (James Joyner): In the “great minds think alike” department, see Steve Verdon’s post on this from this afternoon.

White House Implicated in NH Phone Jamming Case

James Joyner — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 11:28:56 +0000

AP reporter Larry Margasak has written a piece headlined “Phone-Jamming Records Point to White House” by YahooNews. Perhaps a better headline would have been “Republican Operatives Call Political Affairs Office.”

Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was unfolding, phone records introduced in criminal court show. The records show that Bush campaign operative James Tobin, who recently was convicted in the case, made two dozen calls to the White House within a three-day period around Election Day 2002 — as the phone jamming operation was finalized, carried out and then abruptly shut down. The national Republican Party, which paid millions in legal bills to defend Tobin, says the contacts involved routine election business and that it was “preposterous” to suggest the calls involved phone jamming.

[...]

Democrats plan to ask a federal judge Tuesday to order GOP and White House officials to answer questions about the phone jamming in a civil lawsuit alleging voter fraud.

[...]

Repeated hang-up calls that jammed telephone lines at a Democratic get-out-the-vote center occurred in a Senate race in which Republican John Sununu defeated Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, 51 percent to 46 percent, on Nov. 5, 2002.

[...]

The phone records show that most calls to the White House were from Tobin, who became President Bush’s presidential campaign chairman for the New England region in 2004. Other calls from New Hampshire senatorial campaign offices to the White House could have been made by a number of people. A GOP campaign consultant in 2002, Jayne Millerick, made a 17-minute call to the White House on Election Day, but said in an interview she did not recall the subject. Millerick, who later became the New Hampshire GOP chairwoman, said in an interview she did not learn of the jamming until after the election.

A Democratic analysis of phone records introduced at Tobin’s criminal trial show he made 115 outgoing calls — mostly to the same number in the White House political affairs office — between Sept. 17 and Nov. 22, 2002. Two dozen of the calls were made from 9:28 a.m. the day before the election through 2:17 a.m. the night after the voting. There also were other calls between Republican officials during the period that the scheme was hatched and canceled.

[...]

Virtually all the calls to the White House went to the same number, which currently rings inside the political affairs office. In 2002, White House political affairs was led by now-RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. The White House declined to say which staffer was assigned that phone number in 2002.

It seems highly unlikely that the White House was involved in this illegal, hare-brained scheme to jam a get-out-the -vote call center in a race they were winning handily. Certainly, there’s nothing surprising about high ranking campaign officials coordinating with one another.

Stephen Spruiell agrees, asking “Wouldn’t it be more newsworthy — i.e. more unusual — if Tobin had no contact with the White House that fall?” Indeed, “I would bet my next paycheck that all the RNC regional directors in the country talked pretty regularly with the White House political affairs office in the months leading up to Election Day 2002.”

Joe Gandleman, though, gives this a big “Hmmmmm” and snarks, “This White House would never get involved in any kind of covert phone jamming. The next thing you know people will start suggesting the White House does warrantless surveillance of Americans abroard or even here in the United States.” Because catching al Qaeda terrorists and winning the New Hampshire governor’s race are similar priorities?

Scott Shields contends that “Republican corruption is a huge knot that ties together their entire party. Until it’s untangled, I’m afraid that voters will be left scratching their heads, trying to make sense of it all, without really understanding the connections. But it seems to me that this developing story could go a long way in answering at least a few questions.”

The problem with that assertion is that there were plenty of dirty tricks, including the slashing to tires on buses, on the other side as well. People who volunteer for campaigns are very passionate about politics and often adopt a “good versus evil” view of the parties, which in their mind justifies any means to win a particular race. Professionals at the top of the party hierarchy generally have a more detached view, realizing that getting caught will damage them in the long run.

The Ketchup Heiress

Kate — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 14:56:07 +0000

Bombshell disclosure at the Smoking Gun…

Plea Bargains for Election Tire Slashers

James Joyner — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 23:04:13 +0000

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that four Kerry-Edwards staffers who slashed tires of Republican Party vans that were to take voters to the polls have been allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges.

In an unexpected twist in the Election Day tire slashing trial, four former Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers, including the sons of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, have agreed to plead no contest to misdemeanors. The plea agreements came in the middle of jury deliberations after an eight-day trial on felony property damage charges that carried potential 3 1/2 year prison terms upon conviction.

Michael Pratt, 33, Sowande Omokunde, 26, Lewis G. Caldwell, 29, and Lavelle Mohammad, 36, have all pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of criminal damage to property. Omokunde is Moore’s son.

Prosecutors will recommend probation sentences as part of the deal, and that the four together pay $5,317 in restitution for the damaged tires. The surprise resolution was offered by prosecutors at 2 p.m., nearly 7 hours into deliberations and an hour after a jury note complained of an impasse.

Milwaukee blogger Sean Hackbarth thinks this a gross miscarriage of justice and rounds up some other reactions.

Milwaukee District Attorney E. Michael McCann’s office is known as a plea bargain machine. Conservatives were pleasantly surprised when his office took the Milwaukee 5 to trial. Prosecutors went through eight days of testimony and arguments and put it in the jury’s hands. Until a few hours ago it seemed like we would have a verdict, but that wasn’t the case.

He has followed the case much more closely than I have (indeed, I haven’t thought about it much since it was first reported) and certainly has a better feel for the nature of McCann’s conduct. It could well be, though, that the threat of a deadlocked jury was real and he judged this better than re-trying the case. Certainly, a second trial would have come at great expense to the taxpayers and neither victory nor a near-maximum sentence would have been a foregone conclusion.

A CourtTV report gives some credence to the idea that it was not a slam dunk:

[P]rosecutors hope that the testimony of Opel Simmons III, a Virginia-based campaign strategist brought in to energize black voters in Milwaukee, will help jurors connect the dots. Simmons, along with four other members of the get-out-the-vote team, testified that the five defendants came back to the office bragging about deflating the tires. “If these defendants had not gone back and bragged to their co-workers, they would have gotten away with it,” Assistant District Attorney David Feiss said during closing arguments Thursday.

It remains to be seen, however, if jurors will believe the testimony of Simmons and his co-workers, all of whom admitted lying, or as Simmons put it, telling “a vague variation of the truth,” to investigators when they were initially interviewed. Simmons himself was an initial suspect in the case and gave up the names of the five defendants only after being held in custody for more than 36 hours. “These people were willing to change stories to achieve a desired result,” Rodney Cubbie, Michael Pratt’s lawyer, told jurors during closing arguments.

It should be noted that the most serious charges, those against Justin Howell, were not dropped.

Still, this outcome has to be deflating considering where the case was 24 hours ago. CourtTV again:

It started out with an alert security guard noticing a man urinating on a wall. Then the distinct sound of tires deflating. Now, two sons of prominent Wisconsin politicians and their three friends could end up in prison for allegedly attempting to sabotage a Republican effort to drive voters to the polls for the 2004 presidential election.

Jurors began deliberating this afternoon in the politically charged trial of five Democratic activists who are accused of slashing the tires of 25 vans rented by the Republican Party to shuttle voters to the polls for the Bush-Kerry presidential election. In what is perhaps the most extensive Wisconsin case involving a tire-slashing, jurors heard from 16 state witnesses and three defense witnesses during the nearly two-week trial that pitted local Democrats against national Democrats and revisited campaign “shenanigans” from both parties.

[...]

Republican campaigners had rented more than 100 vehicles for a get-out-the-vote campaign. The vehicles were parked in a lot adjacent to a Bush campaign office, and party workers planned to drive poll watchers to polling places by 7 a.m. on Nov. 2 to deliver any voters who needed a ride.

The state contends that the five men, all local campaign workers, left Democratic campaign headquarters and punctured the tires of vans parked around the perimeter of a staging area so that the vehicles inside couldn’t leave.

Attorneys for the five defendants, however, argued that the slashings were part of a broader national campaign by the Democrats to prevent a large Republican turnout in key states, and pointed to several “out-of-state political operatives” brought in by the Democrats as the culprits.

What’s really interesting to me isn’t so much that some people who probably slashed some tires aren’t getting substantial jail time but rather that their attorneys are claiming a widespread criminal conspiracy on the part of the Democratic Party and neither the press nor the Democratic Party seems particularly interested. It is an absolutely outrageous charge and one that the Democrats would seem to want to deny vehemently. Of course, if the press doesn’t air it, then there’s not much need for damage control.