Friday,
June 25, 2004
KERRY SLIPS: Prompted by the Harris
poll showing a ten point lead for President Bush among
likely voters I speculated
that the Normandy commemoration, the G-8 Summit, the formation
of the new government in Iraq, the unanimous UN Security
Council resolution and Reagan's death had perhaps provided
a turning point in the race. Since then we have seen the
release of three major polls (ABC News/Wash Post, CNN/Gallup/USA
Today, FOX News/Opinion Dynamics) two of which support the
contention there has been real movement towards the President,
one which does not.
ABC/WP's
poll indicated a four point shift towards Kerry among registered
voters. Their poll from May
20-23 had the race tied 46%-46%, this week's poll taken
June
17-20 has Kerry ahead 48%-44%. However, Gallup's poll
showed a seven point swing towards President Bush among
likely voters. Their poll from June
5-8 showed Kerry ahead 50%-44%, while the poll taken
June
21-23 has Bush ahead 49%-48%. The FOX News/Opinion Dynamics
poll shows the same seven point move towards President Bush.
Their poll from June
8-9 had the race tied at 42%, the new poll taken June
22-23 has Bush ahead 47%-40%.
From
a time standpoint the the ABC/WP isn't the same type of
apple-to-apple comparison, since their previous poll was
taken May 20-23, as opposed to the FOX & Gallup polls
which were both taken in early June. But the FOX & Gallup
polls do provide strong evidence that Bush has gained support
from the first week in June. From
a results standpoint all three lead to slightly different
conclusions as Gallup suggests the race is tied, ABC/WP
gives Kerry a 4-8 point lead, while FOX shows Bush ahead
6-7 points.
With
FOX reporting a seven point lead for Bush suddenly Harris'
10-point Bush lead doesn't seem like such an outlier. In
fact, when you look at RCP's
3-way poll page, it is the ABC/Wash Post poll that stands
out as the only poll in the last eight that doesn't show
Bush ahead.
I said
after Kerry captured the nomination that these polls were
going to bounce around and it would be a mistake to get
caught up in a blip one way or the other (barring one side
being able to establish a five plus point lead for more
than a week). And I think that is still good advice until
we get through Kerry's VP selection, the Boston convention
and then the 9/11 anniversary and the GOP convention in
New York.
But
if I were a Kerry strategist I would not be feeling too
hot right now. The idea parroted by the NY
Times earlier this week, that Bush's TV barrage
was more or less ineffectual is pure spin. The Bush ad assault
on Kerry has had exactly the intended effect. You can see
it in the unfavorable ratings where Kerry, in the FOX poll,
has
a higher unfavorable rating at
43% compared to Bush's 41%. Gallup and ABC/WP didn't
have favorability results, but even if they are 4-7 points
worse for Bush, for Kerry to have such high unfavorables
is bad news. [LATE UPDATE: Gallup did have an unfavorable
number on Kerry, it is 35%, eight points better than FOX's
number.] Bush's high unfavorables make some sense given
the polarization in the country and the fact he has
been President for 3 1/2 years. Kerry on the other hand
is a relative newcomer to the national scene and it is very
bad news for him to have a higher unfavorability rating
than President Bush. And make no mistake about it those
unfavorable numbers are a direct result of the Bush ad campaign.
Other
bad news for Kerry is the President's job approval appears
to have stabilized in the high 40's. And results from the
National
Annenberg Election Survey of 1431 adults taken June 8 -
June 21 give President Bush a 52% job approval. These
type of job approval numbers aren't going to get it done
for the Democrats, Kerry is going to need to see the President's
job approval fall below 45% to have a real shot at winning
this fall.
With
the economy continuing to chug along and job growth finally
flowing through the business pipeline, Kerry is left hoping
for utter chaos in Iraq. Like I said at the beginning
of the week at some point the day after day coverage
of how awful it is in Iraq reaches a saturation point where
all the bad news effectively gets "priced in."
So even if Iraq remains an unstable mess, the media's relentless
negativism has in many ways prepared the public for the
worst. Which means we may have seen the bottom in the President's
job approval a couple of weeks ago, and if that is the case
Kerry is in big trouble.
J. McIntyre 7:48 am Link
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Thursday,
June 24, 2004
BREAK OUT THE BUTTER: Jack Ryan is toast.
The Sun-Times
reports Ryan is "reassessing" his candidacy and
the Tribune
says he is exploring an "exit strategy."
Eric
Zorn, columnist for the Chicago Tribune, is all over the
story with a round up on his
blog. Particularly damning was this
piece from John Gizzi and David Freddoso at Human Events:
Jack
Ryan, the Illinois GOP's nominee for the seat of outgoing
Sen. Pete Fitzgerald (R.-Ill.), saw his campaign implode
Tuesday after the release of highly embarrassing papers
from the divorce custody battle over his nine-year-old
son.
This
came as a surprise to the two of us, despite the fact
that we had heard rumors about Ryan--which in retrospect
were surprisingly accurate. That's because Ryan looked
both of us straight in the eyes and lied to us in an off-the-record
lunch two weeks ago.
We've
gotten a lot of email on the Ryan story, and it varies from
those who think Ryan ought to get out immediately to those
who say, "what's the big deal, he was with his wife
and didn't break any laws" to people warning us not
to make the mistake of conflating public and private morality.
The
core of this story, however, isn't about Ryan's private
morality or what he did or didn't do with his wife. The
issue is the way Ryan handled the disclosure of the information
with members of his party and the press. It's just that
simple.
Imagine
how different things would be if Jack had publicly disclosed
years ago that he and his wife had gone through a nasty
divorce and that terrible false accusations had been tossed
around during the custody fight for their son.
Would
the story still be out there? Sure. Could it still be used
in a whispering campaign against Jack? Of course. But it
would never have become a real issue in the race because
the story would already be "old news" by definition
and Jack would already be on record denying the allegations.
So
the next question is, would having the story out there have
prevented Jack from winning the nomination? Hard to say,
but my guess is "no." I'm sure even the rumor
of that sort of behavior in his past - true or not - would
have turned off some conservative primary voters, but I
don't know that it would have made much of a difference.
I also
don't think there is a reporter worth his or her salt who
would have taken a he-said/she-said case like this from
a contentious divorce file and gotten in Jack's face demanding
to know if the allegations were true or not.
Even
if a reporter had gone that route, the question would have
been easily brushed aside with a "I addressed that
issue years ago" and a referral to his denials in the
divorce settlement. It's a dead end, the story goes nowhere.
The
lesson here is nothing more than another affirmation that
honesty really is the best policy. It's so cliche but so
damn true. We've all learned the lesson at one point or
another. Jack is just learning the really hard way. -
T. Bevan 3:24 pm Link
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GET
YOUR PREDICTIONS HERE: From
USA
Today:
A
formula by a Yale University economist that has correctly
predicted five of the last six elections shows President
Bush winning in the biggest landslide since Ronald Reagan's
49-state victory in 1984. It says Bush is a shoo-in.
The
economist in question is Ray
Fair and the model he uses is based on
a few basic economic factors. Fair's model currently
predicts Bush will win 58% of the popular vote this November.
For posterity, however, it should be pointed out that the
only election out of the last six where Fair's model failed
to accurately predict the winner was.....1992. Maybe it's
a Bush thing.
The
rest of the article by Susan Page is, well, let's just call
it debatable. Along with economic indicators - which Page
claims give an advantage to Bush - Page looks at five other
"measurements" for predicting the outcome of presidential
contests: Presidential job approval (advantage Kerry), war
time support (advantage Bush), the outcome in Ohio (advantage
Kerry), Dem nominee being from the South (advantage Bush),
and the height of candidates (advantage Kerry).
All
in all, Page looks at six categories and gives Kerry the
advantage in three and Bush the advantage in three. It's
a perfect toss-up! Or is it?
For
example, on the section regarding Presidential Job approval,
Page works off the conventional wisdom that a 50% job approval
is the "magic number" and then cites their latest
USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup number for Bush's job approval (which
she may have to do for contractual reasons) at 47% as proof
Kerry has the advantage.
But
beyond that single number (which is nearly a month old,
btw) five
of the last nine polls taken show Bush's job approval
at 50% or higher. We currently have Bush's average job approval
rating at 49.4%. In other words, it's a bit silly to be
so literal with 50.0% as a definitive "magic number",
especially when there is ample evidence that Bush is at
or above that mark.
Then
there is this tidbit from Page's section on the predictive
value of winning Ohio:
From
Abraham Lincoln to George W. Bush, no Republican has been
elected president without carrying Ohio. In 2000, Bush
won the state, but by just 3.5 percentage points and only
after Al Gore abandoned campaign efforts there.
This
time, Kerry leads in three of the last four statewide
polls, though in two of them the margin was too small
to be statistically significant. The latest survey,
taken by the Los Angeles Times June 5-8, put Kerry at
46%, Bush at 45%.
That's
a red flag for Bush. At best, he's even in the Buckeye
State. (emphasis added)
Unless
Page has access to different polls than we do (which is
certainly possible) I would think this has to be a typo.
Because if you look at the latest poll numbers we have for
Ohio, the exact opposite is true. Three
of the last four polls out of Ohio favor President Bush.
The LA Times poll is the only exception, and we
know that the methodology of that poll was deeply flawed
at the national level and also produced some wacky
state numbers as well.
(LATE
UPDATE: ARG just
released a poll out of Ohio showing Kerry up 6. Just
as a point of reference, this is actually a one-point gain
for President Bush from where he was in their poll last
month. To be fair to Page, the new ARG number adds additional
evidence to support her claim that Kerry has an advantage
over Bush in Ohio and that, "at best", the President
is running even with Kerry. However, given that the polling
was conducted from Monday the 21st through last night, it's
unlikely Page knew about it at the time she wrote her article.)
(LATE
LATE UPDATE: Fox News now
has a poll out from Ohio showing Bush up 4. Sweet vindication!
Just kidding. What this shows is that no single poll is
really definitive proof of anything, and I still contend
that on balance Bush probably has a slight edge in Ohio.)
Regardless,
I think Page mischaracterizes the race in Ohio. Bush has
a small lead there, roughly comparable to his margin of
victory in 2000. How Page can write this up giving the advantage
to John Kerry is a little bizarre - unless you take into
account that she needed to massage the facts a bit in order
to fit the "indicators say Presidential race is a toss
up" theme of her piece.
Because
really, if you were to cite the fact that there is evidence
Bush's job approval is right at or over the "magic"
50% mark, and you were to accurately state that Bush has
a small advantage in Ohio, by Page's calculations the only
thing John Kerry would have left as an advantage in the
Presidential race is the fact he's six foot-four. Maybe
that's the truth, but it sure wouldn't make a very good
front page story for USA Today, now would it?
JUST
SLIP OUT THE BACK, JACK: Make a new plan, Stan.
You don't need to be coy, Roy, just listen to me.....
You
can hear the Paul Simon theme music playing in the background
of this
story from today's Chicago Sun-Times whose title and
opening line read: "Republicans Band Together Against
Ryan. They just want him to go away."
It's
looking grim, folks. Despite the results of this
snap poll conducted by CBS News the other day which
showed voters backing Ryan to stay in the race by a pretty
large margin (62-35), things have gelled quickly against
him.
Late
yesterday Denny
Hastert cancelled a fundraiser for Ryan in DC. Apparently,
Ryan tried to call the Speaker to talk but Hastert
did not take his call.
That
came on the heels of an
AP story (which sat underneath a picture of Ryan on
Drudge's web site all day long) that had RNC spokesperson
Mary Jo Arndt essentially cutting Ryan's legs off:
"I
feel he betrayed all of us by implying there was nothing
detrimental in the sealed records," Arndt said. "I
don't think he was protecting his son; I think he was
protecting his political aspirations."
You
don't see quotes like this unless they've been authorized
at the highest levels.
Lynn
Sweet points out that Ryan made things worse for himself
by releasing his divorce documents on Monday, against the
wishes of the Bush-Cheney team and smack dab in the middle
of their tour to promote Jim Edgar as the Chairman of the
President's reelect effort in Illinois.
The
coup de grace is that apparently Ryan had told
Edgar on the phone the night before there was nothing embarrassing
in his divorce files, and Edgar spent Monday defending Ryan
at press conferences, only to have the bomb dropped on him
by Ryan Monday night.
In
other words, this whole thing has been handled about as
poorly as you could possibly imagine. Ryan now faces a bleak
choice: leave the race under a cloud of scandal or forge
ahead with little or no institutional support behind him
toward an almost certain defeat in November. -
T. Bevan 8:24 am Link
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Wednesday,
June 23 2004
DEMINT CRUSHES BEASLEY: Fifty-nine
to forty-one. Though Beasley was the top vote getter
in the GOP primary just
two weeks ago at 37%, he wasn't able to expand his appeal
much beyond his base of support.
Demint
moves on to face Education Superintendent Inez
Tenenbaum in November to replace the retiring Fritz
Hollings.
IS
THE FORK IN JACK RYAN?: Given the polls we've seen
over the last three months, it's not like Jack Ryan was
in any danger of winning the Illinois Senate race against
Barack Obama in the first place.
Still,
despite Ryan's
repeated assertions yesterday that he's staying in to
the end, the allegations
by his ex-wife that he took her to sex clubs and wanted
her to engage in sexual acts in front of other people puts
his future as the Republican candidate for the US Senate
in serious doubt.
If
Ryan does step aside, it probably won't be because of the
sex stuff, though the imagery of the potential US Senator
from the state of Illinois visiting places that have cages
and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling certainly
isn't going to help him win the votes of social conservatives
and suburban women around the state.
The
bigger problem is that it looks like Ryan
misled members of the Republican establishment - not
to mention thousands of GOP primary voters - about the embarrassing
nature of the allegations.
When
you have people like the head of the Illinois Republican
Party Judy Baar Topinka and former Governor Jim Edgar saying
in print that you didn't tell them the whole story, you're
in a bit of trouble. It becomes even more serious when one
of the two major papers in the city essentially repeals
the endorsement they gave you during the GOP primary and
tells you to "hit the road", as the Chicago
Sun-Times did to Ryan this morning.
Just
weeks ago I wrote that I thought this race would be a high-minded
debate about the issues by two extremely intelligent men.
It certainly doesn't look like that right now, and the prospect
it will ever become such a race is likely to be diminished
as long as Ryan stays in with these salacious allegations
hanging around.
But
he might. Lynn
Sweet does a nice job of running down the factors at
play that will influence Ryan's decision. One of the things
working in Ryan's favor is that the Republican bench in
Illinois isn't very deep. There are very few people waiting
in the wings that are able or willing to step in at this
point and run any more of a credible (not to mention an
almost completely self-financed) campaign against Obama.
As a result, Jack is probably going to get a lot less pressure
to step aside than he otherwise would have if a suitable
replacement was standing on deck.
Jim
Edgar is probably the only person who could really make
this a competitive race again, but he's already said no
to the job twice - including this past year - and it's hard
to imagine him wanting to do it now.
-
T. Bevan 8:24 am Link
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Tuesday,
June 22, 2004
THE GREG PALAST FANTASY: Greg Palast bills
himself as "best known in the USA for his reports
on the theft of the election in Florida and the connections
between the Bush family and the Bin ladins which form the
basis for Michael Moore's latest film."
So
it wasn't a surprise to see this
piece of lame, divisive propaganda appearing under his
byline in the SF Chronicle on Sunday alleging a racial conspiracy
to disenfranchise black voters in 2000. Palast asserts that
of the 1.9 million "spoiled" votes in the 2000
election, more than half (53% to be exact) were cast by
African-Americans, even though they make up only 12% of
the population nationally.
Palast
writes:
While
investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC
Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was
played -- with black voters the
predetermined losers.
Florida's
Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters
in the state -- and the highest spoilage rate. One in
8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters
wrote in "Al Gore." Optical reading machines
rejected these because "Al" is a "stray
mark."
By
contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote
spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference?
In Tallahassee's white- majority county, voters placed
their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they
added a stray mark, they received another ballot with
instructions to correct it.
In
other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get
another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your
ballot is tossed.
The
U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile
of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855
ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were
cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was
10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white
voter...
This
"no count," as the Civil Rights Commission calls
it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered
that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush's office well
in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the
vote- count procedures.
Herein
lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system
is far from politically neutral. Given that more than
90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had
all the "spoiled" votes been tallied, Gore would
have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening
his popular vote total nationwide. It's not surprising
that the First Brother's team, informed of impending rejection
of black ballots, looked away and whistled. (emphasis
added)
Palast
paints quite an ominous and reprehensible picture, especially
with respect to Florida: an "apartheid vote-counting
system" where votes from white-majority counties (think
"Republican") are counted and votes from black-majority
counties (think "Democrat") are deliberately trashed
while a nefarious Republican Governor looks the other way.
There's
only one thing wrong with Palast's picture, of course: it
isn't even close to being true.
The
first problem with Palast's assertion is that it rests on
the flawed statistical analysis of the US
Civil Rights Commission. For starters, there is no racial
data on individual voters, so the percentage of "spoiled"
African-American votes Palast cites with such certitude
is really an estimate based on statistical regressions of
voter registration.
Secondly,
the Commission's report emphasized results from county-level
analysis and focused solely on the 2000 election without
taking into consideration any historical factors such as
previous levels of spoilage, etc.
Indeed,
the Commission's analysis is constructed to lead people
to the same simple, misguided conclusion that Palast proffers:
race was the driving factor behind higher rates of disqualified
ballots in Florida counties with larger numbers of registered
African-American voters.
This
ignores a whole host of reasons that may have contributed
to higher spoilage rates in certain counties including literacy
rates, voter error and standard machine error (which can't
possibly discriminate based on race).
Dr.
John Lott conducted a precinct-level
analysis of disqualified ballots in Florida for USA
Today that took into account data from 1996 and 2000 as
well as demographic information. Lott found that a rise
in a county's black population over time did not result
in a similar rise in the rate of ballot spoilage, suggesting
that race was not the causal factor at work.
(Ironically,
Lott also discovered that the group most affected by ballot
disqualification in Florida in 2000 was not African-American
Democrats, but African-American Republicans. Though obviously
a smaller percentage of the black voting population, they
were 50 times more likely to have their ballot thrown out
in 2000. Go figure.)
Palast's
ridiculous charge of a "apartheid vote-counting system"
with partisan motivations also crumbles when one stops to
point out the obvious: the officials in charge of the counties
in Florida that experienced the highest rates of spoilage
were Democrats, and in some cases African-American Democrats.
Abigail
Thernstrom and Russell Redenbaugh wrote in a
comprehensive dissent to the US Civil Rights Commission
report:
The
majority report lays the blame for the supposed “disenfranchisement”
of black voters at the feet of state officials—particularly
Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
In fact, however, elections in Florida are the responsibility
of 67 county supervisors of election. And, interestingly,
in all but one of the 25 counties with the highest
spoilage rates, the election was supervised by a Democrat—the
one exception being an official with no party affiliation.
The
majority report argues that much of the spoiled ballot
problem was due to voting technology. But elected Democratic
Party officials decided on the type of machinery used,
including the optical scanning system in Gadsden County,
the state’s only majority-black county and the one
with the highest spoilage rate.
No
wonder Palast omitted these damning facts. They simply don't
fit his fantasy that America is still a deeply racist and
oppressive country, and that Jeb Bush and Republicans in
Florida actively discriminated against African-Americans,
creating a "Jim Crow spoilage rate" that allowed
George Bush to steal his way into the Oval Office.
- T. Bevan 10:56 am Link
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Monday,
June 21 2004
KERRY UP 8?: The
ABC
News/Washington Post poll shows Kerry ahead by four
points with Nader in the race (Kerry 48%, Bush 44%,
Nader 6%) and ahead by a large eight
points in the head to head (Kerry 53%, Bush 45%). So
what gives, Harris has Bush up 10 points in one poll and
ABC/Wash Post has Kerry up 8 in another?
The
ABC/Wash Post poll is of registered voters, unlike Harris
which is likely voters, which explains a couple of points
of the discrepancy, but certainly not all of it. Let's see
where the other new polls shake out in the next few days,
but this poll from ABC/WP coupled with Rasmussen's result
from earlier today which shows Kerry
up 3, leans the balance of evidence, at least right
now, toward the conclusion that the Harris poll is the outlier.
Which means we probably have the same status quo race we've
had for the last couple of months. J. McIntyre
7:47 pm Link
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BUSH UP 10?: What
to make of the new Harris
Poll showing Bush with a ten-point lead among likely
voters - Bush 51%, Kerry 41%, Nader 6%? The first rule of
thumb is not to get too exercised about one poll, especially
one that is dramatically at odds with all of the other major
polls.
On
one hand, Rasmussen's tracking
poll has shown little change in the race. The last three
weeks his poll has bounced around between Bush up 3 and
Kerry up 2, and Sunday's number had Kerry ahead 46-45. (Late
update: Monday's has Kerry ahead 47-44.)
On
the other hand, Investor's Business Daily and the Pew
Research polls taken at roughly the same time as Harris'
poll showed Bush with
3 and 4 point leads. Pew's poll indicated a seven point
swing towards Bush from their last survey in May.
I suspect
some of this movement has to do with the good feeling towards
Republicans surrounding the death of President Reagan. But
even before Reagan's death, there was a feeling that the
mood of the public in regards to Iraq, the 9/11 commission,
the prison scandal, etc... had begun to swing back in the
President's favor.
There
is only so long the national press can write bad story after
bad story describing how awful it is in Iraq, before at
some point all the bad news gets "priced in,"
so to speak. Reagan's death coinciding with the Normandy
commemoration, the G-8 Summit, the formation of the new
government in Iraq and the unanimous UN Security Council
resolution changed the daily drum beat that Iraq was an
unmitigated disaster. And
may, as time passes, prove to be an important turning point
in the public's view toward the President's decision to
invade Iraq.
It
will be very interesting to see what the next batch of polls
from the major firms show, but if they indicate anything
close to what Harris is picking up, we may look back on
the last three weeks as the period when Bush started to
pull ahead.
However,
if they are closer to what Rasmussen's poll is showing,
it will indicate the race is maintaining more or less the
status quo we have seen since Kerry clinched the nomination
in March. J. McIntyre 8:56 am Link
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RUSSIA'S WARNING TO THE U.S.: It's
not surprising that the press hasn't made a big deal over
last
week's comments from Russian President Vladimir Putin:
After
the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and before the start of
the military operation in Iraq, intelligence repeatedly
received information that the official services of the
Saddam regime were preparing terrorist acts against military
and civil targets on the territory of the United States
and beyond.
The
playbook for the press is simple. Anything that makes President
Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq look foolish or misguided
needs to be played up hard and repeatedly, and any information
that would bolster Bush's argument for removing Saddam Hussein
needs to be buried, or at a minimum downplayed.
So
on top of all the other reasons why we went to war in Iraq,
here you have the President of Russia, a country that had
extremely close ties to Hussein's Iraq and opposed
the U.S. attack, telling our government that Saddam's regime
was "preparing terrorist acts against military and
civil targets on the territory of the United States."
What many in the press and, unfortunately a majority of
the Democratics in Congress still don't fully get is that
post 9/11, the threshold of proof for taking action has
been dramatically lowered. Contrary to the what might be
conventional wisdom in Washington, the American people WANT
a leader who is willing to take action to remove threats
preemptively.
The
American people in their instinctive wisdom understand that
sitting back and waiting for conclusive proof and complete
agreement with France, Germany, China, et al is a prescription
for the exact type of inaction we saw in the 1990's. Inaction
that contibuted directly to what happened on September 11,
2001.
President
Bush laid out the nation's new policy of preemption very
clearly two
years ago at West Point:
In
defending the peace, we face a threat with no precedent.
Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial
capabilities to endanger the American people and our nation.
The attacks of September the 11th required a few hundred
thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and
deluded men. All of the chaos and suffering they caused
came at much less than the cost of a single tank. The
dangers have not passed. This government and the American
people are on watch, we are ready, because we know the
terrorists have more money and more men and more plans.
The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous crossroads
of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical
and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic
missile technology -- when that occurs, even weak states
and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to
strike great nations. Our enemies have declared this very
intention, and have been caught seeking these terrible
weapons. They want the capability to blackmail us, or
to harm us, or to harm our friends -- and we will oppose
them with all our power.
For much of the last century, America's defense relied
on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment.
In some cases, those strategies still apply. But new threats
also require new thinking. Deterrence -- the promise of
massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against
shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens
to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced
dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver
those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to
terrorist allies.
We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for
the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants,
who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then
systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully
materialize, we will have waited too long.
That
type of approach may repulse and incense liberals, but it
sounds like just plain common sense to a majority of Americans,
and it is the primary reason Kerry has always been, and
will remain, an underdog in the election this fall. J.
McIntyre 6:46 am Link
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