emptywheel

The Diebold voting machine controversy is finally beginning to take off. Kos, Atrios, Billmon, and CalPundit have all mentioned the machines recently. Mark Crispin Miller is making it a centerpiece of his new blog. It's beginning to look like people are becoming aware of the problem.

But not in MD.

The report from SAIC, on the security of the machines came out yesterday. And the report basically said what we already know, that the machines have serious security problems. But the response from MD seems to be to go ahead anyway.

It has been pointed out that SAIC is itself in the business of voting machines. So you can't really expect this report to be legitimate in any sense. But here the report is, admitting there are problems with the machines.

Any bet that Bush carries MD in 2004?

Well, it has happened again: a massive power outage. First the outage in the US, then one in London, and now this.

And, little noticed (as was this one in Scandinavia) was another power outage, the Monday after the US blackout, in the Republic of Georgia.

Now, as a Dane interviewed about their blackout pointed out, the London, US, and Danish outage came in countries that have soldiers in Iraq. Georgia, of course, doesn't have soldiers in Iraq, except for any mujahadeen sponsored by Al Qaeda. But Georgia is basically a summer camp for slavic mafia types, terrorists, and others interested in doing business on the the not-so-up-and-up.

I'm not saying they're related. But I am saying that these blackouts merit more unified attention. Purported Al Qaeda spoksepeople tried to take credit for the US blackout. They said they didn't want to explain how they had caused it, because they planned to use the strategy in the future.

Voters are getting fickle about negative campaigning.

Pollsters have noted that when Joe Lieberman started slamming Howard Dean, Lieberman's poll numbers dropped drastically. When Gephardt started slamming Howard Dean, Gephardt's poll numbers dropped drastically. Pollsters are beginning to chant that negative campaigning is really going to hurt people in this campaign cycle.

Maybe on intra-party rivalries, but not when the country is at stake. Even though Republicans complain about attacks on Bush and suggest that "negative campaigning will hurt the Democrats," they seem wrong. The two candidates who have been boldest in criticizing Bush are Clark and Dean. And they, of course, are the poll leaders.

I sincerely wonder whether it is a matter of substance (unlike Rove or Lehane campaigns, Dean and Clark are simply telling the truth), or whether the electorate has soured on Bush, which makes it okay to attack him. EIther way, it is shaping up to give an interesting characteristic to the election.

Okay, so everyone has noticed that Bush's job approval ratings have fallen to an all time low. As they have noticed that Wesley Clark and John Kerry would both beat Bush in a head-to-head matchup conducted today.

But think about these latest poll data. First, a recent Washington Post poll found that nearly 70% of Americans believe Sadaam Hussein had some connection with 9/11. Meanwhile, in the recent Gallup poll reporting Bush's record low job approval ratings, only 50% of those polled believed that the war in Iraq was worthwhile.

I realize these two polls use different methodologies, and therefore can't be considered in complete conjunction. But even if you assume that Gallup would show a smaller number of people who believed that Sadaam sent over all those Saudi terrorists, you'd still have a significantly larger number of people who believed there was a connection than who believed that the war in Iraq was worthwhile--say, 15%.

15% of Americans believe Sadaam Hussein attacked us, but think that the war is not a worthwhile response to that attack.

I find this remarkable. For all the claims that Americans are bloodthirsty, short-tempered provincials, here we have a significant minority who believes that a war is not a worthwhile response to a terrorist attack launched--so they believe wrongly--by that country.

I don't know what to make of it. But I think it suggests a lot more ambivalence about war as a response to terrorism than you'd expect from watching Fox News.

I have a hunch about David Brooks. He's thrilled about his new New York Times gig because it gives him a very prestigious pulpit from which to shout his message. Newspaper of record and all that. But at the same time, I think he has heard myths about the liberal media so often, that he doesn't respect his audience at the Times. He can barely conceal his disdain for his own readers, and it makes his normally logical prose appear ridiculous.

Over the weekend, he wrote an article comparing Bush's and Dean's relative social standing. Dean, he pointed out, boasted a much higher pedigree. Although how he can equate Dean's years as a ski bum with Bush's as an alcoholic and coke aficionado, I don't understand.

Nice hook on your story, David, but who cares? Unless you hold a really caricatured picture of Democratic politics, you really can't think that this article is going to have an effect on Dean's support among Democrats. By suggesting that Dean's supporters ignore his class or pedigree, Brooks avoids having to deal with the real energy Dean has generated, not to mention the set of pragmatic (and none-too-liberal) policies he championed in Vermont. FDR's and JFK's pedigree were also good (although, Brooks would be sure to point out, not as good as Dean's). But it didn't play the definitive role in their policies.

Now, in today's column, Brooks makes a very weak argument about how Republican pollsters would welcome a Dean candidacy. The first problem with the argument is that Brooks doesn't even try to make his argument appear to be anything other than chatty insiders gabbing (his portrayal of their response as "hahahahaha" does little to improve this). When they're presenting supposedly scientific polls, pollsters are going to present a much different face than when meeting for beers with their co-conspirator.

But he also makes a very weak argument about what Dean stands for. He suggests that Dean can do no more than mobilize the democratic base (whose weak showing in the mid-term elections may have been decisive for the Republicans). He doesn't begin to explain why so many people on Dean blogs describe themselves as independents. In short, he makes a fairly reasoned argument that this election will be about mobilizing independents, but he fails to even address the issue of whether Dean is pulling support from the Democratic base or from independents.

And the argument is pretty bunk anyway, given all the recent coverage of how worried Republican pollsters are about Bush approval ratings in general. If they're so worried about a growing perception that Bush is a lying incompetent who will doom the economy and the war on terrorism, then why aren't they worried about one of the voices who has most effectively sold that message?

As I write this, I think Brooks' recent columns refute his pleas that Dean is not a threat quite well. If Dean is such a lightweight, David, why waste your lucrative Times space belittling him?

But the biggest problem is that Brooks doesn't seem to think that Times readers have any more sophistication than your average Fox fan. He can simply make blank accusations, without employing any of the sound argumentative ability he has shown in the past.

Which makes this respectable commentator look like a buffoon.

I can't help but wonder whether or not there is a connection between the hard stance developing nations took in the Cancun trade talks and our (the US') bullying leading up to the Iraq war.

The unwillingness on the part of the 6 decisive countries on the Security Council to vote in favor of the Iraq war was an almost unprecedented rebuke of the United States on the part of the developing world. (Ditto Turkey's refusal to allow basing privileges for the war.) For the most part, these were individual countries that, for disparate reasons, decided that voting in favor of the Iraq war was not in their own best interest. Importantly, these decisions were often made out of prinicpled opposition to pre-emptive war or the aggression of a developed nation against an overpowered developing one. I'm sure it helped, of course, that France, Germany, and Russia were supporting these developing nations behind the scene. Nevertheless, it was an inspiring stand against the world's biggest bully.

I think the stance signalled several things. First, it highlighted how little the United States really gives to most developing nations. It threatened these countries with trade retaliation. But few of them (Chile is the biggest exception) had much real trade with the United States anyway (the African nations usually trade more with Europe than the United States.) Further, the US really gives a teeny bit of international aid, particularly as compared with other developed nations. So in a very real way, I think the confrontation over the Security Council resolution really demonstrated how little the US gives to developing nations.

Perhaps more importantly, US intransigence about the war demonstrated (if our stance on Kyoto, etc. hadn't already done so) to all the world how relentlessly we are going to pursue our own interest, at the expense of the everyone else. It demonstrated the need for the rest of the world to start forming coalitions that could counteract our power. Belgian, France, and Germany formed the beginning of a military alliance. China and India resolved some long-standing disputes and developed closer relations. And now this.

The Group of 21 and the Group of 17 (groups of developing nations objecting to the agricultural and the investment rules, respectively) represent a very intriguing alliance. They include the largest developing nations, many of which have significant raw materials (Nigeria, South Africa) or human capital (India). And they include most of the world, literally. They largely feature an alliance between Brazil (which is reported to have provided the development leadership), China, and India. An alliance between these three nations really could threaten the United States. They represented the largest possible markets, some of the best human capital, and a good deal of military heft.

So I wonder whether our Iraq bullying has led directly to the coalition that eventually lead to our demise.

Bush is pretty clear when it comes to the road map, or the reasons behind his dismissal of Yasir Arafat. The Palestinians, you see, need to crack down on the terrorists within their midst.

As many people have pointed out, it matters little to Bush that the Israelis have completely dismantled Palestinian security services. Do it anyway, he seems to be saying, even if the people who could have done it have been killed or arrested.

Funny, then, their approach to the Pakistanis. It's pretty well accepted the Osama Bin Laden has taken refuge in the tribal areas within Pakistan, and that the Taliban has regrouped thanks to the safety offered by Pakistan. These, of course, are the terrorists who have actually struck the United States. And this is happening within a country run by the military. In an article describing US acceptance of Pakistan's ambivalence about pursuing Al Qaeda, this was basically dismissed as a question of capacity.

Western diplomats say the Taliban is building up its forces along the border and running a recruiting network inside Pakistan. But they see the problem as one of Pakistani capacity and politics, not will, and say they have seen no evidence of direct aid from Pakistan's government to the Taliban. "They may not know what to do," said one Western diplomat.

I guess Pakistan is lucky that they do not share a border with our closest ally?

I've been thinking about Bush's $200,000,000 warchest a lot.

I am beginning to believe that either Howard Dean or Wesley Clark could beat Bush. And I'm doubtful the Administration will be able to entirely steal the election--that ability (through Florida-like shenanigans and the manipulation of electronic voting) is probably several years off. (Although if Arnie wins in California, it probably brings them a lot closer.)

Even so, I'm still worried about the power of a 2 million dollar warchest. That can pay for a lot of negative advertising, and we all know how good Rove is at that.

So I'm beginning to get more and more interested in seeing democrats develop a plan to have Bush legally removed from office in, say, August of next year. Before he gets the nomination, but not too far before.

You see, the Republicans have made a pretty crafty decision. They've postponed the Convention until September of next year, about a year away. They've done this to postpone the time when Bush will come under a different set of fundraising laws. The date of the Convention largely makes the $200 million warchest possible.

But I suspect that if, before he received the nomination, Bush were forced to resign, then he wouldn't be able to pass on the money. The money is specifically Bush precisely because he is not yet the party's nominee. So unlike the case of Lautenberg last year (who was able to take Torricelli's money as the new nominee of the party), I don't think the party would be able to pass it along in one lump sum.

And of course, Bush wouldn't be able to give it to the new candidate either. Rather, he'd be able to give only $2000, which won't fund many negative ads.

Perhaps I'm not remotely realistic. Perhaps there really isn't a chance in hell for Bush to have to step down from office between now and then.

But I'd prefer to be optimistic and at least plan for this kind of timing. There are so many possible reasons why Bush might have to step down (my new favorite is to hold him accountable for exposing 8 million New Yorkers to Superfund-like toxic chemicals by forcing the EPA to lie about air quality after 9/11. There's got to be a way to hang that on him--and make him accountable.

But there are other things. Enron may finally begin to burble some scandal again. There may be some kind of legal accountability for the falsified Iraq war. As a related issue, Bush's energy plan (or lack thereof) may doom him (more likely to get Cheney, I know, but you never do know).

Basically, I think there is enough flammable issues to convince other republicans (at least the marginally decent ones) that they need to jettison the captain to save the boat. And if that were to happen, it might be a surprisingly beneficial thing to happen to the presidential election.

I've been thinking that Blair's problems with the Hutton inquiry bode poorly for the peace process in Israel. Bush's recent refusal to provide Ahmed Qureia with the reassurances he asked for before taking the prime minister job convince me I'm right.

Bush only ever invested in the Road Map as payback to Blair for his support in the Iraqi war. Blair needed some kind of tangible evidence that the Iraq war would have positive outcomes meaningful to British voters.

But now, Blair's support has sunk to the lowest point it has been in his administration (well, for that matter, so have Bush's, but he won't have to face up to the consequences for another year or so). It is highly likely that Geoff Hoon, his Defense Minister, will have to resign at the close of the Hutton inquiry. And more people have started to call for Blair's own resignation. The latter will probably not happen. But from this point forward, anything Blair does to support Bush will not be accomplished via normal parliamentary channels. Witness, for example, Hoon's ordering that 1200 more troops head to Iraq--he accomplished this by memo, not by debate. So it is no longer necessary for Bush to waste his political capital on helping Blair out.

I'm not sure whether Blair knows this and has told Bush as much, or whether Bush has just decided to cut bait (which would be more likely, but stupid). More importantly, I'm not sure whether the Palestinians have figured this out. Any more support for the Road Map is solely for political consumption at home, classic Bush rhetoric with absolutely no intention to follow through on it.

I still think that Qureia, if he were to decline the position, would still be making the right decision. Without real pressure from the United States, following the road map would only be accomplishing Israel's objectives with no payback--it would mean dismantling the only kind of defense the Palestinians have, with no hope they will get anything in return.

But that is a bleak, bleak proposition.

You hear the argument that people who have spent too much time inside the beltway lose their ability to understand common problems, outlooks, and perceptions. I agree with that in general. But I'm not sure I've seen a recent case as bad as Lieberman's.

Most inside-the-beltway democratic presidential candidates seem to have this problem (I think Kucinich is the exception, but he has his own set of problems). Their unquestioning vote for the Iraq war is one symptom of an inability to really evaluate something independently of the dominant paradigms of the capital. With the exception of Lieberman, however, the candidates seem to have responded more recently to what they were hearing on the campaign trail.

I don't think Lieberman's support for the war is the best evidence of his blindness--I think his stance can be defended with a lot of coherent (if not logical) reasons. But I do think his approach to the economy, the election, and the relation of the democratic party to its base are evidence of it.

The ferocity of his attack on Dean about his stance in the Middle East conflict is one example of this. Liebermans suggested that even voicing such ideas was dangerous: "If it's not [a well-thought-out idea], it's very important for Howard Dean, as a candidate for president, to think before he talks." As Dean has clarified, what he was basically saying is that, if we're going to intervene as mediators in the conflict, we need to be "even-handed" with both sides. It's a pretty good point: we're never going to win over Palestinian radicals so long as they believe they will not get all that is promised in the road map. And our lack of even-handedness has thus far been one of the problems. We're pretty quick to judge that the Israelis have fulfilled their obligations to free prisoners and end settlements, even though progress on both fronts was entirely symbolic.

I realize that, for Lieberman, this is a very personal issue. But to suggest blankly that Dean's comment was "a major break from a half a century of American foreign policy" implies a monolithic approach to Israel, one that does not allow for a critical stance towards any of its actions. Even as recently as the Clinton administration, an important part to our approach was a measure of distance from Israel.

So I think the retort to Dean's comment was ill-formed. But more importantly, I think it betrays an inability to rethink the paradigm currently dominant in Washington DC. Yes, there is currently little room in our unquestioned support for Israel. But this a product of the neo-con policy, not really an accurate description of the American policy in the second half of the twentieth century. And it doesn't allow for any reflection on what is going wrong with the Road Map.

Lieberman's attacks on Dean's economic comments seem similarly divorced from out-of-the-beltway realm of possibilities. As this this Newsday account relates, Dean questioned the standard of our free-trade agreements:

"We ought not to be in the business of having free and open borders with countries that don't have the same environmental, labor and human rights standards," said Dean, the current if uneasy front-runner in the race for his party's nomination, during a nationally televised debate with seven of the other eight candidates in New Mexico. Dean's comment drew a sharp retort from Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who said adoption of that policy would mean abrogating existing trade agreements with Mexico and many other nations at a cost of millions of American jobs. "If that ever happened, I'd say that the Bush recession would be followed by the Dean depression," Lieberman said.

This comment certainly made for some good press coverage. But it doesn't really account for the effect free trade agreements have had on our economy. We continue to lose more and more manufacturing jobs--to countries with low or no environmental, labor, and human rights standards. More recently, we have begun to lose more lucrative service jobs, similarly to countries with fewer protections. We have replaced these jobs with low-paying service jobs . . . Wal-Mart jobs and the like. Sure, by changing the terms of free trade, we might lose some of the new service jobs supported by an expanding consumer society. But our society would lose much.

Now, even some corporate minds are beginning to accept this. Certainly, the common Joe has been able to figure out that his job has disappeared to a country where it will pay less. But Lieberman seems to uncritically accept what is only believed by those still living in the early nineties--or within a limited circle of DLC supporters.

Much of the analysis of Lieberman's assault on Dean has focused on machinations within the party and their likely influence on the primary outcome. But I think the issue is more important than this (that is, it will affect the general election as well). I think it is as much a question of whether the Dems can distinguish an evolving understanding of existing conditions from the paradigms available in a neo-con dominated Washington. Can they distinguish ideas that--outside of Washington--are readily accepted as legitimate from the limited set of ideas largely produced by the AEI? Do they have access to vibrant ideas anymore, or are they simply responding to Bush, as they have been for much of his administration?

Further, I think Lieberman's blindness risks losing one of the stregnths the Dems can leverage in the next election. The easiest way to undermine Bush's key asset--his charm--is to show how distant he truly is from normal folks' concerns. Lieberman's patriarchal tone and inability to understand the realities of real people risk ceding this advantage.