Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Nothing To Hide

February 13, 2004

Russert: But you authorize the release of everything to settle this?

President Bush: Yes, absolutely. We did so in 2000, by the way.

April 28, 2004

Q He’s bringing up an issue that was bounced around this room at length —

MR. McCLELLAN: And it’s been fully addressed, and all the records have been released, and the President fulfilled his duty and was proud to serve and be honorably discharged from the National Guard.

September 8, 2004

Q Will the Commander-in-Chief insist that his Pentagon get to the bottom, find every last document of the National Guard service?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think that’s what the President directed back in February.

Q Are you frustrated, or is he, that more documents are surfacing?

MR. McCLELLAN: All the personnel, payroll, and medical records have been made public, and the President directed back in February that the Department of Defense do a comprehensive search and make all the documents available, and we had assurances that they had done that and, unfortunately, we have since found out that it was not as comprehensive as we thought. So they’ve continued to go and look for additional documents.

Q Is the President frustrated, irritated by this?

MR. McCLELLAN: See, that’s why I pointed out that all the personnel, payroll and medical records have been released.

Q How do you know that?

MR. McCLELLAN: They’ve assured us that all those records are out, and in fact, you have those records.

WaPo September 16, 2004:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan hinted that more documents regarding Bush’s National Guard service may soon be released. Asked whether officials in the White House have seen unreleased documents, McClellan called that “a very real possibility.” Other officials with knowledge of the situation said more documents had indeed been uncovered and would be released in the coming days.

Hobgoblins

Geraldine Sealey of Salon.com reports:

Republican congressman Christopher Cox is asking for a formal congressional investigation into CBS News’ use of what he calls “apparently forged documents concerning the service record of George W. Bush intended to unfairly damage his reputation and influence the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.”

Less than a month ago, though, Cox used a different standard to judge the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” whose every allegation about Kerry’s service in Vietnam turned out to be inaccurate and was most certainly intended to damage Kerry’s reputation and influence the outcome of the election — and was reported endlessly without appropriate skepticism in the media. From the CNN transcript:

“Blitzer: Chris Cox, you’re a good Republican. Should the president specifically denounce this ad put out by these Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?”

Cox: Well, this is obviously what’s going on now with campaign finance reform, 527s and so on. There’s a lot going on around the campaigns that the campaigns don’t control. I think that, for the candidates, the risk is, if you try and take ownership, either positively or negatively, of what’s going on around you, then it looks as if you’re even more involved. With respect to the facts underlying all of this, there was a book published by swift boat veterans. It ought to rise or fall on its own merits, just as with ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ which is loaded with factual inaccuracies.”

But Cox isn’t content to let CBS’ report “rise and fall” on its own merits. He wants Congress involved.

Yes. Christopher Cox is a little bit, shall we say, “inconsistent” about these matters. For instance, back in July 2003, he was very upset about another issue pertaining to media and the government:

U.S. Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, sharply criticized a decision by the U.S. Secret Service to interrogate Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez about the subject of a recent editorial cartoon. The cartoon, based on an award-winning photograph from the Vietnam War, depicts Bush with his hands behind his back as a man labeled “Politics” prepares to shoot him in the head. The background of the drawing is a cityscape labeled “Iraq.”

“Those of us in Southern California are used to seeing Michael Ramirez’s political cartoons in the Los Angeles Times,” said Chairman Cox. “They are amusing, insightful, sometimes historical, sometimes biting—but never illegal. I was disappointed to read that the U.S. Secret Service, according to an agency spokesman, was considering ‘what action, if any, could be taken’ against Mr. Ramirez for his recent cartoon depicting political attacks on President Bush.

“The use of federal power to attempt to influence the work of an editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times reflects profoundly bad judgment,” Chairman Cox said in a letter to Secret Service Director Ralph Basham.

You see, it is bad judgment to use federal power to influence the work of a conservative editorial cartoonist. A news organization making a controversial claim about the president is subject to a full congressional investigation, however. Anyone can understand that.

Stock Up For The Season

If anyone’s looking for some unusual political buttons or stickers to go along with their Kerry/Edwards stuff, check out pinkObuttons.com.

Reporters and Pundits Know Their Stuff

I’ve been trying to be positive about Kerry, but perhaps I’ve been silly. When the press develops a consensus like this it’s hard to argue that they don’t know what they are talking about. Jack O’Toole makes you stop and think about what is really going on here:

Business Week asks the question that seems to be on just about every pundit’s lips — Does Kerry Still Have A Chance? — and the answer sounds really, really bad.

After a long swoon marked by snoozy stumping, staff feuds, and the inevitable campaign shakeup, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry is trying to claw his way back into the…presidential race.

….Kerry has to do something he has failed at thus far: provide a compelling rationale for his candidacy. Indeed, he has trouble coming across as a passionate pol who fights for Middle America. With his attenuated frame, sparkling starched shirts, and aristocratic mien, he looks every inch the Beacon Hill Brahmin. The “real deal”? That’s the nickname of former heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield, who was a great fighter in his almost 20-year career but never managed to electrify the crowd.

God, talk about a nightmare. Of course, I have to tell you, I’d probably be even more concerned if the article didn’t also say this:

With the Jan. 27 New Hampshire primary looming and Dean holding a commanding lead in the state, the pressure on Kerry to break out is immense. But even on his home turf, there are troubles. In a Nov. 19-21 poll by RKM Research & Communications, he trailed Dean by 9 points in Massachusetts. What’s the problem? Kerry’s detached sang-froid seems to pale in the face of Dean’s fiery populist orations. “Dean is having a virtual coronation in New Hampshire,” says a Democratic strategist. “If you’re second, you have to take the guy down. Kerry isn’t making Dean play defense.”

‘Nuff said?

I think so.

Still Waiting

As we watch Dan Rather twist in the wind while the National Guard story transmogrifies into a tale of liberal bias and dirty tricks, let’s not forget that we are still awaiting some apologies for hoaxes and frauds that were happily and unabashedly served up for years at a time by a gullible press corpse.The Daily Howler gives us a little reminder today:

Did CBS run with crudely forged docs? Here at THE HOWLER, we can’t really say. But how comical are the outraged squeals about “liberal bias” which are all over cable? Those squeals are very comical. What does this current episode show? It shows this: If you broadcast a shaky tale about Bush, the world will land on your head in an instant. Does this show the corps’ “liberal bias?” We’d have to say that it does not.

Yes, a shaky tale about Bush has produced instant outrage. But what if you broadcast shaky tales about Democrats? Twelve years later, has anyone ever made the New York Times explain its Jeff Gerth Whitewater hoax—the hoax-like stories that gave the name to a decade of phony tales about Clinton? Has anyone ever made the press to explain all those bogus tales about Gore? And by the way—will anyone ever ask O’Neill why he keeps saying that John Kerry fled? At best, O’Neill’s kooky book is highly marginal; more reasonably judged, the book is a joke. But has anyone landed on O’Neill the way the press corps has beaned Kitty Kelley? Indeed, very few papers have even printed a formal review of O’Neill’s kooky book. Liberal bias? To all appearances, major papers are afraid to say how kooky this book really is.

Readers, treat yourselves to a dark, mordant chuckle! O’Neill has dissembled all over the land—and the wolves are screaming for Dan Rather’s head! But we’re supposed to see these troubling events as the latest proof of a liberal bias. Big orgs have produced a string of fake tales about Dems—but one shaky tale about Bush proves a point. Well-trained pundits swarm over cable. And they know what to yell: Liberal bias!

It an amazing thing to watch. From state troopers to lounge singers to homely office clerks to love story to swift boats, this country has been taken on a multi million dollar right wing funded fraud for over a decade and I still haven’t seen even one “journalist” apologize, retract or even acknowledge it.

Dan Rather will probably resign over this unless something new comes up very soon to back him up. But, if a reporter being duped by somebody with a political agenda is now grounds for resignation, let’s just say that there are going to be a whole lot of job openings in the “liberal” media coming very, very soon. Unless, of course, the standard only applies if it’s a hoax perpetrated against a Republican. In that case then we are talking about a completely different animal, aren’t we? And that animal doesn’t feature the word “liberal” in it’s description.

But, the words “chickenshit whores” do come to mind.

Time To Put On Your Game Face

I enjoy backseat campaign managing as much as the next person. And I admit that the press and our inability to manage it profoundly depresses me. But, I NEVER say we are going to lose. I love to analyze the race and offer my ideas, but it is never done in the spirit that the Kerry campaign are a bunch of losers. I cannot conceive of a more demoralizing and hopeless thing to read than something like this:

Some prominent Democrats are already grumbling privately that none of the people in Kerry’s communications operation should ever work on campaigns again, should Kerry lose. Given all the money Kerry, the DNC, and the 527s have raised and spent this time around, the typical Democratic lament of having been vastly outspent will ring hollow. If Kerry loses, it will not be because he was outspent; he will be because he was outfoxed.

There was a moment in the 1992 campaign, former Clinton-Gore ’92 communications director George Stephanopoulos told Frontline in 2001, where the staffers could suddenly feel the weight of what it was they were trying to do. Stephanopoulous talked about it in the context of the history of the War Room, and it’s quite illuminating:

Frontline: After the primaries in California, you then set up the war room. What are you trying to do?

Stephanopoulous: Not to be the Dukakis campaign, which a lot of us had worked in. And a lot of us felt we had been beat because the Republicans had laid out a pretty targeted, fierce assault on Dukakis that we didn’t answer. We were determined that if we were going to lose, we were going to lose fighting. We were going down fighting. In June, we were in third place, broke and we hadn’t gotten paid in two months. And Ross Perot was moving. And like I said, we were not going to go down without a fight.

And the war room was important, not just for the actual work it would do in answering the Republican charges and counterattacking, but the very idea of it was important — just having a war room so that Democrats, especially, but also others who were just going to start to pay attention to the campaign, would see that we weren’t like Democrats in the past. They’d see that we were different — not only because we were different on our ideas — but because we fight back when we’re hit.

Frontline: Later in the fall, polls were looking pretty good for you with Bush. Still, according to everything everyone had written, there’s a sense of fear that never goes away.

Stephanopoulous: It’s a different kind of fear. I remember the first time I ever really let myself believe we could win and we’re going to win. It was late September in the Washington Hilton on a Sunday morning, and Clinton was about to go give a speech in North Carolina on NAFTA. And he called me in and had his standard morning outburst on the speech and was yelling about it. And, but his heart wasn’t really in it, and I could tell. . . . And he suddenly stops yelling, looks me right in the eye and says, “You think we’re going to win, don’t you?” I said, “Yes.” And he goes, “I do, too.” And for me, that was just incredible. He was saying out loud what we all hoped for, but could never say. It would be like talking about a no-hitter in the eighth inning.

And from that moment on, inside we didn’t feel like underdogs anymore. We felt like we had this responsibility to win. And as a staffer, it was starting to get a little bit out of control, because I had never been through anything like that and nobody else had either. When you’re in a presidential campaign at its peak in the fall, all the sudden it’s not just 20 people in Little Rock sitting in a room. You’re representing a lot of people who have invested in you, and not just the money. People have just invested their hopes. The whole country is paying attention. There are millions. And we start to think, my God, if we blow it now, it’s all our fault. And we will have blown this opportunity that a lot of people are counting on us to carry out.

So the fear of making a mistake and letting these people down and thinking, basically, that you’re going to have to leave the country becomes tremendous. You just don’t want to blow it.

You have to wonder if the Kerry team is feeling that same fear right now, though, as they approach late September trailing rather than confident of victory. Because if they blow this one…

In late September of ’92 people were beginning to beg Perot to get back in the race and nobody knew what was going to happen. There was no empirical reason to believe that Clinton had it in the bag although I’m not surprised that he felt confident. That’s how competitors make themselves get up in the morning. That race was like a fucking bungee jump. And believe me, if you’d asked the same crew of sad sack Democratic insiders what they thought at the time they would have said that the sky was falling and that we were doomed, doomed, doomed and should have nominated Tsongas because he didn’t have a draft problem.

I’m as fond of Clinton hagiography as anyone on the planet, but a whole lot of this fuzzy nostalgia about ’92 is just crap. Bush senior was in free fall in the polls because he was widely considered to be out of touch on the economy, which was perceived to be very bad. Ross Perot had sucked all the oxygen out of the campaign for months and took the press’s eye off of the Bush assault on Clinton. Then he dramatically withdrew from the race during the Democratic convention saying that the Democratic party was “revitalized.” That was quite a gift and it gave Clinton a chance to re-start what had been a very anemic campaign.

He fought back, yes, by using the innovation of answering charges within the same news cycle. But, I watched that campaign more closely than any in my life and I can tell you that each one of those hits took another piece off of his hide. He didn’t lie down, and that was admirable, but that’s not why he won. He won because both he and Perot were hitting Senior hard on the economy while Senior and his crew were having to discredit both Perot and Clinton with character smears. Perot imploded, but by the time he did he had helped drive Senior’s negatives even farther into the dirt than Clinton’s and maintained a “movement” that siphoned off 20% of the vote when he got back in. It was one of the weirdest campaigns in American history and virtually no lessons can be drawn from it.

Kerry has every reason to be hopeful. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that Bush’s ephemeral lead is shrinking as we speak. It’s a nailbiter, but it is far from over.

I just wish that Dems could put on their game faces and try to sell the guy a little bit instead of constantly writing his epitaph. He’s really a good man, you know. He’s spent his life in public service, trying to do the right thing, working hard and carrying our agenda. He’s our most liberal nominee in decades. He’s smart and energetic and he’s never been tainted by corruption or scandal. Is it so hard for Democrats to get behind a man like this or are we just as shallow as everybody else? Would we too be happier with a brand name in a suit?

Poll Jumpy

DonkeyRising has a few more thoughts on the state of the race:

Well, those cards and letters keep coming in, so I thought I’d respond to a few of the most common questions that have been posed to me.

1. How can you deny that Bush is ahead?

I don’t. My view is that he is currently ahead, but only modestly, contrary to the tone of media coverage and the findings of some polls. I have tried to explain the reasoning behind this assessment, especially as it pertains to possible problems with contemporary polls.

It’s worth noting that the latest poll data on RVs–ending the night of the 12th–have Kerry up by 2 (IBD/CSM/TIPP) or Bush up by 4 (ICR). That averages out to a 1 point Bush lead, even without party-weighting the data. And Rasmussen LV data for the period ending the 12th also has Bush with a one point lead.

2. How is it possible for samples of RVs to suddenly have too many Republican identifiers? Aren’t voters just shifting their party identification?

It is certainly possible that we gone from, say, a 4-5 point Democrtic lead in party ID to a 4-5 point Republican lead in the space of the last month. But color me skeptical about this 8-10 point swing in a few short weeks.

A better explanation for this sudden shift in poll samples, in my view, is that when the political situation jazzes up supporters of one party, they are more likely to want to participate in a public opinion telephone poll and express their views. An increased rate of interview acceptance by that party’s supporters would then skew the sample toward that party without the underlying distribution having changed very much, if at all.

In this case, the Republican convention, coming on the heels of the Swift Boat controversy, may have helped raise political enthusiasm among Republican partisans, leading to more interview acceptances and a disproportionate number of Republicans in recent samples.

Do I know this for sure? No, I don’t, because we lack direct evidence that this is happening, just as we lack direct evidence that individual voters are suddenly and massively shifting their party allegiance. But I do know which of these explanations I find more plausible and consistent with other evidence about the general stability of party ID.

More here

My uninformed gut tells me that this race is, and will likely remain, close. I always thought it would be, as inexplicable as that is. I have been following this interesting theory by professor James Galbraith that Bush is on a slow trajectory to defeat for some time. Basically, he says that Bush has been artificially boosted above his natural level by three events, 9/11, Iraq and the capture of Saddam. He is fairly sure that it will take an October Surprise for Bush to win:

With about seven weeks to go, this equation suggests that if no new major episode occurs, Bush should lose about 2.1 percentage points between now and Election Day. In that case, he will face John Kerry with approval ratings very close to the lows of his presidency. And very close to the floor, below which he probably can’t sink.

The moral remains the same. As I’ve said in earlier columns, an “October surprise” could tip the balance. The country should be braced for news on the terror front from Pakistan or elsewhere. Or perhaps we’ll see the gift of a “You can go home soon” speech by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. One hears, at this stage of the campaign, all kinds of rumors. They can’t be verified, but they gain weight from the fact that the Bush team tried to manipulate the terror war — ordering up well-timed arrests in Pakistan — to squelch Kerry’s convention bounce last July. Who knows what else they have planned?

On the other hand, it’s clear that Bush hasn’t put the contest away. Kerry can win this thing for sure.

True Lies

The truth of the Killian memos has been established, at least according to Andrew Sullivan in TNR. But, while simultaneously taking credit both for being a superior blogger and a superior journalist he explains that he is actually superior to everyone by telling them that they should all just stop being so superior. Meanwhile, he reveals that he is living on another planet.

There’s been a lot of hubris in the blogosphere about this, and, indeed, some blogs, most especially Power Line, should get the blog equivalent of a Pulitzer for their dogged pursuit of the truth. But the reality is far simpler and less flattering to bloggers. Journalism is not a profession as such. It’s a craft. You get better at it by doing it; and there are very few ground rules. By and large, anyone with a mind, a modem, a telephone, and a conscience can be a journalist. The only criterion that matters is that you get stuff right; and if you get stuff wrong (and you will), you correct yourself as soon as possible. The blogosphere is threatening to some professional journalists because it exposes these simple truths. It demystifies the craft. It makes it seem easy–because, in essence, it often is.

Blogging’s comparative advantage has nothing to do with the alleged superior skills of bloggers or their higher intelligence, quicker wit, or more fabulous physiques. The blogosphere is a media improvement because the sheer number of blogs, and the speed of response, make errors hard to sustain for very long. The collective mind is also a corrective mind. Transparency is all. And the essence of journalistic trust is not simply the ability to get things right and to present views or ideas or facts clearly and entertainingly. It is also the capacity to admit error, suck it up, and correct what you’ve gotten wrong. Take it from me. I’ve both corrected and been corrected. When you screw up, it hurts. But in the long run, it’s a good hurt, because it takes you down a peg or two and reminds you what you’re supposed to be doing in the first place. Any journalist who starts mistaking himself for an oracle needs to be reminded who he is from time to time.

This must be the bizarro world blogosphere where truth is decisively discovered by an objective judge (perhaps Sullivan himself) who hands down a final order when the facts have been established. In my blogosphere, nobody agrees on what color the sky is. And for some reason, the vaunted self correcting mechanism only seems to run one way. Why is that? For instance, the right spent two months swearing the John Kerry faked his medals in Vietnam and I haven’t read any “corrections” to that “simple truth.”

Here on planet earth even if writers correct their errors, readers pick and choose which versions to believe and continue to battle the arcane details long after everyone else has lost interest, clinging to their own version of reality as if it is a life raft. The “transparency” of the blogosphere is as clear as orange juice with pulp. Nobody gets stuff “right.” They just get stuff. Errors are sustained forever. The “collective mind” is schizophrenic. The blogosphere demystifies the craft of journalism all right and turns it into an endless self-referential loop of The Osbornes.

What an nice bizarro blogosphere it is indeed when you just dismiss fully half of it as “moonbats” in order to believe that you have achieved a pure and real set of facts. I’d like to go there. It sounds soothing. What’s the URL?

In Sullivan’s blogosphere, credibility is granted once everyone (who’s anyone) agrees. Therefore, the famous blogger hero Buckhead, who within seconds of the CBS broadcast, had “proven” the documents were forgeries, should be deemed credible for his other scoops as well, yes? Like this one:

The question on the table is going to be whether John Kerry was a witting or unwitting communist agent.

1. He traveled to Paris for illegal meetings with the communist enemy.

2. He comes back and in his Senate testimony gives them a major, major, major propaganda victory with his lies about war crimes.

3. He presents to the Senate and the country, and argues for, the communist proposal for giving them complete victory.

4. He attends, in leadership positions, meetings of the VVAW at which the assasination of American political leaders is openly discussed, and does not immediately disasssociate himself or do anything to report on this criminal conspiracy.

5. Post war he is lionized by the Vietnamese communists for his indispensable contributions to their victory.

135 posted on 09/02/2004 5:41:03 AM PDT by Buckhead

Just another credible blogger/journalist plying his craft. I’m sure Sullivan will get right on the case and fact check his ass.

Oh and by the way, I’m no expert mind you, but I’ve spend a bit of time on blogs and I’ve never come across Sullivan’s little insider “blogspeak” term for the mainstream media — MSM. Is this only for super bloggers who get more than 20K hits a day or something? I feel so small and insignificant.

Bringing The Two Together

The Decembrist makes an extremely valuable insight into the way the intersection between issues and character help people to make decisions. His advice to the Kerry campaign is, I think, very valuable:

I don’t think the problem with Kerry is that he talks about issues when he should be talking about character. That was Al Gore’s problem. I think the problem is that the Kerry brain has split into an issues half, and a character half, and the two sides aren’t communicating. The character half controlled the convention, and focused on Vietnam. Fine, but what did that say about how he would deal with Iraq? And the issues half has plans — entirely good ones, even for Iraq. But those proposals don’t reinforce any sense of the kind of person Kerry is, and how he would cope in a crisis.

I don’t know enough about the internal politics of the Kerry world (in which I know almost no one) to speculate whether one side is represented by Bob Shrum or Michael Whouley or John Sasso or whoever. But whatever the factions are, they have to get it together. The issues and scheduling side of the campaign has to stop picking an issue of the day, based on the polls. It has to start trying to choose some issues that really emphasize whatever it is that they want to say about Kerry as a person that contrasts him to Bush (honest, brave, forward-seeing, smart, common-sense, independent, cares-about-ordinary-people — pick one and reinforce it) and then use those issues to tell that story over a period of a week or more. And where they want to attack Bush on either character or issues, pick a point that best emphasizes a single point that they want to emphasize to draw the contrast with Kerry. That means, among other things, saying no to all the issue-advocacy groups that are besieging the campaign, brandishing polls and begging Kerry to devote a day to their cause.

The issue advocates need to be bum rushed out the door. Kerry is hanging in there in the polls (contrary to the news which has suddenly decided that outlying polls are the best guage of the state of play) but he needs some focus as we go into the stretch to pull this out. Relying on the debates isn’t enough because you simply cannot depend upon the press corpse to properly report the event. What they can do is try to find that sweet spot and hammer it home so that when the debates arrive your storyline has been set.

“Brave” is the quality I’d choose and I’d hammer Bush for not being brave enough to fight off the special interests, the neocons, the tax cut zealots and the extremists in his own party. Kerry volunteered to fight a war, take on criminals as a prosecutor and big corporate interests as a Senator and says “bring It on” to smear artists and dirty tricksters who’ve tried and failed to take him down. (You don’t even have to mention the guard stuff. The implication is clear.) You could tie this in to terrorism, health care, Iraq, the economy and judicial nominations. Any of those issues can be framed as Bush being unable to stand up and be his own man. You could even use the fact that he hasn’t vetoed one bill as evidence of his cowardice in facing the congress.

But, regardless of what character trait they choose to highlight, the key is to stick with it and hammer it home relentlessly. Bush is vulnerable on almost everything but I think it it could be quite helpful for Kerry to focus on one character contrast that can illustrate the whole enchilada.

What The White Men Want

Apparently most white guys are so egotistical that they think they could be president and so they want a president who is just as stupid as they are. People were offended by the title of Michael Moore’s book, but the truth hurts.

George W. Bush has it down: the “bring ’em on” macho sensibility, the public swagger, even the quick-draw High Noon cowboy stride. Call it the testosterone factor. It’s one reason Bush has maintained a strong appeal to white men throughout his presidency, especially in the South and Southwest.

[…]

“Part of it is a Republican thing,” says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker, “but a good part of it is a Bush thing. For guys who drank and loafed their way through college, he’s a familiar figure.” And, it turns out, a popular one. In his early years, Bush was a likable party animal, seemingly committed to a lifestyle of making wisecracks, chasing women, and guzzling brew. He says he reformed two decades ago, giving up alcohol and becoming a born-again Christian. As president, he has come across in an equally comfortable way to white men–as a strong commander in chief and a conservative who seeks to return honor and responsibility to public life.

What works for most white men (as opposed, for example, to African-American men, who evaluate the president in starkly different terms) is Bush’s reputation as an “average guy,” says a senior White House official–the opposite of what California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously calls “girlie men.” Baker says Bush “has a down-to-earth quality that men find appealing. You know he won’t slip off to a quiet place and strum a six-string guitar.” And his support among white males has helped Bush open up a 52-to-43 percent lead over Kerry among likely voters, according to that Washington Post /ABC News poll.[bullshit ed.]

Vacillating. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of white male voters since Jimmy Carter in 1976. That’s partly because the party’s candidates have come across as vacillating on military issues and lenient on social concerns like crime and federal “giveaways” to the poor. Al Gore got only 36 percent of the white male vote in 2000; Bush pulled 60 percent. Bush now has about 57 percent support among white men to Kerry’s 39, according to GOP pollster Ed Goeas, and Bush appears to be gaining momentum on issues most important to those voters, such as making America safe and waging the war in Iraq Bush leads Kerry by 8 points among single white men and by 20 points among married white men, according to recent polling.

Adding to Kerry’s problems, if the Democratic challenger tries to court the white male vote too aggressively, he risks alienating white single women and minorities who are turned off by Bush’s macho tendencies. Joe Lockhart, former White House spokesman for Bill Clinton and now a Kerry adviser, says, “If you want the easiest way to define the Bush doctrine, it’s what I call the testosterone presidency. They’ve worked very hard making him look like Gary Cooper in High Noon. Why? Men have testosterone. Does that make good policy? No, of course not.”

But Bush advisers say the president’s big advantage in attracting the “white-guy vote” is that he can just be himself. Bush, like those in this core constituency, likes to watch sports on television, enjoys fishing, doesn’t take himself too seriously, and doesn’t express himself well. White males like to see themselves in what White House officials call Bush’s “moral clarity,” his attitude toward the war on terrorism, and his espousal of conservative values, such as opposition to gay marriage.

“Bush has his flaws,” says Ted Stout, 39, who runs a bus company in Scranton, Pa., where Bush and Kerry made stops after their respective conventions. “But there’s no question that when he says he’s going to do something, he does it. That’s what I like about him.” Stout, waiting to bowl on league night at Scranton’s Southside Bowl, adds: “He might seem a little dull-witted, but he’s an average person. He makes the right decisions when he needs to.”

Sporty. “We can’t be girlie men” about the war on terror, says Michael Bidwell, a 38-year-old Republican dining at Scranton’s Stadium Club with three male coworkers. “We need to go after terrorism. Terrorism isn’t going to go away, and we can’t put a blanket over it.” Bidwell says he has a son and a daughter serving in the Middle East and adds: “I don’t want to see them over there on a mission that’s not finished.” Steve Pasternak, a retired utility worker standing among “Sportsmen for Bush” signs at a pro-Bush rally in Johnstown, Pa., says he will vote for the president “because he thinks like sportsmen do. He’s a hunter going after the people who need to be hunted.”

Kerry has made a bid for white males by calling attention to his record as a Vietnam War combat hero. The Democratic nominee has also been emphasizing Bush’s poor record on job creation and improving the economy.

But so far, none of this has made much difference. “I’d rather vote for action than inaction,” says David Thorn, a 30-year-old communications representative from Overland Park, Kan., who sat in the dark-paneled comfort of O’Dowd’s Little Dublin, a bar in Kansas City’s upscale Plaza district. “And I’d rather stand for something than nothing. John Kerry doesn’t seem to stand for anything.” That’s not an enviable position to be in with the election less than two months away.

God, that’s depressing.

However, there is some good news. The GOP pollster who says that Bush has 57 percent of white males to Kerry’s 39% is full of shit. (Why this guy is the only one quoted for this article is anybody’s guess, but fair and balanced it ain’t.) This article by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira explains why. Iraq.