George W. Bush and his political Svengali, Karl Rove, are sharing a genius moment. Everyone in politics gets one, and this is theirs. It began right after Trent Lott stepped down as majority leader, with a Dec. 22 piece by Adam Nagourney in the New York Times headlined, “Shift of Power to White House Reshapes Political Landscape.” Nagourney quoted former Democratic Party Chairman Robert Strauss saying that Bush “and several talented people around him have made the White House a power center in ways that I haven’t seen in a long, long time—all the way back to Lyndon Johnson.”
[…]
Years from now, when we look back and puzzle over Dubya’s genius moment, a key historical document will be “The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush: 10 Commonsense Lessons From the Commander in Chief,” by business consultants Carolyn B. Thompson and James W. Ware. The just-published book’s strategy is to redefine Bush’s vices as virtues that the corporate world ought to emulate. “Much has been said about Bush’s deficiencies in foreign policy, lack of attention to detail, and big-picture orientation,” Thompson and Ware write. But “part of the leadership genius of George W. Bush is just that, knowing that no one can know everything.” Bush’s ignorance renders him unself-conscious about hiring “people who are smarter than he is.” From this, Thompson and Ware derive the lesson, “Check your ego at the door, and then get on with the recruiting!” Once Bush hired these smart people, did he boss them around? Did he show off by asking them complicated questions? Hell, no! That’s because Bush “also has the common sense and discipline to leave them alone to do their jobs.”
On some occasions, of course, Bush must make an actual decision himself. On such occasions, does he study up so he can understand the arguments on all sides? Hell, no! Naturally, this invites some criticism:
Many of Bush’s critics claim that he is not well-read. They say he does not spend enough time reading policy statements and studying long briefs. … [But] Bush’s honesty about intelligence and learning is downright refreshing. Rather than faking understanding, he will unashamedly admit that he isn’t following. At one large conference, Bush turned to New Mexico Governor George Johnson and said, “What are they talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Johnson replied.
“You don’t know a thing, do you?” Bush shot back.
“Not one thing,” said Johnson.
“Neither do I,” said Bush, and the two high-fived each other.”
Here, Thompson and Ware employ the very technique they praise by not bothering to check the name of New Mexico’s former governor, which is Gary, not George. One obstacle they may face in marketing their book is that remaining ignorant about what’s done in your name (or at least pretending to) is a strategy already in place in most of the nation’s boardrooms, as the recent corporate accounting scandals amply demonstrated. What’s new in “The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush” is the insight that feigned shallowness is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Sleeping with pigs is a no-no, but a BLT once in a while never hurt anybody, right?
It looks like Shiny-and-New Shapiro may have been playing hooky from Hebrew school some afternoons. Find out why at physics professor Jacques Distler’s
Musings, a blog that features everything from a Gilbert and Sullivan version of Xena: Warrior Princess to posts that say things like this: “Remember that a single harmonic oscillator has an infinite-dimensional Hilbert Space, and a single free scalar field corresponds to an infinite number of harmonic oscillators, and you see just how weird that statement is.”
Check your local listings and set your TiVos for “Media Matters” on PBS to see the great Oliver Willis, Anil Dash, Megan McArdle and Instapundit featured in “A Trip to the Blogosphere.” (Should air sometime around January 16th.)
“Now if this had happened someplace else, we couldn’t have helped…Just do as I say … All that’s left is our friendship.”
Brad DeLong says there’s no good reason for Glenn Hubbard to drink this kool-aid.
Remember the scene in the Godfather part II where they set up the Nevada Senator with the dead hooker? It’s getting to the point where I’m quite seriously beginning to believe that this is what’s going on in the Bush administration.
Ron Brownstein has a very interesting piece in today’s LA Times about the shape of the electorate for 2004.
First, I cannot emphasize enough that this triumphalism about George W. Patton’s win in ’02 is just another example of Rove’s “inevitablity” strategy and in my view it is much less effective than he has persuaded his minions and the mediawhores to believe.
The fact is that the electorate remains polarized between the two parties. 9/11 changed that temporarily, but it has crept back incrementally and resulted in a 2002 midterm squeaker for the party that would have been expected to win after the 2000 election result. This is because historically the party out of the white house gains seats in the midterm due to some weak candidates being turned out after having come in on the winners coattails. See: Jean Carnahan. Bush’s small gains in ’02 had nothing to do with his huge swinging manhood or the country’s overwhelming support of his policies, (even Ike lost seats in his first midterm and he was mighty popular) but because like most elections, the party that won the white house in the previous election lost seats in the next one.
Granted, that is only relevant to the extent that Bush is being given credit for something that is easily explained by forces that had nothing to do with him and it creates the impression that he is stronger than he really is. Brownstein’s piece shows the actual depth of the electoral divide and discusses the small range of voters who are up for grabs to claim a victory, assuming that the Republican base stays true to Bush.
This is where the votes are:
Data from Los Angeles Times Polls over the last several years offer a revealing look at where Bush has made the most progress — and where Democrats might still find opportunities. The best insight comes from an analysis in which pollsters group voters by their partisan leanings and by ideology. That divides the electorate into six groups: liberal Democrats, moderate to conservative Democrats, liberal to moderate independents, conservative independents, liberal to moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans.
The liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans are the base of each party: Just 4% of each group voted for the other side’s presidential nominee in 2000, according to The Times’ exit poll. Not many more will be up for grabs in 2004.
The real battle is in the middle. Relative to Bob Dole, the GOP’s 1996 nominee, Bush in the 2000 election advanced across the entire center of the electorate. Bush improved on Dole’s vote by 7 percentage points with moderate Democrats and by double digits with the three other swing groups: moderate independents, conservative independents and moderate Republicans. Yet that still wasn’t enough to win the popular vote
Bush has gained more ground since: In the latest Times Poll, 52% of adults say they’re inclined to support him for reelection. But his advances have been uneven.
Compared with his vote tally in 2000, Bush didn’t do any better on that reelection question among conservative Republicans — largely because he already attracted 95% of them last time. With almost all the other groups, Bush managed small gains, from 2 to 5 percentage points — within the poll’s margin of error. Though lessened, the basic polarization from 2002 is still visible: Bush draws little support from Democrats but overwhelming backing from all voters to the right of center.
Intriguingly, just one group is moving in the opposite direction: moderate to liberal independents. Just 28% of them said in the poll that they’re inclined to support Bush in 2004, down from his 38% vote in 2000. Just over half of the center-left independents say they’re now inclined not to vote for Bush.
Those attitudes are opening a huge chasm with the conservative independents, four-fifths of whom say they’ll now support Bush. What explains this divergence? The center-left independents are much more likely than the conservatives to favor legalized abortion. And the centrists are less hawkish: In the Times Poll, the centrists were much less likely than the conservative independents to favor invading Iraq without allied support or if U.N. inspectors find no evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been developing weapons of mass destruction.
But the economy is the biggest divide between the two groups. Three-fourths of the conservative independents say they approve of Bush’s economic performance; just one-third of the center-left independents agree. And while half of the conservative independents say further tax cuts are the best way to revive growth, two-thirds of the centrist independents prefer spending on infrastructure and schools — a view that brings them much closer to Democrats.
The public judgment that Bush has effectively handled the war against terrorism is an enduring strength. But it hasn’t answered all questions about him for the electorate. Bush’s hold on right-leaning voters is overwhelming. But these numbers suggest that beyond the conservative core, there’s still a large audience for competing ideas on the economy, health care and even a possible war in Iraq — if Democrats can find something to say, and someone to say it.
The important thing to remember about this is that with the electorate so polarized and static both parties need these center-left moderates. Rove is going to try to use the war with Iraq to give Bush a glossy winner’s image and project the usual inevitability of his win, but he is also going to have to fend off the wing-nuts who are starting to get restive and want some action. And, according to yesterday’s NY Times, “In a New G.O.P. Era, DeLay Drives Agenda for Congress” quite a few of these wing-nuts are leaders of his own party. It’s going to be quite a challenge to keep them under wraps considering that they no longer feel the sting of Gingrich’s downfall and the failed impeachment. Rove’s troops believe that George W. Bush is unbeatable, largely because Rove has told them so. It will be interesting to see how they react when they are told to sit down and be quiet so Junior can woo the center-left moderates!
Meanwhile, a bad economy, a frighteningly militant foreign policy, an ascendant far right faction means the Democrats are much better positioned to capture those center-left moderates who should find the Democratic party to be a much more comfortable fit than the party of Trent Lott, Richard Perle and Tom DeLay.
Hello to my smart commenting buddy Emma at her new blog Late Night Thoughts (Isn’t that one of those blog titles you are just shocked to find that nobody’s taken already?)
Also, give The Better Rhetor a look. He’s got a dump Ashcroft movement going that should be supported by all lovers of cats, nudity and freedom.
You keep all your money in big brown bag…inside a zoo, what a thing to do
Hesiod alerts us to the fact that they are considering destroying the ballots from the 2000 election in Florida.
The designer of the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, says she’ll take her cue on what to do with the old ballots from the state.
Asked what she’d rather see done with the punch cards, she replies: “A big bonfire.”
There’s a big surprise.
This brings up an issue I’ve been thinking about. With all the hoopla about putting together a Democratic media operation and getting some rich donor types to fund a network etc., I have a couple of ideas that I think someone with some money could fund rather inexpensively but that could be very useful to Democrats.
Preserving these ballots seems like something that some rich Democrat who has a feeling for history, or libraries or their alma mater could offer to do if the State of Florida, as expected, decides to destroy the evidence…er…ballots “due to the cost” of storing them. Perhaps a rich Florida Democrat would like to offer to fund a study at The University of Florida or something. It’s a small thing, but historians and scholors really do have a right to study everything associated with that anomolous election and Jebbie and his pals should not be allowed to throw the disputed ballots on “a big bonfire” to save the Bush dynasty from further embarrasment (as if Dubya’s foreign travels aren’t enough.)
The other thing I think that someone should fund is the archiving of Republican propaganda. There should be a repository and database of tapes and transcripts for Rush and Sean et al, along with FoxNews, various pundits and print material. Not only would this be a valuable historical project, it would be very useful for countering the Mighty Wurlitzer.
It’s always frustrated me that you can’t get Rush transcripts because the single most effective thing you can use against the GOP propaganda machine is to expose the blustering fatuousness of its premiere disseminator of The Big Lie. Normal people find him absurd at best and repellant at worst. Only Dittoheads, mediawhores and RNC operatives think that his every day rhetoric is mainstream. He cleans it up for TV or interviews, but his show is is truly a sickening display of raging mendacity.
Of course, it would take a very special liberal to be willing to immerse himself in the music of the Wurlitzer all day long. I’d suggest a savant of some sort who is beyond being affected by relentless brainwashing. Otherwise, your going to have another Republican Railian on your hands or a Democrat so frustrated and angry that he could morph into one of those violent MWO types that Mickey is so afraid of.
Still, there should be some moneybags who could do this much at least. It’s embarrassing that we have to take shit from people like Howie Kurtz who claim that Rush is just offering mainstream conservative criticism when we know damned well that his simple mission is raising Republicanism to a religion and fomenting hatred toward liberals. I’d like to be able to shove old Rush’s words up Howie’s…uhm…inbox.
Atrios has a lively discussion going about today’s Tom Friedman column that more or less defends the notion that the Iraq operation is at least partially about oil. I also believe it is partially about oil, but only to the extent that it is about neoconservative geopolitics and their stale but untrammeled notion of what constitutes American vulnerability.
It is true that Iraq could get nukes and Saddam could extort the entire western world by withholding oil and driving up the price. So could other countries, for that matter. No matter who managed to do this, it would not be a pretty picture. But, evenKenneth Pollack, who is held up as the authority on the necessity of invading Iraq, argues that while Saddam will have to be deposed, it is not so immediate a threat that we could not wait long enough to mitigate some of the potentially dangerous repercussions and plan for our long term responsibilities in the region before taking action.
Confronting Saddam could have waited because what is not waiting is the simmering bloodlust that is sweeping the Middle East, particularly in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Invading Iraq on a thin pretext (which is what is going to happen because this war is already timed for American convenience and nothing else) is possibly going to set off chain of events that could have been avoided if we handled the situation with a little more sophistication and finesse instead of fulfilling some long held neocon wet dream. And that is the real problem.
The Wolfowitz/Perle school never took terrorism seriously when it was becoming a threat on the world stage and they don’t take it seriously now. The influential CSP issued only 2 reports since the 1998 embassy bombing about the threat of terrorism until 9/11. The PNAC has been wringing their hands about Iraq and pushing for missile defense for years, but terrorism was hardly even on the radar screen. They are about China, Iraq, North Korea, Israel, US “benevolent” hegemony and missile defense. Period. Anything else will be subsumed under what they believe is the real agenda.
As with the ever changing justifications for the tax cuts for their rich friends, Bush and his foreign policy mavens are so blinkered and myopic and that they pursue their preordained agenda no matter what the current situation. They seem completely incapable of exercising any flexibility in light of changing circumstances. They just find a way to use the changing circumstances to justify what they plan to do anyway.
This is very dangerous. Bush, with his stupid bellicose posturing has created a needless crisis in Asia by challenging a cornered and neurotically proud despot in North Korea into a nuclear standoff. He has escalated the problem with Iraq to one of immediate danger, when it was a medium term threat at worst, and by conflating it with Al Qaeda and Muslim fundamentalism for no good reason other than political expediency, he has made it a cause for a whole lot of disaffected people in the Mideast and Indian subcontinent to rally to.
All of this is because the primary neocon focus of the last 10 years has been the threat of China and rogue states and thus their obsession with missile defense. This is what they have been lobbying for, this is what they believe is the greatest threat to American hegemony and this is what they want to use their newfound political power to deal with. And, while there is no doubt that individual bad actors with nukes are a serious challenge, there was absolutely no need to put the issue of rogue states immediately on the table next to Islamic terrorism, confusing the world about our intentions and creating a sense of chaos. Events are predictably hurtling out of control because the Bush administration has spoken with a rhetorical blunderbuss and opportunistically used 9/11 as a way to achieve their long held goals instead of refashioning the agenda to meet the changing threat.
And now, even after seeing with their own eyes the dangers of using a crisis to further unrelated goals, they still seem to think that we can beat North Korea or some former Soviet State or a middle eastern power like Pakistan to the punch with this missile shield that is many, many years away from reliability, if ever. The technology for ICBMs, on the other hand, has been around for decades. N. Korea is probably quite close and has shown a willingness to sell such technology. The former Soviet states probably have access to the technology already. Yet, the administration is still barrelling ahead in a near panicked state, ratcheting up the crisis so they can build their fantastical missile shield with the only recourse in the meantime being military intervention and a series of dangerous standoffs.
Meanwhile, just a little over a year ago we got attacked by terrorists who used low-tech box cutters to destroy Americas most vivid symbols of economic and military power. We got attacked on our own shores and thousands died and the success of that action absolutely guarantees that it won’t be the last. For this administration to basically sideline that issue into bullshit “homeland security” with a color coded danger chart and bogus manhunts to pretend they are doing something— in fact, to exacerbate the danger by provoking all manner of violent and unpredicatable global reactions with their swaggering bullyboy rhetoric — mainly because they refuse to relinquish their cherished vision of themselves as astride a great global military Colossus, is about as irresponsible a position as I can imagine.
The Bush administration shows every day that they are willing to compromise American security rather than compromise goals that anyone else would have reevaluated in light of the new priorities wrought by the destruction and death of September 11th. But, apparently even the demolition of the World Trade Center was not enough to blow them off the course they set those many years ago.
One can only hope that their misguided relentlessness doesn’t blow back on us in ways that are too terrible to contemplate.
The New York Post, of all venues, reported recently that the Tennessee senator had of late become something of a sex object for “Capitol Hill hotties,” one of whom complained about “all these other women” who wouldn’t leave the senator alone. “I can’t get up to get a cocktail at a party without coming back and finding some girl sitting at my chair,” the woman was quoted as saying.
Margaret Carlson, the writer for Time and host for CNN, is described this way: “She calls his apartment all the time. It’s the joke all over Washington that Margaret has this huge crush on him. And Fred is clearly not interested.” (To which the gallant Thompson responded: “I generally don’t comment on these matters, but as it relates to the statements made about my friend Margaret Carlson, I should be so lucky.”)
For some reason, every generation loses the ability to appreciate the emotional impact of events from the previous generation. They become merely words in history books, and the players seem somehow like misguided little children making silly mistakes that, really, are sort of obvious in hindsight, aren’t they?
Hey, we’re not even paying attention to the words of various revered Greatest Generation types who are still alive and fully appreciate the emotional impact of events of their generation. The videogame cowboys who think to prove their manhood by saying things like “glass ‘em” apparently believe these men don’t have a clue about war and geopolitics. After all, they only lived through a worldwide depression, a war of survival that took the lives of about 50 million people and then ran the world during the following 40 years of nuclear standoff known as the cold war. Surely, they could not possibly have anything useful to say about Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il.
As Kevin Drum says, “these two are not the first thuggish dictators we have had to face.” Try Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler on for size.
How ironic it is that the Republican baby boomers, most of whom “supported” the Viet Nam war but were awfully busy and didn’t have time to actually participate, would find in their middle years that the elders and the Generals whose favor they so unctuously sought in their youth are now openly contemptuous of their adolescent bloodlust. Because the fact is that many of the elder statesmen who lived through the bloody 20th century are not very impressed with the bellicose prattle emanating from the President and many of his advisors.
I don’t consider him to be a liberal pushover, but Andy Rooney was on Donohue last night and pulled absolutely no punches in his criticism of the Bush administrations foreign policy. (No transcript available.) Studs Terkel is downright