Time columnist Joe Klein has a simple suggestion for what John Kerry ought to be saying about Iraq: blast Bush for fighting an incompetent, no-win war, and challenge him to get serious about ending the Sunni insurgency or admit the whole thing’s been a failure. Klein even scripts a debate line for JK: “Fight the war, Mr. President, or bring the troops home.”
Though Klein framed this advice as a retroactive critique of what Kerry’s actually been saying on Iraq, TNR’s Noam Scheiber endorses the approach as an avenue the candidate can still pursue. And I would add to his comments that it’s (a) consistent with Kerry’s sharp critique of administration war leadership in Afghanistan, past and present, and (b) consistent both with Kerry’s earlier proposal for a larger troop deployment in Iraq, and his more recent argument that we need an end-game for the Iraq engagement. Sure, the Bushies would call it a “flip-flop,” but they’re going to do that with anything Kerry says on any subject.
I’m sure the CW will be that Kerry dare not try to out-tough Bush on Iraq for fear that it will “de-energize” all those anti-war Deaniacs he’s counting on in November. But as I recall, the Good Doctor himself often said that stabilizing post-war Iraq was a mission in which the United States could not afford to fail.

Today’s New York Times has a useful front-page piece on early voting and the uses and abuses thereof. But it’s written from a strange goo-goo perspective that emphasizes the potential for voter fraud inherent in unsupervised absentee balloting rather than the much bigger story that early voting is slowly changing the very definition of “election day.” The piece also doesn’t hint at the partisan implications of loose absentee balloting laws. I can think of at least one state where Democrats won big in the 1990s by investing heavily in absentee ballot distribution, and another where Republicans did so. But by now, it’s pretty safe to say that both parties understand the laws and are exploiting them to the fullest extent.
Early-voter targeting, like traditional election-day GOTV, focuses on heavily partisan segments of the electorate, so it’s unlikely that the overall dynamics of the race will have much impact on who “wins” or “loses” in this shadowy competition. But conversely, early-voter targeting could greatly affect the outcome in a very close race.

I highly recommend guest blogger John Belisarius’ analysis in Donkey Rising of the public opinion evidence about the Swift Boat Veterans’ smear and the lessons learned for the future. It should give pause to all those “eye-for-an-eye” Democrats who believe high-pitch shrieking is the only proper response to negative attacks on a candidate.

Every now and then, even the most inveterate political junkie just has to take a break, and that’s what I did this weekend. Instead of obsessively surfing the internet to make sure I didn’t miss a single assessment of the Mood of Ohio. I spent Saturday in a redneck bar watching college football. And the only partisan conflict I encountered was a brief but tense discussion with a bartender who threatened to switch all nine televisions to a NASCAR race (thank God I wasn’t trying to watch a French soccer game).
Properly refreshed, I returned to Washington this morning and made the mistake of reading the Wall Street Journal, which featured an op-ed by Zell Miller. It was like an electric cattle-prod plunged into my morning bathwater.
The guy gets more unbelievable every day. He delivers the most over-the-top convention speech in decades, for the opposition party. He becomes the Maximum Hero of the Republican Right. He’s spent the last week strutting around the country with George W. Bush. Yet he now feels compelled to publish a whiny, defensive op-ed in America’s most renowned right-wing editorial page complaining about “my critics in the national media” and responding to their criticims of his smear-job on John Kerry’s national security record.
I can’t link to this screed because I won’t pay WSJ for access to their online edition, and neither will you. But suffice it to say that Miller does as much violence to the Laws of Logic as he does to John Kerry’s record.
Citing his “critics'” accurate observance that Dick Cheney opposed many of the same weapons systems that Miller scored Kerry for opposing (or more accurately, for scaling back), he claims Kerry opposed them “at the height of the Cold War” while Cheney “waited until after we won the Cold War.” Wrong-o, Zell. Read that oppo research memo more carefully. They opposed them at exactly the same time, in 1990 and 1991 (there’s one other Kerry vote to scale back certain types of weapons in 1995, but if I’m not mistaken, the Cold War was over then, too). Moreover, Miller’s argument in New York was that Kerry was trying to zap the very weapons systems that proved useful in Iraq. So who cares whether Cheney tried to scrap them before or after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
But Miller’s most egregious rebuttal is this one:

My critics love to point out that I had nice things to say about John Kerry when I introduced him to a Georgia Democratic dinner in 2001. That’s true and I meant it. But again, timing is everything. I made that introduction in March 2001–six months before terrorists attacked this country on Sept. 11. As I have said time and time again, 9/11 changed everything.

If that’s the case, then what’s the relevance of John Kerry’s votes on weapons systems in the early to mid-90s? Has Miller cited a single example of any weapons system votes by Kerry after 9/11, which “changed everything”?
There are three or four other howlers in Zell’s brief op-ed, but you get the idea. The WSJ entitled the piece “Telling It Like It Is.” A better title would have been “The Man Who Can’t Smear Straight.”

As we all navigate through the fog of the polls that are rolling in almost hourly this week, one factor in the presidential race is especially confusing: what about Nader? Will he pick off anti-Bush votes in battleground states and throw the election to the incumbent? Will his support melt away in a close, high-stakes contest? What if anything can Kerry and his allies do to minimize his vote?
The threshold question here is how many Americans will have a chance to waste a vote on the wiggy former Green. And the answer is very unclear at present. According to a very comprehensive AP story published today, Nader’s currently on the ballot in eight of the 18 battleground states (AR, IA, ME, MI, NV, WA, WV, and CO), and is likely to get certified in three others (MN, NH, and WI). He’s definitely off the ballot in MO, and probably won’t make the grade in OR and PA. The situation in AZ, FL, OH–all states where Nader’s ballot status is in legal limbo–is hard to assess, and LA is just now looking at the petitions.
There’s rich irony in all the kvetching we’ve heard from Ralph about the flotillas of lawyers Democrats have unleashed on his ballot petitions and on the dubious credentials of the Reform Party (last seen as Pat Buchanan’s vehicle) that is sponsoring him in several states. After all, Nader is a lifelong ally of the Maximum Litigation wing of the trial bar; if given the option, he’d probably prefer to make his case against the Corporate Conspiracy To Sell Out America via a vast class-action suit than by running for president. And it’s hard to symphathize with his apparent belief that he’s a national icon with the inherent right to hop from party to party like a political cowbird, gaining ballot access on the prior efforts of others.
So Democrats have every right within the law to challenge Nader’s ballot access. And I can’t see how even Ralph can complain about the very public efforts of former supporters like Michael Moore, Jim Hightower, and half the editorial board of The Nation to deride his candidacy.
But Democrats should not get hysterical about Nader’s 2-4% standing in national polls. Even in 2000, when the dishonest “compassionate conservative” candidacy of George W. Bush and the eccentric “I’m not Clinton” candidacy of Al Gore convinced millions of voters that the stakes in the election were low, Nader’s support dropped 50% between the pre-election polls and the actual results. Sure, Nader’s Florida vote exceeded that of Bush’s dubious margin in the state, but so too did the vote of the Trotskyist and Natural Law candidates. In a tie election, everything matters, and all the dirty tricks and screwups in Florida election procedures undoubtedly had a greater impact than Ralph.
In the end, Democrats should recognize that there is an irreducible minimum of roughly one percent of American voters who, basically, are crazy people. They’ve always been there, and God bless ’em, they always will be there. They have every right to their opinions. Some of them will vote for overtly crazy-people candidates, and some will vote for Ralph, who’s staked out a position near the gates of delirium. Some won’t vote at all, and nobody knows what they’ll do if they show up at the polls and don’t see a valid crazy-people option.
The Kerry campaign should obviously make every effort to convince voters that this is a high-stakes election with stark differences between the two candidates, in which every vote counts in the actual, two-party choice. But beyond that, Democrats should leave the fringe votes that Nader and others may receive in the hands of the Lord, or whatever other voices fringe voters happen to hear.

One way of looking at the dynamics of the presidential race is this: Will BC04 succeed in making the election about the incumbent’s character? Or will KE04 succeed in making the election about the incumbent’s record?
The character/competence choice is hardly a new development in presidential politics, but I certainly can’t remember an election where an incumbent struggled so hard to avoid any discussion of the actual impact of his actual policies on the actual condition of the country. For that reason, it’s pretty important that the challenger continue to draw attention to Bush’s actual performance in office.
On the issue of the relative importance of character and competence–not in politics, but in George W. Bush’s real lifelong passion, baseball–the best lines I’ve ever read were written back in 1983 by the Kansas Sage Bill James. In a tirade aimed at then-Detroit manager Sparky Anderson for his frequent praise of Tiger first baseman Enos Cabell as a “we ballplayer” whose character justified his position in the lineup, James said:

I mean, I would never say that it was not important to have a team with a good attitude, but Christ, Sparky, there are millions of people in this country who have good attitudes, but there are only about 200 who can play a major-league brand of baseball, so which are you going to take? Sparky is so focused on all that attitude stuff that he looks at an Enos Cabell and he doesn’t even see that the man can’t play baseball. This “we” ballplayer, Sparky, can’t play first, can’t play third, can’t hit, can’t run and can’t throw. So who cares what his attitude is?

No, I am not endorsing Bill James’ views about Sparky Anderson or Enos Cabell, but the underlying point is not only accurate, but is applicable to government as well as baseball: performance matters. If we are going to choose a president strictly in terms of admiring someone who is resolute, self-confident in his judgments, and ill-disposed to pay attention to contrary developments or the opinions of others, then there are probably millions of Americans who match or exceed George W. Bush in possessing these qualities. Hell, I know ten or twenty people like that. But I don’t think they’re qualified to serve as President of the United States.
You can certainly argue that the president has some character flaws with serious implications for the country, but in the end, the most compelling critique of the incumbent comes down to his performance in office. And if that record of performance is terrible, then: The man can’t play baseball. So who cares what his attitude is?

The president doesn’t just flip-flop on issues other than tax cuts; sometimes he waffles and plays possum. Remember campaign finance reform, the prescription drug benefit, the highway bill, and for all while, even the gay marriage amendment? These were all issues where Bush tried to have it both ways. Well, there’s another great example today, where supporters of an extension of the assault weapons ban on Capitol Hill officially threw in the towel, while the White House pretended there was just nothing poor George W. Bush could do about those mean Republicans in Congress. Check out the story in today’s New Dem Daily.

Having opposed a 9/11 commission, and then accepted it; opposed cooperation with the commission and then agreed to it; opposed a National Director of Intelligence, and then pretended to propose it; and then opposed giving that director real power over intelligence agencies: the president has now suddenly flip-flopped on this last issue as well.
Republicans like to say you always know where George Bush stands. But on just about everything other than tax cuts, he rarely stands in the same place for very long if it’s not to his political advantage.

Yesterday’s CBO update on the federal budget–which projected $4.4 trillion in deficits over the next ten years, if Bush’s own proposals are implemented–is being spun by BC04 as just wonderful, wonderful news. These guys really are shameless.
Today’s New Dem Daily looks at the facts and the spin, and says everything worth saying on the subject, so I won’t comment here.

You might think that having savaged John Kerry for four days on national television, the Bush-Cheney campaign would give it a rest for a week or so. But no. Dick Cheney’s remarks yesterday in Iowa said it all about the tone we can expect from BC04 in the runup to Election Day: “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again–that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States and that we’ll fall back into the pre-9/11 mindset, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war.”
In response to these pithy remarks, John Edwards accused Cheney of trying to “scare voters,” which Cheney’s flack called an “overreaction.” “Whoever is elected in November faces the prospect of another terrorist attack,” said Anne Womack. “The question is whether or not the right policies are in place to best protect the country. That’s what the vice president is saying.”
Nice try, Anne, but that’s not what the vice president is saying. Look at the words. He’s directly saying that John Kerry doesn’t believe we’re fighting a war with terrorists, and that terrorists will immediately take advantage of that and hit America again.
It would be nice if the news media would follow up by asking Cheney exactly how Kerry would differ from Bush in fighting the war on terrorism. Unless I’m missing something, Kerry would do five things differently: (1) beef up homeland security, in part by making this a core mission of the National Guard; (2) refocus on Afghanistan, where the Taliban appears to be making a comeback; (3) get serious about finding and securing nuclear materials that may wind up in the hands of terrorists; (4) provide some international support and clear direction to our troops in Iraq, resolving the mess that’s currently the number one recruiting tool for al Qaeda; and (5) rebuild our alliances and international institutions to make the war on terrorism a collective security mission instead of a unilateral U.S. effort.
Now Cheney is perfectly free to disagree with any of all of these suggestions, but the idea that Kerry is less worried about terrorism than the incumbent, or less committed to waging an aggressive war to defeat terrorists, is a conscious lie.
But it points to an even bigger act of deception that was at the center of the GOP convention: the not-so-subtle claim that the only reason terrorists haven’t struck the United States since 9/11 is that they are terrified of what George W. Bush would do to them.
Nobody knows why there hasn’t been another attack. Maybe al Qaeda’s going after softer targets elsewhere. Maybe our military and intelligence operatives have disrupted their leadership (though not because of any distinctive Bush administration policies). Maybe they’re planning an operation right now. But the idea that George W. Bush’s steely Texas character has intimidated them into inaction defies everything we know about al Qaeda and about jihadist terrorism generally.
But expect to hear this line of “reasoning” often from the GOP. The implicit claim that Bush has somehow already defeated al Qaeda may be audacious demagoguery at its worst, but it’s the one claim they can make about Bush’s record that cannot be refuted by the evidence before our eyes.