campaign update

General Wesley Clark's endorsement of John Kerry just a few days after he dropped out of the race is something of a surprise. (It's scheduled for Friday.) Though Clark was polling in the teens for the Wisconsin primary, his endorsement probably won't end up adding much more than would have gone to Kerry anyway, likely to be half or more of those numbers. The endorsement comes as Clark is being mentioned more often as a v.p. candidate, and there's a report going around that Kerry isn't real interested in Edwards. On paper, Clark is a strong v.p. choice, just as he was a strong choice to do well in the presidential primaries, on paper. The problem is that he isn't on paper. Out on the campaign trail, on his good days he was great, and on his bad days he was alarming. The Kerry campaign doesn't need a v.p. who is as likely to be a liability as a help. We hope Kerry comes up with a better choice. (The fact that insiders are mentioning him could be a trial balloon, or just to compliment him and keep him motivated, but isn't a serious consideration.) Our bet is that Clark won't be the v.p. If Kerry thinks Edwards hasn't shown enough strength in the south to warrant being on the ticket, why would he pick Clark, who has shown less? It would have to be that Kerry believes Clark has what it takes to be president should that be necessary, which reportedly is a stronger consideration for Kerry than it is for people who like to speculate and don't actually have the responsibility for the choice.

Howard Dean is now running third in Wisconsin polls, and since those polls have come out he's again changed his public position on what he will do after the primary. First he said he would be out if he lost,then he said he would stay in until the end no matter what, but at least one reporter has him saying he will go home to Vermont and think it over. He's gone negative on Kerry and it's not helping. He's apparently angry over some ads in New Hampshire by a third party that he suspects the Kerry people had something to do with, though they've denied it. Angry enough perhaps to quit the race, and endorse John Edwards.

stats of the day

proportion of voters in Virginia Democratic primary
who believe John Kerry can beat G.W. Bush...........85%

proportion of votes in TV poll on the Lou Dobbs
Moneyline conservative cable TV program who believe the payroll records
released by the White House answer all the questions
about G.W. Bush's National Guard service...........5%

who believe they don't....................................95%



Wesley Clark gave the best speech of his campaign in thanking the voters of Tennessee, but he'd come in third, and was barely above 10% of the vote in Virginia, so Wednesday he will formally announce he's dropping out of the race.

Senator John Edwards gave a variation on his homily of last week, which was at once an extraordinary moment in American politics---like you'd imagine Jimmy Stewart playing him---and also kind of weird. He'd talk about the dire straits of a worker who had to tell his young daughter he'd just been fired, and his crowd would roar and he would smile that Jimmy Carter smile.

Senator John Kerry appeared more tired and more serious than usual, and wasn't as effective in his victory speech, which hasn't varied much, but that hardly mattered. He did make sure to include the lines that the media would transform into the soundbite of the night---that America had voted for change, in the east, in the west, in the north, and now the south. In Virginia he again got more than half the votes cast. Edwards was credited with a "respectable second," though he was thirty points behind Kerry. Edwards did about the same in Tennessee but Clark was about 10 points stronger there, and Kerry was in the mid 40 percentiles.

On to Wisconsin. It's possible these three candidates will be in the race until after the last primary, and possibly until the convention. Edwards is planning on a two man race but he was running behind Clark in this week's Wisconsin polls. He doesn't automatically pick up Clark's support (as he might in a southern state) so Wisconsin will be his last real test to take his campaign to the next level. Right now Dean is running second, and he's vowed to keep on going no matter the outcome. He may pick up some of the Clark "outsider" vote, but a lot of Clark's support will probably go to Kerry. Another 50%+ win is not out of the question. That they're contesting Wisconsin is good for Kerry. He's proven something different each week. Wisconsin is the first state so far to allow Independents and Republicans to vote in the Democratic primary. That will be the headline next Tuesday.

(There will be some tempted to suggest Clark as the v.p. on a Navy-Army ticket. Bad idea. Clark is still too much of a, if you'll pardon the expression, loose cannon. He can be incisive and very effective, but sometimes his competitiveness gets the better of him. )

Dean and Edwards can continue to pick up some delegates in Super Tuesday's 10 primaries, and if Edwards has surged into second place across the board, he may pick up more in the next block of Southern primaries in mid March. But nothing short of a revelation that John Kerry started out life as Johanna is likely to stop him, and victory after victory becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that he's a winner.

But it's not true that voters are voting for him just because he won the previous contests. The exit polls show the voters overwhelmingly believe he is the one to right the economy, to right foreign policy. In a year that seemed to be repeating the recent trend of voters going for novelty and the "outsider" candidate, primary voters cite Kerry's experience as an important reason they're voting for him, and an important reason they believe he can stand up against and beat Bush. Defeating an incumbent president who has taken the nation to war requires a candidate with stature, and Kerry is now the only candidate in the field who qualifies.

These primaries suggest that another bit of conventional wisdom may be faulty: a Massachusetts Democrat can't win in the South. We believe that Kerry's performance in the primary puts Virginia in play as well as Tennesee, along with Arkansas, Louisiana and---above all---Florida, where the African American vote is going to be huge, assuming they are permitted to vote this time. (Media bobbleheads who claim a Democrat can't win Virginia should notice that Kerry was standing next to the Democratic governor of Virginia, who had endorsed him and introduced him for his victory speech.

The only fly in the ointment so far: apparently all this corporation bashing has cut into the soft money that the Democratic party wants to raise, to counter the upcoming onslaught of slick negative advertising the Republicans must already be putting together. So we'll see if Americans can still be swayed into voting against their own interests by fifteen seconds of slick deception, repeated a hundred times a day.

Waves

On the eve of the Virginia and Tennesee primaries that are likely to turn the rest of the Democratic presidential nominating process into a formality, it's worth pausing for a moment to look at the dynamics of the upcoming months of contention between John Kerry and G.W. Bush.

For Bush and the Republicans, the dynamic is quite different than it has been for the past two years plus. Two sorts of things have happened. The first could be called the chickens coming home to roost, or the reality catching up with the illusion. The rationale for the war in Iraq, and by extension the way the Bushies choose to run the war on terrorism, is at best now in question. Readers of AmericanSamizat will not be surprised by the "revelations" of the past weeks regarding WMDs, a war forced for political reasons rather than in defense of America, and so on. Neither will they be surprised that Bush economic policies have devastated lives all over the country, and threaten to do so for generations yet to come. The only news about all this is how and when these situations were revealed. No one could have predicted it would have been now.

The second thing is related to the first but not completely dependent on it. It is that the media and the media audience are now receptive to hearing the reality falling like a ton of bricks on the Bushies' manufactured illusions. In part this too was inevitable, though the timing could not be predicted. For years the media was acting as if hypnotized, and in a way they were. The media powers are located in New York and Washington, and any time we talk to people from there, it is clear how deeply traumatic 9/11 was, in deeply personal ways. That's the charitable reading of why the news media became the propaganda arm of the Bush administration. Feeling themselves under attack, they rallied behind their king to defend their country. They competed only to wave the flag higher than each other. But somehow, somebody counted to three , and they woke up from that hypnosis. They are appalled at what they did, and the extent of their loss of reason and skepticism is partly reflected in the power of their skepticism now, aimed at Bush. Now Time magazine has a cover suggesting there is a Bush credibility gap. And as usual when he is really under pressure, Bush is wilting.

That's part of what's happening with the media. There's also the nature of story: you can only go so long with the same plotline. There has to be a reversal at some point or the story becomes boring and no one will watch or read or buy it. The rise has to be followed by the fall.

Together these two elements created a massive wave that is now washing across the political and media landscape. By fortunes of timing, John Kerry is riding that wave. His rise in the primaries, his message at its high point of articulation, the primaries themselves and how the candidates are behaving, the behavior of the voters, have all contributed to an extremely fortuitous force. Now Kerry is the New hero, while Bush, the emperor of an hour ago, looks weak, without clothes.

But it's best not to entirely buy into the media bobbleheads' latest tune. Just a month ago they were saying Bush would ride easily to re-election. Now they are saying doom, for they don't believe things will get better in Iraq or the economy will generate enough jobs to blunt that growing issue.

But events could intervene. What would the capture or death of Osama bin Laden do to everyone's political calculations? What if Iraq pastes together an actual government in July that doesn't fall apart by October? It's widely believed that a significant terrorist attack on the U.S. or its allies would hurt Bush, but that's not necessarily so. It would give him the opportunity to look strong again. Why people bought that the first time is hard to understand, since it costs Bush nothing to act strong and he has plenty of people around him to pump him up. He's never in any real danger from terrorists or Saddam Hussein. He's in danger from Tim Russert and the voters, and he looks it.

The tide may continue to favor Kerry. He's good in ways Gore wasn't, and maybe he'll also stay lucky. Certain elements of this current tide are likely to keep building, like the jobs issue and particularly health care. Kerry is capable of making the deficit more of an issue than the bobbleheads believe, along the lines of the moveon ad that shows children working on the assembly line to pay for the Bush tax cut for the wealthy. That is, the future will be paying. He'll also point out the massive cuts in social programs and infrastructure that Bush has scheduled for after the election. If Kerry can tie in what's happening right now in states and municipalities, as they cut services and people lose jobs, this issue will continue to build. Kerry will also add new issues that resonate: energy and the environment.

The Bushies are counting on their huge hoard of campaign money to fill the airwaves with charges against Kerry that can't be simultaneously answered because they're made in ads. They'll go after him as a liberal, for proposing tax increases (which was obviously part of the whole idea of cutting taxes on the rich, so that when Democrats tried to get that money back Republicans could say they were increasing taxes). Perhaps they'll raise the "special interests" issue, or go after him for throwing or not throwing his medals in protest. (He's been criticized for throwing his medals on the steps of the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam war, but he threw his ribbons and kept his medals. So he's also been criticized for NOT throwing his medals, but the medals of other soldiers who asked him to.)

They'll try to do to Kerry what they did to John McCain in the 2000 primaries, and what Bush the First did to Dukakis. Why not? It's always worked before. In a way, we're glad they're thinking that way, because we believe there's a very good chance that this time it won't work. The voters are tired of it, they may not even hear it this time, and Kerry is very good at defending and counterattacking.

But the Bushies will keep doing it whether it works or not because it is all they know. They believe that perception is reality, that the photo op is more important than the duplicity afterwards. You can see it in everything Bush says---he just keeps repeating the same bald assertions and lies, even when it's clear he knows they're now falling flat, and being so obviously contradicted by reality. But they'll keep doing it---and hope that with enough stage managing, with the right pictures and music in the flow of their campaign ads, they'll get away with it yet again. It's the ultimate in cynicism. But this time it's old, and maybe it's too old to work.

That Bush was king especially to Republicans has thrown the party into confusion as his feet of clay are exposed. Their ideological differences are being revived by his more outrageous policies, and their identity is no longer quite so clear . They have nowhere else to go but Bush, of course, but at a time that Democrats appear to be energized and united, even some sluggishness could be costly, and a few well placed survivalist agendas could be disastrous.

There are lots that can happen to turn the tide, or to turn the whole process into a series of whirlpools and rocks. The biggest danger we see is that something happens to absorb the media, something big enough to get them competing with each other on a single story or a single obsession, so that what Kerry is saying and doing out on the campaign never gets covered. That's the truly scary thing about the media these days, even apart from deliberate control by a small number of conglomerate corporations. The media no longer feels a responsibility to cover the candidates for president, to print or show what they say on issues. They can fill their airtime talking to each other, debating their own self-generated ideas and scenarios. What's very sad about this especially is that the process hasn't yet reached bottom. You can go for weeks and months without seeing an experienced, intelligent and relatively sophisticated adult newsperson on cable TV, unless you really look for the few that have regular slots. But you see all of the surviving ones covering elections. It's like finding a tribe that was supposed to have vanished---where are they keeping them, we didn't know so many were still around. Try watching CNN's election coverage and switching for a moment to CNN Headline News and you'll see exactly what we mean. Headline News has become MTV News Lite. They even put one of their last remaining adults in a hockey shirt with USA across it the other day, to report the news. (He was wearing a shirt and tie under it.)

So the dynamic has changed considerably, and that's good for Kerry now---and of course we believe good for the country, the world and the future. Maybe this is just the beginning of a long term change that will last into the election and beyond. Our resident intuitives believe it will. Our resident skeptics aren't so sure. But our majority agrees on one thing: this particular wave will eventually break. Let's hope there's another bigger one just like it right behind.

Primarily Inside Politics

Stat of the day

annual increase
In U.S. health care costs.......10%

Annual increase
In U.S. health insurance
Costs...................................15%


John Kerry won the Washington state and Michigan caucuses Saturday, in each case with around half the votes cast. Today he'll likely win the Maine caucus. He is leading in preliminary polls in both Virginia and Tennessee, two sort-of southern states where John Edwards and Wesley Clark now appear to be fighting for second place on Tuesday. Apparently what's going on with them is an elimination bout to see who gets to be the last candidate standing, other than Kerry. Howard Dean, who got seconds on Saturday, will stake his claim on that role in Wisconsin.

That's how the dynamic has changed, and it’s not exactly a big change: it's for the right to be the alternative to Kerry. Edwards and Clark are splitting the non-Kerry votes (and attacking each other) in Tuesday's southern states. If he's second in both states, Edwards seems to have the money to go on and contest Wisconsin. Clark may not, and it’s unlikely that he will squeak a second over Edwards in both states. Unless he has a win Tuesday, we expect Clark will drop out of the race.

What's likely to happen we feel is this: Edwards emerges from the south with respectable showings but no wins, Clark fades into inconsequence with thirds. Dean fights for a win in Wisconsin but doesn’t get it. Right now the only question is whether Edwards can finish there ahead of Dean. If he doesn’t---if it’s Kerry, Dean, Edwards, nobody has emerged as the single alternative, and they all check their bank accounts and their agendas for their futures to decide if they want to go on to Super Tuesday just to be the last man losing.

That's the inside baseball. The significance of the primaries so far is this: turnout in every primary and caucus has been high, and in most it broke records; Democratic voters (and in New Hampshire, Independents who comprised 40% of the voters in the Democratic primary) are focused on defeating G.W. Bush. They are not demanding perfection on their most cherished issues, they are not nitpicking voting records (a strategy that Clark is trying, as are advance snipers of the Republican right guard, and a strategy that used to work...but it sure isn't right now.) The voters are voting overwhelmingly for John Kerry. He has won a major industrial battleground state in Michigan, a major industrial battleground border state in Missouri, a far western state in Washington, two small states in two very different parts of the country--- North Dakota (big state, small population) and Delaware. If he wins Virginia, he will add a state of the Confederate south. If he wins Tennessee, it will not only take all the air of his primary opponents, it will shake the confidence of Republicans in the effectiveness of their “northern liberal” tag for Kerry, which is the best they’ve come up with so far.