Day: October 23, 2005

Dean Takes Party Where It’s Already Been – and Lost

Trish

If Democrats were ever of a mind to say, “I told you so,” now would be the time.

• Hurricane Katrina, which offered Bush a way out of the nightmare Cindy Sheehan had made of his extended vacation – as well as an opportunity to look presidential again – instead exposed cronyism and ineptitude.
• Bush’s must-do social security reform campaign laid there like road kill, with Democrats holding their noses and politely steering around it.
• The Harriet Miers nomination shows Bush to be clueless but committed – just like in Iraq – no matter bad a choice he’s made.

But Democrats are doing what any party without power does, pointing out problems while no one pays attention. After hearing Howard Dean on ABC’s This Week talk about the Democratic platform for 2006, I only feel gloomier.

Kitchen table issues like “more jobs” don’t bring out voters. They don’t rally people, they don’t fire up the electorate. Republicans know this.

Dean named several things Americans care about: schools, jobs, health care. He left out a clean and diverse environment as well as reestablishing America in the eyes of the world as a good country full of good people.

Dr. Gov. Dean has spent too much time in rooms full of fellow Democrats, debating the best way to appeal to the most voters. He’s distilled the issues into inoffensive bromides all can agree on. But what that means is that no one cares very much about a single one of them.

Here’s what Dean and my other party leaders don’t seem to get: Kitchen table issues like “more jobs” don’t bring out voters. They don’t rally people, they don’t fire up the electorate. Republicans know this. The best way to turn out a bunch of GOP voters in Florida is to put a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage on the ballot, even though this state already forbids gay marriage through statute. Repugs know if they convince their folks that unless they turn out to vote on Tuesday, legions of gay couples will appear on Wednesday, people will vote. And while they’re there, they’ll vote the rest of the GOP candidates and initiatives as well.

Instead of running from things that actually matter, like separation of church and state or protecting a woman’s right to privacy within her own body, Dean is focused on… nothing much. And even on issues he’s identified, like health care, there are no distinct Democratic solutions. Dean isn’t standing up and saying something radical like, “We have to quit tying health care to employment.” Instead, the Democrats just want to “help” (read: have the government give tax breaks to) businesses so they can continue to provide health insurance to employees.

Al Gore has never followed the Dean strategy, which might be why he a) got more popular votes than Bush in 2000 and b) electrifies our party every time he makes a speech. Man, I hope he runs in 2008.

Meanwhile, if the CIA leak investigation produces indictments, and Tom DeLay ever gets convicted of anything, Democrats have a real opportunity to say not only, “We told you so,” but, “Give us back our country and move over because we’re taking it where it needs to go.” Dean’s milquetoast truisms aimed for mass appeal will only produce more Republican victories.

Congressman Demands Fitzgerald Investigate Bush Admin’s Lies to Congress about Reasons for War

Jon Ponder

“The CIA leak issue is only the tip of the iceberg. This is looking increasingly like a White House conspiracy aimed at misleading our country into war – in part by manufacturing now-refuted evidence in support of its rationale, in part by smearing and silencing critics, and in part by manipulating media complicity. There is mounting evidence that there may have been a well-orchestrated effort by the President, the Vice President, and other top White House officials to lie to Congress in order to get its support for the Iraq War.

“Honest, if mistaken, reliance on faulty intelligence to convince Congress to authorize a war is bad enough. But, if, as mounting evidence is tending to show, Administration officials deliberately deceived Congress and the American people, this would constitute a criminal conspiracy against the entire country.

“We are no longer just talking about a Republican culture of corruption and cronyism. We now have reason to believe that high crimes may have been committed at the highest level, wrongdoing that may have led us to war and imperiled our national security.”

— Rep. Gerald Nadler (D-NY), in a letter to Acting Deputy Attorney General Robert McCallum, making the point that it is illegal to lie to Congress

The Rashomon War

Jon Ponder

Cause of war: The best thing about the CIA Leak investigation is that it has forced a topic back into the media that is in dire need of revisiting: What were the real reasons President Bush took the country to war in Iraq.

Today, Frank Rich suggests that because the two men under scrutiny in the investigation, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, were instrumental in creating the fictional causus belli that led us into Iraq, the investigation into whether they leaked a the name of a CIA agent could have the unexpected consequence of unmasking the administration’s true motives.

[There] had to be that “why” for the invasion, the very why that today can seem so elusive that [New Yorker writer George] Packer calls Iraq “the ‘Rashomon’ of wars.” Abstract (and highly debatable) neocon notions of marching to Baghdad to make the Middle East safe for democracy (and more secure for Israel and uninterrupted oil production) would never fly with American voters as a trigger for war or convince them that such a war was relevant to the fight against those who attacked us on 9/11. And though Americans knew Saddam was a despot and mass murderer, that in itself was also insufficient to ignite a popular groundswell for regime change. Polls in the summer of 2002 showed steadily declining support among Americans for going to war in Iraq, especially if we were to go it alone.

For Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush to get what they wanted most, slam-dunk midterm election victories, and for Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for reasons predating 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by fictional, more salable ones. We wouldn’t be invading Iraq to further Rovian domestic politics or neocon ideology; we’d be doing so instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda and because Saddam was on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons. The facts and intelligence had to be fixed to create these whys; any contradictory evidence had to be dismissed or suppressed.

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